The view outside my window is a tapestry of snow and ice interwoven with skeletal trees. Narnia has taken hold. A large mountain lion was seen on my street early one morning this week. Coyotes howl out of the dark of the frigid hillside. I sit at my desk and spin words, getting close to the end of my final read-through before sending my book off to my agent for his perusal. The Ute Indians used to come to this corner of Colorado, but only in the warmer months. We Pale Skins are here only because of fossil fuels and electricity driven by fossil fuels. If all that failed, we would be dead in a matter of weeks, even after we had burned all our furniture and used our manuscripts for fire-lighters. We would die, because nothing grows in Narnia, at least not until it rejoins the living in May.
A quote on my calendar tells me that beneath the apparition of the surface, all living beings are one thing. And here we all are, one human thing, buzzing around in our heated vehicles, eking out our lives from one centrally heated house to another and to the cinema, and restaurants if we are lucky. All uniformally and stupidly forgetting how tenuous all of this is, how temporary this sliver of life we have parked our one human backside on.
And I was going to be good this winter and not get bogged down in the cold and ice like the shrivelled carcasses my dogs dig up from the snow banks, sticks with fur and frozen eyes. But I lost the battle, I guess, because next week I'm off cruising. The lifeless landscape has finally got to me, and I need out. People were never meant to live here anyway alongside the starving coyotes and elk and the mice curled in their grass nests beneath feet of snow. Once I dot the last "i" and hit "send" and my lovely words go sailing through the ether to the east coast, I am boarding a ship, donning the plush bathrobe in my cabin and settling back on my veranda with a glass of champagne.
I have earned it. So there.
You HAVE earned it! Enjoy your trip!
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