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Show 7. There are worse things than getting up early on a June morning and stepping outside, the sun new again above Red Rocks, the air soft and cool to my skin, a meadowlark singing from a fence post fifty feet away, south the high mountains of the San Juans with snowy peaks sparkling in the first sun, and all about me the fields and meadows which I had seen and touched all my life, had played and worked on all my life, as intimate with as with my family, the green fields under the waxing summer sun, the sheer beauty of the life-giving world. I would greet my dog, always there, then go down to the barn to milk the cows and feed oats to the teams. After breakfast I would harness one of the teams and be in the field at seven, or draw on rubber boots, lift a shovel over my shoulder and with my dog go off to irrigate, walking eight or ten miles a day to bring water to the land. While haying I worked with a crew, with them and with the horses united in a common purpose. Driving a team to harrow or cultivate, or out irrigating, I was alone most of the day, my solitude filled with purpose and quiet and dreams. And so, beginning my 30-day sentence, I felt it perfectly natural every morning to sing for joy. Those are my lost fields and meadows. At the bottom end of them the Uncompahgre River twists its way with cutbanks and sand bars, fine pools, small rapids, flowing on through cottonwoods and willows, through squawberry bushes and bankside grasses. In some of the contributory streams were beaver. I trapped muskrat in the swamp nearby, and sometimes caught mink. In the spring and fall ducks stopped by to feed in our fields and swim in our streams; geese passed over in wondrous Vs. In the river the great blue heron fished, nested |
