The viewership of this blog is declining like the population of most towns in Kansas. I don't know what to do about it, and neither do most of the towns in Kansas. Decline can be a way of life. What am I talking about? Decline is a way of life, even for folks in the big booming city. Every breath we take burns our lungs out. After twenty-five, life in this world is simply a coming to terms with the process of our own physical demise. I'm not sure it should be a sad event though. There is something Romantic about rubble. Perhaps it's not the rubble itself, but the war against it--the will to survive against all odds.
Whatever it is, I have always loved towns on the brink of extinction. My mother is from one such town on a bay fingered off Lake Ontario. I visited there once as a child. At one time there had been a cement plant. That is why the town was there. It was a company town. When I was there, the town was all but gone. I stayed in my aunt's house--one of the very few remaining--and watched big mining trucks haul away the last of the cement plant away, day after day. A chalky dust would rise as the giant trucks went by. The town was gone. Where my mom's childhood home had been, there were only concrete steps. She tells a sad story about how after they moved and the house was torn down, the dog would go over and sit on those same steps. He could not move on.
People do, though--move on. Perhaps all too easily. Place doesn't seem to tug on everyone's heart. That I don't get. Every place I have lived pulls me back. I can never fully be in the now because I am always tethered to my past. I even long for days gone by that I rationally know were not that good. There is a literary term for that, ubi sunt, which means, "Where are those who were before us?" It's somewhat like nostalgia, but not quite. Nostalgia involves a willing ignorance of reality. Nostalgia is looking back with a glow at pre-1960s America without coming to terms with the lynchings. Ubi suntis walking through southern woods on a warm summer night and seeing black bodies hanging from the trees now, ghosts of the past mingled with the present. Ubi sunt is an all encompassing yearning to understand decay. Nostalgia is a willingness to accept a distorted past in order to escape the reality of today. I don't suffer too much from nostalgia, but I live ubi sunt.
As we made our way through the scattered towns of eastern Colorado and on into Kansas, I was aglow with depression, reveling in loss. Here was an America gone.
Aesthetically, perhaps the most notable was Manzanola, Colorado. I stopped to take a picture of what I assumed must have been an old school or factory. I had failed to record the name of the town, and just now spent 45 minutes using Google Maps to go through every town along Highway 50 between Pueblo, Colorado and Garden City, Kansas, looking for the right one. I finally found it, after spending quite a bit of time "walking" down Goff Ave in Granada, Colorado with the little man on the map you drag over and plop on in the middle of the highway for a street view. Then I did the same, "walking" down Ave A in Syracuse, Kansas. Both were amazing, but neither was the right town.
I had gone too far. Backing up, I finally found it: Manzanola, Colorado. And the building that so amazed me was the old State Armory, pictured below. I was so moved, I dare say that if you haven't driven through Manzanola, Colorado you haven't fully lived. Give up the drugs, put away the gun, get out of your easy chair--if today sucks, well, tomorrow you might find yourself walking down First Street in Manzanola, Colorado. With a population of only 435 (2010 census), there won't be much to do, but who cares? The shadows of the big elm trees against the brick facade of the armory are all one really needs to live for. It's a good thing I don't live across the street:
"Honey, did you take out the trash yet?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Damn it, leave me alone."
"What?"
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. It's just that I'm looking out the window to see if the shadow moved on the armory."
"You were doing that 10 minutes ago, an hour ago, this morning, yesterday, need I go on?"
"And, your point is?"
Old State Armory, Manzanola, Colorado
I could look at shadows on the brick facade of the old State Armory
in Manzanola, Colorado for hours, months, or even years.
It's clearly best for me that Manzanola, Colorado remain a fond memory from a road trip and that it not become my retirement destination. No use ruining what will then be 35 + years of marriage just so I can enjoy shadow and sunlight on the most amazing brick facade I've ever encountered.
Composition Dates: November 26, 2018 - December 1, 2018
I had the urge to jump ahead in this narrative and get Marci and me out on to the plains. I had the goal to finish this account by Christmas. It is taking so much longer than anticipated. I rationalized that a well-written piece includes editing and compacting. I said to myself, "I don't have to include the whole journey." So, I skipped ahead and had us out on the Great Plains. Yet doing so would cut out the Royal Gorge pictured below, which even in such an inept photograph, is clearly not a trifling matter. And while it was not one of my favorite parts of the trip, it would be terribly dishonest to record a trip where I did in fact behold such a brilliantly delicate structure of steel spanning that gorgeous gash in the earth and pretend the experience did not occur simply because I was worried about meeting a self-imposed deadline and was less moved by the sight than almost any small town I encountered along the way. So, I will slow down here and enter the third day of our eleven day excursion properly.
Royal Gorge Bridge, Colorado
It was a gray day. We woke up late. We decided to pack up quickly and stop somewhere along the road for breakfast. It looked like it could possibly rain, and we wanted to get the tent down and in the car before it got wet. Nothing is worse than packing up a wet tent--well, except maybe unpacking a wet tent weeks after it was put away improperly. Mold and mildew sliding off a slick surface and into the hand is not a soothing sensation.
It did sprinkle a bit while we were working, but we got camp down and everything put into the car pretty much dry. Then we headed out into the gray day, continuing to wind along the Arkansas River, enjoying the rubble-stone remnants of the Rockies.
If we were headed west, "remnants" would be precisely the wrong word. No way were these ridges small little buttes rising out of the plains. Anywhere else, we were still high in God's country. However, having descended from Monarch Pass the day before, which tops out at 11,312 feet (the actual highway itself), it seemed by now, we had dropped very much down stream. The high stuff was back behind us, viewed occasionally out the rear-view window.
In front of us was the curve of the river and the curve of the road tucked in tight between boulder-chunk granite slopes. Again, my pictures don't do it justice, but for what it's worth, here is a glimpse of it:
What is clear even in the dull photograph above is the immensity of stone. In so many places on the globe it is easy to forget we live on a rock that is molten deep down below. We get thinking earth is but turf: rolls of green, soft soil, gentle undulations, trees down in the dimples and white washed farm houses on grassy knolls. That is all an illusion. We live on a flaming marshmallow that spits and sputters and crusts over hard as the black cheese clinging to the bottom of your oven, so to speak. Rock rules-- bubbled, layered, twisted, tormented. We just don't see most of it. Except out West. The glorious West. Geology thrown up in your face. Deal with it. You want to go this way, don't even think about it. Not unless you want to drop down a 1,000 foot cliff to the river only to climb back up on the other side. Roads here don't follow the compass. They follow rivers, and where that becomes impossible, they are blasted up the sides of mountains until some sort of semblance of level ground can be found, and often that is not found without a myriad of tunnels and bridges. Geology is everywhere here. Biology clings in crags and crevices in bold stone. Time rules; life chisels its way in where it can. The west is the primeval planet frozen and then thrust up for all to see.
