You would think that as many times as I’ve hiked @SpruceMountain, I’d have run out of new stuff to see – but no. Today I found a gravesite I hadn’t noticed before, near the end of a trail I’d never been on before. Go figure.
Spruce Mountain sits south of Larkspur on a parcel of Douglas County Open Space that runs from near I-25 on the east all the way to CR-105, the 2-lane road from Sedalia to Palmer Lake, on the west. Usually I like to hike straight up to the top to take in the vista @WindyPoint. But today I took the Eagle Pass Trail along the bottom of the butte all the way west to CR-105. There I found an unexpected treasure. But first, a word on terminology… just in case the term “horse hockey” from a few days ago had you confused.
Now that we’ve cleared that up, it’s on to the gravesite on Eagle Ridge.
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When I got to the trail head early there was only one other car. There were 20 in the lot by the time I got back two and a half hours later. I did not see a single living soul while hiking save for one young woman wearing a black bonnet and a long black skirt. I am told that – since they don’t wear wedding rings – this color configuration helps identify unmarried Amish women (white bonnets only come after marriage). While I can’t vouch for any of that anthropological detail, I did notice that she wore white Nikes adorned with a fluorescent green Swoosh. This makes me pretty sure she was NOT a time-traveling emigrant from the 1850s, since Nike didn’t introduce fluorescent green Swooshes until well after the Civil War. But in any event….
The only other evidence of non-gravesite humanity during my hike today was the sonic boom of practicing USAFA Thunderbirds overhead. Low cloud cover obscured them at first – like redwing blackbirds, you often hear them before you see them – but the sound is unmistakable. On a second pass, they were maybe only 500′ off the ground, well below the bottoms of incoming cumulus clouds threatening rain; and – as always – quite impressive.
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You would think by now I’d be done with philosophy, but no. Not that it has anything to do with today’s hike other than the fact that I realized while walking what it is about Plato and Descartes that puts me off my feed. It’s that they’re both Universalists. While I – at least in my old age – have become more of a particularist. Meaning, I’m more interested in individual trees than in forests. In details rather than in overarching schemes-of-things. And I guess maybe that’s what makes me a fan of Aristotle.
The thing about Aristotle, though, is that he’s not nearly as quotable as the other guys. No “Cogito Ergo Sum.” No flickering shadowy images from a campfire on a cave wall. All Aristotle’s got is just one damn thing after another: Fourteen kinds of this, and thirty-five kinds of that. About the best you can glean from Aristotelian philosophy is his taxonomy of causation. To wit…
There’s the material cause, meaning the physical properties of a thing. Then there’s the formal cause, which is its structural makeup, kind of like a blueprint. There’s the efficient cause, which is what we usually mean when we say that event “A” caused event “B” to happen – you know, like two billiard balls hitting each other and causing one of them to fall into a corner pocket. And then there’s the final cause, which isn’t really what we usually mean when we say “cause” at all: It’s the purpose or end-point of a thing or process. And it’s something that’s often seen only in retrospect.
Don’t get me wrong: Aristotle’s useful, but he’s no story-teller. And what’s so seductive about Universalists is that they’ve often got a narrative that sounds great. But in the end, where the rubber meets the road, you’re more-often-than-not left with a big load of horse hockey. Not to put too fine a point on it.
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Rest easy, gentle readers: I’m now done with philosophizing. But not, however, done with hiking. I mean, c’mon: You just never know when you’ll discover that next new gravesite. Or run across an Amish woman wearing Nikes. Or get buzzed by the Thunderbirds. The world is a great big wide and wonderful place, full of fourteen different kinds of mystery. And the final cause? You would think maybe we might be able to guess it in advance. But my suspicion is that we’ll have to make it all the way to the end of the trail to find out what it’s actually gonna be.