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| Buffalo Creek burn scar – Photo: Kae Penner-Howell |
I can’t say exactly why we chose to hike for half a day on this little-used and not particularly scenic section of the Colorado Trail. Maybe because we were bored with the familiar beauty of the nearby Buffalo Creek trails and needed something new. By contrast, this windswept footpath meanders through a decades-old burn scar. The mostly flat route offers little in the way of navigational challenges, and even as a specimen of devastation it isn’t much to look at. The fire that raged here was so hot even the topsoil caught fire. Subsequent flooding and erosion ensured no forest would soon return. What remains is an undulating boulder field with a ribbon of single-track snaking through it, a few skeletal spires that once were pine trees, and the kind of grasses that can eke out a life on cracks in rocks. Still we opt to give it a go. To see what we may see.
A trail that winds through a forest naturally accommodates the landscape. It twists and turns according to the placement of trees and creeks, drop-offs, and bodies of water. But when the trees burn up and the creeks run dry, the shape of the remaining path ceases to make the same kind of sense. In the years since the fire, this trail has straightened itself out a little, but there are still the occasional zigs and zags that suggest phantom obstacles. The ghosts of trees long incinerated. It is mildly disorienting to hike such a path, its layout strangely at odds with the land it tries to make accessible. Like the solemn, circuitous route one follows to the center of a labyrinth laid in stone on a cathedral floor, I begin to wonder if the point of all this winding has something to do with observance of a ritual, its purpose long ago lost in flames.
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| Chartres Cathedral maze. Image: Wiki-Commons |
We begin to look for some sort of destination, a place to call our journey complete. Maybe somewhere with a view where we can eat our sandwiches. A hill in the distance is crowned by a small stand of Ponderosa pines, unlikely survivors of the Buffalo Creek Fire. Surely there would be decent views of the Continental Divide from up there, and the trees could provide some shade for our lunch. We agree to make it our turn-around point, but as we get closer the trail angles away disappointingly into a rocky ravine. Having already fixed our expectations on that summit, we decide we are done with the trail, and begin to climb.
There is something thrilling about going off-trail (where allowed by law, and common sense), even in a place like this where being on or off the trail are nearly identical. The first step off a path always initiates a heightened awareness in me. I’m careful about how and where I walk, both to lessen my impact in a place unaccustomed to human footfalls, and also for reasons of safety and efficiency of effort. To exit the well-worn trail is to commit to your own wits. Each step is a tiny symbolic rejection of the known. Admittedly this isn’t much of an undertaking in a denuded landscape where the way home is more-or-less apparent. Still, there are places not far from here where to walk just a few feet from the trail renders it, and all it represents, indistinguishable from the natural world that surrounds it – the way back home can suddenly be obliterated by nothing more than a field of tall grass and wildflowers, humbling in their complete indifference to us. Like astronauts on a space walk, we are tethered to all that is safe and familiar by contrivances of human effort. Good trails allow us to pretend we are better connected with the natural world than we may actually be.
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| Photo: Kae Penner-Howell |
Up on the hill we find an old dirt road running along through the trees. It leads out into a meadow and across a grassy ridge where it doubles back abruptly in a tight loop, as if changing its mind. The fire has opened up unnatural vistas here - the kind you would ordinarily have 4000 feet higher, where trees simply won’t grow. To the north, the icy Mount Evans massif glows blue-white on the horizon. Ahead of us, a few yards past where the road ends, we see what looks like a small brick chimney. Heading over to check it out, we find it’s only about 4’ tall and completely solid - not a chimney at all, but some sort of marker set on a round flagstone base. About a foot above the base are three concentric iron rings circling the structure like the rings of Saturn, but also like some sort of footrest, or step. On top of the structure is a brass survey marker set in concrete. This is what surveyors call a benchmark, and it is where we get that word. But why the metal rings, and the large flagstone base? The structure is only mildly perplexing at first, like any sort of old weathered object you might stumble across while hiking. But when we step around to the other side and see a plaque which reads: HISTORIC UFO MOORING POST, things start to get interesting.
