Among quarantines and wildfires, an understanding about Life

I feel an emptiness, the kind of emptiness that creeps into heart and mind when something precious slips away. But this emptiness is bigger, more complex, because it fills the absence of so many precious things.

I heard my first elk bugle in July of 1974. Just a few squeals that early in the season but the sounds of elk nonetheless. Listening to elk bugling became an icon of Colorado autumns. Sometimes, I went afield on my own to be alone with my own thoughts in the company of the elk; sometimes, I took other people with me.

Four years later, I moved to Florida in September. I cannot remember if I heard elk bugling that year, but I remember thinking that elk might become a part of my past. But Florida did not suit me and so I came home.

And I have listened to the elk bugle ever y year since.

Ever y year except this year.

I visited Rocky Mountain National Park the first time when I was 10 years old in 1962. I visited a second time in 1965. Fifteen years passed before the third visit; but since that third visit in 1980, I have visited Rocky as few as a dozen to as many as three dozen times ever y year for the last four decades.

But I have not set foot in Rocky since Januar y. Now, I am not sure I will have a chance to visit Rocky again this year.

I visited Pawnee National Grassland the first time in October of 1980. I didn’t even know it existed as a public land entity until I moved to Fort Collins that year to attend Colorado State University for a master’s degree.

The regular person in me never entertained the idea of living out there, but the naturalist in me loved prowling Pawnee — day and night, good weather and bad, winter, spring, summer and autumn.

My enthusiasm for burrowing owls and earth-wolf spiders, for badgers and swift foxes, for rattlesnakes and lizards, for yuccas and the tiny moths that pollinate them — for all of these and ever ything else that lives out there — kept me returning almost monthly for decades.

Except this year. Not missing summer visits for 39 summers in a row, I last visited there in May. And Life prohibits going back; no do-overs.

Other, smaller things crowd the emptiness growing within me.

I did not find boreal owls this year; and I have yet to hear the mystic calling of migrating sandhill cranes. I found only one blue columbine blooming this year and found no Parry’s primrose

— two wildflowers as iconic of summer in Colorado as elk bugling is in autumn.

A vexing combination of multiple ripple effects from pandemic quarantines and wildfire closures plus work demands and home repairs have kept me home. And here I now stand, a mug of hot tea cradled in my hands as I look out a new window to watch 100 birds of seven species eat their fill at my birdfeeders.

Watching them turns on an inner light of realization.

Life is not somewhere else; it is right here. Life is not a squatter in the place I call home; home is wherever I can engage Life. Through memories I can be here but still hear the elk bugling even though they are far, far away. Such memories do not inflict emptiness; they prevent it.