God's country

It is Wednesday morning. This is my day off from work.

I drive in to work and work until noon. When I leave I am headed for a funeral, but instead turn my car around on Highway 97 and take a left up Cameron Lake Road. As I climb the hill the snow deepens and the sagebrush is joined by the occasional ponderosa pine. The small fragments of light offered by mid-December are gathered up carefully by the new snow and amplified, reflected, a thousand million tiny suns making the short day bright. At the top of the hill I pull over and climb out to take in the view.

The air is colder here and I haven't brought my hat or jacket; I can only stand outside for a few moments before returning to the valley, to the funeral, to people and community and the warmth offered by the shared experience of living and dying. But for this instant I am alone with the indifferent and utterly beautiful landscape.

Directly below me a small lake is identifiable as a flat expanse of uninterrupted snow, which in this rocky terrain can only be explained by water. Below that a bluff blocks my view of the Okanogan River, and in the places where I can see further, the river itself is mostly hidden by trees. Wherever there are trees there are houses, at least in the valley floor, and from here the towns of Okanogan and Omak appear to be only slightly dense accumulations of the the farm buildings that dot the river's path to the north and south. But for the most part what I am looking at is wide-open space. It is rugged country writ large, basalt cliffs rising to timbered slopes and painfully white peaks, and all human endeavors look small and transient by comparison.

I think of the writer Ed Abbey, describing the desert southwest he so loved, God's country, Abbey's country. The same wide-open beauty.

In a few minutes I will drive down and cross the river and go into a church. I will hear about how wonderful God is to have given us this time here on earth, and I will find it hard to argue. The pastor will tell me that we are here to glorify God and be thankful, and who am I to argue? I will hear this message, spoken perhaps in different words than I would use, but expressing the same idea. We are here to love one another. We are here to be a part of this beautiful world, and if given the opportunity, to leave it a better place than when we entered it.

In a few minutes I will hear all of this, and be grateful for the human companionship, the hugs, the offers of pie and coffee, the warmth. In a few minutes.

Right now I am happy to just be here on the ridgeline with my thoughts.