Watch beeps. Groan awake. Clothes on, clothes in backpack, liner in stuff sack, sleeping bag in stuff sack. Pad folded, rolled, molded into the stuff sack. Stuff the stuff sacks in the pack. Hot water’s ready. Acquire ingredients and pour them in a Tupperware. Instant oatmeal, dried cranberries, dried bananas, dry nuts. Instant coffee in a cup. Saturate, sit, stir, spoon, sip, enjoy. Appreciate breakfast. Now get back on my feet. Crouch down, stand up, grab my things, rinse my cup, my spoon, my bowl, dump it in the sump hole. To sump or to spray? I’m a sumper all the way. The stuff’s all around on the ground. We organize and pile and pack. Take down the tent, stuff it in a sack. God forbid I have to poo. So many more things to do. But the morning activities do come to an end. Water bottles are full, bear spray is at the ready, and it’s time for packs to go on. We hike, we have lunch, we set up camp, we read, we have class, we cook dinner, eat dinner, clean up dinner, smellies and foods away. No bears today. Read and write and into my sleeping bag. My puffy comes off and goes into my stuff sack pillow case. Head down, eyes shut, fast asleep.
The days are busy. They’re long and loud. A day on WRFI Restoration Ecology is packed with laughter and joy and uproar. With gratitude and stories. Discussions and schoolwork and reflection and learning. Wildlife and nature and sightings and discovery. There’s hiking or traveling or working or restoring.
I settled into the routines and accepted the constant busyness, while also appreciating the moments of stillness and being. It was fun and exhausting and rewarding, but could also be stressful and overwhelming. Around halfway through our course, when we were camped at the beautiful and serene Red Rocks Lake, we had our Celebration of Knowledge, a misleadingly chipper term for a two to three hour midterm. The celebration was draining, but left me feeling accomplished and relieved, to reach the end of something rather than always being in the process of something. It was a time to rest.
After dinner many of us went up the road above the lake to watch the sunset from a field of wildflowers. Ten people piled out of the van and dispersed into the open field, abundant with purple and yellow and pink and white. After exclaiming awe and interest and chatter, we spent the sunset in silence. I wandered through the field, stopping to bend over to look at a flower, sitting to examine another. There was a small spiderweb perfectly constructed in the deep arc at the top of a blade of grass. In its center sat its creator, positioned perfectly in the middle of her handiwork. I sat with the spider, admiring her web and small body glistening in the sun. The sun burned bright into the horizon. It slowly sank further into the mountains above Red Rocks Lake, warming the sky and casting an orange glow across the field and onto the surface of the lake. I wandered on, from plant to plant, breathing in the air and the light and the beauty and the stillness of the earth moving from day to night. We all walked our own ways in the field. Alone, but also together as a part of nature, sharing the moment of the sunset. I sat in the tall grass and wildflowers, and noticed the swooping strands of spiderweb sparkle between the grass, stretched out in lines before me down the field towards the setting sun. I sat as still as I could for a person being eaten alive by mosquitos. My head twitched the flying villains away from my ears, but my eyes fastened on the view, and my breath fell into rhythm with the moment. As I hid my legs into my fleece, the last rays of sunlight were lost behind the mountain and the sky fell dim.
The sunset over Red Rocks Lake, for me, was a time to sink into the experience of the present. It was a sunset to escape routine and tasks and the small and large stressors of being a human in a human world, and to instead just be a human in the world. I wasn’t looking at my watch to check the time to move to the next thing, because the earth keeps its own time. It was a time to observe and absorb and be a part of nature’s rhythms as the sun went down.
