The Garden

Ruth strolled out into her garden munching on a crisp pickle and wearing a big straw sunbonnet as an afternoon rainstorm swept down from the mountains. She straddled a pale green, three-legged stool that stood in the midst of the garden and smiled as big cold drops of rain plummeted from the grey flat underbelly of the clouds.

Her garden had come into its glory in the short hot days and pleasing cool nights of September. Arranged upon a rectangular plot of ground next to a small greenhouse that her husband, Christian, had built with his own hands soon after they had married. The garden, enclosed in a seven foot tall chicken wire fence to keep the deer and rabbits out, brimmed over with the bright red colors of spicy chilies and plump tomatoes, fragrant clusters of green onions and bulbs of garlic, bristling, snaky vines of zucchini and summer squash that threatened to overtake every inch of the garden. At the far side of the garden towering broad-leafed stalks of sweet white corn brushed against one another. Along the inside perimeter of the fence nearest the house sprouted several rows of tiny-leafed Arugula, pale green Bibb, and hundreds of pods of snap peas and snow peas twirled up tall wooden stakes. Near the greenhouse, upon raised mounds of earth, flourished thick-stalked broccoli, winding vines of pickling cucumbers, and clusters of green and red sweet peppers. Scattered throughout the garden bloomed orange, yellow, and white Marigolds, which defended with their musky aroma, like battle-hardened sentries at the watchtowers, the garden from the attacks of ravenous aphids, beetles, and grasshoppers.

A cat appeared from beneath a tomato plant where it had been napping, galloped out the open gate in the chicken wire fence, and as it disappeared through a broken opening in the wooden fence into the neighbor’s backyard Ruth called after it, laughing, “Here kitty, kitty, kitty. Don’t you like the rain?”

Soon the soggy earth yielded its grip on the long tangled roots of the weeds. Ruth rocked the stool side to side with her bottom as she worked her way down the rows, her dirty white sneakers splashing in the water. Just as her determined wet hand closed around another weed, an important artery throbbing with oxygenated blood popped like a kid’s spit bubble deep inside the right side of her cerebrum and surprised her into gasping, “Oh!” The wound-spilled blood seeped into the surrounding brain tissue with every life-giving thump of her heart. Fear mushroomed up inside her. Her desperate lungs gasped for air. More and more blood leaked until weakness, then numbness, and finely paralysis gripped the left side of her body. She tumbled from the stool and crushed some green onions, their pungent essence filling her nose.

Face down in a rain puddle, her nose and mouth submerged and her eyesight blurred, she lifted her head and shouted for help, but her tongue betrayed her with a confusing moan of garbled words. Nausea swept over her and she retched a dark green slurry of pickles. Her head splashed down into the mess. In that instant she knew this was the last experience of her life.

Christian found her crumpled body. He sagged to his knees in the mud, rolled her small empty body up into his trembling arms, and weighed down the still air with dreadful mourning sobs that sucked the color out of his life.

After coming home from the funeral, still dressed in his Sunday suit, Christian plopped his weary body on the welcoming earth of Ruth’s garden. He smiled at the neighbor’s cat grooming herself in the dwindling sunlight amid the thick clutter of the tomato plants. On the western horizon towering thunderstorms bubbled above the mountains as grey-scudding clouds rushed eastward and the air was damp with the fresh scent of approaching rain. The plunging barometric pressure caused Christian’s head to ache, and he massaged his forehead with the heel of his palm.

Drowning in the memories of their relationship Christian sloshed over with the fiery pain of sorrow. He furiously clawed long, deep furrows into the ground with his fingernails. Despite the agonizing warm swelling in his aching, arthritic knuckles and burning ache along the brittle long bones of his fingers he allowed himself to suffer until the hot, salty tears streaking down his old weathered cheeks and into the corners of his mouth stopped. Christian smeared the tears across his face with the back of both hands and sighed.

A cooling temperature change brought on by the setting of the sun pushed a brisk breeze over the ridges and down the slopes of the mountains and rustled the vegetables, forming rhythmic waves in the tiny forest of corn stalks. The gold and orange leafed branches of an aspen tree, planted near the greenhouse, began to tap an uneven cadence against the glass roof. Christian stretched his long arms towards the heavens and wallowed in the healing stretch of muscles and ligaments through his shoulders, chest, and back. Far above him the clouds finally relented and let loose their burden of rain. Big cold drops plummeted out of the darken sky and thumped into the dirt all around him drenching his clothes. A jagged, multi-branched bolt of lightning, and then another and another, crackled through the air. Rapid firing and cascading blasts of thunder, short violent sounds, like hard fists cracking ribs, overwhelmed his senses.

