Enough

We went to see the aspens. This is a pilgrimage many Santa Feans take this time of year, traveling up Hyde Park Boulevard to the end of the road, or some point in between---Aspen Vista Trail, or the Santa Fe Ski Basin, or something else in the Dale Ball network. If what you seek is immersion in the fiery yellow world of aspen trees at the apex of their color change, most any of these will do.

We missed it last year, landing in Santa Fe around the first of November. We had been waiting.

Aspens are a kind of willow tree, with slender trunks of papery white bark and roundish leaves that shimmer in the wind. Sometimes called quaking aspens, a stand of these trees is considered a single organism; its main life force pulsing underground in an extensive root system. Sometimes these systems lie dormant for years,

waiting for conditions to be exactly right. Then, they start shooting up trunks into the sunlight. A stand of aspen trees is sometimes called a “clone.”

These trees are all over Santa Fe, and wide swaths of them march up the flanks of the Sangre de Cristos. Like their cousin the cottonwood, they are bright green all summer—waiting, waiting. And then, through an alchemy of sunlight and rainfall and rising and falling temperatures, they begin to change. The roundish leaves take on a subtle yellow tinge around the edges. In a heartbeat, they burst into yellow flame, which spreads through single trees and across the mountains. It starts earlier at the higher elevations, and once it does, wind and rain do their work quickly. All that’s left are the tall, slender ghostly trunks. You have to pay attention or you’ll miss it.

The first week of October, word started passing around town: the color was coming. A woman in my exercise class said “You better go this weekend if you want to see the peak.” Thinking to beat the crowds (we didn’t) we headed up the mountain Friday.

The Aspen Vista trail is a relatively gentle one. At least at the bottom, it is more of a fire road than mountain trail. All in, the loop is seven miles, and it’s high. It starts a little above 10,000 feet and climbs to above 12,000. We discovered this the previous November—and also that beginning a hike above 10,000 feet is probably not the best idea for flat landers. On our second day in Santa Fe, our pitiful Bay Area lungs proved unequal to the job. Our ambitious seven-mile loop became a quarter-mile gasp, and an almost instant cave-in for lunch on a log.

This October morning, the trailhead lot was full and we parked with many others along the road. An official trail race had kicked off about a half hour before; something like 12 miles for serious mountain runners. The place was crowded, the air was festive, and there was a riot of color all around. Broad stands of aspens—clones—were everywhere. It was like climbing inside one of those yellow highlighters you used in college to study a textbook. We started up the trail; about a mile up we crossed over the north fork of Little Tesuque Creek. Around every bend, the vistas got more dramatic. More trees, more intensity, more electric yellow.

I start snapping pictures, obsessively. It was like the reaction I have to sunsets. I can’t stop photographing those, either. Like somehow, having caught an incredible shot; colors that are unbelievable; the next one might be even better. Remember when film cost something? When every new picture added to the expense?

When you had to be disciplined about it? No more. Shoot away! I snap, getting that satisfying, electronic little swoosh-click that the iPhone makes. I look to see what I’ve got. I swoosh-click again. I look again. I swoosh-click and look and swoosh-click and look.

And then I think: what are you doing?

Are you living this moment, or recording it? Do you need 100 shots, or do you need this experience, right here, right now?

I put the phone away.

It wasn’t easy. Around the next bend was a view more incredible than the last. My fingers itched to pull out the phone. I resisted the siren call of the swoosh-click. I tried instead to let my eyes see, my brain fire. I let the place wash over me—the smell of the mountains; the warmth of the sun, the sound of the shimmering leaves and the murmuring creek. As the Japanese do, I forest-bathed—shinrin-yoku. I breathed, centered, focused. I tried to trust that my senses right now would beat having 100 photos later.

There’s a Toni Morrison poem about this: "At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough."

Where is that point, when the beauty is enough? I'm not sure I know. But, I trust. And I put the phone away.