At some point we left the river, climbed up on a bit of flat ground, and headed back down slope, but not without passing a sign that said,"Royal Gorge Bridge". I drove on past. I was then, as I am now, anxious to get us out onto the plains. We still had a long ways to go to get to Texas, the theme of the whole excursion. Even more pressing, we still had a long ways to go to get to Garden City, Kansas. So, I drove on. But "Royal Gorge" just kept beeping in my mind like a time bomb ticking, a flashing warning: "Hey stupid, Royal Gorge probably does not indicate some small gentle-sloped side canyon." So, reluctantly, I found a spot and turned around and headed back.
CoRd 3A wound us all over the place--first straight past Canon City KOA and then up and around juniper and pinion covered hills. It was really quite pretty other than the frequent Route 66-type tourist trap signs that warned that dingbat knickknack America was around some corner. And it was. Or appeared to be. Perhaps it was just the ruins. Maybe things were just closed for the season, but that didn't seem to be the case. It seems like perhaps the Royal Gorge is no longer the draw it once was. On the right was an immense red atrocity with a gate outside a great expanse of cracked pavement that said, "Come See Royal Gorge Bridge and Train". However, there wasn't a single car around. It looked like a prop for a movie set. I liked that. Nothing is more beautiful than a tourist trap in demise. A concrete purple dinosaur is an ugly thing when new and freshly painted, but give it a few years under the hot Arizona sun to fade it out, and wait for the cement in the long Brontosaurus neck to crack and the head to fall off, a spine of rusted rebar jutting out into the blatant blue sky, and you've got something. This wasn't quite that cool, but it was certainly big and red and bold enough to catch your attention and diminish any awareness of the handiwork of the Almighty surrounding you. Man at his imbecilic best.
We continued winding our way up through the juniper and pinion blobbed landscape, eventually passing a beautiful little picnic area. Then we went through a gate onto private land and arrived at a monumental work of American Industrial Tourism rising out of the wilderness: The Royal Gorge Bride Park complex, everything you could possibly need to take away from the majesty of nature at your finger tips. A little bit of Disneyland on a cliff. The bridge itself, built in 1929 as a tourist attraction, is actually quite beautiful, but all the tourist infrastructure that surround it, such as the visitor center and trams, clutter up any meaningful dialog between architecture and landscape. At 955 feet above the river below, it was the highest bridge in the world from 1929 to 2001 (Wikipedia). However, knowing that it was never needed, that it never impacted the life of some villager on the other side who used to have to climb 955 feet down to the river on a rope ladder, swim across the raging Arkansas River, and then climb up 955 feet on a twin rope ladder on the other side with a basket of goods on his head to take to market before the bridge was built sucks all meaning out of it. No route was shortened, no lives improved. The only thing the bridge has accomplished over the years is to make some people lose their lunch and suck money out of the pockets of thousands, if not millions of tourists.
Still, if you are attracted to such folly, here is an appetizer:
Such fun! Not. I wanted to puke, but not because of the height. However, Marci and I did not experience that Royal Gorge both because we were on a budget and because such experiences really aren't our thing. So, instead we drove back to the small publicly-funded picnic area on public land. The view wasn't as spectacular, but it was real. There we had a breakfast of yogurt and fruit and looked over the rolling Juniper covered foothills of the Rockies. There was only one other family. It was quiet, insignificant and wonderful. It reminds me of one of my favorite Alice Walker poems, "I Said to Poetry," where she argues with poetry about her need to be engaged with the practice of writing, and poetry answers back:
Poetry said: "You remember
the desert, and how glad you were
that you have an eye
to see it with? You remember
that, if ever so slightly?"
I said: "I didn't hear that.
Besides, it's five o'clock in the a.m.
I'm not getting up
in the dark
to talk to you."
Poetry said: "But think about the time
you saw the moon
over that small canyon
that you liked much better
than the grand one--and how surprised you were
that the moonlight was green
and you still had
one good eye
to see it with.
Think of that!"
The problem with grand views is that they attract grand numbers of people, and most of those throngs of people simply are not attracted to the views the same way I am. They are attracted there for the human experience--to socialize, to go "Ah" and "Wow!," to Snap Chat and Facebook it, to show off their adventure like a new car, a cool blender, or Tupperware bowl. It's not bad, and they should be allowed to do that. They have as much right to their life as I have to mine. We just seek different forms of connection--and if God is at the center of it all--then all are attempts to connect with that glorious core of creation. It's that our means are different.
Subtlety and silence, a prolonged absorbed gaze into a still moment watching a jack rabbit scurry from sagebrush to sagebrush on a frosty morning is how I meet my creator.
And so I can leave Royal Gorge to the tourists and sit at a quiet roadside picnic area with my eternal companion instead and be quite content.
Generally, like Alice Walker, I like the small canyon much better, if only because most of the world never even notices that it's there, and so I can have it to myself to share with one or two of the significant people in my life that I might bring along.
Works Cited
Walker, Alice. Horses Make a Landscape Look More
Beautiful. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
Wikipedia. Royal Gorge Bridge. 13 November
2018. Document. 1 December 2018. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Gorge_Bridge>.
Our campsite at Vallie Bridge Campground along the Arkansas River, Colorado
It is so dang difficult to get into a moment, stay with it, and write it as it was. The now is always nagging. Other moments bubble up from the ground water and muck things up--or enrich the brew, depending on how you look at it. For instance, I just had an image flash into my mind of staying home from school and watching "Days of Our Lives" with my mother. Well, not so much watching it as listening to it. I was probably playing with my green Matchbox Javelin. I loved that car. One of my strongest early memories is of playing with that car on the kitchen counter in our apartment in Salt Lake City. It was sometime around Christmas. My mother's green radio was on. "Joy to the World" by Three Dog Night was playing. It was at night and most of the house lights were off. A glow came from the orange light on the radio. In my imagination, I was driving up to some roadhouse in my Javelin. I would have not had those words, I'm sure. There is no way at that age I'd know what a roadhouse was. I was only five. Yet, there I was driving up to this roadhouse with my gal to listen this great new band. How? There was nothing in my experience, other than perhaps TV, to plant such a fantasy in my imagination. We didn't live anywhere near a bar, and we were Mormon. A roadhouse just would not have been part of my consciousness. I wasn't even really interested in girls when I was five. That didn't happen until I was nine. The only thing I can account for this childhood pretend scenario is that we each must come to earth with much of our personality in place. I must have lived at least some of my premortal life thinking, "Hot damn. There will be live music. All one has to do is pull up to the right place, find the right sound, and melt away into the night."
