Susan Tichy is a poet who lives for part of the year in a hand-built cabin in the Sierra Mojada (Wet Mountains) of Colorado. She has been an active war-protester and has written on the theme of conflict as well as discussing the subject on seminar panels, alongside veterans. Susan’s poetry collections include Bone Pagoda, a journey through Vietnam – the title taken from the name of an ossuary on the Vietnamese-Cambodian border, where the bones of 3000 massacre victims are preserved; A Smell of Burning Starts the Day, an account of a soldier relative who was part of the occupying U.S. army in the Tarlac Province of the Philippines at the turn of the century; and, most recently, Gallowglass, which takes its title from the Gaelic gal-óglac, a foreign soldier or mercenary.
Struck by the parallels between
Sweeney’s flight into the wilds of Glen Bolcain and the refuge cabins and
shacks, or ‘hidden fortress’ strongholds, that a number of war veterans have
made in mountain landscapes, I invited Susan to share some reflections on
our bothy. Her immediate response to my sketches was that, ‘swathed in thorns
it seems earthy, hidden, secretive, safe from the inside, fortified from
without. A bothy held aloft by thorns feels dreamlike, lifted up with only
the sky above; though approaching it on the level the thorns might be
discovered below you, a very different and eerie experience, subconscious, or
lying in ambush.’
In America the motif of the hut
carries from Thoreau’s cabin to the hideaway of the Unibomber – the tradition
is not one of uncomplicated pastoral. Given Sweeney’s battle-induced madness and
the contemporary recognition of PTSD, it seemed crucial to understand such
contemporary parallels, exposing the bothy to both hutopianism and survivalism.
AF: Susan, let’s begin by taking our
bearings within the landscape itself. Can you sketch the situation of your
cabin in Colorado? My own sketchy impressions come from a visit to Taos, and
also meeting with Jane Wodening, in Boulder, and reading her hut tales – she’s
way above the tree line.
I’ve also worked with Andrew
Schelling on a mountain project, where he mapped the Arapahoe peaks in a renga,
which I twinned with Mt Lushan in China:
hooxeihiinenii
beiinese’
Pawnee Fort this peak’s
earlier name
warrior stronghold in
cloud wisps
Algonkian scored on
billion-year granite
linked by arêtes &
capped
by perched isolate
fragments
Devil’s Thumb far
altithermal—
shall I take to carrying
a possible bag
prepare the blue corn
ceecéecó’oh to
smudge
smudge this rattle with
ceremonial herbs
winter’s deep study
precipice
not afraid to call
thunder down
wear out thick boots
or make poems from the geology
handbook
I also recall a wonderful signpost –
reported to me by Gerry Loose, after a hike he made with Andrew – which read
something like:
FOR A BEAR PLAY DEAD
IF IT’S A MOUNTAIN LION
FIGHT BACK
ST: Hmmm, well, depends on what kind of bear. Play dead for a grizzly or a black bear with a cub, but fight any other black bear. They are rather timid, and fatal attacks are rare. My husband was confidant enough to walk towards one on open ground and gently back it down, till it moved back into the trees and away from a neighbor’s open door. (The dog wisely stayed just behind his knee.) As to lions… I have a friend who fought back and lived to tell about it, but if it wasn’t taken by surprise (as hers was, near a den), and if it’s really trying to kill you, it will hit the base of your skull from behind, like a tiger, and you won’t know a thing about it.
So, yes, that’s one kind of knowledge
you pick up, living here. Personally I would be happy just to see one of
the lions who share my favorite trails and the fifteen acres I call mine. So
far only tracks, scat, kill sites, and the cry at night.
My husband, Michael O’Hanlon, was a
combat vet (River Assault Force) and a mountain climber. He and his cousin found the Wet
Mountain Valley during their quest to climb all Colorado’s Fourteeners – peaks
over 14,000 feet. It’s in southern Colorado, in the middle of the state, far
from paved places, and about equal driving time from Denver north or Taos
south. His first memory of the place was of driving up into the valley at dawn,
October, through wave after wave of migrating elk drifting over the road with
the mist, and he never got over expecting to see that again.
