Ed Berg "Walking Without Joe"

Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine

On winter mornings I get up and go out to the back yard while the coffee perks, just to be under the stars in the quiet time before dawn. Our dog Joe comes out with me out to sniff the air for other early morning wanderers. In late November a celestial parade kicks off in the north where Cassiopeia, the vain Greek goddess, is setting. Three of her stars are now known to have planets circling them, like children playing around her skirts. Maybe that’s what she’s proud of. On her left is the Pleiades flock, and just north of west is Orion, finishing the night hunt with his dog Sirius in the west. I used to think that the Dog Star was following the Hunter, but after living with a herding dog, I’ve learned that the Hunter is the one who follows along behind. After settling the stars, we go inside, I pour up the coffee, and Joe joins me on the sunroom couch where I write this stuff.

Joe came into our lives fourteen years ago via a ranch pickup in the Walmart parking lot. He was a Border Collie- Heeler mix who wasn’t allowed to compete in herding trials and needed to be disposed of, one way or another. His humble start didn’t deter him from becoming an intelligent, courteous, and loving member of our family and circle of friends. We’d had good dogs before, but that was before I understood that while dogs can just be pets, some of them have the potential to become family members, if their humans are well-trained. Anyone who’s had a close relationship to a non-human person can understand why indigenous peoples recognize consciousness in all things. It’s only recently that we’ve bought into the illusion that humans are separate from other beings, an illusion that causes untold suffering.

Joe and I enjoyed many of the same things: the sights, sounds and smells of the woods, a game of Chase-Me With-The-Ball, and an afternoon snooze together with him tucked behind my legs on the couch. Unlike me, he took delight in chasing tennis balls and chewing them into shards which we would later find on the carpet under our bare feet. He also took keen interest in smelling things that I thought were distinctly un-interesting. Joe cleaned our plates after meals. Yep: a good dog is also a valuable kitchen appliance. We called his service our Pre-Wash Cycle, and we undoubtedly saved a ton on hot dishwater.

We lived our indoor and outdoor lives together, nearly free of injuries and late-life ailments. We even slowed down together as I moved through my mid-seventies. Joe lost his hearing that last year and his eyesight was dimming. On the next-to-last day in November, he was playful in the morning as usual. Around 2:30 in the afternoon we left to meet friends on the edge of a favorite aspen grove for a last-of-the-year Cocktail Hour. Lately he hadn’t been able to jump up into the truck, so I lifted him into his favorite spot on the back seat floor. When we got up to the grove, he didn’t want to get out, which was odd. It was too cold and windy for sitting out in the sunset, so we all came back to the house for pizza together. But Joe couldn’t get out of the truck.

I lifted him out and he whimpered, which was also unusual. He went ahead into the yard but collapsed to his side just inside the gate. He rested a minute and got up, went inside with us, and lay down on his pillow. We finished our meal without lingering. I sat down next to him and realized he was having a stroke. I got out a sleeping pad and bag and laid down next to him. It was a long night, with him shifting restlessly and me stroking his head or just touching him, telling him it was okay to go on ahead. At about 3:30 he lifted his head, rolled onto his side and was gone.

The next morning, we laid his worn-out, beautiful body in a private spot in that aspen grove above the Valley, thinking his spirit, freed from its cocoon, could roam the places we once hiked together… but darned if he didn’t follow us back down the mountain and is curled up beside me once again on the couch. But now when I think to reach out to stroke his soft ears and muzzle, the thought has a solemn echo, and I don’t move my hand.

My sister, who trains service dogs and their humans, advises me that the process will take time and to let the tears come. She ought to know; she’s loved and lost a few grand dogs over the years, not to mention two husbands and a lovely ranch. I haven’t shed many tears, but while we were up in the aspen grove, some racking sobs broke free. There are frequent catches in the chest and a mental step back from the edge when I glance toward a spot where Joe should be. I stand there, staring at nothing, and realize this will indeed take its own time. The grief of loss is only one side of a coin; the other is the joy of having been together all those years. They can’t be separated.

Someone recently told me that grief lasts as long as love, so I looked up the best description of love that I know of, St. Paul’s in his first letter to the Christians in Corinth. Here’s part of it:

Love … bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

I always thought the passage was an instruction about how we should love. Now I know it tells us that when love arises within us, it never fails; we can count on it forever.

So you run on ahead Joe; I’ll be along before too long.