The memory of listening to the Days of Our Lives though is later, and probably not a single event, but many compacted days of missing school. Who knows how many millions of people share that same single memory, but with different mothers, different settings, different smells. A single sentence and simple music uniting people with divergent lives into a unified moment of nostalgia.
That perhaps is the ultimate power of words. The right image taps into an aquifer of shared experience. I'm not sure a writer can know what will do that before hand. He just does his best to jump into the flow, and get down now what is occurring in his memory, his imagination, and his life.
Yet because of the constant flow of time, nothing in writing happens in real time. Any impression of immediacy is an illusion. Any life captured in the narrative is long gone, time constantly rushing forward. And perhaps that is its real value--fossilized life. Days turned to stone to be analyzed forever by subsequent generations.
Viewed this way, it's not so much what you write--just that you write at all, and get it down as real as possible, given that we are all living on a bullet train aimed at some milky white void called tomorrow.
Still, it is good for a work of writing to have some sort of structure. This narrative is about a round-trip journey to Texas. In that narrative, we are now in Colorado, headed down the east side of the Continental Divide towards the Arkansas, River.
The night before Marci and I froze in a tent in Green River, Utah, underestimating the power of the desert to drive down night time temperatures even after a hot day.
Because I was sleep deprived, as beautiful as the drive was, for me it was losing clarity. So now, unlike my memory of my pretend drive in a green Javelin to the Radio Bar on the kitchen counter, the route along the Arkansas River has all but evaporated. I could probably pull up images off Google and jog shards of the broken stained-glass mural out into the light and get down a few good images, but I think I will just move on.
After Monarch Pass, to move on was clearly all I wanted then. Once again, I found myself in the Rockies too burned out to enjoy God's country. Sometimes the road is the road trip's worst enemy on clarity. I think I remember several towns along the river. Some were cedar and pine clad Yuppie ski-type get-aways. Others were white trash trailer trailings along the river, over-stuffed chairs sitting on plywood porches, the stuffing pulled out by deviant dogs foaming at the mouth, the usual rusted bed springs, and a washer or dryer off to the side, next to a brand-new four-wheel drive Toyota Tacoma.
Whether these places really exist or not, I'll leave up to you to research. I'm ready to get to Texas, or as close to it as I can, given the enormous distance we still have to cover.
But for now I'll stop you at our campsite.
At about 4:00 in the afternoon, I felt I could drive no further. I was incredibly tired. With each corner, it became more difficult to stay on the road. It was incredibly soon to stop for the night, but we had the luxury of no longer needing to get to Garden City, Kansas in the same day. I don't know what I would have done if that still was our destination. Marci and I maybe got four hours of sleep the night before, if we were lucky. It may have been more like two or three. It is hard to calculate when you sleep ten to twenty minutes at a time, waking up frozen, staring into the blackness, thinking When will it ever get light?
We had stopped to look at a couple campgrounds, but they were full, or too full for our liking anyway. Plus, we wanted to get as low down as possible so that we wouldn't have another cold, sleepless night.
We finally found a place, Vallie Bridge Campground. It was small, only for tents, which was perfect, right along the banks of the Arkansas River. It is a walk in campground, so perhaps not too fun to set up if you are the type to bring the fold-out kitchen, your own grill and propane meat smoker, an entire living room of lounge chairs, etc. But there is a small unloading area not too far from the sites, and as we packed fairly light as there is only so much you can fit into a Toyota Camry, it worked great. And the lack of pavement or other infrastructure near the campsites left it feeling wild. There was only one other family camping while we were there, and so that was nice. That was not true up river, and so in my mind this the ideal campsite.
It was lovely. We set up the tent, placed out our chairs, and made Frito-pie for dinner, which is, Frito corn chips topped with canned chili, shredded cheese, diced onions and sour cream. It was easy to make on our single burner propane stove, and it was warm and delicious.
After supper, we cleaned up after dinner, sat in our chairs and read for a while, walked down to the restroom, and then went to bed--this time with a foam for the cots below us and a sleeping bag on top. We slept long and deep, only waking once to get up and go to the bathroom.
At the time, getting up to use the restroom while camping seems such a drag. It's cold outside, you can never find the flashlight in the dark even though you put it in just the right place. The same is true for you socks, shoes and coat. But, after the tangle with the bag, your partner, your clothes, and finally the tent zipper, you finally exit out into a shocking cold and brilliant star-studded night. It is at that moment you realize just for a second just how truly great it is to be alive.
We walked up the gravel road. If I remember right, there was just a little moonlight. There was the hush, the only sounds being the river and our feet on the earth below us. There were some stairs going up to the camp entrance made of stone that I admired. No mortar--just flat rock placed in the hillside, a few wildflowers that seemed intentionally seeded to grow around them. Simple, natural, amazing.
Of our time at Vallie Bridge Campground, my most vivid memory is of our trip to the toilet. It is almost always like that. The joy of camping is being stripped of modern conveniences and being taken back to an elemental state. Something must surely be lost in the experience in a $100,000 RV, generator humming, heater blowing warm air, toilet just down the hall, light above your head.
We, on the other hand, peed like Adam and Eve.
Alright, that's not quite true. That sentence was just too good not to use. There was a light in the latrine and a toilet seat. But, what was most essential to the experience was the necessity to get out under the night. There was a short time in my life when I'd get up in the winter at 5:00 a.m. and walk out into the pre-dawn when it was something like twelve below zero for a half hour or so, and then I'd come back in and write. It felt good, it felt right.
