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>.
