Reflections from a mountain cemetery

      Over yonder … just me, just sitting on the stone bench within the old cemetery’s iron fencing. Around me hatched shades of green speak of desultory human attention, blessedly absent from the surrounding dry grass. But green or dry, these wild weeds are congenial to my spirit.

      Just me, still above the hardscrabble, if ever more tenuously. Me, quietly nursing a new sharp pain at the juncture of left femur and pelvis, nevertheless content to just sit through these last final chapters. Just sitting, nearly as still as the old regularly clumped bones of my future neighbors, below.

      If cemeteries don’t encourage reflection, no settings will. And this one fairly does the work for you, itself just sitting at 10,000 feet in an undulating valley below the rocky outcrop that supports my home.

      I say “home” despite all the natural loveliness and real love labors that have gone into our primary residence down below, where the Great American Plain, fanning eastward, has staked out an uncontested claim. Up here—way up here!—in a ruin of a Colorado high mountain town, a less tended, more makeshift log house feels like real home to me. 

      Some of the few local residents affectionately call this place, “a small drinking town with a large mining problem.” And, in fact, hidden just beyond the town’s northern crests, a mammoth, expanding moonscape crawls with other worldly vehicles at one of the world’s largest cyanide-extraction gold mines.  

      It feels like home even though my careless trajectory just dropped me here one day, the way the high wind scatters fertile seeds and empty husks alike. Randomness … rocky soil … I almost scan the sky for devouring birds.  

      The prematurely old city has a simultaneous rundown and vital aspect, both afloat in the historical wake of a once manic boom town. There was, and is, gold in these hills, and scarcely more than 100 years ago, man and beast, horse flesh and iron horses, streamed in to scrape, shovel and erect a mini-civilization of sorts—a diverse, wilder version of urban life today. 

      Miners and milliners, preachers and whores, saloon keepers, sots, gamblers, barbers, dentists, doctors, lawyers, newspapermen, telegraphers, assayers, school teachers, children and a congeries of cats, dogs, donkeys and horses jostled through the snow, mud and dust—working, exhorting, conniving and brawling their way through the many stations flesh inherits. 

      Then and now, the mix of civility and human wildness was surrounded and interpenetrated by the natural wildness commended to us by Thoreau. Today there remain signs, sounds and sightings of fox, bear, elk and mountain lion, who scratch and claw out their own living suitably wary of the savage predators homesteading in their midst.  

      An ever-shorter century ago, with gold lust’s voracious flames consuming the ancient hills’ natural architecture, great stone buildings rose up within six months of actual fire that razed many of the city’s first wooden structures. The town rallied back and flourished, carving out huge niches for mining operations and a citizenry burgeoning into the tens of thousands.  

      Homestake! Homestead! Bustle and boom! The town lurched up like Shelley’s monster—alive, yet artificially so—sparked to life by the antic charge of gold demand, gold lust, gold fever. 

      And almost as quickly, when demand fell and easy extraction was played out, the town shriveled and began its descent toward ruin. 

      These days, except for the occasional muffled boom and rumbling quiver of a mine blast, the old town is quiet, its few sleepy movements underscoring an essential emptiness. Day to day, a ragtaggle of remnant natives, long-time residents and eccentric late-comers marshal their angels and demons as best able. Townsfolk present a mix of independence, ingenuity, rough labor, trade skills and fine artistry. Quietly, unpretentiously, art intermingles with life, takes hold and sprouts like the bristlecone pine among rock and ruin.  

      This day, from the cemetery stone bench, squinting under a bright sun, its white heat tempered by redolent breezes, my eye travels through clear air to the distant snowy streaks of the Sangre de Cristo Range … 

      … Sangre de Cristo—Blood of Christ … 

       Thoughts of heights and depths—wisps of thoughts, really—snake their way among the old stone markers of mortality. Sangre de Cristo—wraiths of thought, curling upward and dissolving beyond those universal words of reconciliation and life’s everlasting body. 

      Moribund words—and all the more for it, telling of life reborn from ruin and death. Naming words, nailed ever so transiently on those far silent peaks, themselves, in truth, unnameable.  

      And today, well descended toward ruin, just me just sitting among the cropped cemetery weeds. Feeling home at last. Soon to be home forever.