A Three-Frog Summer

I enjoy tramping in the mountains solo. Each time, once I’m well away from trailheads, my pace slows to a meditative meander. I open to the signature of each beloved place: its scents, a particular drift of air flow, familiar landmarks and first-of-season wildflower sightings. I feel present in body and glad to give the mind a rest.

Yet, worry is never far away. Today, I see the shrinking patch of ice that my topo map still displays as a glacier. Below it are the bare gray branches of dead whitebark pines.

I’m cheered by the sound of chorus frogs calling from a vernal pool, and stop to listen for a while. If there are more than two or three callers I can’t count them by ear. Today there are too many to count — cause for celebration.

I’m reminded of a conversation with a friend while we were hiking last fall. She told me that between early June and the end of August she had seen a total of three spotted frogs. “I call this my three-frog summer,” she said with a laugh.

Only three? In the places she mentioned I am used to seeing quite a few.

Glaciers, whitebarks, spotted frogs: what will be the next to go? With effort, I remind myself to be here now. Just hike, I say; you can worry later. Appreciate what is all around you. Meld into it, if only for a few hours.

When I was young, nonverbal interchange with nature felt automatic. In the remnant woodland where I roamed as a child, I noticed, watched and took things in, from termites excavating a rotten log to the long, erect branches of a willow. Knowledge of a place settled into me, a kind of learning that arrives by experience and absorption, rather than receiving instruction. 

Decades later, I aspire to bring back the sense of inhabitance that once came without effort. It’s hard, after a lifetime of words, to avoid replacing immediate impressions with thoughts that insist on being heard: the names of plants and peaks and what I think I know about them. I clear my mind of clutter and start again. I say a silent hello to a silvery lupine covered with blooms, glad to give myself respite from dwelling on the sadness of disappearing glaciers, dying forests and three-frog summers.

A few months after my husband died, I paused along a ridgeline on a windy August day and found shelter under a lone Douglas fir. Having grown there since it was a seedling it leaned far to the leeward side. Its wind-sculpted crown came to a sharp point, like the north arrow on a compass rose. The pointy-tipped conifer seemed to beckon, as if it recognized a need in me that I didn’t yet feel. I walked up to it and placed my hand against its trunk.

I took off my day pack and sat beside tufts of cured bunchgrass and dried cow pies, listening to the wind sifting through the tree’s branches. With forearms wrapped around my knees, I rocked back and watched the leaves of a stunted stand of aspen nearby, fluttering like prayer flags from the ends of long, thin branches. My mind emptied — I felt it happening. I became aware only of being part of that place.

The sound of the wind lulled me and I lay down on my back for a while, then did something I never do while resting during a hike: I turned onto one side and curled up, as if to take a nap. The ground, warmed by hours of sun, felt both soft and rough with drying grass and fir needle duff. With half of my face pressed to the earth, I watched the movements of ants and spiders as they skittered over the fallen cones and shreds of tree bark that formed the foreground of my view. Seeing the world from ground level felt like seeing a new world.

My dog Maya must have felt the same sense of peace that I did; she too lay down instead of nosing and pawing and squirming as she usually does when I’m lying on the ground.  

My eyes closed. In the most vulnerable position possible, I listened to the wind increasing while I remained snug in the stillness of the narrow zone where earth met air. A deep serenity came over me and I felt the presence of a benevolent, comforting spirit.   

I’m not sure who that spirit was or what the arrow-headed Douglas-fir pointed to, other than a limitless infinity. Maybe that was all I needed to know.

Today, in a different year and new season, I walk among two generations of lodgepole pine that have grown since a wildfire burned in 1981. The first flush of rebirth has now yielded 30-foot trees whose cones have given rise to short shrubby youngsters nearby. Seeing the new growth brings me hope in the resilience of nature, even as I miss the old mixed-conifer forest that covered the land before the fire and seemed destined to do so forever.

Anything before this moment is old and getting older, already replaced by the present that will soon become the past. The woodland where I played as a child is now a paved cul-de-sac ringed by houses. Before houses erased the woods, the low hill was covered by a mix of red alder, pin cherry, Pacific dogwood, madrone, and second-growth Douglas-fir. Decades earlier, logging operations took the primeval forest that stood with its giant cedars towering 200 feet above the mossy gloom. In my imagination that place comes alive like a time-lapse film, the stages of removal and replacement one long gesture.

Nostalgia for the past often lures me into thinking that the old is by definition better than the new. Before: cathedral forests. After: suburban sprawl. Before: pools alive with tadpoles. After: three frogs seen all summer. These examples lead me to the conclusion that the old contains abundance, the new poverty. But not always. After decades of neglect, some coastal watersheds have been restored and once again welcome the salmon home. Extirpated species have been reintroduced into the Yellowstone region, and some are thriving.

The “new” that I imagine is actually a return to the old, when human beings had a personal relationship to the Earth that is our home, rather than thinking of home as where the parents lived when we were young, where the job was as we grew into adults, and where we find ourselves today. Humans once inhabited the land rather than simply residing. We lived in and with it, rather than on it. Some cultures still do, and I have to say I envy them.

When we turn our attention back to Earth as home, we see that the new returns to the old in an endless cycle — the turn of seasons year after year, the ebb and flow of tides, the sequence of life and death and renewal that we witness in natural ecosystems. Where I walk today, cones have dropped from fire-killed pines and a new forest is on its way to maturity. The wildflowers I admire will wither and their fruits will fill with seeds. Summer’s butterflies will turn pale, their wings ragged, and caterpillars will appear.

The glaciers of the Tetons polished some of the oldest bedrock on the surface of the Earth. Ice piled the powdered rock into moraines and rearranged it with torrential rivers. The glaciers then retreated to sheltered alpine defiles, leaving a clean canvas for life to return: lichens and moss, those original soil-builders, followed by wetlands, brush fields, forests and sagebrush steppe. Fauna of all kinds inhabited this new Eden, settled and became part of an interdependent community.

We humans joined them rather recently in geologic time. The changes we have brought in the last 200 years have happened at a pace wild nature rarely matches, short of what we call catastrophes: volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods. Rapid changes and disruptions like these also become old, to be replaced by the new, like the lodgepole pine forests that burn and burn again.

We have a choice: We can become the new catastrophe or render our disruptions slight and temporary, realizing the need to curtail our impact to allow other lives in our interdependent community to adapt. We can learn a new language for the holy, a language that does not need thought or words to steer us through the gates of the unseen.

When I look out from the Tetons into the wide valley below, I see the old and new joining hands in the dance of the ages, a mosaic of forest and openings, some old, others new. Rivers with old oxbows and new meanders. Perhaps even a three-frog summer will, with our care, expand into new seasons of plenty.