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?
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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