LAST NIGHT

I woke late last night to sound of boulders rolling in rushing water as the melting snowmelt from the top of moutains reached our town.  The Boulder Dance is something I have been lucky enough to experience for many of my 57 years.  High water in early summer has always been an excitement living in the upper end of Clear Creek.  When I was a child my mother, grandmother, brother, sister and I raced the flood of water from a dam break all the way to Idaho Springs.  We beat the water but the wall wiped out every bridge between that town and home.  We stayed there for three cramped, uncomfortable days.  But so very exciting!

When I was in my early twenties I lived right beside one fork of Clear Creek.  It ran through my backyard.  It raged during high water and rolled boulders down crashing into the rock chimney across the torrent that shaded my yard during the summer.  The grinding roar, the dull thud that nothing else could ever replicate, the song of the Boulder Dance still sounds in my memory.  That was the best place, the loudest, the most dangerous.  Every spring my yard filled with water and the little cribbing that held some of the dirt in place trembled and threatened to float away.  I would come outside on the small cement porch and sit with my room mates.  Often the peak of high water comes during a full moon.  We would watch the silvery reflection in the roiling water come closer to our feet.  

In my thirties I lived a little further from the creek and when those boulders rolled the sound was muted like giants walking.  We could feel the ground shake when the Boulder Dance happened at that house.  It was hard to hear it over the sound of the children running madly around.  I did day care then.  

Now I live just up the road from the creek again.  I can hear the Boulder Dance now clearly as I am alone and no one makes any distraction from the Dance.  I find my mind moves in different ways now and it is easy to sink into onomatopoeia, the hypnotism by the sound or sight of something in nature.  The Dance is my meditation.  It is the background music to all the springs of my life.