And so did this. We constantly seek warmth and comfort, and yet those are the same things that often insulate us from truly experiencing life. It's good to give them up once in a while to have moments in the mind frozen brilliantly crisp and clear.
Going east on Highway 50, the ascent over the Rockies is a long drawn out affair. From the small unincorporated community of Cimarron, which is 6,896 feet above sea level, we casually ambled up the slow incline of a slightly slanted plateau towards Blue Mesa Reservoir on the Gunnison River. Now, you might be thinking 6,986 feet above sea level is quite high and could give one a sense of vertigo, and you'd be right if you were in the Olympic Mountains of Washington jutting out into the ocean on a peninsula. But, the West, overall, is a high place. The average elevation of Colorado is 6,800 feet above sea level, and that's including the plains on the far eastern side that touch flat places like Nebraska and Oklahoma. The average elevation of Utah, where we started, isn't that much lower, being 6,100 feet above sea level. The elevation of Grand Junction is 4,583 feet above sea level, so, we'd only climbed 2,217 in 79 miles. That is mild by Western standards. Out here, it's not uncommon to make that ascent on a winding mountain road in 10 miles.
If I was anticipating vertigo, up to this point, I would have been sorely disappointed, but I wasn't. Sure, I was looking forward to it. I knew whatever route you take, there is no route over the Colorado Rockies that doesn't involve getting mind-blowing high. Altitude here is just a way of life. But I come from plateau country. I know just how drawn-out an ascent can be. Experiencing altitude is about more than feeling vertigo. It's a sense of a thin atmosphere and the pure, hard light that comes with it. It is about that narrow range between hot and cold that also comes with elevation. Up here, 66 degrees can have a bite to it, and yet 68 can be almost unbearably warm, depending on the angle of the sun. People can say what they want about John Denver, but he got it right, when he sang "You can talk to God and listen to his casual reply" when voicing his wonder of the Rockies. There is something about the thin atmosphere and accompanying hard light that makes one fragile enough to open up to something greater than the I. Up here, even the air you breath renders you insignificant. That in turn allows you to open to the world around you and see the creator everywhere. For whatever reason, stifling heavy heat and damn lowland mosquitoes just don't have the same effect.
Eventually, we did really start to climb. It was somewhere beyond Gunnison. I liked Gunnison. It was far less touristy than most Colorado mountain towns are these days. I'm not sure why I didn't take any pictures. I think our lack of sleep the night before was beginning to take its toll. I know we stopped for gas and bought drinks and snacks. I should have at least snapped a photo from the pump. I grew up hearing about Gunnison. My stepfather taught school there early in his adult life and loved to tell stories about how cold it was.
According to Wikipedia, "Gunnison is located at the bottom of several valleys... [and] cold air in all the valleys settles into Gunnison at night, making it one of the coldest places in winter in the United States" (Wikipedia). Also, according to the site, the average low in January is -8 degrees Fahrenheit, and the record low is -60 degrees. Even in the summer, it's cool. The average high in July is 82 (Wikipedia). In short, Gunnison is a very cold place. Its motto is "base camp to the Rockies" and it had that feel--a place real mountaineers would stop before making their ascents rather than a holiday destination for Texans wanting to go putput golfing (that's miniature golfing for all you non-Texans) and ride bumper cars in the cool mountain air high above the chiggers. In short, it is not Estes Park. I left pleased.
Leaving Gunnison, we followed a narrow river valley of hay fields. Then we started to climb towards Monarch Pass. It's a steep winding road and mountains are numerous and pine-covered. It teases you. You know there are high bald, wind blown peaks somewhere, but you can't see them. Just ridge after ridge of damn pine-covered slopes. Anywhere else, you'd be thrilled. But not here. Here, it's, "Where are the real mountains? These are nothing but hills."
Still, it was wild and remote. Canyons were significantly deep. Rocks jutted out now and then. We even stopped to take in a tiny bit of vertigo. There wasn't a hawk, but I hear one in my mind because that's what you're suppose to do in such places. The mind just fills in what ought to be present based on past experience.
View from Highway 50, winding up towards Monarch Pass
Eventually we peaked on the Continental Divide at Monarch Pass, which is 11, 312 feet above sea level. That's about as high as you can go in a car on a U.S. designated highway. It's the highest point on Highway 50, which stretches across the country for over 3,000 miles from West Sacramento, California to Ocean City, Maryland. You'd think we'd stop for such a grand occasion, at least get out and snap a couple of selfies together by the brown forest service sign that says Monarch Pass, Elevation 11,312 feet, Continental Divide, and points to the Atlantic (left) and Pacific (right). But we did not. I only know of such sign from looking at Wikipedia. There were a lot of cars, and some days, to put it bluntly, I don't much like people. So we drove on, hoping to find a spot that didn't scream, "Tourists! Stop now for breath-taking view."
And we found one. Down slope. Over the pinnacle of the Rockies, rooftop of the lower 48. It wasn't as Snap Chat worthy. Not notable on Find My Friends. But, it was superbly beautiful. Across the highway, golden aspen climbed up a mountain slope. I hadn't been prepared for that. At home, fall had just begun. There were a few golden aspens along the tops of our mountains, but that was it. Everything else was just a dull, dark gray-green, the trees too tired from the long hot summer to either live or go to sleep. I didn't expect much of a fall, and now, writing this, I can say we didn't get one. Leaves just turned brown and fell off. Life in the West after climate change.
But, I guess at the roof top of the the continent even on a drought year there was enough moisture to produce color. The golden slopes were spectacular. I was in heaven. And only one other car pulled out for the view. There simply was no sign: Stop Ye the Dead in the Head & Soul, and Live!
Fall colors taken from the east side of Monarch Pass
Travel Date: September 8, 2019.
Composition Date: November 10, 2018
As I sat down to write this post, the refrain from an Abba song, "Slipping Through My Fingers", rang through my mind:
Slipping through my fingers all the time I try to capture every minute The feeling in it Slipping through my fingers all the time.
This was supposed to be a quick and dirty blog--just a place to get down my impressions of Marci's and my 21st Anniversary trip before they were lost somewhere in the deep dripping caverns of my mind. Then I was to move on and get back to writing my novel.
Time. Damn time. Working your way through it is like climbing up a rock slide. No matter what moment you try to capture, it's a downhill slide. That jewel anchored above you that you want to touch again stays there, diminishing, as you slip away towards some unknown future. You try to grab each and every detail, but you can't. The gravity of the moment pulls you away.
