Pathways Newsletter

My crew’s last backcountry hitch was spent on the shores of remote Harrison Lake in Glacier National Park, improving the nearby trail. Often on quiet mornings during those ten beautiful September days, I would stand on the shore of the waking lake sipping my coffee while my bagel toasted. I’d marvel at how the water was so still in the morning, like a waiting drum with its skin pulled tight.

On those mornings, on the shore of a lake fed by the ghostlike glaciers of the high alpine, I’d look to the mountains for snow and listen to the silence and try to make sense of my presence in that place. Seeing the first snow of the season on those peaks was like feeling the light gold of an autumn leaf that has fallen on your shoulder: it seems for a moment that the season is changing just for you.

But this is what I have gathered from those moments: the leaves do not change for me, the snow does not fall so that I might see it. The passing of summer is not an event because in nature there are no events, only transformations, processes unfolding according to their own logic, like the ebbs and flow of the waves or the leaves that turn every autumn.

And that is why memories and photographs are usually unsatisfying: moments cannot disclose the whole. Any attempt to fix things in some interval of time denies the basic fact that there is no such thing as a moment, that nothing can be distilled. Leaves fall, and so do parts of ourselves; roots grow, and so do we. The present moment is infinite only if we understand that there’s no stopping and starting. Time does not tick. It blows and calms, falls and decays, freezes and melts, with a grace we would do well to imitate.

Instead, what will we say? The season is over, it’s come to an end. We take our final crew pictures, celebrate, and imagine now that a new page is about to turn. We are compelled to think of our lives as segments of time, numbered and dated, with a beginning and end. In our memories and camera rolls we will organize these months according to the logic of time. But we must not forget that there are processes within us that began before the season started and will not end at graduation. There are transformations at work within ourselves too large to be photographed, too detailed to be remembered. The logic of our lives is deeper than time. It is deep as the buried rock beneath the mountains and deep as the soil the fallen leaves will soon join. 

I hope not only to remember this season, but to continue living it, in imitation of the lake, which knows the stillness of its mornings but does not count its dawns.