We built the cabin with our own hands, beginning in 1982. Michael was finished with his post-war travelling days and ready to put his foot down somewhere. land was still cheap and we wanted a home base without a mortgage, so though we had never built so much as a bookcase, off we went. I played architect, and Mike found a way to get lumber at wholesale, and we both pretended we weren’t terrified. The cabin’s still standing, and still not finished, and still amazingly solid, though looking at it now I sometimes wonder who built it. When? How?
We built the cabin with our own hands, beginning in 1982. Michael was finished with his post-war travelling days and ready to put his foot down somewhere. land was still cheap and we wanted a home base without a mortgage, so though we had never built so much as a bookcase, off we went. I played architect, and Mike found a way to get lumber at wholesale, and we both pretended we weren’t terrified. The cabin’s still standing, and still not finished, and still amazingly solid, though looking at it now I sometimes wonder who built it. When? How?
The cabin sits just under 9000 feet,
in the western foothills of the Wet Mountains/Sierra Mojada, east of the Wet
Mountain Valley and 1000 feet higher than its floor. The land is part of the
ghost town of Rosita, a silver-boom town that once held 2000 people, hotels,
saloons, and a famous brewery. Not much of that is visible now, except piles of
slag from the two big mines. Aside from silver, Rosita was famous for its four
good springs, one of which lies just downhill from the cabin, though not on my
land. We chose the drier, sunnier side of the valley because we intended to
live there year-round, and we chose Rosita because it had already been built
on, trashed, and abandoned. We didn’t want to disturb new land. On the west
side, at the foot of the big range – the Sangre de Cristos – land at the same
elevation has thick forest, fast streams, with cold winds off the high peaks:
lovely in summer. Our side is semi-arid: pinyon pine and ponderosa, aspens in
wet spots, and a lot of brush – chamisa, wild currant, buckbrush, and (before
the epic droughts of the last ten years) wild roses. The cabin has
double-glazed passive solar, backed up by a woodstove, and until 2001 had no
phone, electricity or running water. (We liked to say we picked up the 20th c. cheap, after everyone
else was through with it.)
Parts of the valley are irrigated, so
in June, as I drive down from Rosita toward the valley floor, it can look like
a strip of Scotland has been laid down among the paler greens at the base of
the Sangres.
The peaks rise straight up from the
irrigated ground, so as I drive down from my side, they stretch out like a wall
in front of me, maybe twelve miles off. It’s a spine of a range – a sharp,
steep uplift with nine Fourteeners among its summits. You can walk from our
side to the other in less than a day if your lungs and knees can take it—and
much is Federal Wilderness, the rest mostly National Forest. For 80 miles, no
paved road crosses it and only two jeep roads go all the way over, passable in
summer, though one is a nightmarish drive. Tree line hovers around 11,600 feet,
a couple hundred higher on warm or less windy slopes, and the tundra harbors
plants that were stranded by the last ice age.
Histories of the Wet Mountain Valley
begin around 1870 with the silver strikes, the first cattlemen, and the German
Colony – a band of immigrants, some of them Civil War veterans, determined to
farm communally though they didn’t know how to farm. All that’s left of them
are place names including “colony” and a few old families who stayed on when
the venture failed. Local authors dispense with Native history in a sentence or
two – “summer hunting grounds of the Ute Indians” just about does it. But there
was always plenty going on. The Ute, Arapahoe, Apache, and Comanche territories
all more or less converged here, and Blanca Peak, our southernmost Fourteener,
is Tsisnaasjini', the Navajo’s sacred peak of the east. I could write all day
about comings and goings over this land, a history most ignore though the clues
are all over the place. Just for starters, in the Catholic cemetery at the edge
of town you’ll find graves from the 1850s and 60s with the name Garnier, a
French/Sioux mixed-blood family whose trading business stretched from Canada to
Santa Fe and lasted four generations, through French, Spanish, Mexican, and
American rule. Kit Carson isn’t buried there, but he helped trap beaver to
extinction in the Sangre de Cristo decades before “white history” is said to
have begun here.
The Sangre de Cristo range from Rosita Road, Susan Tichy, 2010
It’s landscape on a magnificent scale, open and dramatic, with a big sky nearly always blue. You can see thunderstorms fifty miles off, watch weather move toward you or away. I can’t count the people I’ve met who first drove into the valley on holiday, went home, gave notice at their jobs and came back, with no more idea of what they were doing than Mike and I had when we bought our hammers. Is that an American thing?
