Reg Saner

Prologue
That we live in a mystery has always fascinated me. From the small world of a small child recalled in “My Grandmother’s House” to my grown-up view in “The Cosmos & Me” most of the essays here have something to say about that, if only indirectly. In pondering this often cryptic world, however, you may as well start where you are. And because my days have for years begun at the foot of a Colorado mesa, from its environs many of these pages have arisen, with a few side trips taken farther afield.

My favorite book is one nobody owns, yet everyone reads at least passages from it; a compilation which earlier ages called the Book of Nature, where a starry night’s almost my favorite page. However, this present volume is more earthbound, hardly equal to so much as one line within that most inexhaustible of all books. Because my kind of knowing must be lived before it can be written, this book delights in creatures and things I see throughout the year, and does so untechnically. Scientific rigor is all very well for the happy few, but too much like canned spinach for the rest of us. And since the animal we’d most like to understand is ourselves, it’s more than a pleasant coincidence that the sun’s humbler inventions--such as mule deer, teasel, voles, pasqueflowers, yarrow, sandstone, coyotes, and magpies--reflect facets of our own condition.

Certain key motifs recur not only as a convenience to readers not perusing these pages consecutively, but because they’re second nature to my way of seeing, which is incorrigibly religious, though I may be the only one who thinks so.

The mesa where these recurrent motifs come to mind was deposited by the Cretaceous Sea during that long “ago” when much of the interior West lay underwater. Then, around the time a big asteroid smacked into our planet and wiped out the great reptiles, that inland sea began to dwindle.

Simultaneously--as rock epochs go--an uplift began along what is now Colorado’s Front Range and mountains just west of it. Summits begin to die as they rise, so streams north and south of the mesa started eroding that uplift, thereby carving valleys which partly isolate the mesa to the stand-alone form whose rim sits about 400 feet higher than my house.

Seen from a short distance away, grassy slopes soften its appearance, although those slopes are quite rocky underfoot. Then too, hither and yon about their surface, red boulders lounge in primeval ease rendered picturesque by millennial weathering and splatters of lichen making them look very wise.

Having spent my schoolroom years on a Midwestern prairie while daydreaming out the window and longing for horizons of some relief, I now live at the foot of that boulder-strewn mesa. Thus, in my case it seems especially true that the child is father of the man. What’s more, within walking distance just beyond our mesa, a couple of mountain peaks rise over a mile and a half above sea level.

Throughout such country, great planetary forces stand naked, so questions about how things came to be the way they are arise naturally as gazing. Mountains are time we can see. For that matter, so is the eye that sees them. Countless creeds offer explanations for the scope, complexity and temporal depth of all we belong to, usually doing so with lots of pat answers and no questions whatever. Sadder yet, not long ago-- and even today in certain countries--saying “nobody knows” was punishable by death. Yes, that was then, but we’re still far from any truth equal to the evidence. Meanwhile, orthodoxy’s narcissism offers denial as insight.

Well, my religion finds our world all the more intriguing for being ultimately unknowable by anyone, now or ever. In the very nature of things it is, therefore, a mystery religion. Because that’s where we are.