Gray Day, Silver Outlook

It’s not always a bad thing, this color, or lack of color, that man calls gray. After all, what is the difference between gray and silver but the amount of light that’s reflected? My Fleetwood Cadillac might be called gray by some, but the title says it’s silver. A man whose black hair is losing its pigment at the temples might be said to have silvering hair, while one with light brown is graying, yet they might be exactly the same shade. I guess gray and silver are in the eyes of the beholders.

Looking outside today, I am greeted by what most would call a gray day. It isn’t the kind of day with black or purple, towering clouds, swollen with rain, ready to assault the earth with lightning, or to reverberate with the pounding, sonorous boom of thunder. Rather, it is one of those days where the gray clouds hang low over blue, snow-dusted mountain, dusky foothill, and amber plains alike. One of those days that starts out misting, and you can see the gray bleakness stretch beyond the horizon, and you know that the entire day, from dawn to dusk, is going to sleep in this dim-lit blanket of fog-like quietude. The entire day, at least infrequently, will drip with the rains of autumn. And if you aren’t careful, your mood will become as gray as the day.

The silver in a day like this comes, perhaps, because two of the things I claim most deeply are to be a lover of nature, and an artist. I have on my land over one hundred fifty trees, and hundreds of flowers, all of which are loving this day. They stand quietly as the silver autumn mists wisp like smoke to the ground, as the cooling and calming waters of October-end seep like lifeblood into the thirsty soil. Except perhaps for spring, this is the time of year for which the landscape holds its breath most impatiently, waiting for reprieve from the triple digits of summer. It is this time of year that gifts the land with its last long drink of water before laying the soil and the flowers, the grass and trees, down for their long winter’s nap under sheets of blue ice and blankets of sparkling snow. It is this time of year that goes down with a promise of things that are brighter, things that are full of life and color, and not so very far away.

Now is the gardener’s time of reprieve from watering, from weeding, and from the harvest. It is the time to sit at one’s window, a down comforter across one’s lap, sipping hot cocoa and gazing at the wintry blue landscape and city lights that sparkle through the chattering, wind-battered branches of the trees. It is the artist’s time of contemplation, of thanks for the beauty of the fall, appreciation for the austere and solemn snowscape, the chickadees and juncos that flit among the crab apples or the mountain ash berries, still stark red or flaming orange against the drab purple-gray of the bony branches left by the old year gone.

Two days ago my wife and I stood in the logging yard at Pratt Logging, in Blackfoot, Idaho, surrounded by the scent of new-felled lodgepole pine and the pitchy-sweet aroma of burning pine slash. The sun was bright, and golden and fiery leaves surrounded us on every side. Sawdust was thick beneath our feet, and its fresh-cut perfume rose up to us with every step. So soon that sunshine faded, and this grayness—this silver—flowed down over us, this sign of autumn lying down to rest.

To an artist, to a friend of nature, this isn’t dull grayness. This is the silver promise of a ghostly white winter, melancholy on some days, sparkling with the brightness of broken diamonds on others, yet in all cases only a sweet March breath away from new grass and flowers, new growth on the trees, and new life in the landscape.

A LIFETIME ACCOMPLISHMENT

(Photo: Jacob Jonas and Hannah McIntire, the front runner for the girls team)

There he was, at the top of the hill. The last two hundred yards of the three mile race lay before him, all of it downhill. And Jacob Jonas was in the lead. And all alone . . .

The crowning of my oldest son, Jake, as the top high school runner in his district this year, as a junior, began many years ago. At least for a boy of sixteen it has been many years--the vast majority of his life.

Jacob was four years old at the time. It was a bitterly cold night in December, shortly after his birthday. I had missed taking my wolf dog, Loup, for her run earlier in the day and felt guilty for it, so I decided that in spite of the cold that seemed to gnaw into your bones, a cold magnified by winds of twenty or more miles an hour, I would take Loup for her run. But in this case, I did a personal cop-out, because she was going to be running alongside me while I drove in the nice warm pickup. Loup was half timber wolf, half malamute, so the cold was nothing to her. In fact, she preferred it. She could come in the house for five or ten minutes in the deadest of winter nights because it was too warm for her inside, even though we keep our house at a fairly consistent 62 to 65 degrees.

