The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 9. Along the Arkansas River

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.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 8. Up Over the Rockies

Travel Date:  September 8, 2018

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

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 7. Lunch Along the Cimarron River, Colorado

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.