Through the blur of the rain Christian glimpsed a thatch of gray-streaked auburn hair, then pale blue eyes that expanded into a beautiful face, and finally the most precious possession of his life, his Ruth, straddling the three-legged stool in the midst of the garden. For a brief moment, just as he toppled over and his heart stopped thumping, he experienced something simple, warm, and genuine, his wife’s calloused hands caressing his face.

Whitewater

Jack squatted beside a crackling fire along a swollen river, while two skewered trout turned black and crispy in the flames. His boots, the muddy laces undone and the cracked tongues hanging out, stood on a nearby rock drying out. A massive, longhaired dog lapped water from the cold river and sniffed the air near a canoe. Towards the south, steep hills blanketed in thick Ponderosa pines, crumbling cliffs, and the bare branches of willowy Aspens camouflaged seven men on horseback. The dense, misty puffs of their breathing betrayed their location. Three riders broke from the group and crept towards Jack.

Jack reached into the fire, flipped the trout over, and yanked his hand out of the piercing heat. He then felt the insides of the boots before turning them, as if preparing them for some desperate man’s breakfast. The dog yanked his head up and growled. Jack snapped his head around and looked at three men on horses rushing from the tree line. Two held rifles and one a double-headed ax.

Adrenalin flooded Jack’s body as he leapt to his bare feet, pulled a razor-sharp hunting knife from his waistband, and crouched in fighting position with the fire and the dog between him and the riders.

Jack clubbed the first rider with a flaming piece of wood he snatched out of the fire as the man’s horse jumped the fire and tried to run him down. The startled man fell and stared into Jack's eyes before his head cracked hard against a rock; a wounded animal whimper popped out of his mouth. He crumpled up, vomited, and his legs twitched in a hurky-jerky way.

Jack sidestepped the next horse and slashed at the rider with the knife. The rider gasped, dropped his rifle, and yanked back on the reins. He reached down at a deep, spurting gash in his thigh just as the dog knocked him from the saddle.

Jack rushed the final rider who waved an ax above his head. He grabbed the bridle of the horse, swung up, and kicked the man in the face with the balls of his feet. The man tumbled backwards. His weapon jumped from his hand as he smacked the ground hard. Jack ducked under the rearing horse's belly, bent over the stunned man, and plunged the knife between two ribs before twisting it. A grunting gasp of air escaped the dying man’s lungs as he rolled onto his side and the sand sucked up his gurgling blood.

From the distant tree line the remaining riders fired rifles. A bullet snapped against a nearby rock and then another and another. Jack turned towards the river, plucked the skewered trout from the fire with one hand, and snagged the boots with his other hand. He sprinted towards the river, his hat bouncing off his shoulders, while the dog dashed out in front of him. Jack flung the boots and trout into the canoe and then pushed the boat into the icy water, his bare feet slipping on the slimy rocks. He hopped in, followed by the dog, and the boat lurched as the river current grabbed it. Downstream the thunder of cascading rapids filled the air.

Water splashed up into the boat as it slid into the first stretch of whitewater. The intense roar of the bubbling water swallowed up all other sounds. Jack sat at the back of the canoe with the paddle deep in the water, while the dog, whimpering and its snout pressed against the bottom of the boat, crouched up front. The river bucked and stirred up mud as it squeezed between sheer rock walls that rose perpendicular to the water's edge. The deep canyon hid the sun and the air chilled in a haze of icy mist.

The river's power hurled them at breakneck speed down a long series of large waves and vortices. Jack flailed back and forth with the paddle, trying to keep them upright. A sharp bend in the river pushed the canoe hard toward the canyon wall, which siphoned water straight into a treacherous undercut cliff. For a brief moment the canoe teetered on a huge, standing wave just inside the shadow of the cliff. The strong conflicting currents played tug-of-war with the taunt chords of muscle in Jack’s arms, shoulders, and thighs as he strained on the paddle until he forced the canoe away from the danger. A large, swirling hole appeared in the river. Its circular current swallowed up nearly a quarter of the river. He dug hard with the paddle and propelled the canoe along the lip of the hazard and then the boat went charging down a line of small rapids and out into milder water. Jack smiled as water splashed in his face and he shouted out to the dog, “We beat it.”

