Romancing the Moon

Last weekend gave rise to a Super Blood Wolf Moon. A very special moon. A moon at its closest point to the earth. A moon full at mid-winter when it is said that wolves would howl into the night from the snow covered land surrounding Native American villages. A moon eclipsed by the earth, kissed with red. As with so many things in life, there are multiple aspects but it is blood that is most important.



The first Blood Moon that I witnessed preceded Halloween of 2004, a spectacle that I shared with my oldest grandson who was just five and half years old at the time. This was our first “guys’ trip.” We could have just as easily called it our Dinosaur Volcano Blood Moon trip.



We traveled from Colorado Springs that weekend, setting our course south (a direction that brings me much comfort). The first leg of our journey saw us cross the Colorado/New Mexico border by way of Raton Pass then turning east in the direction of Texas.



At the border with Texas, there is Clayton Lake State Park. The park has one of the most extensive dinosaur trackways in North America. What better way to start our trip than walking where dinosaurs walked, by witnessing the fossilized footprints of creatures that now only live best in our imaginations.



My grandson ran me ragged over those grounds. We saw every site of interest. The highlight of which was my grandson and I looking out from a foot bridge over a dry shallow river bed the color and texture of moonscape. It was covered with the rounded prints of thick-skinned herbivores and the three toed prints of the long-toothed creatures that pursued them.



From Clayton Lake Park, we headed back west the way we came making for Capulin Volcano State Park. Capulin is an extinct volcano (my level of courage only extends so far!). Visiting something so ancient, something that helped to define the landscape, define the earth with my young grandson at my side grants a particular perspective on past, present, and future. Our trek was not limited to the rim, but we also followed a trail down into the crater. We walked on rocky ground and among stubborn ragged vegetation aware that at one time this hole in the mountain was bare and gaping and spewing ash and lava into the air and over the land.



Exhausted from miles of travel and long hikes, we made our way back into Colorado for fast food and our hotel in Trinidad. We ate our food and watched tv waiting for nightfall and the lunar eclipse. When the time came, we went out into the cold. Scrub oak and small pinon pine trees were dark twisted silhouettes in the night. Above us the moon shone dully in the sky, a celestial eye, unblinking and bloodshot. My grandson pointed up toward the orb and breathlessly uttered, “Look, Bumpa. The BLOOD. RED. MOON.”



As a post script to this trip and to my grandson’s beautiful innocent enthusiasm, I took one of the many photos from the trip and scanned it into my computer. Ineptly, I did a rough cut and paste of a T-Rex image into a picture of my grandson looking at a Clayton State Park sign. When I showed this composite to him, he looked at me wide-eyed and said, “Bumpa! I didn’t even see that when we were there!”



For me, the moon makes time fluid. Starting from the moon, I flow with ink black waters from one memory, one story to the next. And those stories are not only behind me. As-long-as the moon rises in the sky, the headwaters for those stories are not yet reached, and there are memories upon memories to be made.