I love the fruition of fall. Last week I walked home from work a different way, along the bike path by Boulder Creek. It’s been 13 months since our big Colorado floods, and at this time last year the path was buried under silt and downed trunks. Now it’s clean, except for a few fallen leaves pressed into the concrete by the tires of whizzing cyclists. The riverbed has recovered to the point that big trout again sway below big rocks, their backs catching shafts of light if you stop and look. The only remnants of last fall’s rage are higher up, in the crotches of cottonwoods where tangles of sticks and hairy debris still hang, bleached and angular like the entwined skeletons of drowned lovers. Perhaps the cleanup crews decided to leave them as reminders that, yep, the waters ran THAT high.
Farther along, I pass under apple trees practically collapsing under loads of so much fruit, the surrounding lawns littered with fermenting bear forage. Normally the cops collect beer from weaving freshmen on weekend nights, but how exactly do you confiscate cidered apples from a drunken bear? We had a bull moose in town this week; the authorities tranquilized and shipped him to higher ground for the offense of picking fights with labradoodles he mistook for wolves. And yesterday a neighbor’s wildlife-cam caught a pregnant mountain lion hauling her belly up the street in broad daylight. Kaisha and I jogged past the spot that afternoon, her nose twitching like a Geiger-counter. I pulled on the leash, but she defiantly squatted to leave her comment on the urinary Facebook thread. Usually by October, life here has begun its wither into dry grasses and crackling leaves. But this year, thanks still to our flood-saturated water cycle, we remain green, plump, and almost muddy.
I don’t much mind my own property’s brambles of poppies and bindweed. The berm we built last winter to prevent recurrence of the water entering our house (it’s axiomatic that engineering for a 100-year event should be performed in the 101st year), remains unsculpted into anything you would call “landscaping.” Wrecked irrigation tubes still protrude at angles from under surviving spirea shrubs. Neighbors around us beautifully rebuilt their yards this summer, and when I mentioned to one that next spring we intend to scrape our failed xeriscape back to simple lawn, he practically wept with relief. But I’m not stressing about it. Recoveries take their own sweet time, like rivers. The beauty of experience is sensing when to let the current take you, when to find your feet, when to stand.