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    Marie's Place: Journals of Mountains and Plateaus
    Marie's Place: Journals of Mountains and Plateaus
    Marie's Place: Journals of Mountains and Plateaus
    Ebook128 pages1 hour

    Marie's Place: Journals of Mountains and Plateaus

    By Jim Heaton

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    About this ebook

    Marie's Place is a series of stories about places and personalities in Northern Colorado and Malawi, from the '60s through the '90s. The stories involve people Jim knew, and would like you to know, centering on a friend of the family named Marie, and moving to the country of Malawi, where Jim worked as a Peace Corps volunteer teacher, living on a plateau in the northern part of the country. Included are various happenings in both countries: being nearly blown off a mountain on a backpacking trip in Colorado, and living alone in a cabin in a village called Hahns Peak. The book begins with a near-death experience while Jim was living in Fort Collins, CO, and is accompanied throughout by the laughter of his Pickwickian friends of the Western Slope and the people of Malawi.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGatekeeper Press
    Release dateJan 7, 2021
    ISBN9781662905575
    Marie's Place: Journals of Mountains and Plateaus

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      Book preview

      Marie's Place - Jim Heaton

      Chapter 1

      Marie and the Troll

      There’s no way to encapsulate the changes that happened during all the fifty years or so that I knew Marie, and the cabin at Hahns Peak, but the sounds and smells and good times of all seven of the people who lived in or around it have infiltrated its walls even though the folks have passed on; their benediction is very alive .

      The cabin at sunrise yesterday morning was afloat in a sea of white. Fog had covered the still-warm lake during the night, and now it was creeping across the gulleys of Poverty Bar, which we could see from the downhill side and it proceeded up the hill as a truck started somewhere across the meadow and progressed along the main road. There was a tentative ghost of a sun coming through the fog, over the hill toward the Peak. As the fog envelopes the cabin, you could see the individual particles, like powdery dust, swirling against the dark logs. Eventually the fog rose up and coalesced into a layer of cloud, carefully balancing over the valley, submerging Bud Hurd’s totem pole and most of his green-roofed house down below. Bud, a retired Forestry Department ranger, would like that, even though he’s long since moved away. He’d say would you look at that, and he’d put up another pole with a letterbox labeled Air Mail.

      In the crawl space of the cabin, I work like a troll putting sleeves of insulating foam over all the fragile copper pipes that connect the well to the hot water heater and the sinks, and the indoor system to the polybutylene pipe that comes from the wellhead outside and under the foundation and finds its way into the crawl space somehow under the footing, to rise like a tree root from the dirt floor. I put a blanket of fiberglass R19 over the pipe where it emerges into the cabin, and another blanket over the pressure-accumulator on the cross-joist. Tiny mushrooms grow on the moist dirt floor, and the place still smells of sweet lumber from the original construction of fifty years ago. These lie scattered about with the carpenter’s empty Copenhagen tins. The history of this place is in the little jobs that lie half-completed: a service inspection tag for the well pump, left as it was after the pump was tested for the final time in 1973; some floor braces no longer bracing anything but hanging in the air between the joists, which have become self-supporting as the cabin shifted through all the freezes and thaws and rode the dirt between heaven and earth, and heaved itself, perhaps more toward heaven. The doors on the cabin tell the story by becoming unopenable from the snow weight in winter so you learn not to use the bolt-lock because it will quickly get jammed as the door frame shifts. Through it all, the troll imagines that the 2-by 12-inch joists could have supported six grand pianos on the flooring of the living room above, despite the frost-heaves, and without suffering strain. Maybe, someday, someone will play a grand piano here. Quiet now.

      Needless to say, this is a different quiet from the quiet when I’m working on the roof, though each has its points. Both quiets put you into a kind of isolation from the rest of humanity, and both are direct metaphors and reflections of the structure of your mind’s continuing machinations when you’re at the cabin. Both show you one side of the heavenly versus the fundamental. Once, when I was up there, I burst into a couple choruses of America the Beautiful, just to see how funky I could get with shaking up the neighbors a bit. One of Wayne’s little girls down the hill ran into their house to tell her daddy that somebody was singing opera and she thought it was coming from Jim’s house. Or so I heard later from her daddy.

      Living more or less in the shadow of a mountain is the same thing—the shadows make you look up. I’ve heard that some people who transplanted from back East to the Colorado mountains to do mining went crazy from feeling hemmed in by the walls of granite in the mine valleys. Others found their merry way into the tunnels underneath, and then dug out that which they sought, gold, silver, lead, molybdenum, dynamiting and whistling all the way, and treating the ore as just another currency to be traded in Steamboat for whiskey. There are at least a half-dozen mines under Hahns Peak today, not counting the one that runs next to Marie’s Place and that also drained away my neighbor’s first attempt at a water well. Trolls. You could hear them whistling, as many still do. You could smell the smoke from their pipes, too, or is that wood

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