silver

As soon as I hear the hummingbird’s little motor sound, it’s already at the feeder. This is a hummingbird story, but it’s going to take a while to get there.

Once, we visited friends in Colorado whose family had a small cabin in a remote town way up in the mountains. No electricity, no power, just an old old mining town now mainly referred to as a ghost town.

I was maybe ten years old. My family in one jeep, the other family in their jeep. We were told to leave our seatbelts unbuckled because if your car slips and rolls down the cliff, it’s better to fly out of it than to go down with it. It was exhilarating. My sister and I crouched down in the back seat, eyes wide, hanging onto the roll bars for dear life, the two 4 x 4s climbing steadily up the shelf road, bumping up and down the whole way.

All the most beautiful places include an element of danger in order to get to them. Oh and it’s beautiful up there. The air is thin, crystal clear. The mountains. Oh, those mountains.

This old mining town was booming in the late 1800s, a hotbed of silver mining. By 1917, the mines had shut down their operations and the town was nearly emptied of its residents.

I pause here to acknowledge that this land, burned, forested, and blasted apart in the name of precious metals, the people living on it forcibly removed, is the unceded territory of the Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱, or the Ute people. Yes, there were treaties and yes they were broken, because folks on the make who were hungry for silver or gold are the same in any time, placing their value on shiny things over human beings.

I caught a fish in a stream here. I didn’t expect to. It was a rainbow trout and I used a thin branch threaded through its mouth and out its gill to carry it back to the cabin. I remember how shiny and silvery its scales shone in the sun. I cried a little as I walked. I spoke to it, saying I was sorry. After cleaning the trout, I fried it up in a cast iron pan with butter. It was delicious.

In this cabin’s kitchen, a hummingbird feeder hung outside the window. You could put one of your fingers out onto the red plastic ledge, hold real still, and they would sit on your finger while they drunk up the sugar water. Light as a tiny feather, barely weighing anything, so shiny and silvery.

All this memory. All this beauty. It’s hard to choose just one.