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| 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.
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