Debbie, my wife, wanted to come with me, and of course we brought the baby, Clay, and Cheyenne, my daughter and oldest child, would never miss an adventure, which a ride is to her. So we all bundled up and ventured out into the cold. Behind our house was a dirt road that wound up into the mountains at an incline of somewhere between 5 to 12 degrees, depending upon the stretch. It was a road I loved to run, but not with a wind chill of twenty degrees or less.

This night there was ice covering most of the road, and there was no moon, so it was fairly dark, and the stars sparkled like ice chips in the sky. I had only gone a hundred yards or so when Jake began saying that he wanted to get out and run with Loup. Mind you, Loup was then 9 years old, and what I would consider an extreme athlete. She could run with me for a dozen miles, but her "miles" were double miles, because she would sprint back and forth, checking out some mystery of nature ahead of me, then coming back to make sure I was still tagging along. She was the ultimate sled dog, just without the sled.

Jake was a four-year-old boy with a big imagination. He imagined he could run alongside this world-class athlete who was my dog. He was very adamant, and as I drove along I told him several times he could not get out. It was too cold, too steep, and too slick with ice. I knew he couldn't last, and I would be stopping the truck right away to let him back in. It was nothing but a pain in the butt.

Yet Jake was insistent, and so finally, with a knowing glint in my eye, I relented. We made him bundle up, tie his hood down tight, and then he hit the ice. I looked at Debbie as the door shut and said, "I'll give him half a minute."

Well, I gave him more. A full minute. Then two, then three. Debbie and I started to get a little worried, so we started opening the window and asking him if he was ready to get back in. Hardly looking up at us, he would just shake his head and say, "No." Jacob has always been a boy of few words.

So on and on Loup ran, and on and on Jake stayed with him. Like the protective girl she was, Loup started going back and forth, this time checking not on her daddy, but on his little boy. For tonight, this miniature of his father had become her friend, her partner . . . her charge. She wasn't about to let him fall behind.

There is a point a mile up in the mountains and eight hundred feet or so higher that the road dead ends. Little Jacob Jonas was still running by the time we reached that dead end. He was running, and running strong. By this time we had stopped asking him if he wanted to get back in where it was warm. It was obvious that this four-year-old had determined to stick it out as long as Loup did. He would not be deterred by any biting wind or freezing ice.

At the turnaround, Debbie and I finally made the command decision that all parents at some time must make. We forced him to give up and get back in. He wanted so badly to run all the way home, too, but with the icy road going downhill didn't seem like the best of ideas. That and the fact that we had another twenty minutes or more ahead of us if we allowed him to have his way forced us to draw the line.

But that was only the beginning for my son. In the 7th grade, he joined the cross country team, and one of his first races was an invitational for all family members and friends. I was the only adult who took the team up on this invite, and although I got endless harassment from Jake's team mates, telling me no forty year old could keep up with them, I placed fourth (beating all of the naysayers by a LONG distance, I might add), and came in behind Jake. And my boy had won it fair and square. Yes, I tried to catch him. He beat me by four seconds.

He has been running off and on now for twelve years, and although I was still easily able to take him as an eighth grader in an eight mile run, by the next summer he was blowing my doors off by ten minutes in an all steeply uphill six miler. And I was doomed.

All through grade school I had coached all of my children about starting out too fast, about pacing themselves early and overtaking those who insisted on sprinted out at the gun. The grade schoolers always ran a half mile run in the fall and another in the spring, and about the fourth grade it switched to one mile, fall and spring. Jake came in first on every one he ever ran, as did his little brother, Clay. But I learned in the last few years that although Jake doesn't take off from the mark in a sprint he might as well, because it is certainly a sprint compared to mine.

My last hold-out, the last ace in the hole, was my 100 yard dash. Even last fall Jake had no chance against me there. But this summer he beat me by an easy 10 feet. My reign, in all arenas (well, except for weight lifting) has ended. Jake is the king of the track, not only the top runner for Pocatello High School in the three miler, but the top runner on the track in the spring as well.

