If I were holy or interested in holiness, I would bathe myself in Colorado’s Bear Lake like a baptism or a cleansing, a healing wade into crisp Rocky Mountain waters, sacred snow melt washing away my sins. Like Hindus worship the moving waters of the Ganges as a goddess and believe in the purifying power of the river, I could be sanctified right here. The still waters of Bear Lake shimmer like a sari catching sunlight, and the simplicity of tree, rock and water offers a spare, lush green landscape. Sensing something like a goddess, I worship in my American way; I take pictures.
I know something about the ways that water can seem alive: calm and lovely one day, angry and roiling the next. Inviting and playful in the morning, rough and pushy by late afternoon. Living beside the sea will inspire belief in Poseidon no matter the science of waves and wind, tides and currents. Something powerful seems to brew storms or peace at sea depending on a whim, and it all feels mystical and magical, something for the poets and the storytellers and religious zealots not the scientists and weathermen. The people of the Ganges know something of holy water too, and it really can’t be contained by a font at the front of the church that you dip a finger lightly into and cross the air around you with barely a dab. Some people want the whole river of the goddess herself, not just the water bowl of the priest.
I would think some Coloradans aren’t satisfied with a church building but rather see the Rocky Mountains as their cathedral. The trees are the finest spires. The sunlight reflecting off water is flawless stained glass. The stone boulders are prayerful altars beside the lake. Birdsong is a glorious hymn. We spend hours walking and talking with our eyes skyward seeking the mountaintops draped in white furs and the trees fitted with emerald dresses. In the wide open spaces of a national park, we could not talk ourselves back into the claustrophobia of the car. So, we walked a little more to Nymph Lake which looked more like the enchanted forest of a fairy tale or a Tolkien land.
Sometimes we forget the wildness of the world because we are caught in our suburban dreams and concrete cities and in our planned communities and walking paths through green patches and playgrounds. We inflict order and tame the unruly mountains and aimless trees. We forget that being lovely and green is purpose enough. I grew up with bulldozers clearing the way for cul-de-sacs and fenced yards and streets made for Kick the Can and skateboarding ramps. The city grew alongside me and the woods were always being paved and houses grew seemingly out of the dirt and empty spaces left by the trees.
I remember when my mom and stepdad bought their first house together with the largest backyard you could find in a planned subdivision. If everyone else had a postage stamp size yard, their yard was postcard size. The yard was big and scrubbed clean of all but a spared copse of trees, lonesome and stranded but alive and circling up and facing off for survival. Bordering the house’s edges were a few flowerbeds of color and commotion, the housewife gardener’s ordered beauty of buried bulbs bursting one after the other, a complimentary planned palette of phlox and daisy, daffodil and lily. My stepdad took one look at the yard and the rewilding began in 1984. Today, the backyard is a riot of green.
Growing up, my bedroom window looked out into the backyard. I spent years watching things grow and clamor with a beautiful immortality, trees withering to winter bones then unfurling petals and leaves like Lazarus rising. I wasn’t much of a tree climber when I was young, but my second story bedroom made me feel as though I had ascended with the birds and lived perched in the mighty oaks. I swayed with them in soft summer breezes and held on tight when they lashed out during storms. The trees that came with the house were a gift, but they never replaced my favorite tree from another childhood home, a weeping willow of my adolescence.
The willow was a tree with secrets and hiding places and a mess of green tangled hair, a hippy tree of feathery leaves. My bus stop was next to the weeping willow near the house my mother and stepfather rented as their relationship turned serious. We moved to this house from the apartment we had been living in after my parents divorced. Apartment complexes in the suburbs, for me, were hives of destitution and loss, full of single parents adjusting to a new order or drifters unable to take root. A dirty creek flowed behind our building with rusty brown water lapping a bank of stiff reeds with trash caught in the muddy silt and knotted roots.
The move from the apartment to a house made me feel that something in my life was reclaimed. Just before my parents divorced, they had plans to buy their first house in a new neighborhood just breaking ground. The rental house with a new stepfather and a beautiful willow would have to suffice. Visiting my dad on weekends with no pretty trees at his bachelor apartment with plain prickly shrubs summed up all the differences for me between my mother and father and their new lives with me somewhere in the middle.
Like the divorce, the fate of my favorite tree was a lesson in sorrow. One desperate night, the willow was uprooted and toppled by a terrible storm that battered it senseless. The earth could not hold the weight of the boughs heavy with fringe and burdened with rain and wind. The same storm lit a chimney on fire with a lightning strike that sent the neighbors running to our house for shelter. The world seemed fragile and cruel that night, but my stepfather’s house was safe and sturdy.
Today, I have no desire to labor over green gardens and blossoming backyards, that suburban kind of wild which relies upon endless Home Depot trips and tireless cycles of planting, mulching, weeding, blooming, and dying. I want to go to wild places by the shifting, quaking Earth itself always breaking apart, crumbling and growing, flowing and flooding, eroding and bursting and rising like the Rocky Mountains, ancient, full of sea memories, snow-capped now and aiming for the heavens.