Ed Berg "Between Earth and Sky"

Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine

We humans straddle two worlds, one foot in the chop wood, carry water, earthly realities, the other in the heavenly world of compassion, poetry, reverence for nature, and art. We’ve been around for some 300,000 years, a long time to live between earth and sky, but looking at the condition of the planet’s forests, farms, oceans, and war zones, you’d think we could have made more progress. We’ve done well in some things: flutes and drums were being played over 60,000 years ago, exquisite cave paintings and carved figures go back more than 50,000 years ago, and body decorations go back more than 100,000 years BP (Before Pizza). Apparently, all the human types indulged in art back then; there were about a dozen, instead of the solitary Homo Sapiens (“wise human”) we proudly name ourselves.

Prehistoric art depicts scenes from everyday life, like hunting scenes of prey and predators, as well as baffling images from trance states, indecipherable to those of us who live disconnected from the natural world. Still, connecting earth and sky is a powerful element of our lives and is a big part of why we choose to live in these alpine valleys. Last summer I met a concert cellist who also renovates adobe buildings. You can’t get more connected to earth and sky than making a mud house and celestial music with the same pair of hands. So a few weeks after the concert meeting, I drove over Poncha Pass, down between earth and sky through the San Luis Valley, to visit Mark Dudrow in the small town of Jaroso, a half mile north of the New Mexico border. Jaroso is a place where willows grow… like Alamosa is a place where cottonwoods grow. It has a post office open for twelve hours a week, and being the only storefront business in Jaroso, it serves as a community hub where more than willows grow.

Twenty-five years ago, Mark saw an ad for 16 acres with an adobe house and capilla (chapel), so he bought the place and moved there with his partner and baby daughter. He renovated and enlarged the adobe house (so small that the front and back door hung on the same hinge), and then renovated the church, where he holds concerts and recording sessions in its still-sacred space that echoes both music and memories. Now he rents out the house and lives in a more recently acquired two-story adobe house built in 1910; also renovated by Mark. No, not by a contractor hired by Mark: by Mark. He stacks and burns 6 cords of wood every winter to heat the place. It’s a cool residence: never gets above 710, even on a hot summer afternoon, and on a raw February morning? Cozy if you keep close to the stove.

My neophyte’s image of a concert cellist, (urbane, manicured fingers, polished shoes, living in an elegantly regentrified neighborhood) was pleasantly updated over the next few hours. Mark normally dresses in a T-shirt and jeans, and polish doesn’t stick to sandals and ditch boots.

We went through casual introductions that included Martha Shepp, a pianist Mark is working with to produce a series of concerts and recordings of Spanish and South American composers. Another stereotype went away: my idea of what goes into a project like this. When I arrived, they were finishing a three-hour practice session, one of (how many?) over the last three years. Three years of work for three or four concerts in a sparsely populated region next year. It makes me wonder how many hours (years?) of work it took to produce those cave paintings that no one looked at for thousands of years.

After Martha left, we shifted to the front porch. Mark’s weathered recliner is within easy reach of a guitar stand. Oh, to be a fly on the wall there on a summer evening! Given my background of complete inexperience with interviews, I didn’t attempt to steer the conversation, (much less the flow of this essay) so we spent the time chasing curiosity’s tail between vegetable plantings and dwindling creek flows, to the absence of rabbit damage (Rabbit was there trimming the lawn), to the hole up in a dead cottonwood that shelters Kestrel falcons during springtime child-rearing. Starlings destroy Kestrels’ eggs and hatchlings, but Mark told them to stay away, and they do. Perhaps the rabbit is under a similar caution. Talk wandered to the dried-up Costilla Creek for which the county is named, although willows no longer grow there, due to diversions, water table drawdown and rapidly increasing summer heat, all side-effects of industrial farming practices... locally and globally.

It occurred to me that the connectivity Mark’s life embodies was in high contrast to the separation our industrial economy is based on.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer (botanist and Potawami Nation citizen) talks about how her people’s language uses verbs to identify things we use nouns for. Indigenous cultures see all things as persons, not the inanimate objects we casually name and exploit. A few summers ago I watched an enormous house being built nearby, a plywood palace completely disconnected from the earth and sky it stood between. There will be no masterpieces painted, no music played there by the hands that built it. Disconnection shows up in the way we value land only by its ability to generate short-term profit. So agricultural land in the West turns into developments to house people who have no connection to the land, severing water and productivity to create a one-time profit for a few who live disconnected from earth and sky. Other disconnections show up in the woods outside town, where summer campsites pop up like sad toadstools, brief shelter for people severed from our society. Seeing them makes me want to head down to Jaroso.

If we would again take our place in connecting earth and sky, maybe all of us can find homes… and make some music together.

Ed Berg "Brinksmanship in the Valley"

                Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine

A few weeks ago I woke from a dream where I was in a tiny village in steep mountain terrain, talking with some folks outside a cottage on a dirt road. I noticed a gulch dropping off the roadside next to the cottage and stepped closer to peer over the edge… then jumped back. It dropped vertically out of sight into nothingness. A misstep would be fatal. End of dream.

