Trip to the mountains

 

    "Only to life have the cedars learned to attend."

     from Epithalamion in Time and Place

     by Roy Daniels

https://defendabparks.ca/

Concrete overpass on trip to Hafford for lunch. Part 2

  ''one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world,

on the great grass plains or the sage brush desert.

That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long

after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but

 he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild

and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened

the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the

prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning,

into the morning!''

from Death Comes for the Archbishop

by Willa Cather

Concrete overpass on trip to Hafford for lunch. Part 1

  Tuesday we took Helen's mom to lunch at the great A&M Bistro in Hafford. Each time we take that hwy Helen is more and more intrigued by an old concrete overpass over the railroad. Both railroad and road are long abandoned but on the way home Helen wanted to see what was still there. The answer, beautiful views. Even the remaining concrete bridge is lovely, save for some callow  graffiti. The last two years Helen and I have climbed Memorial Hill in Shelllake for the view. But the Shell Lake area is the parkland and the views are restricted. South of Blaine Lake you are in the prairie and it shows with these rolling vistas. I will split the photos into two posts, because I cannot choose just one or two.

"He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon

it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller

used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter

was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm,

and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told

the story.  This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put

plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even

the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was

already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and

song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,—these he had

caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,—and this would always be his"

                                         from Lost Lady

                                                     Willa Cather

Fall landscape and poetry

"I don’t know, but I do know that one thing that interests me is being in a landscape and trying to attach a language to something that you could never attach a language to."

An Interview with Michael McGriff at Poetry Daily
http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_evans_mcgriff.php

"My blood fills with so much iron I'm pulled

to a place in the hard earth where the wind 

grinds over the ridge bearing the wheels of tanker trucks 

oiling the access roads, where deer ruin the last of the plums, 

where the sloughs shrink back to their deepest channels, 

and I can turn away from nothing."

from Iron

by Michael McGriff

The Plain

“Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of the demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.”

from Moby Dick

by Melville

"Time is measured in change

whether by the movement of

instruments or in the appearance

of our bodies. We often feel the 

need to escape to places where time 

will not follow. To the solitude of a 

cathedral or an untouched forest

floor. Here, as we contemplate the

scope of human existence, we

cannot forget that even cathedrals

crumble and forests die. The 

computations of astronomers bear

witness to the gradual alteration 

of the constellations as the stars

move across the firmament. The 

works of nature and man disintegrate

and are gone,  and nothing endures

on the vault of the sky of the surface

of the sea. Only the shapes of the

land seem eternal."

from A Vanished World, T

he Dinosaurs of Western Canada

by Dale A. Russell