The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 6. Dominguez Canyon, Colorado

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.

All was right and we turned around.