As soon as it had started it ended. The rocky cliffs receded, the sun warmed the air, and the water quieted. The canoe spent most of the day curling back and forth down a valley about two miles wide, with rolling hills on one side. On the other side olive-colored grasslands and occasional patches of dark green forests of pine trees covered the land. In many places Elk lounged shoulder-deep in the cold, dark-blue river to ward off the relentless swarms of biting black flies. Near the end of the day the boat floated by a small rocky beach where dozens of vultures squabbled over the rotting carcass of a dead antelope, while a determined golden fox darted between the clumsy birds to rip bloody, tough muscle from the rib bones.

A Life Changing Experience

I traveled to Phnom Penh, the capitol city of the Kingdom of Cambodia, to adopt a child. One morning I made my way through the colonial-styled lobby of the Hotel Le Royal, located just off Monivong Street in the historical center of the city, and out onto the pale gray driveway curving up to the entrance of the hotel. The sticky summer air stunk of gasoline fumes and food carts that lined the street just outside the gates of the hotel. The washed out sky was saturated with the melodious rumblings of a romantic and dangerous Asian city. A thought crossed my mind that somehow I had been transported into a Hollywood movie. Off in the distant I heard the lapping of the Sap River where tiny wooden houses are perched on stilts and rusty Chinese container ships are moored with thick-corded ropes. The river’s muddy water meanders to the Mekong River and fans out across the old battlefields of the Mekong Delta of Vietnam before sweeping out into the South China Sea.

An old black car with caramel colored upholstery pulled up alongside me. Behind the wheel sat a slender man with a small nose and shiny black hair. He introduced himself in perfect English as Hae Kim and then let out a deep-throated laugh, which caused me to wonder about my safety. Nevertheless, I slipped into the back seat, sunk into the soft leather, and began a journey to the high school that Pol Pot turned into death.

Except for a couple of warning horn blasts, my driver made no other sounds during the trip.Once he smacked the car horn at a bright green scooter that darted by burdened with two, chicken-wire bound pigs hanging over the back wheel. He let out another blast at a weaving truck, with five splendid, saffron-robed monks sitting cross-legged on top of a large pile of coconuts, which caused a motorcycle to veer towards us. The cycle’s nearly invisible driver’s face and skinny limbs poked out from an immense bunch of dark green bananas.

Block after block of houses made from unpainted wood passed by the car windows. Outside many of the houses huddled people, their knees up near their chins and their bottoms hovering just above the ground, around open fires with steaming black cooking pots. On the side of one house, between two pale-barked trees, a man sat on a green and white-striped hammock trimming his hair with scissors in one hand and a mirror in the other. Shiny black hair littered the ground underneath his dangling feet.

As we drove past Charles De Gaulle Street, a reminder that Cambodia once belonged to the French Indochina Empire, three naked and squirming boys hopped about a mud puddle. A clothed girl, with a menacing switch in one hand, poured bowls of water over their heads while they scrubbed their skinny bodies with open hands. A woman, wearing a long gold skirt and black blouse, strolled by them with a tall stack of glowing silks perched on top of her head.

We arrived at our destination, the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum. Outside the museum’s entrance stood a one-legged man beside an ice cream cart underneath a large red and yellow umbrella. Behind him a yellow-cheeked gibbon, chewing at a purple-flesh fruit, was tied to a bolt sticking from a double wall of corrugated steel.

I got out of the car at the place where the Cambodian people believe the bones can find no peace. The serenity of large palm trees in the courtyard of the school misled me into a false sense that this was just another tourist attraction. I soon realized my ignorance when I browsed a small visitor’s center that sold the belongings of people murdered by Pol Pot’s revolution.

The plain gray, three-story buildings, which were once high school classrooms, are wrapped in barbwire. In the first classroom I was shocked by the metal frame of a bed and on the wall above the blood stained floor a photograph of a woman’s rotting body found on that bed after the Khmer Rouge fled the city from the approaching Vietnamese army. Crude doorways had been broken through the cinderblock walls of the classrooms to connect them. In another classroom I found a disturbing painting of fifty to sixty people shackled, lined up head to feet along the mustard and white tiled floors, and left to lay in one another’s filth. It’s impossible to wrap my mind around the documented facts that several thousand men were imprisoned and exterminated in this place with their wives and children. The evidence, their bones, is buried nine miles from the city in the infamous killing fields of Choeung Ek.