Writing is a deplorable hobby. It consumes great quantities of time, and you never get things down the way you want to. Incomplete projects stack up on paper, in the cloud, and in the deep wells of your mind, constantly being buried by the nagging of now.
Now I have to stop writing. I have a job. When I come back home, my mind will no longer be in this place. Whatever thought was to come next will be gone.
. . . . .
At some point a travel blog should be about the places traveled to. That makes sense. That's how it should be. The problem is, how do you capture a moment the way it was after it has already slipped away and all you've got is a bunch of cruddy flat photographs?
Montrose, Colorado, September 8, 2018
Take Montrose, Colorado for instance. It looked and felt nothing like the flat, light-less photograph above. As we pulled off and parked across the street from the building pictured and opened the car doors, a perfect September morning greeted us: warm, sunny, but just a tad cool in the shade. It was the type of day you really notice the difference between light and shadow. Stand in the sun too long and you want to find some shade. Stand in the shade too long and you want to find some sun. It was that exciting time between seasons when the air is alive with change.
There was that certain slant of autumn light so that you could see that temperature even before you could feel it. So, when we passed a farmer's market on a side street, seeing the light, I said let's pull over, walk around, stretch our legs, maybe buy some crisp apples or some exotic cheese. It's fall. Let's live!
Do you see any of that in the photograph above? Neither do I.
I don't know if we really lived or not, but we got some goat cheese and lemon cucumbers. I payed more than I wanted to, but standing in the sunlit plaza where the farmer's market was, made it worth it.
. . . . .
From Montrose we followed 50, the highway my brother Lloyd has dedicated much of his life to painting, and yet I remember very little of Marci's and my journey across this section. I probably wouldn't remember any of it if I didn't take pictures. So, I'm glad I stopped and snapped the iPhone once in a while or the day would be lost forever.
Other than what I have digitally, all I really remember is that the climb into the mountains was slow and indirect. Through my mind's eye, I see the road winding up through gamble-oak and sage-covered rolls, perhaps some cottonwood or aspen down in the green hollow where a small creek meanders. But I don't know if I really saw this, or if I am just filling in the blank canvas with an appropriate Colorado scene.
At some point we started to drop down the other side of a pass through a somewhat narrower canyon. At some point enough time had passed that we were hungry, and we found this amazing little picnic area along a river, which after consulting Marci and Google Maps, I determined was the Cimarron River.
Looking at it from above, the picnic area is just a doughnut of pavement oozing out one side of the line of asphalt that is Highway 50. There is a little trail going to an outhouse, and that is it. From the air, it is clear the man made river of black top is actually wider than the natural river.
Yet, down close, it's a different wold. Sunlight filtering down through big, sprawling cottonwood and fine fingered willow along the river gave the world a glistening as if it were draped in spiderweb.
We unpacked the trunk, carried the cooler over to the picnic table, and Marci started to make the sandwiches. She made every lunch along the way, which was nice. I often cook, so it's not like that is her assigned chore. Perhaps it was an unspoken trade-off as I did all the driving. I'm not sure, but lunch was definitely better because of it. There is simply no one who can make a sandwich like Marci. I'm not quite sure what she does, but her sandwiches are always incredible. These were simply egg salad sandwiches, but oh my, they were good.
East Cimarron Picnic Area
While she made lunch, I walked down the path to the river. For the west, it was a significant river, almost as wide as a two-lane highway. A blue light skimmed along the surface of clear water, the boulders and pebbles clearly visible below. There was the gurgling sound of water churning over and around boulders. I don't know if I saw dragon flies or not, but my mind is placing them there as I've known so many similar rivers throughout my life, and they usually come with dragon flies.
Perhaps, other than my own life, that is the greatest gift my father gave me: summer weekends along lakes and rivers. They stack up thick and grand in my mind: the water glistening; heat through Ponderosa pine--that distinctive rich, acidic smell; dragon flies hovering along backwaters of the shore, mating, their brilliant blue bodies absolutely bedazzled with light.
These images bubble up in me at the most inopportune times. I'll be headed to work and the light will be just right and I'll think, Why don't I just keep going? The Sierra Nevada is out there somewhere. Sure, I'll have to do some heavy explaining, but it would be so worth it. Thankfully, I'm a coward and so I still have my job, but isn't it a great gift to give someone?--images in the very ground water of their being. Perhaps it is those camping trips that made me a writer. I am always searching for my way back to that moment to where the self disappears and a dragon fly darting down to the river is all there is.
Cimarron River from East Cimarron Picnic Area
I had a taste of that translucency standing for a moment along the Cimarron River. I didn't try to push it. You can't. As soon as the conscious mind arrives, it's over. Besides Marci had lunch ready. So, I just stopped, entered oneness for a second, and moved on to my same old stupid isolated self, happy that for just a moment I had penetrated life.
I left Grand Junction, Colorado feeling enlightened. I bet few people ever say that. That's like saying Odessa, Texas is a world-class travel destination. Yet, I did feel different, and because of it, Grand Junction will never be the same. I actually want to go back and spend an entire day walking along the railroad tracks.
I'm not sure how Marci experienced Grand Junction, but as we left, she had her book open and seemed content. A road trip for me is simply an excuse to crank up the music and let my mind wander between the blur out the side window and the distant horizon. (Don't worry, I do look out the windshield now and then, and keep my eyes glued to the road when it either offers the best view or a large truck is coming towards me). Marci too navigates a world between here and a distant horizon, but instead of the view being the one outside her window, it is the one inside her book. For long stretches of time, we say little to each other on these long drives, and yet we feel incredibly close to one another. I love the scene from the movie Notting Hill that captures that quiet, separate, unified closeness beautifully:
To an outside viewer, we may seem lost in our own worlds, but we're not. There is a connection greater than words, and as the words come, they come like personal thoughts, naturally arriving from something I've seen out the window or something that rises out of the pages of Marci's book. I will draw her attention to something on the horizon, she will read a paragraph or two, and for a while our galaxies will commingle as we pass through each other, and then slowly we slide on through to our own individual thoughts again as we silently revolve around each other at a distance far enough for us to experience our own individuality but close enough that we always feel the gravitational pull of the other. Perhaps that is why the 21 years of our marriage has been so easy, yet so necessary. All we need to do is be near each other. Nature takes care of everything else. We do this nightly by something as simple as watching TV. Why it works, I'm not sure, but it does.