I’ve heard of Hippies and New-Agers appointing themselves ambassadors to extraterrestrials. There’s even a UFO landing pad in the desert down near New Mexico, but it’s sort of a tourist thing. Is this a cultural remnant of such an effort? We busy our brains with all the possibilities. Did a UFO-believer commandeer an old government survey post, or was it the other way around? Or maybe they collaborated on this dual-purpose marker in the middle of nowhere. This is Colorado after all. We have a town with a house cat for mayor (Divide), another town with a festival to raise money for a home-made cryogenics experiment (Frozen Dead Guy Days in Nederland), and a town where all adult head-of-housholds are required to own guns (Nucla) - and I’m only getting started with the civic weirdness in Colorado. It’s conceivable this marker was some such partnership. Or it could simply be somebody’s obscure joke. The word ‘historic” could be a giveaway. Do the plaque-makers mean to say that UFOs used to moor here at some point long ago? Have the UFOs moved on to more updated mooring posts? And how did they moor, exactly? I picture flying saucers bobbing gently a few feet off the ground, a pair of long leather reigns looped around the mooring post. It starts to seem like it has to be a joke, but why? Nerd humor? It’s impossible to know, and there’s not a soul for miles to ask, so we snap a photo and begin to look for a suitable way down the hill.
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| Photo: Kae Penner-Howell |
Below, we see another forest service road and pick our way carefully down through loose talus to meet it. As we guessed, around a bend or two the road delivers us back to our trail, which we dutifully retrace for several dull miles back to our car. In defense of boring trails, let me point out they are a reliable way to get lost in your own thoughts while obtaining the health benefits of a low intensity work-out, if you’re into that sort of thing. For me, this kind of mobile meditation tends to deliver me to my daydreams. Before long I’m crunching along in a half trance, staring down at the left-right-left-right blur of my feet, when all at once a door opens onto a memory I had long ago boxed away. Our visit up that hill had guaranteed this door would fly open, but I hadn’t seen it coming. The memory that overtakes me is less the recollection of an event, and more the story of the memory of the event. A story I long ago stopped telling, even to myself.
A Thing in the Sky
There was a puzzling thing in the sky over our car. My mom was driving, my little brother was in the front seat next to her. I was in the back. We were headed west on a country road in upstate New York on a late summer afternoon. The thing in the sky appeared to move along beside us, a few dozen yards off to the side. Was it following us or simply headed the same direction? My little brother shrieked and dove into the footwell of the passenger seat where he huddled in a fetal position. Was he terrified or just being dramatic? This was in the days when seat belts were a mere suggestion and children were pretty much free to move about the car as they wished. I moved over against the window. Mom gripped the steering wheel tighter and sped up. Was she trying to outrun the thing or simply hurrying home to change the situation? I wished my brother would sit up. I could not take my eyes off the thing in the sky. I stared and stared but couldn’t get a fix on it. It was so completely outside my frame of reference that I wasn’t able to decide what it was. It was big as a house, but smooth and elongated. Like a blimp but smaller and sleeker. There did not appear to be windows, and there were no insignia or graphics of any kind on its surface. It had a row of small lights in a horizontal band which ran its length, and though it shames me deeply to say this, the lights were indeed green. After several minutes beside us, the thing in the sky rocketed off to the south, disappearing beyond the big hill on the Rosecrance farm.
Soon we were safe at home in our driveway, un-traumatized. There had been no alien abduction. No anal probes. I didn’t have nightmares or 'act out' after this. Instead, the feeling I remember having afterward was disappointment. I wasn’t done looking at the thing. I hadn’t figured out what I thought it was, or even which end I was looking at. I felt cheated. It was yet another cool thing that had ended too quickly. In days that followed I kept looking to the skies, hoping the thing would swing back over my neighborhood, and a little frightened it actually might.
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| Ezikel's Chariot vision, by Matthaeus Merian |
Almost Useless
I’m startled back into the here-and-now by the partly decomposed carcass of a small animal just ahead of me on the trail, its rib bones jutting out at broken angles. Probably it’s a rabbit, given the grayish fur with tufts of white. I holler at my dogs to LEAVE IT, using my most serious voice. They nose it quickly – because I told them not to – but seem uninterested. As I pass the carcass I watch it literally transform from a decaying animal to a trampled prickly pear cactus. Shreds of dried gray grass are tangled in it’s spines. A white fuzzy mold covers its blackened fruit. It’s a simple mistake of perception with quite different implications. I puzzle for a moment as my brain abandons one certainty for another.
It’s a wonder that our species not only survives, but flourishes, when we are so unscrupulous about the particulars of the real world. We see a thing and are certain of it. A moment later the thing changes completely and so does its meaning. A dead rabbit becomes a cactus. We may be momentarily flummoxed, but the neural pathways in our brains accommodate the updated information. We adapt, despite the mental dissonance we feel in the wake of our initial perception. Clearly our brains are only partly hard-wired to think a certain way, otherwise we would stick to our conclusions, no matter what. Luckily there’s a whole lot of gray matter where our neurons keep their affiliations loose. This flexibility seems to be a good thing, and may be the advantage that keeps day-dreamers in the gene pool. Evolution would suggest that being half-aware of our surroundings wouldn’t work to our favor as a species, yet somehow our partial engagement with reality frees us up to be creative problem-solvers. We seem to be the only species where beliefs, ideologies, visions and outright delusions are foundational to some of our greatest discoveries and accomplishments. Think pyramids, nuclear bombs. Las Vegas.