First the interrogators questioned the prisoners and if they weren’t agreeable to the charges leveled against them they were tortured. Brutalized by ways that seem only plausible in books and movies. Water boarding that inflicted the horror of drowning over and over. Fingernails ripped out by pliers and then the bleeding wounds rubbed in salt. The victim’s screams echoing throughout the classrooms. Others were hung from wrists bound behind their backs until their arms and shoulders separated. Many were immersed in a large wooden box brimming with water that was connected to a live electrical wire. Then, as if it was some sort of sick joke, they were murdered by blunt-force trauma, sharp-force trauma, or gunshot wounds.

The sky had clouded up and the smell of rain filled the air when I tumbled back into the car. I sobbed all the way back to the Hotel Le Royal. Once there, I wandered into the Elephant Bar and after two burning shots of whiskey inspected the well fed, smiling faces around me and wondered what I had done to myself.

This post is an entry in Robert Hrusek's 'What I Learned From a Mountaintop Experience' click hereI traveled to Phnom Penh, the capitol city of the Kingdom of Cambodia, to adopt a child. One morning I made my way through the colonial-styled lobby of the Hotel Le Royal, located just off Monivong Street in the historical center of the city, and out onto the pale gray driveway curving up to the entrance of the hotel. The sticky summer air stunk of gasoline fumes and food carts that lined the street just outside the gates of the hotel. The washed out sky was saturated with the melodious rumblings of a romantic and dangerous Asian city. A thought crossed my mind that somehow I had been transported into a Hollywood movie. Off in the distant I heard the lapping of the Sap River where tiny wooden houses are perched on stilts and rusty Chinese container ships are moored with thick-corded ropes. The river’s muddy water meanders to the Mekong River and fans out across the old battlefields of the Mekong Delta of Vietnam before sweeping out into the South China Sea.

An old black car with caramel colored upholstery pulled up alongside me. Behind the wheel sat a slender man with a small nose and shiny black hair. He introduced himself in perfect English as Hae Kim and then let out a deep-throated laugh, which caused me to wonder about my safety. Nevertheless, I slipped into the back seat, sunk into the soft leather, and began a journey to the high school that Pol Pot turned into death.

Except for a couple of warning horn blasts, my driver made no other sounds during the trip. Once he smacked the car horn at a bright green scooter that darted by burdened with two, chicken-wire bound pigs hanging over the back wheel. He let out another blast at a weaving truck, with five splendid, saffron-robed monks sitting cross-legged on top of a large pile of coconuts, which caused a motorcycle to veer towards us. The cycle’s nearly invisible driver’s face and skinny limbs poked out from an immense bunch of dark green bananas.

Block after block of houses made from unpainted wood passed by the car windows. Outside many of the houses huddled people, their knees up near their chins and their bottoms hovering just above the ground, around open fires with steaming black cooking pots. On the side of one house, between two pale-barked trees, a man sat on a green and white-striped hammock trimming his hair with scissors in one hand and a mirror in the other. Shiny black hair littered the ground underneath his dangling feet.

As we drove past Charles De Gaulle Street, a reminder that Cambodia once belonged to the French Indochina Empire, three naked and squirming boys hopped about a mud puddle. A clothed girl, with a menacing switch in one hand, poured bowls of water over their heads while they scrubbed their skinny bodies with open hands. A woman, wearing a long gold skirt and black blouse, strolled by them with a tall stack of glowing silks perched on top of her head.

We arrived at our destination, the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum. Outside the museum’s entrance stood a one-legged man beside an ice cream cart underneath a large red and yellow umbrella. Behind him a yellow-cheeked gibbon, chewing at a purple-flesh fruit, was tied to a bolt sticking from a double wall of corrugated steel.

I got out of the car at the place where the Cambodian people believe the bones can find no peace. The serenity of large palm trees in the courtyard of the school misled me into a false sense that this was just another tourist attraction. I soon realized my ignorance when I browsed a small visitor’s center that sold the belongings of people murdered by Pol Pot’s revolution.

