On the Wild Edge In Search of a Natural Life

Pre-amble New Year's Eve already, again. Stepping out through boot-deep snow. Here on Spring Mountain it's traditional to celebrate the final evening of each calendar year with a good stiff hike, accompanied by whatever hounds are currently at hand and up to the effort. This year, I'm down to Mr. Otis, since Angel dog is thirteen and on her last leg and that last leg is lame. While Otis is nine, which in big-dog years makes him a borderline senior like me, he, also like me, still thinks he's a stud. In fact, old Oats frequently wins compliments as a supremely handsome example of the Labrador breed, even in his muzzled grayness. He's been blessed with glossy black hair (recently, a visiting Alaskan trapper friend made Caroline nervous when he stroked Otis appraisingly and remarked on what a "fine pelt" he has), long sturdy legs (Dr. Woody, Otis's personal physician, calls them "mountain legs"), clean white teeth, and a broad intelligent head (as opposed to the rat-nosed look of lesser Labs). So why ruin the ruse by revealing that his mother was a golden retriever? Of course, for O and me to take an evening hike together is hardly unique, insofar as he walks me most every evening, the high point of most every day. The high point, at least, when the weather is pleasant and calming, or nasty enough to be exciting because it's scary enough to offer a reminder that nature always bats last: say, a wildly showy electrical storm, wind like a low flight of fighter jets screaming through the trees, a blinding whiteout of blowing snow and swirling frozen fog. Barring any of that, during the moody holiday seasondeep in the white gut of winter, with its foreshortened days, crackling cold nights, delaying snow, and precious little wildlife to animate the scenea walk in the winter woods can often seem more effort than entertainment. But on this good evening all is right in our pristine mountain world, and the uphill pull is unburdened joy. The weather is gentle for the last day of the year here at eight thousand feet in the Colorado sky. The snow is dry and less than a foot deep (this is the fourth consecutive year of record-breaking drought), and Otis and I are hot to trot in celebration of another mostly good year lived mostly on our own terms in this mostly good place. It is nearly a quarter-century now since Caroline and I fled southern California with all we needed or wanted stuffed into my VW bus: camping gear mostly, plus two wooden orange crates holding 123 1960s and '70s vinyl albums (but nothing to play them on); a couple dozen nature, philosophy, and "back to the land" books; and clothing for all rustic occasions but none for job interviews. Everything else, what little there was, we'd sold or given away. Between us, we had $5,000 in hard-saved cash, good health, no debt, no worries, and, best of all, youth. Caroline was twenty-five. I was thirty-four. After years of slow-burning boredom and simmering frustration, our lives had linked and blended and now stretched enticingly ahead like a scenic mountain highway, where everything in sight is lovely but you can't see beyond the next hill or curve. On the road, headed east, in search of the American West. In search of a natural life. It was August 3, 1980, that anxious day we fled Laguna Beach, where Caroline had enjoyed her teenage years as something ofPetersen, David is the author of 'On the Wild Edge In Search of a Natural Life' with ISBN 9780805080032 and ISBN 0805080031.