Triangle of Light

When I was growing up in Houston in the 1960s, my kin taught me to be leery of snowbirds—folks who lived up north but who descended to our fair climes each winter and so much sunlight. We pitied them, poor weakling snowbirds—emigres, in exodus from a homeland they could not survive.

The epithet was a puzzling paradox to me, for I enjoyed journeying just a few miles west of the suburb I lived in as a child. I’d go out to the flooded rice fields of the Katy Prairie, where in winter a rippling wave of white wings pulsed like those of butterflies, with every inch of prairie occupied by wintering snow geese. Then, I cherished the geese more than the light, for I lived in the light while the geese were visitors. Now that I reside in Montana, the light is but a visitor in winter.

Out on the Katy Prairie, the geeses’ gabbling and honking sounded like applause, like joy, like life. And now I have become one. Craving sun and light in January as one might desire food or water, I am headed for an unpeopled land I hold dear—the approximate triangle formed by an imaginary dashed line between Alpine, Marfa, and Fort Davis. My home of the last 35 years lies in a similarly sized triangle on shaded inland rainforest at the opposite end of the country—the Valley in Montana, where only 150 people live year-round. It’s 97% national forest, and a group I work with—in partnership with Houston’s Jacob and Terese Hershey Foundation—has been advocating for the largest and oldest trees to be protected as a climate refuge. The largest 1% of a forest’s trees can hold