It’s landscape on a magnificent scale, open and dramatic, with a big sky nearly always blue. You can see thunderstorms fifty miles off, watch weather move toward you or away. I can’t count the people I’ve met who first drove into the valley on holiday, went home, gave notice at their jobs and came back, with no more idea of what they were doing than Mike and I had when we bought our hammers. Is that an American thing?
Monitor 2 at SEA FLOAT, photograph Bill Patterson, 1970
AF: It is how we tend to think of an American mode of settling. Your account catches the sense of the human as an agency of change, and the associations of these influxes with various wars – from the Civil War of “colony”, to the Vietnam war, and now Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan, that have swept waves of vets up into the mountains, Michael among them.
AF: It is how we tend to think of an American mode of settling. Your account catches the sense of the human as an agency of change, and the associations of these influxes with various wars – from the Civil War of “colony”, to the Vietnam war, and now Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan, that have swept waves of vets up into the mountains, Michael among them.
Embedded in this migration there
seems to be an impetus, or need, to escape, and sometimes that carries with it
a sense of right, even destiny? Agriculture and mining have absorbed the
technologies of war – DDT, say, or explosives, for mining – activities that
we’d set against the hutopianism of Snyder, wild nature, the Thoreauvian
tradition.
Given the parallels with Sweeney, what
interests me is the pattern of individuals, families, and communities entering
the mountains, as a means to access a mindscape of reclusion – the Amish moving into your valley as
much as the Vets – and I’m wondering if you feel that there is some primal
instinct at work here?
Does one enter the peaks as a means
to still change, to enact a pause? Wittgenstein’s essay on wound shock
comes to mind – based on his experiences working in hospital during World War
II as well as, no doubt, his own experiences of the trenches in the First World
War – in which he inverted the word shock as a typographical
register for the force of the human experience that was being objectively
described. What I am speculating is that, in any conflict, but in particular in
a modern warfare, the experience is typified by an exposure to the explosive,
to moments and forces of terrifying speed. (Of course, there is also the exact
opposite phenomenon, in the distancing effect of drones and high altitude
bombing.)
Does it ring true, for you, that a
Vietnam vet might crave the apparent stasis of a mineral landscape – what
Schelling calls the mountain's ‘13,000 year dream'?
ST: If we had a vocabulary for
mountain energy, mountain aura, that did not reduce them to one of our fears or
one of our dreams…. But I can’t finish that sentence, can I? The Tao that can
be named is not the real, etc. So many of the Chinese poets we revere for their
solitudes, the stillness their poems now give us, lived in eras of great wars,
chose retreat or were exiled after combats both martial and political.
So do vets come here to still
change? It’s a beautiful idea, and I’m sure it lurks in the possibles-bag
of motives. Yes, we are far from traffic, urban pressures, most loud sudden
noises (though not thunder, gunshots, or air force jets breaking the sound
barrier), and many do believe that all nature is unchanging, not only
the rock. I would say they have chosen a degree of reclusion as
self-protection, and that might include protection from self, a stilling
of agitations. But retreat is not only from something, but to someplace,
and the place only looks like nowhere or nothing or stillness from a long way
off. Once you arrive, there becomes here, and requires you
to adapt. So I’d say vets who live here have chosen a different set of
difficulties – a tough daily life that may be construed as philosophical rigor,
a distraction from inner demons, or, in some cases, as a shadow-play of war
itself. Sweeney bloodied by thorns instead of arrows.
Snyder was young when he practiced
the severe and stunning solitude of the fire lookout, and when he offered a
double-seeing of men who worked the Northwest woods: “don’t want nothing / That
can’t be left out in the rain—”. Han Shan in a hard hat. Michael had a savant
of his own, a war-vet rancher who played softball with his spurs on (the league
made a special rule: duck tape, and no sliding feet-first). Most famous
quotation, after the loss of a big game – town league softball being, in those
days, a proxy war between various cultural forces in the county – “In the
big scheme of things, it don't mean shit.” (pause for a swig) “In the big scheme of things the big
scheme of things don't mean shit.”
