The Ashes of Estes Park

 During our visit to Randy and Heather at their cabin in Glen Haven, when Randy was leading us into the mountainside for a walk before dinner to increase our appetites, I mentioned the fires that devastated the area the previous October.

"They came really close," he said. "We can see the burned area if we go to the top of this ridge," he said, mentioning further up the mountainside.

It had been a harrowing time, especially for them. They had lost their cabin in a water heater explosion the year before, but this time the danger was the possible destruction of their entire community. Estes Park had been evacuated. It seemed apocalyptic. Somehow the fires were stopped just north of the Glen Haven valley, which is on the north side of the Big Thompson Canyon. Estes Park was spared, as was the YMCA camp.

The idea that something so beautiful and beloved as Estes Park, and the camp itself, could be destroyed like that was only one of a series of events in the last few years that had caused me to feel as if we are living in some kind of end times. The burning of Notre Dame in Paris in April 2019 was certainly among those events. The fires in Larimer County were another. I can barely wrap my mind around how much was burned, in the high country where I have sometimes explored on the back roads, and in the upper reaches of the Poudre Canyon. This last area was to me one of those places that I have long kept in my mind, as a place of refreshing refuge where I could always return, to feel the purification from the world in a way that I have felt in the past.  For now it seems too painful to go there. Someday I'll drive up the Poudre Canyon again perhaps and it will feel the way it used to feel, even though certain recognizable structures, beloved little places on the map, have been wiped out.

But just as Notre Dame refused to collapse, and the rose windows ere intact, so the YMCA Camp was spared. The important things remain. I feel lucky that they are still there.

I can't help feel the extension of this to my family. The visit to the YMCA Camp this year left me further way from my sisters than even before, worse than last year. I don't think there is any chance of having a decent conversation with them in the near future, maybe for years to come.

My middle sister and I tried to have a talk, sitting beside the columbarium at the camp where our parents' ashes are interred. It did not go well. We could not even agree upon the things upon which we disagree.  We could not agree that there are two sides, hers and mine. We are that far apart.

So much about the normal world of the past seems gone, and is not coming back.

In a way it takes a psychological burden off myself to know that it is not just me. Everyone is going through this.