Page Lambert: All Things Literary & All Things Natural

Hasta luego.   Posible manana .   Things are not easy here in this complicated land.   There are unearthed layers of history.   Stratas of human life buried beneath the Spaniard’s churches, beneath the Incan temples and cities, beneath the jungled roots of ancient coco trees and ancient grasses.   “Marble,” our guide told us, “is the crushed bones of fish.”   How deep the history. I have said goodbye to you before, Peru. Andean flutes.   Pachamama.   Hummingbird. Turtle. Fox. Water whistling jars.   Replicas de los indigenous gente mas milenias - before Los Incas.   Saying hello to the Incan woman mummy.   Marcella. Chocolate tea. La mujer de Chili.   Buying sweaters.   Taking music home in my heart.   “Melodia de Corazon,” said the musician brothers.   “Melodia de Corazon.”   The sugar mills, the plantations, the brick makers - they needed the fat of the Indios to grease their machines.   ...

Next Monday , my 19 th annual all-women river odyssey embarks, the rafts launching into the Colorado River at the Westwater put-in.   Each trip brings something new, but the river always gets the creative juices flowing.   We play.   We hike.   We swim.   We journal.   We run rapids.   We talk about process.   We share.   We get wonderfully silly.   Profoundly serious. We get silly all over again, in and out of the water, up and down the canyon walls, in and out of each others stories.    From sun to shade, dark to light—in every metaphorical way imaginable. Wilderness landscapes stir our souls in life-changing ways.   We become lost in their grandeur and in the getting lost rediscover a vital part of ourselves. Nowhere else besides the river is this transformation so enabled.   Each time, the joy of living simply is rediscovered as we journey down t he river together —a cool drink of water, a playful mud b...

Gudy Gaskill’s death two weeks ago inspired a rush of outpouring by all who knew her. Gudy was a trailblazer—literally.   Our small Mount Vernon community knew her as a neighbor and family friend for decades, but the world at large knew her as the “Mother of the Colorado Trail” (more than 500 miles of trail stretching from Denver to Durango).   A painter, sculptor, and river runner, Gudy ascended all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks, climbed 23,000-foot international peaks, and was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame. She rallied our community to help her clear a steep hill of trees and brush so that the Mount Vernon children, along with her own sons and daughters, could learn to sled and ski.   After she died, her children wrote, “She taught us to love wandering in the mountains, the beauty of wildflowers, and the chill of a waterfall.”   Western trailblazers like Gudy break ground literally and figuratively.   Around the same time as...

I was writing this morning about a day several years ago when I watched a massive bull elk with his harem in the Bighorn Mountains near Wyoming's Cloud Peak Wilderness area.  Deeply immersed in describing the bull's tawny coat and dark, ragged mane, I took a break to go outside and stretch when this handsome fellow appeared in our backyard, as if the writing itself had manifested him in the tall grass.  I love it when that happens.   Animal encounters happen to my friend, historian Dan Flores , too.  His new book Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History , opens with a story about the time he was visiting his parents in Louisiana and a coyote passed by mere feet away, shooting him a sideways glance with its "hot yellow eyes."  This photo was taken by Dan when a coyote appeared in the early morning light outside his back door. Coyote encounters are now happening everywhere - thousands of them. In our cities, our countrysides, our suburbs, ev...