Surviving Dangerous Vacations

We’re back from our dangerous vacation in the Rocky Mountains.  While enduring the awful perils described in the last post we also renewed an old friendship, began new ones, fished and birded, ate well, read, slept, and hiked.

And were reminded, before moon rise each evening, that the night sky is gray.  It is the evergreens that are black.  William Rose Benet may have been remembering that when he wrote:

Ghost Lake’s a still lake, a cold lake and deep.
Faint in its shadows a far sound whirrs.
Black stand the ranks of its sentinel firs.

Or Robert Service when he wrote,

We sleep in the sleep of ages, the bleak, barbarian pines;
. . . .On the flanks of the storm-gored ridges are our black battalions massed;

After moon rise, it is the shadows of the evergreens that are blackest.  Not much can be better than listening to two Great Horned Owls calling to each other across a canyon full of black trees and blacker shadows. Unless the view includes a few white-barked Aspen gleaming in the moonlight.  That would be better and that was what we had.

Peaceful, serene moments like that are what makes returning from vacations complicated.  Of course, it is easier to come back if you have some Border Collies ecstatic to see you and some fresh green chile in the refrigerator, but ordinary life with its stresses and challenges awaits.

Some vacations can even trigger existential crises.  Our friend at Wild Resiliency is enduring one of those and writing eloquently about it.  It’s a good thing he is resilient.

Sooner or later, the serenity you achieved on the vacation retreats. Bills need to be paid, the phone rings with somebody on the other end wanting money, a traffic light takes forever to change, the neighbor fires up his lawn mower or — in our case — his hobby bulldozer, some politician somewhere does something disagreeable, the evening news reports on deaths of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the price of gasoline goes up.  All that makes it hard to hold on to the marvelous tranquility that a successful vacation brings.

More on that later but now I have to read all the health care bills which I understand, from my friends on the right, contain provisions for death panels for humans and mandatory puppy euthanasia.

Puppies to be Euthanized under Obamacare

But  there is some good news: According to Gail Collins of The New York Times, the Large Hadron Collider isn’t working yet, so at least I don’t have to worry about being sucked into a black hole. Nor have I had any of those “latrine issues” that the guest ranch made me promise not to sue them for.