The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 11. Out Onto the Plains

Travel Date:  September 9, 2018

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 sunt is 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.