A Memorial Tribute to Bruce Ross
Bertha Falls
I was hiking with a group of poets up the gently ascending trail to Bertha Falls in Waterton Lakes National Park in late August. All along the dry trail were purple asters. Some members of our group were identifying plants that were new to me, such as buffalo grass and thimblebetty. Once we sampled the ripe and subtly sweet berries, my wife and I took turns handing each other juicy ones. The trail was almost uncomfortably warm. I looked up a dried out stream and noticed a dead lodgepole pine beside the line of stones in the stream bed. We trudged in the warmth and the dust:
sunlit trail
a spider drags along
its shadow
At an overlook the aspen leaves were already yellowing. In the distance across Upper Wateron Lake was a mountain range dominated by Sofa Mountain and Vimy Peak. Apparently, in order to climb the latter one had to canoe to its base, as one of our company had on several occasions. The only snow remaining on these mountains were small patches collected in a shaded cirque. I heard some rustling as we all noticed a young mule deer browsing in the shrubs around the overlook. I walked up to it, and it stared at my outstretched fingers inches from its face, not sure. At its hesitancy, I backed away and joined the others back on the trail.
We finally reached the falls whose cascading water was shaded by the dense stands of trees at its top. I scrambled down a steep bank to sit with others on the huge boulders beneath the falls. Every so often a spray from the falls splashed up and was filled with sparkling sunlight. I contemplated the falls for some time and then climbed up to a little bridge to contemplate it some more from a different perspective:
Bertha Falls...
a sweat bee hovers almost
without flinching
We had intended to shsare our poetic impressions of our hike, and some of us were already putting their thoughts together on paper as they sat on sunny boulders and stone ledges fuerther down from the falls. I found that a mountain chipmunk was able to cross some creek stones more deftly than me. I picked out a ledge to sit on and watched a butterfly walk along a crack in one of the boulders. I gave the chipmunk some of my cashews, studied the play of sunlight on moving water, an worked on my haiku:
in unison
the fritillary butterfly
and its shadow