. . . . .
I don't remember what song was playing or exactly what was out the window, but I think we were ten minutes out of Grand Junction when the call came. I remember turning down the music. I could tell by Marci's responses that something wasn't good.
"Oh, alright. I understand. No, we wouldn't want that."
Damn, I thought, not one day into our trip, and there goes our plans.
I listened intently. Our first real stop on this trek was the home of Marci's sister, Charlesia, and her husband, Jeff. The details slowly unfolded that their daughter Maddison had been up all night vomiting. We were still welcome to come, but the flu had gone through the whole family, and it was an intense one. If we came, we would probably spend a couple of nights looking down into a toilet thinking Why me? I didn't mind that so much. Marci hardly ever gets to see her sister. That seemed like a reasonable enough price to pay for the two of them to get one night staying up late talking until almost dawn. What worried me is that we would be staying with and visiting other people afterward. Influenza didn't seem like a very nice Thank-You gift to leave behind after someone opens their home to you.
After the phone call, we talked about it. Perhaps it wasn't too late to reroute the trip. There was no reason to go to Garden City, Kansas if we weren't going to see Jeff and Charles. Nobody makes Garden City, Kansas a top travel destination. That's like planning a romantic weekend of walking along the river bank and enjoying the cafes and street art in Odessa, Texas. That's like planning a weekend of getting drunk and emptying your wallet on hot slots in Provo, Utah. That's like planning a vertigo, adrenaline-rush alpine experience in Oklahoma. That's like dedicating your life to Christian values and then voting for Donald Trump. Oh, wait, people really did do that.
In the end, we decided to not make a decision at all. We would stay our course but simply slow down and take another day. We wouldn't bypass Garden City. We would just delay it. Perhaps Maddison would get better in a day. Perhaps by then she wouldn't infect us.
Right about then we topped a small pass and headed down a long slope on the other side. There was a small brown sign. I love small brown signs; they almost always point to something interesting. It said Dominguez Canyon Road. I braked. We now had all the time in the world--or at least enough for a 10 minute jot down a gravel road. If the road didn't lead to the canyon soon, I'd simply turn around and head back to the pavement.
. . . . .
The road didn't lead to the canyon soon. By the time we returned to the pavement, we'd probably devoured at least an hour of our precious road time. I would have never made the trip if I'd known that. Fortunately, the road teased me forward with low bluffs and marked gouges that hinted something dramatic like Dead Horse Point could be forthcoming.
That deep canyon gulf so suggested by the rubble-rock landscape never materialized. Instead the road dropped along a deep, slow-moving river that I wrongly assumed was the Colorado. Instead, it was the Dominguez River, which I'd never heard of until now.
Although the landscape was not spectacular by Utah or Colorado standards, it was significant, and the fruit orchards and farms along the river against the chalky white canyon slopes black-blobbed with boulders made it feel like Big Bend, Texas. I kept imagining donkeys on the other side of the border. I wanted to take a row boat across the Rio Grande to other side and eat tacos in the shade of a small cantina.
Dominguez Canyon Road, Colorado
The road went up a hill and looked down on the railroad. I wished a train would come along. I could have stopped the car and easily jumped on the roof of a rail car. Of course, I'm way too aware of my mortality to ever engage in such a senseless act, but it would have been cool to see a train from that view. The road then dropped, crossed the tracks and followed them by the river. Again, I wished a train would come. The earth would have shook. We would have been looking up at grimy steel in complete awe. We were very near. But a train never came.
The road eventually ended at a gate just after crossing a wash that led into the river. I stopped and got out to look at the tracks suspended on heavy tar-injected wood ties, a rock slide behind.
Railroad truss Dominguez Dominguez Canyon Road
There was no canyon over look, no picnic table, no trail head. There was a sign indicating Dominguez Canyon was indeed somewhere ahead. There was just no way to get to it.
Oddly, I was okay with the deception of that little brown sign back on the highway. The road, though long, got me down low and intimate with a grand river and a great western landscape.
At home, writing this, I would find out that there is indeed a trail to Dominguez Canyon. Oddly the dirt road that accesses the trail is called Bridgeport Road. Dominguez Canyon Trail absolutely cannot be accessed by Dominguez Canyon Road.
But it doesn't matter. We came to rest between a river and a railroad truss at exactly 38 degrees forty-nine feet and 33.54 inches north and 108 degrees 20 feet and 00.48 inches west at an elevation of 4,767 feet above sea level on a road that ended abruptly at a farm nestled between two low, rocky canyon walls. The sun was intense. The river glistened. Time stopped.
Union Station (left) and Grand Junction Depot (right), Grand Junction, Colorado
(Image from Google Earth)
Travel Date: September 8, 2018
Perception is a tricky thing. The mind is influenced by what is taken in at the eye, but the eye is also influenced by what is put out by the mind. All my life I have been in search of what is real. Sometimes I glimpse it. I know it at the moment, and then there is doubt, and it fades away.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle in perceiving reality is the "I" rather than the eyes. It's difficult to take in what's real when all we can see is ourselves. This is true on a purely physical level. A blind man sees the world very differently than a deaf man. It is also true on a spiritual level. A narcissist sees the world very differently than Mother Teresa.
Some see only the physical world, and others discount science whenever it clashes with their beliefs even while they trust those same laws and theories without a second thought every time they get in a car or walk across a bridge. Chemistry is reality when it is applied to the plastics on an I-Phone but not when it comes to predicting global warming.
On the other hand, scientists, who spend their entire lives studying things at the molecular level, the atomic level, the subatomic level, and at the other end of the spectrum, on the astronomical level--things so small or so distant they are completely undetectable though our natural senses--many of these same people are still somehow sure that there is nothing more than the physical reality before us. To them, those who believe in a tangible spiritual realm are simply crazy. It is impossible for them to consider that the spiritually-minded may simply have tools they themselves do not possess or choose not to utilize. They cannot fathom how anyone can believe in the unseen, even though they go to the lab or to the observatory and see complete universes for themselves that the rest of humanity are not privy to except second hand.
As a species, it astounds me how little we see.
