The river water was cold and even though fairly shallow, its color was dark in the fading light of a February evening. One pool had been staked out by a large great blue heron, who didn’t give way as I approached until I was within 30 feet of where it was standing. It then flew off with a righteous fuss, only to settle on a boulder just 60 feet further upstream.
I took that to mean that there were fish in the pool, and I flailed about in the water for 15 minutes before I yielded the space to the heron and made my way on down the river.
By the time I got back to my car it was so dark I had to use the interior lights to take down my Tenkara rod and stow it away. I had only one small bite that evening and no fish caught. But that line of bright orange clouds against a blue-green twilight sky and that grand-looking bird fishing nearby. Ay ay ay, too good … too good.
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Get a closeup of the bill of a great blue heron and you will see why I am glad they have no interest in making life difficult for humans. If there is a stabbier-looking thing in the universe I don’t know what it would be.
There is no mercy in the gaze of that eye. And that mullet … don’t know ‘bout that.
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In 1974 I moved my family to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, to a small town named Hancock. We loved it there, but by 1980 it was obvious that if I was going to help my kids with college expenses down the road, I was going to have to work in a different part of the country. My pediatric practice in the U.P. was nearly 75% Medicaid, and without boring you with a lecture on medical economics, that is a number that does not equate with survival. It means that you go broke slowly but unrelentingly.
But while we lived there, we thrived in other ways. For me personally, the forests and lakes and craggy shorelines were the sort of stuff that were manna for my soul. I didn’t even mind the fact that five months of the year my head couldn’t be seen above the snowdrifts. Well, that’s not exactly true … but it was and is a special place.
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I am still processing Alexei Navalny’s death. He joins the heroes in my personal pantheon, along with folks like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Thich Nhat Hanh, Harriet Tubman, Crazy Horse … it’s an ever- growing list. All of them people whose courage made me feel both large at sharing humanity with them and small at my own performances.
Not all of my heroes had to die to make it to the list. When I worked at the county hospital in Buffalo NY there were the grandmothers who brought babies in for well-child checks and immunizations and who had long journeys on buses involving the need to transfer twice to get to the clinic. These women were raising those kids at a time in their lives when they might have been slowing down and enjoying the shade of oak trees or putting up preserves from their gardens. Those buses traveled from and through some of the rougher neighborhoods in Buffalo, but the women came anyway and never missed an appointment.
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Thursday a Democratic candidate for the US House stopped in Montrose for what was billed as a “meet and greet.” He was here for about an hour and a half and then zoomed off to his next event in another town nearby.
His name is Adam Frisch, he’s a well-heeled fellow from Aspen, and he seemed awfully sensible. Not exciting, but sensible. He is what is described as a centrist Democrat which means you couldn’t get a feather between him and a centrist Republican, back in the day that there were centrist Republicans. He calls himself a conservative which means that every twelfth word in his short speech was “business.”
Mr. Frisch’s attire was Colorado casual, topped off by a Carhartt vest to make sure that we knew that even though he’s a millionaire from Aspen, he’s really a workin’ man at heart.
But that’s all okay with me at this point, since most of what I’ve been hearing from nthe world of politics recently comes from people who actually should be in padded cells for their own good. And ours.
To listen to someone who speaks in complete sentences with nouns and verbs and everything was a real treat. Frisch was supposed to be running against the Happy Fondler from Rifle CO, but she smelled a loss coming her way and switched districts to try to avoid it.
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Robin and I took a day trip this week to Crested Butte, which is a smallish ski town about a two hour drive from Paradise. We like CB a lot. Of course it is a touristy village, but it is unusual in that it is still quaint. Lots of pastel-painted buildings, unshoveled sidewalks, a nice little bookshop. There is a barn-like pizza joint called The Secret Stash that serves up excellent pies, and which we never miss on our trips there.
Before it became a tourist town, Crested Butte had a strong mining and ranching history, with its own versions of the cattlemen vs. the sheepherder tales. Most of those stories went like this: cattlemen occupy an area of the valley, sheepmen move in with 1500 sheep, cattlemen put on masks to ride out one night and massacre those 1500 sheep, sheepherder leaves town.
Summers there is grand hiking and sight-seeing, and some of the very best alpine wildflower viewing there is. Good place to visit, wouldn’t necessarily want to live there.
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Little Home In The Valley 
They’d all be heroes for me, too.
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