I guess as parents we all want our kids to do better than we did, to reach a higher mark. Jacob has reached this in all areas of his life. I struggled to be a B to A minus student, while Jacob is consistently at over 100 percent in all of his classes and seems to hardly ever study. (Don't ask me how they figure OVER 100 percent, as I have never grasped that.) He has the girls flocking all around him all the time, although he is shy like I was and pretends not to notice. I had none of that--and if I did I truly DIDN'T notice. Jacob, it would seem, has it all, including a sweet personality, the best trait of all. So he has indeed come in far ahead of his father, as a runner and as a person.

As for the district race, for the first half this year the runners had to come past the starting line, and as Jake came around a runner from one of the other schools was still ahead of him. Jacob has been a second place runner many, many times, and I feared this was his lot again. So I generally go out about two hundred yards or so to cheer him on, to work him into a hard sprint at the end of the race. I did this for the district meet.

In this case, I went up the hill, the last stretch, then down a steep hill that comes just before the summit. Here is where I thought I would have to cheer him on to come anywhere near that other boy. I got in position. I waited. Then I saw Jake. He was alone. The other boy was nowhere in sight!

I sprinted up the hill with Jake, cheering him on. We reached the top, and I yelled for him to give it everything he had. It seemed like the entire school was there to cheer the other boy on, and they knew their boy had this race. But their boy had disappeared. Instead, they had Jacob Jonas and his much-too-excited dad running up the last stretch, to the top of the hill. From there, Jake had it. He took the last two hundred yards at a sprint, and nowhere in that two yards was another runner. Jacob took the race, and he took it by leaps and bounds.

I just finished watching the video of that finish, the finish Debbie saw, but I could only watch from the top of the hill two hundred yards away. I don't mind admitting I watched the end of the race through tears. There he was, that four-year-old boy, the little winter runner. It was a beautiful autumn day, and he was flying across the line, all alone--at least to everyone else's eyes. I knew different. Loup's spirit was right there beside him.

A TRIPLE RAINBOW AFTERNOON

Yesterday, while driving a patient from Pocatello, Idaho, to Salt Lake City, Utah, in the ambulance, I saw something I have never witnessed before and had no idea was possible. A triple rainbow. I want to describe this scene as vividly as I know how, and admittedly I do not feel up to the task, so it may be a very humble attempt. Most anything would be humbled in comparison to the scene I saw yesterday.

First, I will attempt an explanation for what I saw, then attempt to describe it in all its glory and pray that if the glory of nature is attractive to you you might be able to envision the scene in the eye of your mind. I did some research this afternoon on rainbows, and it turns out that the phenomenon I observed was what is known as a "reflection rainbow." This makes sense, because it was explained as exactly what I had ascertained it to be: a second rainbow coming off the primary rainbow, but the second one being made from light that was reflected off a bay of the Great Salt Lake, to my right. A reflection rainbow, as opposed to a reflected rainbow, is made by the sun striking brightly off a body of water and thus hitting the rain drops that in conjunction with the sun form the rainbow. Because as you might have observed if you have studied rainbows as I have over the last ten or fifteen years you will have noticed that the farther down the sky the sun is when the rainbow appears the steeper the angle of the rainbow, the reflection rainbow is, at least in the case of the one I saw, almost exactly vertical, and is not a "bow," as such but a strip of rainbow heading straight up from the base of the primary rainbow. Okay, enough for technicality. Now let me get to the surreal beauty of the scene . . .

As I drove the ambulance south, lost in my own melancholy thoughts, wishing I could still be home with my family, the rain was dumping in buckets all over the four lane. At times I was plowing through, and hydroplaning OVER, an inch of standing water. I like rain, but driving in it at high speed is not my favorite pastime, and I was feeling pretty out of sorts. The feeling of melancholy was no doubt heightened by the gray and gloomy day and deep, dark clouds hanging low over the hills, sometimes just above the foothills, with the tops of the Wasatch Range breaking through above, but still within their own shrouding gray-blue mists.