My biggest problem with seeing reality is not with my eyes but with my "I". Unfortunately, I never have a thought that doesn't include myself. I can, at times, be quite generous, but everything I feel or do is filtered through me. What's worse, loner though I project to be, my whole life is driven by the need for acceptance. My entire life is built around craving connection--to get past the "I"--and I can't get there because I need that experience so much. I want to feel. I want to be. I want to be loved. It has nothing to do with you, only me.
Eeek! I looked in the mirror last night before going to bed and that's what I saw: me, me, me! I would have been better off staying up late and watching Psycho. My face was this distorted, dripping flesh of "I, I, I." The pupils of my eyes were in "reality" highways of "I,I,I.." slowly vanishing back to eternity but the I's getting obnoxiously large as semi-trucks coming forward straight at me. I wanted to duck and hide from me.
It was surreal and not at all comforting. It was, of course, just a moment. That is how reality usually hits us. In flecks and flakes of inspiration. In this mortal state, the human mind simply isn't built to take in more than brief moments of truth. In the end, I was able to leave it all behind, go to bed, and get a good night's sleep.
Or sort of. I woke up with the same icky feeling of "I." So, here I am trying to sort it all out.
Here's how it came about:
On Sunday, I got up early to work on my Sunday school lesson. I probably hadn't given myself as much time to prepare as I should have, but I did give myself a good three hours. The lesson was on recognizing some of the wonderful things Christ has done for us, and the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament was the scriptural base. But as I read through the lesson, I just had this feeling: forget the scriptural references today and have the class members write for themselves what wonderful things Christ has done for them personally. There will not be time for you to do more than that. I felt the spirit very strongly and found some videos of hymns to play while the class members and myself free-wrote on the topic. Then we would share out.
In the past, I had given several writing workshops to teachers in the public school system, and at almost every workshop, the activities hit some nerve, and someone ended up crying as they accessed a part of themselves that was previously closed. That was not my intention. It just usually happened. We as human beings bury a lot of pain and writing gives us an avenue back into ourselves and back out, renewed, so that, over time, we come to some sort of semblance. Because I felt the spirit so strongly as I prepared my Sunday school lesson, I expected a similar, only stronger experience.
I didn't get it. While I sat there, the music playing, not even I, who spends all his extra time rambling out his entire life on paper to some unknown audience, knew what to write. All I got down were the exact same things the lesson would have presented anyway and in the exact same fashion. Nothing personal was willing to come out and be presented on the page, let alone to the class.
When I asked if anyone wanted to share out, there was this enormous silence until finally someone who has always been a good and generous friend to the family, took as much time as he could to spare me embarrassment.
And here's the thing. It didn't bother me. I felt that I had delivered the lesson my Savior had wanted me to give on that particular day. I even had some tangible worldly confirmations of that along the way. The talks in church aligned with my intent perfectly, and church had gone way over time, leaving me with little time for my lesson. There was just time for that 10 minutes I'd set aside for writing and a few extra extra minutes to share out and wrap things up.
And so I felt good leaving the church. I didn't get the response that I'd expected, but I was fine with that. I believed I'd came and done my little part in the grand scheme of things. Someone in the audience, even if it was only one, must have needed to journal their thoughts that day.
That feeling lasted several hours, but by bedtime I was standing in front of the mirror disgusted with myself. Why? Some absolutely ineffective part of me craved attention so badly that I couldn't stand thirty or forty people thinking, "That lesson was sure a flop; what was he thinking?"
Why do we need the acceptance of others so badly that we can't fully engage in life out of fear of rejection? Why is our sense of self so immense that we are never fully open to the world around us?
This, in part, is what a road trip is for: to leave the self behind and focus on the sights ahead. To see and be something more than "I," to be the "transparent eyeball" Emerson describes so well in Nature and feel the euphoria created by temporarily shattering the ego and experiencing reality first hand.
But those intense moments of purity are so brief. Most of our lives are experienced through our ego. The life we live is not necessarily the real life, just the felt life filtered through our over-protective ego.
How I experienced Grand Junction, Colorado was a perfect example of this. I didn't experience one Grand Junction. I experienced two very different Grand Junctions based on my mood.
Going into Walker State Wildlife Area, Grand Junction had seemed to be a very ugly place. We had to go through an industrial area before reaching the river bottoms, where we intended to have lunch. I was hungry, wanted breakfast, and the little narrow road ran along the railroad tracks with electrical wires, corrugated tin, cinder block, steel, all abundant. It frustrated me. It kept me from reaching some dream rest area where we could pull up to a picnic table, pull out the ice chest, and eat while watching waterfowl rise from a glimmering, slow moving river.
But then once we got there, although there was no picnic table, that need was met. By the time we finished breakfast, our stomach was full, and we had a walk along the reeds as we looked out over an amazing run of cottonwood along the river backed by the cliffs of Colorado National Monument. This opened up the possibility of seeing Grand Junction in a new light. The Grand Junction I saw leaving Walker State Wildlife Area was not the one I saw going in.
Instead of being an ugly industrial sprawl, it was now a quaint, historic railroad town. I especially loved the two old train stations, Grand Junction Depot and Union Station.
Unfortunately, we were pressed for time. The stop at Walmart had eaten up a good bit of time as stops at Walmart always do, and so I didn't even stop to take pictures. The one for this post was provided by Google Earth.
However, since I've been home, I've learned that Grand Junction Depot opened on September 18, 1906, which you may also know as the day of the great San Francisco earthquake, although I didn't. In fact, the station was first used as a camp for refugees fleeing the devastated city on the bay. I doubt the refugees were in any state to appreciate the beauty of the building in this small city at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, but extraordinary it was. "Designed by famed Chicago architect Henry J. Schlacks in the Italian Renaissance style," Grand Junction Depot "was considered to be the finest depot of its size in the west" (Colorado Preservation, Incorporated).
The clearly older Union Station just down the street is just as attractive as Grand Junction Depot, if not more so, but I was not able to find out more about it. It is an amazing structure, and the lack of easily available information on both of these buildings given their grandeur reinforces my perception that probably most people who travel through Grand Junction see it as I first did: a mass of industrial and commercial sprawl in what once was a beautiful river valley.
Actually, I doubt they even see it as that. It's either an annoyance on the way to Rockies if you're headed east, or a let down after being about as physically and spiritually as close to God as you can get in an automobile as you descend that same glorious range headed west.