It’s hard for me, though, to reduce
this place or these people to pure ideas. Some of the vets I know run
businesses. Some are drunks or religious fanatics. Some live at the end of
long, bad roads, behind KEEP OUT signs and locked gates. When Michael came home
from his first trip back to Vietnam, some tracked him down to shake his hand,
others shouted at him that he was fucking crazy. But no matter why they came –
or, more to the point, why they stay – their reasons, wounds, and desires
remain complex and contradictory. Any of us may, as you say, “desire to enter a
mindscape of reclusion,” but the actual place has a thing or two to say about
that. Opportunities to practice non-attachment may include your roof, as it
blows off, piece by piece.
In daily life here, there’s a lot of
problem-solving. It’s cheap to live but there’s not much work, and not much to
do on Saturday night. Depending on how and where, exactly, you live, you’re
dealing with firewood, frozen pipes, rough roads, livestock, too much snow or
too little, wildfires and evacuations, dust storms or mud, a short growing
season, three hundred trees blown down in one night, bears and skunks, bats in
the attic, woodpeckers turning your cabin to sawdust, no internet, and knowing
that if you break your neck or have a heart attack, you can count on at least
two or three hours from dialing 911 to arriving at a mediocre hospital.
All that is as much “the mountains”
as uplifted granite and snowfields and the pressing in of silence. Michael
climbed so much in the Sangres he stopped counting summits after the first
fifty, and ditto for flat tires on Rosita Road. For vets who have stayed, I
think the way of life is what holds them. Even when it’s hard – maybe
especially because it’s hard – it simplifies things. Get your car high-centered
in mud-season ruts on a county road – is that an afternoon wasted, or an
afternoon when you know with Zen-like clarity just exactly what you have to do,
with whatever tools and companions are at your disposal? There’s a drama in it,
an exhilaration, which in some people reduces the need to create human
melodrama just to have something to feel. We have earth-shaking thunderstorms
that can leave you as wrung-out as good sex. (Afterwards, we get on the phone:
It was fabulous here. How was it for you?) Combat vets are notoriously out of
sync with their own emotions – over-reacting or blankly numb. Here, landscape
and weather deliver the Sublime and life almost daily provides adventure, large
and small. Making it here proves something, and whether that something is
macho, eco, metaphysical, or all three, depends on who you are.
In Michael’s time, a lot of vets
joined Search and Rescue. In the Sangres, because the topography is
predictable, not many people get truly lost. So the ratio of fatalities to
call-outs is high. Pre-dawn phone calls, choppers, adrenalin, radio call-signs,
body bags: “Brings it all back, don’t it?” said a vet on his first mission. SAR
is different now, with more real mountaineers, more training, and better gear.
But back in the day – pre-GPS – Michael was the Sangres guru. He had
bushwhacked all over the range – not just up peaks and not just on trails. He
could predict where a missing climber had fallen, where a lost little boy would
descend from a ridge at nightfall. Dropped with a team by helicopter on a high
ridge strewn with pieces of what had been an airplane and its occupants, he
could recognize where they had been set down, and, without a map, plot a
walking route home. It was, in some ways, a perfect intersection of his
war-self and his mountain-self – in a poem I called it “the rescue of dead
men.” When he quit it was partly his age, mostly a fear that for him every
trailhead and peak soon would come with its own toe-tag.
For those of us who go into the
mountains, their ridges and pathways become as familiar as a hometown. We know
which meadows used to be beaver ponds, when flowers bloom in the avalanche
runs. The awe the peaks inspire is mixed in our memories with humor and
friendship, and vice versa. To speak of one is to speak of the other. Those who
live at the foot of the Sangres without ever venturing into them have a
different experience: an acute sensitivity to the idea of “up there,” with no
way to talk about it. Some are content to call the mountains beautiful, and
watch for great sunsets. Others feel the energy of “up there” and look for an
explanation, a name for it. So I’ve met people (some of them vets) who believe
that grizzlies and wolves still live up there; that escaped convicts survive up
there; that the CIA dumps dead bodies up there; that a spiritual force-field
emanates from pre-Cambrian rock on the highest summits, helping us to channel
angels; or, that “dimensional energy fields” allow aliens to maintain a
spaceport up there; that the aliens and Special Forces fought a battle on the
summit of Blanca Peak (casualties quarantined in the outback of a huge army
base by Colorado Springs – you can’t fault fantasists for lack of detail); that
the government maintains a secret facility inside the mountains, with
invisible entrances up there somewhere; that the Marble Caves at 11,000 feet
(real enough, though it’s limestone, not marble) hold lost Spanish gold, not to
mention a skeleton chained to rock; and of course that it’s suicidal to venture
up there without a gun.
