Letting go and being grateful

“It’s dry – completely dry,” my hubby said as we drove the dirt road intersecting the basins in Cheyenne Bottoms.
I stared in disbelief at the golden grasses and cattails growing where water once shimmered under the Kansas sky. Even more disturbing, some of the basins had only deeply cracked soil.
I’d been visiting Cheyenne Bottoms since I was a child. My dad and brothers fished while my mom and I watched the waterfowls and shorebirds.
The variety of birds was staggering: Pelicans, whooping cranes, sandhill cranes, white-faced ibises, herons, snow geese, and the list went on with over 356 bird species visiting the area during seasonal migrations.
Now, because of the drought, the wetlands were dry. It was a sobering finale to our Christmas travels as we visited with family and friends in Missouri and Kansas.
In the past, the Bottoms had hosted 750,000 waterfowl and 600,000 shorebirds during their biannual migrations along the Central Flyway.
The Bottoms, which are a natural land-sink of about 64 square miles, form the largest wetland in the contiguous 48 states and were a critical refueling place for migrating birds.
To make matters worse, the salt marshes at the nearby Quivira National Wildlife Refuge were also dry. Although we were too late for the fall migration, many hardy birds spent their lives at the refuge.
All we spotted, however, was a redtailed hawk skimming the grasses as it hunted for an unlucky mouse.
“He has it all to himself,” Ted commented.
With no other humans in sight, we also had it all to ourselves, so I searched my phone’s internet for the reason.
“We are 100 percent dry. There’s no water on the property,” said Jason Wagner, Cheyenne Bottoms’ wildlife area manager.
“This year is kind of the perfect storm,” Wagner added. “Our bird numbers are nothing. Most of them aren’t even stopping because there’s nothing for them to stop for.”
And because there was no other place for them to stop, ornithologists said the birds pushed on to their wintering grounds. Weakened by hunger and fatigue, some didn’t survive.
Since we couldn’t photograph wildlife, we left the refuge, but I had another shock when we crossed the bridge over the Arkansas River.
It, too, was dry, affected not only by drought, but also by long-term culinary and agricultural use.
The river bordered Carey Park in Hutchinson, KS where we used to feed geese and ducks as kids. It was hard to let go of the places that had formed my childhood landscapes and even harder to think about the birds dying.
I often repeat “The Full Abundance Prayer” by Tosha Silver, which says, in part, “Let me give with complete ease and abundance, knowing You are the unlimited source of all.
“...Let everything that needs to go, go. Let everything that needs to come, come.”
I will probably never master that practice, but as we left my homeland, I tried to give the drought, Cheyenne Bottoms, the birds, and the river into God’s hands.
One of our friends had kept us updated on Blanding’s weather, and we’d watched satellite pictures of California’s atmospheric river, but we were still surprised at the snow and rain that had drenched our area while we were gone.
Sandwiched between too little and too much, San Juan County received a good soaking.
I’d optimistically bought us snowshoes for Christmas, so on Saturday we went up to the Blue Mountain Recreational Ranch to try them out.
The snow there was at least a foot deep and thickly layered on the ponderosas. Deep gratitude welled up in me as we crunched across the snow which sparkled in the sunlight like millions of tiny prisms and a beautiful San Juan sky arching overhead.
After a few miles, since we’re novices at snowshoeing, we returned to the Jeep and headed to Montezuma Canyon to see the deer. I reminded myself to be grateful for the red-orange mud flying up from our tires and splattering the Jeep.
Clutching the overhead handle, I was even grateful for the sliding of our tires in the mire, but I was most thankful for my hubby’s driving skills, which kept us out of the ditch.
Once safely in the canyon, we visited a pond full of mallards, buffleheads, and wigeons, but when we drove to another lake where we’d previously photographed beavers, ducks, and geese, it looked as parched as Cheyenne Bottoms with the beaver hut sitting high and dry.
It took all day Sunday to let that go.
Letting go and gratitude seem like polar opposites. In the face of difficulty, in the face of drought and dying birds, both are tough for me, but I’m discovering they’re poles of great power because they empty us out and align us with heaven’s grace.
Circumstances may not change, but we do.
On Monday, when I walked the trails in Westwater, the weather had warmed, some of the snow had melted, and water rushed down the streambed, but when I rounded the loop, what stopped me in my tracks, filling me with wonder, was a rare winter waterfall cascading down the slopes.
As Anne Lamott says, “I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”