It's interesting how thangs...times...change. Generations after generations progress in their own ways, leaving behind certain traditions or aspects of their parents' and grandparents' ways of doing things or ways of thinking. They invent new technology, design new fashions, create new fads, stumble on new discoveries and develop new philosophies. Each generation also leaves their marks--or scars, depending on how you look at them--on the land and environment.

And it's interesting, or sad rather, that with the progression we have today, so many of us are so caught up in the "fast lane," as they say, that we are too busy to recognize the occasional need to stop and take a moment or three to appreciate the natural beauty surrounding us.

For the majority of it mountains, in one way or another, have been a part of my life. Growing up in Southeastern Idaho and having relatives in Northern Utah who live in towns nestled in the foothills or at the base of mountains, it's just been an accepted fact of life for me. I'd never really given it much thought. Until recently.

Growing up in the Snake River Basin the mountains were/are just...there, always in the distance, gray-blue in appearance capped white with snow. Nothing to write a foreign friend or penpal about, except for the white "R" up on one nearby butte some college kids had painted sometime ago in honor of or to represent the town and the college that once was named Ricks. Oh, they have a rugged beauty like most mountains do, but to the child I was they were of only passing interest.

The Blackfoot Mountain Range, however, refused to be so summarily dismissed. It edges Pocatello to the...Northeast(?)--I'm bad with geography, so bear with me, please--one end of the university nestling at the base of one of its mountains. In fact, the reason I couldn't ignore this mountain was the simple fact it was practically my apartment complex's "backyard." It, besides the Public Safety Building, was my scenery. It and the big orange "I" outlined in black then a fatter band of white that looked like it was about to slide off its precarious place near the top of zee mountain.

At first I felt hemmed in, not liking the up-close-and-personal contact with a mountain. I wasn't used to having such a...limited view, at least horizontally that is. For there was a view--only vertically. But after four years of living in Pocatello, going to ISU, I began to see the mountain in a new light. Instead of being overshadowed and loomed over...corralled in...the mountain, though a giant still, became a silent, stalwart protector. A benevolent friend.

No longer do I just dismiss the mountains as part of the landscape--although they are. On any drive through the mountains now I look out the windows and pay attention, ignoring my book for the moment. I try to take in everything about them, whether they're covered in trees (evergreen or deciduous or both) or made up of bare rock in places interspersed with grasses and trees, whether there's a waterfall sluicing down part of a rock face (ie. Bridal Veil Falls from the Wasatch Range) or not and whether or not the tops of the mountains have a constant blanketing of white snow.

No longer do they fade into the background; oh no, they can't. They demand, however silently and...authoratively, your attention. Some are stark, bare, jagged and craggy, soaring high into the domed sky; others are more rounded, smooth and softened by the grasses, plants and trees that call them home. (These, of course, are the older ones. The older a mountain range is, the smoother and rounder its peaks, weathered down by Mother Nature.) All are beautiful, majestic, awe-inspiring and sometimes overwhelming and intimidating.

It was on a shopping excursion last week into Provo--or coming back from it--while Mom, Jon and I visited Nan before she moves back to Texas next week, that I had a moment of pause. Granted, I was tired and therefore not totally with it, but... It was like I came to myself. Life was still going on 'round me, time was still moving, but...I was paused. It was like those scenes in the movies where time and everyone else is sped up but one person who is still. Outside the right middle window of our new minivan, well new for us as it's our new wheelchair van, part of the Wasatch Mountains caught my attention.

All the sudden, in this quiet moment, looking at the grassy, red rocky face of the mountain, a question sprang to my mind. What have you seen? In all your years, what changes, by way of cities cropping up and growing; by way of Man's encroachment and physical changes to the land [like the blasting to widen roads through Provo Canyon], have you seen? Then as my mind got going again, I wondered what it must have looked like as a brand new mountain. *chuckles sheepishly*

I dunno how old the Wasatch Range is, or how much change it has seen, or how many people have come and gone, either living nestled at its base or on its slopes, or migrated along its flank. All I know is it's ancient, going back to prehistoric times. Compared to its age and what it silently witnessed long, long ago, events and peoples now lost to the Mists of Time, what is now known of its history is considered quite modern. Explorers; fur trappers, British and American; mountain men; pioneers (the ill-fated Donner Party); prospectors who mined lead, silver and zinc; Spanish priests who passed over the range into present day Spanish Fork; 26 saloons and six breweries and brothels in numerous mining towns... And most recently, *laughs* its resevoirs in the summer and snowy slopes in the winter have made the Wasatch one of the finest recreational places in America.

Amazing what a quiet moment can bring about, eh?

The Wasatch Range

moon phase