I decide to ask my mom and brother what they remember about that UFO event.
As we near our car the surroundings resolve into something more familiar and ordinary. Gone are the fire-haunted boulder fields and disorienting views. Later at home, I use Google Earth to fly over our route to see if the satellite photos yield any additional insight into this odd corner of the mountains. It’s easy enough to locate the UFO mooring post, if you know where to look, but I’m surprised to see the road that accesses it seems to be off limits. Zooming down to Street View, I can make out a locked gate and a No Trespassing sign where the road meets the highway. Evidently, extraterrestrials are welcome, but you and I, not so much.
A week later at Thanksgiving dinner with my family, I mention the thing in the sky. It’s been 45 years since the afternoon it shadowed us down that country road, so I’m not hopeful my mom and brother have any better access to primary memories than I do. We haven’t spoken of it in decades. Still I want to know what they do recall, and if their stories intersect with mine – or if we’ve all drifted hopelessly away into private embellishments. Somehow, even mentioning the thing in the sky sends my mom and brother into animated re-tellings of their own versions. They begin comparing notes and suddenly all hope for objectivity is lost. My brother remembers far too many details for a kid who spent almost the whole time on the floor of the car. But he did recall that the object seemed to be glowing, as if illuminated from within. I picture the blurry glow from inside one of those inflatable Frosty the Snowman-type lawn ornaments. This triggers a strong recollection and I feel that his memory of this detail may be correct. Maybe it did glow. Or maybe I’ve heard my brother’s story so many times that what I’m feeling is a nostalgia for his version of it. It’s impossible to know. My mom only remembers that there was something large following along side us, low in the sky, and that she was concerned about getting us all home safely. No other details mattered to her.
After dinner my brother redeems himself by pulling up several websites on his i-pad with information that could corroborate our experience. He’s not a UFO enthusiast. More of a research junkie. One website is a searchable database of thousands of UFO sightings compiled from reports stretching far back into the last century. It seems there were many, many descriptions of odd things in the sky in our neck of the woods around the time in question. Spinning disks, glowing orbs, hovering boomerangs and silent cigar-shaped projectiles. They appeared day or night, to many or few. What is it with UFO sightings in rural areas? I wonder. Are extraterrestrials obsessed with our agricultural practices? Or do city people just not bother with objects in the sky?
Another website indicates we lived near a small air force base - a possible point of origin for test flights of experimental military aircraft. Aha! I decide this is the answer I like best. I have no idea whether it is true. I just like it because it seems reasonable and doesn’t demand a thing of me. No major shift in beliefs. This was during the Cold War, after all, the Baroque era at the Pentagon, when our military leader’s most creative thinking was poured into the absurd proliferation of experimental gadgetry, much of it useless and unfeasible.
And so the family arrives at the place we always do with the thing in the sky, a place of familiar unknowing, where a shrug or a “who can say?” signals we are done with the topic, and the conversation is again free to drift where it will. Later in my room, my thoughts return to experimental flying things. I am drawn in by several images that Google serves up under the search term “experimental military blimps.” It could have been this one. Or that one. I picture them each taking a turn flying beside our car, low and silent. Each is equally feasible.
Human Benchmark
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| Stapelton control tower. Image: Wiki-Commons |
Today I live on the site of that airport. The Stapleton neighborhood in east Denver was redeveloped as a massive 'urban infill' project after the airport was relocated in the 1990’s. I’ve pored over vintage maps and determined that our house sits roughly at the far end of the old Concourse E.
Prior to moving here, that family vacation was my only experience of Colorado. It was two summers after the UFO event, and my parents used some inheritance money to bring us out to a Dude Ranch. It was our first and only vacation that wasn’t a car trip. We bought 'western' shirts at the one department store in our town before the trip. At the Stapleton airport, the dude ranch shuttle driver spotted us immediately. We drove down through the Rampart Range to the Lost Valley Ranch down near Deckers. I was twelve years old and completely smitten with Colorado. I knew I could probably never live here, but for the price of a black felt cowboy hat from the Lost Valley Ranch gift shop, I could pretend. Six states and thirty-five years later I moved to Colorado. I learned the dude ranch had been nearly destroyed by the Hayman forest fire a few years ago. The buildings were spared, but thousands of acres of trees in every direction were burned to the ground. It turns out this ranch is just a stones throw from the burn area where we recently found the UFO mooring station.
