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 "Water and Wellness in the West"

Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine

Solitary hikes with the family dogs are a relief from the intolerance and antagonistic noise of this tipping-point election year in the USA. I recently discovered a gulch north of town that is too boulder-choked for a bike trail… even for a deer trail. I was clambering up it at that magical moment when the sun gets high enough to pour into the gulch and backlight the foliage with brilliant halos. (I avoid using the word “coronas”.) So it was dismaying to find an empty plastic one-gallon water jug lodged between two boulders there. I checked the label before crushing it to stow in my backpack. Arrowhead “Spring Water”. A gift from Nestle. It was labeled “A Local Favorite”. My knee-jerk reaction was that it felt like salt in a wound mixed with the stink of fresh bull-oney. Then it occurred to me that although Nestle spreads billions of plastic bottles around the world, someone else tossed away that bottle. Finally it struck me that this was not the convenient half-liter throwaway we pick up on our trails and riversides: no one carries an eight-pound jug of water on an afternoon bike ride.

Walking across the mesa above the gulch, I bypassed two homeless camps; jumbled piles of discarded sleeping bags, clothes, tarps, and plastic wrappers from convenience foods. The dogs alerted, so I knew the camps were occupied. When homeless wanderers abandon their camps, they walk away from the tarps and trash; discarded refuse left behind by the discarded humans of our consumption economy. Here was the real origin of the water jug: not vagrants, not even Nestle. The source of waste in our hills, our water, and our growing homeless camps is the careless self-absorption of our society. We have met the enemy and he is us.

If there Is a positive spin on the otherwise absurd “A Local Favorite”, it is that Nestle recognizes the market power of “local”. The word connotes authentic, healthy, and fresh, and “local favorite” suggests that the local people know a good thing. I agree. We are here because we know a good thing. The Envision Chaffee County survey showed that preserving agricultural land and keeping the rural character of the County were the local qualities we value most highly.

That is why, during a time of extended severe drought, with more drought years coming, with over 90% of the food we eat shipped in from all over the world and gaps showing up on grocery shelves, with farmland in the Central Colorado headwaters region still being subdivided and turned into mini-desert subdivisions, the idea of permitting the removal of 65 million gallons of water every year from the Valley’s irrigation system doesn’t seem like a local good thing so much as local slow suicide.

Sadly, the basis for the relationship of water to humans in Colorado is that it is a commodity to be traded for profit, rather than nurtured as the bloodline that ties plants, animals, and soil and humans together in a complex web of well-being that we understand only poorly. No human system can trump natural law. Nature has no agenda and makes no judgement between good and evil, never lies and never fixes blame. But nature, with no malice at all, quickly eliminates unworkable organisms and systems, and leaves no discarded waste in the process.

Extracting water from a local ecosystem, burning thousands of gallons of diesel fuel to truck it 150 miles away to a factory so it can be put into billions of plastic bottles that we flawed humans discard to break down into particles that are toxic to plant and animal life, is a prime example of an unworkable system. It’s a system that is currently supported by human laws, but nature will slowly and surely trump these as the plastic waste slowly poisons us and our food supply, and we either replace the water extraction with a regenerative use, or we cease to occupy the land that we ourselves made barren.

Nature is in the business of creating beauty from chaos. Life is opportunistic and uses whatever comes to hand to continue to survive. Why don’t we take the same approach? Nestle owns the land and the water rights, and it isn’t likely that we can overturn entrenched laws, but those laws give County Commissioners the right to set conditions for granting the extraction permit. Why not create an opportunity for Nestle to convert part of its permitted water extraction and part of its profit to a model of regenerative resource use?

Abandoned mining towns are mute testimony to the short life-expectancy of extraction economies. Why not give Nestle an opportunity to create a more wholesome future for itself than extraction offers, by converting part of it to local regenerative agriculture? There are several projects and organizations that would benefit from support and create a more positive public image for Nestle than its currently negative one.

A model for this already exists in Alamosa: the Rio Grande Farm Park Chaffee County already has all the elements needed to create a beacon for local agriculture: we are a magnet for outdoor tourism, and there is ag land close to towns. A mobile processing unit would hugely benefit meat producers who now drive hundreds of miles to process their animals. 

We have investment vehicles like SOIL Sangre de Cristo and the Central Colorado Conservancy, and we have collaborative farming organizations like Guidestone Colorado, the Upper Arkansas Conservation District, and Chaffee County Local Food Coalition, to facilitate gathering the threads and weaving a tapestry for the future.

A contribution by Nestle to fund a beacon project should be a condition of their permit renewal. Maybe we could transform the “Local Favorite” salt and bull-oney into something lovely, lasting, and true, something that benefits everyone… including Nestle, maybe even something that could benefit a wandering vagrant or veteran in need of a healthy meal… or a job.