The Greening

Starnacosis The Reader posed an excellent question to Sunday’s Double Feature post:  “WTF?”

Or, more literally: “It’s been another year of regrowth there in your valley, are there any pictures of what it’s beginning to look like now?”

Why, yes.  Yes, there are.  I found this, which seems to have been taken in the past couple weeks:

It’s the barest of improvements, but when its this vs. ash, I’ll take this.

Here’s an… interesting shot which was taken from a rock formation visible from the ranch:

That explains the slight greening we see in the first picture.  This area was once pure forest.  But although the trees are gone, life is returning to the former undergrowth in the form of grass and wildflowers.

The marked difference has, of course, raised the question I asked myself last year at this time:  Do I want to go back?  Ever? Or only in the winter, when snowy white lies will protect me from the truth of destruction and adulthood?  Should I shield the childhood memories of a place which are perhaps even now glossed over by intense nostalgia?  Or do I layer in new experiences in a real landscape which could alter or completely consume a well-worn mental escape?  Are these questions I should have been asking myself even before the fire?  Where is my Percoset?

Well, it’s not really an issue at this point; for our second wedding anniversary, Josh The Pilot and I have plenty of budget-directed choices:  We can take a romantic stroll around the Wal-Mart parking lot, or we can plunge our heads into the bathtub in celebration of our deeply underwater mortgage.  Even if I wanted to go back, I can’t.  The issue is in the hands of… of… whatever the current name of our bank is.

It’s a convenient debt.

Some of the online photos I found create the illusion that from a few angles, it looks as though nothing has happened in Pike National Forest at all.  But that, I know, is self-delusion of the most destructive kind.  I still feel like I miss a place which doesn’t exist anymore, like I’m loving a dead person.

Then again, I expect heaven has sunrises much like these.

aren’t you glad you asked at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com