Wooden Bear Sculptures

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What An Autumn Night At The Park

The last time I got bitten by the travel bug, I didn’t take off all that far. I just pilled in the van with my wife, put our two years old son above the Britax Boulevard 70CS and drove to another part of Montana. To be precise, we drove right east to the side of Glacier National Park, left the van on the shore of a long, bright and windy lake, and started hiking uphill the Continental Divide. We hear that the tree leaves around us were whispering loudly to each other about the beginning of autumn. We can see that many had already turned as purple as the last frostwrinkled huckleberries, as red as the bands of argillite rock towering overhead in the distance, as gold as the eyes of Glacier’s wolves and ospreys.

Almost before midnight, in a very small yet standard almost-room in front of the burning fireplace (well we purposely left our Kozy World KWN321 heater as well as our MBP36 video monitor at home), we thought we hear of a sound of another creature sometimes colored yellow or gold –a grizzly. Just climbed alone in a wild country is a dandy way to begin exercising unused synapses and pores, along with ancient connections in the subconscious part of your brain. And to make sure you don’t overlook any, there is absolutely nothing like a great grizzled bear near us. As a matter of fact, you may never completely discover all the things you are made of until you do confront something on the order of midnight grizz. Or a passing elk or moose that grunts and snaps brush like a bear, which is what we probably had by our room. Whatever it was, it surely made the next day’s dawning all the sweeter.

We left the room and traipsed up a trail until we reached a waterfall. After splashing our faces in the cold, leaf-swirling poll at the base, my wife and I stared silently up at the cascade for a while. It spilled over a couple of hundred feet of limestone ledges. The morning sunshine came directly on the falling water, the stone, the flower and our child scrambling uphill among those blossoms. The extra-rich, almost tangible quality of low autumn light spread the same kind of expectant glow upon animate and inanimate alike. Leaves seemed like sculptures. Rocks were vibrating, dancing to the water’s tune.

Everything was amazing; this is what people are getting at when they speak abaout the harmony in the nature. No matter how many words they use, the essence comes out the same: everything fits, everything seems to belong. It simply means that the harmony is renewed within us.

After leaping off a point onto the ledge below, my son raised his arm with a shout. In his hand was a perfect arrowhead, most likely made by one of the Blackfeet Indians who had once lived on the eastern side of the mountains. To me, the worked piece of flint was confirmation that such earlier travelers felt the same as I did about this waterfall, sensing it to be a spirit-restoring place, spending their sunrise hours here.