September 3

The fledgling signs of winter’s approach now over the painted hills & mountains, snow line down lower along Healy Ridge & down south over Panorama. & all the fireweed gone red. Running twenty miles yesterday, the leaves underfoot along the trail vermillion & crimson & gashing gold, rain-slick or lazing unhurried from white bough to black dirt. & a few days ago, running on a sheep trail on top of Sugarloaf, a gargantuan hyperphagic griz sauntering about in the berry patches just below, so that to reroute I had to sidehill a steep scree-field for a mile. & here it is September, already. The moose in rut, temperatures to thirty overnight, the autumnal crispness attending the mornings or carried in the breeze. & the colors in this place pyrotechnic & endlessly beautiful again.

On the property we’ve been stalled by busy-ness & marathon training. I hauled the concrete piers out a few days ago in five trips totaling somewhere around 700 pounds. Didn’t get them up the hill yet, but at least in the meantime, they’re out of the truck & on our land. These next days off I hope to get the platform started & get the batter boards up for the main cabin site. Got to beat freeze-up. But until then I like seeing how seasons can rotate around one steadfast plan or two, like a time-lapse video almost. It seems to put idea & practice both in conversation with other elements, to subject them to something closer to natural fact (which is an especially effective antidote to tangential thinking). Like all of this arises out of an agreement between ourselves & the land & the plans, each of the three serving an organic function in moving forward. I’ve come to kindly depend on that conversation.

In the meantime, Kristin is out along a ridgeline at Moonlight Creek on a fifty mile patrol, in the middle of all of that variegated splendor. The dogs & I stick closer to home, & on walks they’ll weave in & out of the willows & collect yellow & red leaves on their heads & backs unawares & look up smiling & then pull harder, thinking about the snow to come. Amen.

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