AF: Homer, Sweeney – each war seems to
project its aftermath, its journey to a home that is rarely found. The skills
learnt, the knowledge of war, needs an out. I think back to my visit to Dùn
Scaith, on Skye, which Sweeney would have seen when his ‘leaping’ flight took
him as far as Eigg. The poem I wrote lists some of those warrior skills.
the isolate dùn
& broken-ridge mountains
give barbaric vigour
true to the warrior
the fort’s named
for
Sgathaich
queen
super of the fight-school
Cù-chulainn’s instructor
in the
arts of fucking & fighting
her tricks &
feints set his shanks & joints shaking
like an oak in the
spate or reed in the burn
the apple
feat
the
thunder-feat
the feat
of the sword-edge
the feat
of the rope
the feat
of Cat
the heroic
salmon-leap
the leap
over a poisoned stroke
the barbed
spear
the
breath-feat, with gold apple
blown up
into the air
the
stunning-shot
the
cry-stroke
and
running up a lance and standing erect
on
its point, and binding of the noble hero
(around spear points)
dare the broken arch
of the voided drawbridge
gain the wave-washed
rock
pinch the summer thyme
whose rule outlasted
the walls of the dùn
The hollow bridge is still there, and
your narrative reminds me that the fort rests on a detached block of rock,
fused to the land, but geologically separate, psychologically apart. Everything
you’ve said here is a reminder that there are only so many ways these
experiences, their force and impact, can play out. The skills of the
mountaineer, that exposure; or reference Robert Macfarlane, that moment under
the Inaccessible Pinnacle in the Cuillin, when he confronts his own daring and
its desire for dying, and turns back, down the path to Coruisk, white with
fear. Or those who press on.
There seems no doubt that this does play out for a vet in some special way. And I recall a phrase you used in
an email, that it is, perhaps, 'like guarding the frontier to a country you’ll
never visit'.
ST: Yes, as I’m writing this, I’m
thinking of the aura ascribed to a combat vet, who has broken the greatest of
all taboos, thou shalt not kill. And, with that, the knowledge and
authenticity we assign to the idea of being there, of witnessing. As I
write, I see myself attaching a similar credential to those who have lived in
high mountains. McFarlane has also written, “With mountains, the gap – the
irony – that exists between the imagined and the actual can be wide enough to
kill.” An actual mountain did kill Michael, eventually. His death in a place
that to him spelled perfect happiness has become a talisman to some who knew
him – though it means that for us the high ridges are no longer “a zone without
grief.” But there’s something else about the day he fell: he wasn’t alone. In
contradiction to the advice he gave others, Michael often went into the
mountains alone. In the twenty-six years I knew him, he dislocated his
shoulder, broke a toe once and his ankle twice, got caught in storms, fell into
cold streams, came home sunburned, snowburned, bleeding or limping, but he
never once got hurt when walking alone. Alone up there, he was as close to
one-with-the-mountain and as close to still as he was ever going to be.
Gallowglass,2010
THAT MOST HEART-EXCITING
OF EARTHLY THINGS
'Wind and thunder cross my threshold'
Child masturbating on the edge of a
door
—any moment in which to
practice calm
‘With your own body
carry yourself’
Though we were less
strong
than stubborn
Writing with gloves on,
burning scrap
Freeing a doe with her
hind leg caught in a fence
‘If you don’t wash your
clothes
you can carry smoke’
scribbled inside my copy
of High Path
‘Roads appear and
disappear’
‘We walked upon the very
brink’
Large, therefore, is
spoken of
Tea settles in a dirty
cup
And a few pennies left
for the news
‘War horses graze by the
city walls’
‘Seed pods ripen to
brilliant red’
Trim the wicks, so the
lamps burn brighter
Leave the window open
for company
The car high-centered in
knee-deep ruts
Ridge-tops shining by
starlight
As the master says:
impossible
to set a mountain before
your eyes
ST; first published, Beloit Poetry Journal, 2011
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____________________________
Bothan Shuibhne | Sweeney’s Bothy
Alec Finlay & The Bothy
Project
commissioned as part of Creative
Scotland’s ‘Year of Natural Scotland 2013’