Then, as beautiful coincidence would have it, the sun reached a point in its westward descent where the cloud bank was broken by brilliant patches of azure blue, and it was precisely at this point that I came to the northern end of what is known as Willard Bay, an arm of Great Salt Lake.

Fleeting images of rainbows began to appear to my left, to the east. At first, these were simply spears, only the southern leg of rainbows, and some of them pretty faded, since the sun was still struggling through clouds. But as the sun continued to drop far down the sky, these rainbows began to brighten and grow, sometimes forming all the way across the east in a full, brilliant bow, and often in a double rainbow, the secondary one being outside the first, less brilliant, and a mirror reflection of the first.

To set this full scene, I have to say that the Wasatch Range is in the full height of its autumn color. The close-up brilliant gold-yellow of cottonwoods was almost brighter than an artist could capture, and the gambel oaks that carpet the steep ridges of the mountains were in full and gleaming cloaks of scarlet. These are some of the most beautifully rugged mountains I have ever seen, pale tan to gray in color, and in some places can hardly support a blade of grass for their ruggedness. Deep canyons open up in them and chew their way back into the mountainsides, and in the gleaming, golden sunlight of late afternoon every crag and fastness and mountain valley was accentuated. Yet because the sky was so black and glowering, much of these mountains were in shadow, and so the clouds hanging like tattered sheep in the foreground stood out against them that much more brightly. It was against this backdrop that the rainbows appeared.

Suddenly, as if by magic, the two magnificent bows of color came at a steep angle out of the ground, seeming almost close enough to touch, and then, forming at the base of the inner, primary rainbow and shooting almost straight upward to meet the secondary rainbow as it started to make its northward bend, was a third band of gleaming light. At first, I thought it was a trick of my eyes, something to do with light coming off my window. So in spite of the still-falling rain I rolled down my window. But still, there it was, beautiful and plain as day.

I had no explanation for the phenomenon at the time. To be honest, I could hardly think. To things amazed me, truthfully. The first was the very beauty of the scene, and the second was how every driver who passed me in the next twenty minutes or so that this phenomenon remained visible were staring straight ahead, moving down the road as if this were just another day, as if the most incredible display of nature's beauty wasn't sprawled out right over their left shoulders. Unbelievable. I'm all for driving safe, but had I not been taking a transfer I would have pulled to the side of the road and gotten out. This scene was most likely a once in a lifetime occurrence. I'm guessing that's the case, since I'm 45 and after that many years of studying nature's beauty have never seen it before.

So now you have this incredible scene as I hope in some remote way I have managed to capture it: One of the most rugged and steep ranges of mountains I know of, its rocky tan crags turning orange-gold in the late afternoon sun, its deep canyons dark purple, black clouds hanging over them, with lighter clouds drifting before them, bright white and sometimes leaning toward yellow. A vast array of trees clothed in colors from dark to pale green to the most impossible yellow you can imagine, and the mountains clothed in red oak. And then, framing it all, this display of triple rainbows the like of which most people will probably never see.

It was just as I was nearing the end of the Great Salt Lake that I realized this third phenomenal rainbow was being created by the reflection off the lake itself. I had started noticing that if I looked that direction I was almost blinded by the light off the lake, and then it hit me why that stretch of rainbow was vertical. Shortly after this, the ambulance passed the lake, and the vertical spear of color was gone.

I was left pondering the wonder of nature and my gratefulness that I had taken this opportunity for overtime. Even though I was away from my family, I had witnessed something I would never have known about had I been home with them. And yes, I broke one of my cardinal laws of driving and got on the cell phone to share the wonderful moments with my wife.

Being an artist, besides a writer, I will one day attempt to recapture what I saw yesterday, but I pale at the very thought of the challenge. Perhaps some things are of such unspeakable glory that they were never meant to be put to canvas or even to the written page.

I guess that remains to be seen.

Disclaimer: The reflection rainbows shown in the photos at the top are NOT the one I saw. These are pale, drab version of what laid itself out over the Wasatch Valley yesterday afternoon. These, particularly the bottom one, judging from the almost vertical sides, are from probably just before the sun slipped from sight below the horizon.