The plain gray, three-story buildings, which were once high school classrooms, are wrapped in barbwire. In the first classroom I was shocked by the metal frame of a bed and on the wall above the blood stained floor a photograph of a woman’s rotting body found on that bed after the Khmer Rouge fled the city from the approaching Vietnamese army. Crude doorways had been broken through the cinderblock walls of the classrooms to connect them. In another classroom I found a disturbing painting of fifty to sixty people shackled, lined up head to feet along the mustard and white tiled floors, and left to lay in one another’s filth. It’s impossible to wrap my mind around the documented facts that several thousand men were imprisoned and exterminated in this place with their wives and children. The evidence, their bones, is buried nine miles from the city in the infamous killing fields of Choeung Ek.

First the interrogators questioned the prisoners and if they weren’t agreeable to the charges leveled against them they were tortured. Brutalized by ways that seem only plausible in books and movies. Water boarding that inflicted the horror of drowning over and over. Fingernails ripped out by pliers and then the bleeding wounds rubbed in salt. The victim’s screams echoing throughout the classrooms. Others were hung from wrists bound behind their backs until their arms and shoulders separated. Many were immersed in a large wooden box brimming with water that was connected to a live electrical wire. Then, as if it was some sort of sick joke, they were murdered by blunt-force trauma, sharp-force trauma, or gunshot wounds.

The sky had clouded up and the smell of rain filled the air when I tumbled back into the car. I sobbed all the way back to the Hotel Le Royal. Once there, I wandered into the Elephant Bar and after two burning shots of whiskey inspected the well fed, smiling faces around me and wondered what I had done to myself.

This post is an entry in Robert Hrusek's 'What I Learned From a Mountaintop Experience' click here

Beauty

I have this thing for beauty. I sense it encircling me and peeking out from everything I come in contact with; whispering, demanding, and hungry for attention. Through its persistence, and sometimes its devious and clever methods at breaking in on my life when I am suppose to be serious about this or that, I have come to an understanding that the choices I make about how I live my life are all wrapped up in one big but simple thing, a quest to immerse myself in beauty.

I live in a gorgeous city, Colorado Springs, Colorado. The Springs, which is what the locals call our fair city, is spread out in the cooling eastern shadow of Pikes Peak and snuggly pressed up against the foothills and smaller mountains that ride up and envelope this famous mountain like so many green folds in a young girl’s party dress.

I have put down roots here because I choose to raise my family, do my work, and embrace my life in a place that makes me happy. There was a time, not so many years ago, when I let the endless list of pressing obligations and responsibilities that the world constantly hurled at me to determine who I was and where I should go. Then a soft voice began to weave a story about the world, the real world, and I listened.

One of my favorite hiking trails is The Seven Bridges Trail, which twists along the clear, rushing water of Cheyenne Creek and over seven sturdy wooden footbridges that span the creek as it steeply climbs up to Jones Park. Jones Park is a mountain meadow of tall grass, aspen forests, and open spaces tucked between towering mountains that range in elevation from 9000 to 12,000 feet.

This time of the year the mountains are brimming with life that is green, damp, and growing. Nearly every afternoon the sky above the mountains and the immense expanses of open air in the valleys between the mountains are the stage for wandering springtime mountain thunderstorms. I love these storms. One of my favorite things to do is get caught in a rainstorm, the lightning so bright, the crack of thunder so startling (the thunderous train of air passing through me), that in frightening awe I wonder if I’m going to get hit and fried crispy like a crab wonton from my favorite Chinese restaurant.

Five minutes from the front door of my home is the Seven Bridges trailhead. The dirt trail is littered with a jumble of boulders and snaky tree roots. It twists up and down the sides of the jagged valley, past springs bubbling from underneath stones, around corners where the drone of cascading water masks the voices of the blue jays, woodpeckers, and crows, and emerges in a towering Aspen forest at the edge of Jones Park. It is easy for me to imagine tiny, mystical creatures scampering between the rocks to hide and then look out of the cool, dark places as I pass.

An interesting fact about this wonderful place is that buckets of sweat and profound moments of self-reflection are necessary for me to soak up the majesty. There is a lot of body and mind angst involved with running around the mountains. Climbing up and down miles of rugged mountainous terrain, unpredictable and sudden weather changes, and the occasional shock and joy of seeing a black bear, mountain lion, or fox requires that I suspend my usual habits of wanting to live a reasonably safe and comfortable life in my home in the city.

The peace I experience is enlightened yet simple, graceful yet stark, magical yet real and that is more than enough for me to pursue the possibilities of my life as seen through the eyes of beauty.