Or perhaps worst of all, Grand Junction is a convenience: a place to stop for food, take a pee, gas up, and restock the fridge of your $100,000 RV at Walmart, if you be so lucky.
We see what we need, and we never need more than what we prepare to see.
To need in a spiritual sense is a good thing. I may never get past myself, but I'm less harmful as aware narcissist than as an oblivious one.
Yearning is a type of seeing. I yearn for the open road. I yearn to see more, to be more.
Perhaps spiritual death occurs when a man looks in the mirror and likes everything he sees.
Works Cited
Colorado Preservation, Incorporated. Grand
Junction Depot. 2018. 18 October 2018.
<http://coloradopreservation.org/programs/endangered-places/endangered-places-archives/grand-junction-depot/>.
Travel Date: Saturday, September 8, 2018
Date Composed: Tuesday, October 9, 2018
Walter Walker State Wildlife Refuge, Grand Junction, Colorado
It has been just over a month since we set out on our great adventure. In that time, our world here at Dry Creek has changed greatly. When we left, our day-time highs were still reaching into the low 90's. And it was dry--oh so dry. Day after day of heat and smoke filled skies. Grapes were still on the vine. We had squash and tomatoes piled on the kitchen counter. There were still plenty of green tomatoes in the garden, and some bright red ones too. Even though I left my brother in charge, I worried things would dry out and die. He had even more to water at his place; perhaps he would not be able to handle it all. Despite past seasonal patterns and a few scattered patches of yellow aspen high on the mountain tops, all signs indicated that our long summer of drought-driven wildfires would continue.
Now the ground is soggy. It has rained and rained and rained. Thick white snow covers the mountains. Friday night it is suppose to freeze. Sunday I lit a fire, and yesterday we turned on the furnace. Summer is over. Two weeks ago I would have thought "At last!" Now, it is sad to see my favorite season go. No more crickets, no more cicadas, no more dragon flies, no more bees, no more humming birds. True, the deer are back and the wild turkey are ever present. Soon even our local bald eagle, Harold, will return for winter. Still, summer is gone.
And so is our great Texas road trip. I feel it slipping though my fingers before I really even have a grasp on it. Those amazing long days of only worrying about getting from here to there and where to stop to eat a sandwich and have a pickle are gone. All I have is a bunch of inadequate pictures and the yearning to keep that magic alive. It's futile, of course. None the less, I will try because that is what writers do: we try to preserve the vanished and make tangible the intangible. Ours is a profession grounded in sorrow by its very nature. We are here to bear witness to loss.
This is true even if it is a good journey, for every step forward leaves something meaningful behind. This, of course, is true for everyone, but it is the writer who is keenly aware of it because it is he who has been recording his travels all along.
Still, even writers are not always aware that everything is slipping into the rear view mirror. We too can be forward thinking, driven away from the intensity of the moment by anticipation for what's ahead on the highway.
And so, even in my tired state, I leaned slightly forward in my seat, as if the car couldn't go fast enough, and somehow my forward incline would speed us towards our destination. Where? Not necessarily Garden City, Kansas. I don't think anyone is ever in a hurry to get to Garden City, Kansas, even if they know people there. It was probably in anticipation of the Rockies. Oh how I love to be up where the air is rare.
First, however, there would be Grand Junction. We talked about how we had to go to Walmart. I hated the idea. I always do. Yet, I knew it was true. I certainly was not willing to spend another cold, sleepless night of tossing and turning if we didn't have to. We needed mattress pads and we needed a sleeping bag. We also needed to get breakfast. We talked about stopping for fast food, but it was too early in the trip to already be breaking our budget.
We found a place to stop, and a glorious stop at that. It wasn't right off the road. We had to go hunt for it, but it was worth it: Walter Walker State Wildlife Area on the Colorado River.
It wasn't a planned stop, so when I say "hunt for it," I don't mean like looking for your lost wallet, where you know exactly what you must find. We would have stopped to eat anywhere that didn't cost us any additional money. I was just looking for any place that might have a picnic table when I saw a brown sign that said Wildlife Area. We turned and followed a maze of streets--I think it was only two, but it might as well have been half a dozen, the way things spaghettied about--that led us across the railroad tracks through an industrial area along Railroad Ave--bent tin, rusted metal and ugly industrial buildings sprawled all over the place. I thought about turning around and going back, but we were too far in now. I was too famished. If we didn't find our destination soon, I'd gladly find a smoldering dump of tires and set up the breakfast table on an old rusted Kenmore washer with dirty diaper hanging off of the cycle dial. But, we didn't have to. Just when it looked pointless, the road turned left, and I could see a gravel parking lot. Behind it was a glorious line of cottonwood in front of a pinkish sandstone cliff that is part of Colorado National Monument.
The sought-after picnic table didn't exist, which is odd, because there were extensive concrete trails winding around along the marshes, and if you've ever paid to put in a sidewalk or a patio, you know just how expensive concrete is. There were thousands of dollars of concrete before us but not a single picnic table. So, we just opened up the doors and ate in the car.
It was well worth it. Afterwards, we followed one loop of the trail to stretch out our legs for the long journey ahead. I don't recall a lot of birds, but the light on the cottonwood even in late morning was magnificent. Other than the ribbon of concrete, all was wild, which is always enough for me.
Had I not just driven through a rusting industrial park, I wouldn't have any idea we were anywhere near a city--and quite an ugly one at that. Grand Junction, Colorado on first sight has all the appeal of Farmington, New Mexico. In both places, two great river valleys that have been turned into industrial and commercial sprawl. Ain't that like America.
Luckily, here a small portion of the river has been preserved by the government. Listen up Republicans! Somebody's hard earned tax dollars made this amazing stroll along the edges of cottonwood filled river bottoms possible. Without those taxes, and without the environmental regulations to protect the area, my envisioned picnic on a smoldering heap of burning tires would in fact have been a reality. There is absolutely no doubt about it. Wilds near civilization without government intervention equals a dirty diaper hanging from the tree and a shot-up pick-up in the ravine in the best of scenarios, and toxic water and oily sludge in many others. Too many people would just rather not be bothered with the landfill fee and a trip to a designated disposal area. Often it's the owner defecating on his own property that ruins it for everyone else. It's obvious, but for some odd reason it needs to be stated again and again: we need zones set aside for everybody, including the animals.
