Kennecott Glacier Haibun

There is no beginning but each story starts somewhere. A group of walkers silently start off single file in the direction of Kennecott Glacier Face. We crowd each other, almost evenly spaced walking the well-worn path. Until one breaks away, granting the permission implicitly desired to journey by a different path.

Walk back and
You will find the path
That leads to the heart
Trace the walker’s steps
A shape will emerge
Place the shapes side by side
You will find
They fit
Like a puzzle
Rough edges collide smoothly
Indentations of need
Match
Extrusions of wisdom
Off they go every which way.

The space between us, the remaining trail walkers, widens and the trail signs fade. How does a moose choose its steps? I think I will follow its choice, marked by pellets, bowing to the sense of direction I do not yet have in this unfamiliar terrain. Boulders block, trees enclose, and then a meadow of Dryas invites. I have found a footpath that matches my step.

My rhythm is broken by a splash of a bird bathing in a pool in the dip of a boulder. Another lands. Takes flight. Another. There is a path by air, marked by rest and feast. How many paths might there be?

Bound to land and the edge of the glacial lake, each of our footpaths has common features. We walk through a story of succession. By foot the chapters are jumbled – walkers venturing from one section to another and back again as we move through the space, not bound by the order in which nature wrote this tale. All the chapters, as when you hold a book, co-exist. Put in order it is a story of dependence. Each plant species needs another, all are given a space and time to thrive.

Rocky, nutrient-deficient land, touched last by the glacier’s edge, hosts the protagonists of chapter one. Plants that can create their own nitrogen. Here the path is Dryas with tickles of Fireweed. Layers of the Dryas’ life cycle – the unfurled plant, the leaves without stems, the decomposition of ones spent, a gathering of seeds, the network of roots easily lifted from the rock on which they grow – appear in islands on this once seemingly barren land. Preparing the soil to host the seed of a stray Soap Berry or Poplar, they lead seamlessly into the next chapter.

Soap Berries with their radiant reach and yarn red berries sprout and root in the center of patches of Dryas. Poplars add height to the scenery. Green leaves shiver to white. Years add girth to the trunks. The soil richens. Hidden here and there are the seedlings of the conifer giants.

Lone figures to start, in time they take over this story. Forests grow as centuries pass. The light no longer reaching the sun-fed starts of this tale, without whom this story could not be told.

Knowing this story is not a requisite for walking this landscape but once it is known it is like seeing how letters form words and words tell stories and stories connect to that which we cannot know alone.

Patterns of change
What is lost gives way
Believe in connection
To accept what life brings

Walkers take the paths through this story that gets them from there to here. Widely dispersed, the group of walkers is often camouflaged from view, even with the banana yellows, the full spectrum of blues, the barn reds. The vastness of even this small portion of the space is a cover. But we are close enough to hear. When the silence is broken by the call, each of us knows the direction to turn. We turn toward the edge of the lake, close to where the glacier last touched. The land full of promises to come. We converge to recount each of our journeys through this story.

Sit and be heard.
Sit and listen.
Sit and notice when no one speaks.
Sit and be still.
Close your eyes and remember.

There is no end but I will stop here.