The Brighter Day

I’ve been trying to see if there isn’t a bright side to our climate changing, which hasn’t been easy. But as we heat up, I suppose that some of nature’s creatures who have always thought Colorado too cold to be attractive might change their minds.

It might not be beyond the realm of possibility that the corpses of armadillos will begin to decorate our highways as they do now in south Texas, and that when we shake out our sleeping bags in the morning we find that we’ve been cohabiting with new and exciting reptile varieties. Jaguars may move northward from the Mexican border to locations here in Paradise, which would be interesting since they tend to run bigger than our resident mountain lions and could decide to sample the local cuisine, which includes us.

If all of this turns out to become a real thing, I’ll have to learn about these critters and how to deal with them. As of today, I don’t have a plan. Except to run away.

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When I read up on the music’s history, I found that it was written to celebrate the Russians finally turning Napoleon’s Grande Armée around and sending it packing.

On 7 September 1812, at Borodino , 120 km (75 mi) west of Moscow, Napoleon’s forces met those of General Mikhail Kutuzov in a concerted stand made by Russia against the seemingly invincible French Army. The Battle of Borodino saw casualties estimated as high as 100,000 and the French were masters of the field. It was, however, ultimately a pyrrhic victory for the French invasion.

With resources depleted and supply lines overextended, Napoleon’s weakened forces moved into Moscow, which they occupied with no delegation to receive the conquerors. Expecting a capitulation from Tsar Alexander I, the French instead found themselves in a barren and desolate city. To make things worse, 48 hours after Napoleon’s entry to the Russian city on 14 September 1812, three quarters of Moscow was burned to the ground.

Deprived of winter stores, Napoleon had to retreat. Beginning on 19 October and lasting well into December, the French Army faced several overwhelming obstacles on its long retreat: famine, typhus, freezing temperatures, harassing cossacks, and Russian forces barring the way out of the country. Abandoned by Napoleon in November, the Grande Armée was reduced to one-tenth of its original size by the time it reached Poland and relative safety.

Wikipedia, 1812 Overture

Well, it wasn’t enough for the Russians to lick these guys in 1812. They wanted to beat up on France a little more in 1880, with Tchaikovsky’s assistance. And so, this overture was commissioned. Listening to it today I found an amusing tidbit that I missed when I listened in 1959. At 11:12 you begin to hear quotes from La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. That short phrase is played twice without incident, but on the third repetition at 11:45 the Russian cannons blow it to smithereens.

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Robin was away for four days this past week, preserving the well-being of two semi-abandoned children in Durango, so I decided to make things easy on myself re: meal preparation.

So I cooked up a half gallon of clam chowder, and ate it at every meal. This gave me the opportunity to think quite a lot about clams, something I ordinarily do rarely. Each night before retiring I have been dragging out the Water Pik and trying to dislodge clam bits from between my teeth.

It took a while each time because the motes of mollusk refused to be dislodged. They are like barnacles in the mouth. I came to the belief that canned clams really were the soles of old running shoes that had been run through a blender and then packed in sea water.

I’m pretty sure that if you were to take a canful and spend a few hours rearranging the pieces the way archeologists do when they go through bone fragments to reconstruct a skeleton, you would find that they spell out the words Adidas or Nike. Maybe a vowel missing here and there, but you would get the picture.

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The other day my one remaining functional neuron took a day off and I decided to ride up to the Black Canyon and back, something I’ve done twice before. The round trip distance is 37 miles, and with electrical assistance is ordinarily a breeze.

Coming back I ran out of juice about a mile from the park boundary. You can still pedal the unelectrified bike but it is a heavy beast indeed, and I began to pay careful attention to that turkey buzzard circling over head, since the temperature was now 90 degrees.

I began to wonder … was my will in order … had I left food for the cats … did I have any water left … would I be forced to drink my own urine to survive? Would I soon drop by the wayside and my dried husk found by the highway department tomorrow?

I cried out, I’m too young to go … not today … not when I haven’t seen Oppenheimer yet!

And then I crested the hill and realized that it was all downhill now, right to the door of my house. Soon I was balancing an iced tea on my knee and reaching for the remote control.

As my old mentor Scarlett O’Hara used to say – “Tomorrow is another day.”

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