The day before I’d driven through suburban Colorado Springs for the first time in years and was dismayed by the ocean of look-alike homes and shopping malls that replaced the farms, pastures, and grassland that was there not long ago. Thousands of residences served by look-alike chain stores selling mass-produced food, clothing, and stuff, with no sign of the faraway sources of the fuel, food, water, or materials that supply the system. There were none of the mountains of throw-away plastic containers, old appliances, tires, and vehicles that are the system’s end products, that we don’t want to think about. The suburban dream has come true: millions of homes separated by miles of pavement, all built on the brink of the consumption chasm.

Here in my own part-of-the-problem suburban home in Salida, I’m reading through the third draft of the County Comprehensive Plan, a 113-page guideline for changing the Land Use Code that could help avoid turning the Upper Arkansas Valley into another suburban sprawl on the brink of the consumption cliff. The existing code contains regulations that were made when we happily threw things away, things like plastic containers, synthetic clothes, or feedlot animals, or people in homeless camps. Now there is no more “away”. Our County Dump grows by dozens of truckloads every day, and the hills on the edge of Salida are dotted not only with dream homes, but with the litter of summertime homeless camps for discarded people. We live closer to the sources that supply suburban supermarket shelves, lumber for houses, water to spread on lawns, mines for the metal in cars.

The Comprehensive Plan will require concessions from separate interests with apparently conflicting needs and goals. Among them are agricultural producers, real estate developers, tourism business owners, and residents in town and county. Deciding which interests are best for the long-term quality of life in the Valley will be critical... and difficult. But I say “apparently conflicting” because these different interests actually have common needs.

For example, our high property values benefit developers and realtors and give ranchers a chance to monetize property they’ve managed at marginal profit for decades, and maybe replace a worn-out tractor or send a kid to college. At the same time, they force our workers to live in substandard housing or commute here from out of town. Subdivision is like a prescription opioid that suppresses a symptom for the short term, but creates nasty side-effects, with no plan for getting off the drug. Farmland keeps getting subdivided while workers keep struggling to find homes. The side effect is that every pasture taken out of irrigation decreases the water supply in the Valley, not through increased consumption, but because without crop roots in the soil, it loses its water-holding capacity and erodes in summer thunderstorms or blows away in dust clouds that don’t really attract a lot of tourists... or home buyers. Our soil ends up in the Pueblo Reservoir, steadily reducing the volume available for the farms that grow much of the produce we consume in Salida… and elsewhere in Central Colorado.

More people move here every month, but the land area doesn’t grow to meet demand, while the water supply decreases, not only due to development, but reduced rainfall and snowpack. Many newcomers want new homes in attractive rural settings, but very few know anything about the land they (we) enjoy hiking or biking through or are living on. It’s like handing over your checkbook and car keys to a fourteen-year-old: the end result is going to be expensive. In the last year, agricultural landowners incurred $75,000 in cut fences, eroded roads, and harassed livestock. Yet those fence-cutting tourists love their hamburgers, and every new home built on irrigated land invades someone else’s view and reduces everyone else’s water supply. Roads originally built to serve the ranchers now bring in tourists. It’s easy to be destructive if we’re disconnected from the source. The path away from the edge is reconnection: land to water; property values to productivity; health to food and land instead of pharmaceuticals and hospitals, well-being to community instead of possessions; tourists to respect for the land, and ranchers to tourist dollars.

The changes sweeping across the planet has casualties: one must be our practice of separating things that cannot survive without connection. Way back in high school biology class I had to dissect a frog. I separated the skeleton, muscles, and digestive tract, but didn’t learn anything about the frog’s diet and its role in controlling insect-borne diseases. In the end, I had a dead frog in front of me, in pieces. Separated parts don’t make a whole.

There are parts coming back together here. If you shop at Safeway after 7:00 pm, you’ll find some of the disconnected people, buying factory-made food, not looking happy and healthy and not connecting to other shoppers. In contrast, at the Winter Farmers Market on a Saturday morning, you’ll see people chatting with other shoppers and the vendors. You will see and smell livestock and delicious food cooking, but you will not see throwaway plastic shopping bags, nor smell disinfectant. Instead of fluorescent lights overhead, there is blue sky. Instead of partially- empty shelves of foodstuff from far-off places in glitzy plastic containers, there are cardboard boxes full of fresh produce. Instead of linoleum floors underfoot and steel shelves on either side, you will walk on dirt, with snow-capped mountains around you. Reconnecting health to food to water and land is one of the steps we can away from the edge. And it is pleasant.