There Are No Jaguars in Colorado

But I see them anyway

The last text I received before my first solo night in the cabin was about the girl who had just died there.

It was 2018, near Memorial Day, and I was five months into a brave year. Dating remained wildly perplexing and I needed some time away from work, from humans, from responsibility. I’d been to the cabin a dozen times before with and without big groups who often added and subtracted over the course of days, but never alone for an entire trip.

Somehow it was available, and I loaded myself up, told Bob where I would be, and drove west.

I love solo road trips. Silence feels welcome, but when loneliness strikes, I lean on audio books rather than podcasts and listen to a silly story or an autobiography and occasionally both in the same recording. On this trip, I was listening to _Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment_, as it was referenced by an interview I had scoured for work. As I was rounding the last 20 miles, in the last 7 of cell reception, my friend who owns the cabin sent me one last check in text.

“…and if you happen to see someone on the property just to the north, know that their daughter [included her full name] died recently in the river. Send my condolences if you see them.”

So.

Let’s break this down.

1. If you see someone who is not a ghost, offer condolences.
2. If you see someone who is a ghost…

I pulled over and googled, easily finding the long version of the story, which is the terrible power of the internet. She was a young adult, and slipped into the river, witnessed by fellows who attempted to save her. This was seven layers of terrible without my excessive self importance, but excuse me I’m going to stay at the same place with no one to witness or try? And also what if I am clairvoyant and My Gift shows up early in spring near the tail end of my thirties while I’m in a cabin in the woods by myself?

Do I go anyway?

Am I more afraid of slipping and falling?
I’m not normally fatalistic.

Or afraid of being haunted by someone I never knew?
I haven’t had negative experiences with spirits - in fact, I’m often comforted by the omniscience of some of my most dearly passed.

While neither end of the spectrum of possibility felt obvious, they both cast an ominous glow on the cabin.

I did go, of course, and arrived well before sunset. I wandered and unlocked doors and windows, uncovered furniture and sat on the rocks overlooking the river, careful to stay five feet further back than I might normally. It was cool, and I was wrapped in a puffy coat, sitting on both my yoga mat and my sheepskin. The image of  living the dream while intensely, profoundly lost in loneliness.

The appropriate amount of human contact is measured by the narrow edge of a razor, and balancing there is impossible. My life on the Front Range was busy - yoga classes, lunches, and a smattering of awkward first dates. My overstimulation was rocked by the profound isolation of being a few miles from the living, and in the afterglow of the dead. There is a road close enough to hear traffic, so the isolation isn’t absolute, but I don’t find the whir of strange vehicles comforting. No one kayaks this particular section of the river. In the daytime, they portage across the property to avoid nature’s pinball machine of rapids and tight, carved rock caverns as the river runs fast, deep, and truly wild. From my perch, I could see the flat water upstream to my right, and the literal deathtrap to my left.

But the day was over, so no kayakers were on the water, and the sun was completely behind the mountains to the west. There were a few stars as color drained from the world around me, and I tried to stay as long as I could and watch my terrific thoughts bounce around like pinballs downriver. Meditation without a clock or timer or group of other humans passes in a strange way. Time folds in and expands and is impossible to capture. What feels like minutes can be hours, and of course I suppose for some people who are really doing it right, hours can pass like minutes, although this has not been my experience. Eventually the mind lets the roar fade into the background, as it does the song of the river, and some kind of stillness occurs. Some insight or resolution might come as a missing piece slides into a puzzle that has laid dormant in the attic of my mind for a decade.

Often, the complete puzzle looks nothing like what you might have expected it to. It’s a story you hadn’t finished, or a thought that was laying fallow, and then wham. Revelation. Where I lost the umbrella, or the Spanish word for intrepid, or a mic-drop line I should have said on a date a few weeks ago. Snappy comebacks are the music to my meditation.

But this night, it was a single word: jaguar.

(Not the car, although my high school friend Phil’s mom drove one and had a wicked Australian accent and said jagYOUare.)

Spoiler - there are no jaguars in Colorado at 10,000 feet. I didn’t see a giant black cat, or even a tiny black cat, or anything remotely feline. In my earlier wanderings I had looked for footprints, to see who might be around, and saw nothing but evidence of humans and ground squirrels.

Eighteen months earlier, I had been in the jungle in the arms of the sha-wo-man, who spoke in Mayan mythology and a heavy French accent. After wrangling a terrible demon away from my body, mind, and spirit, she called me a “jaguar-seer.” Of course I nodded in agreement - you’re so right! - and later googled what the hell that meant. While the jaguar is an important icon in Mayan cosmology, I couldn’t find anything about seeing such a thing. When I ran into her again a few days later, she explained that I can see the specialness in places and people - jaguars are often seen guarding sacred places. My gift and my curse is seeing the special purpose in humans (and places). It’s a gift when they come to me for guidance, and a curse when it comes to tolerating crappy behavior. I stay far too long in relationships with people and entities that hurt me because I also see the specialness in them.

Oof.

It replayed in my mind at dusk over the river, my capacity to see the sacred in spaces (not that it takes a special talent to see the specialness of any spot above 10,000 feet in Colorado). At night the sun turns into a jaguar and I retreated into the cabin, too tired to cross paths with anything special or sacred. Turns out I wasn’t afraid of my own mortality or a ghost, but the stillness that reveals my potential.

How ‘bout you?

Thanks for reading,
K