These fragments of happenstance are benchmarks in an oddball narrative I’m still somewhere in the middle of experiencing. We’ve all got some version of this. Like pins on a big map that I can’t get up high enough to read, my coincidences may be proof of some sort of pattern beyond my reckoning. It’s possible I’ll never know. It turns out I’m not that much of a stickler for certainty anyway. I’ve never found my own attempts to apprehend it to be that reliable. Each time I think I’ve solved some big life question, a constellation of unknowns circles in to fill the void. Maybe the acquisition of certainty would matter more to me if I were a religious fundamentalist or an atheist. Instead, the need to have all the answers seems like a very useless anxiety.
In Buddhism there is the notion that some things are flat-out unknowable. Buddha is said to have refused any discussion of them whatsoever. These are known as the 14 Unanswerable Questions, and each has to do with things like the nature of the self, whether time and space are infinite, whether there is an afterlife, and so on. Delineating each of these questions with a number and specific description seems to belie the fact that they are unanswerable, but Buddha said that to entertain them is a craving which leads to sickness and misery.
The early Christian church had a similar approach to questions of ultimate knowledge, best exemplified by a philosophy called the “Via Negativa,” an apophatic theology now mostly lost to contemporary evangelical Christianity, but still widely practiced in the Eastern Orthodox Church. This perspective insists that God (or the Ultimate Good) can only be described in the negative, since what IT is, is wholly beyond our comprehension or ability to describe. Therefore, we can say that God is not evil, God is not ignorant, and so on. But here’s where it gets extra squirrely: God can neither be said to exist, nor to not exist, because all questions of existence are framed by limits of the human intellect which is a finite product of the temporal world (which by definition, God transcends). Got it? The modern mind may detect a circular logic at work here, but practitioners of this theology would argue that only by emptying the mind of all notions of God, other than pure goodness, can we hope to experience IT. This is because the Divine cannot be discovered, but must reveal itself to us. Prayer is said to be the mechanism to make this experience accessible, but the practice of humility, thankfulness and love are the virtues that make it possible.
Religion aside (whew!), it’s unlikely anyone would argue that the practice of humility, thankfulness and love isn’t the exact right path to be on at all times. Not that any of those three virtues are easy. The key idea is that they become a practice. I think about this stuff a lot when I’m out hiking in the mountains, particularly if I’m alone, though I’ve never actually set out to be contemplative. Usually I just want to explore some new trail. But then it just sort of happens, an effect of silence, the physical rhythm of hiking, and the awe I feel at my surroundings. It’s easy to be thankful at such times, and when thankfulness kicks in, humility and love are normally pretty close by. It may not be a traditional sort of spiritual path, but tromping around in the wilderness is my own Via Negativa.
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| View toward Pettingell Peak from Continental Divide Trail. Photo: Mark Penner-Howell |
One of my favorite places to explore is up on the Continental Divide, just west of Denver. Little by little I’m trying to hike as much of it as I can. Though I have logged many dozens of miles along its spine, it’s certain I’ll never complete it, given the shortness of the hiking season and the frequency of electrical storms that force me down. Recently I’ve spent a lot of time on the trails around Rollins Pass, a low spot on the Divide long considered the safest place for planes to cross over the Rocky mountains. In the days before large commercial jets - which gain altitude quickly and don’t need to look for low spots - this was the standard route for passenger flights headed west out of Denver. At 11,676’ elevation, the relative lowness of Rollins pass is debatable. Still it is the best approach for small aircraft going up and over the mountains. Nearby is a mountain I like to climb called James Peak, which rises another 1600’ above the pass. From its top you are practically at eye level with many of the planes crossing over. Because James Peak is in a remote wilderness area, by the time you reach its windy summit there may be more people nearby in the sky than on the ground. In such a setting it is impossible for me to not wave at the planes, as ridiculous as that may be. I keep my wave nice and simple - more like a salute - so pilots don’t think I’m in distress. It’s something of a privilege to serve as a human benchmark in such remote and lovely places. Whether anyone looking down takes the gesture as my way of giving testament to the impossibly strange miracle of being alive, or whether they simply have a laugh at my expense, I’ll never know. I’m just happy to be up there poking around, doing my best to live in the present, and once in a while getting a peek at the indescribable. I keep suspecting that this sort of immersion in the moment creates an intimacy with the world that is more about “being” than knowing - a more useful thing in the long run. So that is why I wave at the sky. I don’t always do it, just when someone is close enough that I know they can see me. Whether or not anyone ever waves back is unknowable, and I’m okay with that.
- m.p.h.
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| Continental Divide Trail, looking south near Berthoud Pass, Colorado. Photo: Mark Penner-Howell |
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