For the plains of Texas, there is a lot of eroded earth around Canadian, which is always a pleasant thing in such a large topography-deprived state. That is more apparent from the air than from the ground. Still, even zooming down the highway, there are low, dry buttes and bluffs that stand out above everything else. I looked out the window and enjoyed what was there. Marci read her book and reluctantly put it down as I pointed out how "rugged" the terrain was. Then she went back to her book. This is our pattern on long trips, and we like it. There is a soft, quiet music to it. And so the time and miles went by. We went through Wheeler, although I didn't remember it. I only know because of Google Maps. We also went through Twitty, Texas. I don't remember that either, which makes more sense, as there are only three or four houses. Still, it's worth finding out whatever I can about that place. Can you imagine having to say, "I come from Twitty, Texas"? Not a good thing.
Perhaps it was that precise fear that plummeted the population of Twitty from 116 in 1980 to 60 in 1990, and finally 12 in 2000 (Anderson). That's a growth of -56 from 1980 to 1990, and a growth of -48 from 1990 to 2000. I'm not much of a mathematician, but it seems, based on trends, the projected growth between 2000 and 2010 would then have to be around -40, which would put the projected population at -28, in 2010. Therefore, the current population of Twitty is (I'm ball-parking it here) around -60. However, my math must be flawed somewhere because I know it is never safe to say, "There are no Twits left in Texas."
Also, there appears to be at least one residence left, perhaps the Conways. At first glance, you may say, "That building is abandoned, you nincompoop." However, the somewhat shiny vehicles parked around the side say otherwise. There is proof here, I tell you, that Texas Twits are real, not that you ever doubted that.
Twitty, Texas today
On the one hand, it seems like I'd remember going through Twitty. It's such a classic example of American heartland decay, but on the other hand, Texas is filled with such scenes. It's sort of like not noticing a saguaro cactus in Arizona. Sure, it may be a classic symbol, but they're everywhere in their respective region. Rural decay is as Texan as Republican politicians boasting the economic miracle of trickle-down economics.
Don't let those gleaming city skylines fool you, Texas is a poverty-festering state. Statistically, it's hard to pin down exactly what poverty is. Apparently, it depends on how you look at it because lists don't always agree, other than all lists agree Mississippi is indeed a very poor place. But, using multiple lists, it seems Texas has the 13th highest poverty rate in the nation, at 17.2% (Pariona). That means 38 states have lower poverty rates. Also of note--all of the top 10 poorest states, except New Mexico, are conservative states (Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, Georgia, West Virginia, Tennessee, Arizona) (Pariona). If the Republican economic model is so effective, why is it that it is the conservative states that are so dang poor?
There are exceptions, of course, like Wyoming and Utah, but they are indeed exceptions to the rule. It may be that the brand of conservatism in those two states looks different than the nation as a whole. Both pushed for women's suffrage early on, Wyoming being the first to allow women to vote in 1890, and Utah being the third in 1896. Colorado was second (National Constitution Center), and until fairly recently, it was a conservative state. It is possible Western conservatism and Southern conservatism are not the same thing. That would be an important thing for the folks of Wyoming and Utah to realize because voters there may in fact be supporting a national conservative agenda that does not coincide with their core beliefs.
For instance, although Utah is socially conservative politically, there is a huge economic safety net provided through The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which has the most effective welfare system in the world. As 55 percent of the population is Mormon, a lot of the population is taken care of, when needed, outside the government support system. In rural areas, where economic opportunities are fewer, the Mormon make-up is much higher, in some counties, more than 80 percent. Although the LDS Church does not limit its welfare program to members, I doubt many outside the church are comfortable seeking those resources. As the state's demographics are quickly diversifying, and that safety net reaches less and less of the population, its citizens may need to rethink their position on government assistance. Taking care of the poor and elderly is a core belief and obligation of a majority of its population.
Whereas Mississippi has the historical legacy of slavery and segregation as its economic model, Utah has the historical legacy of economic socialism under Brigham Young and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Some counties in Utah once practiced what was called the United Order where everyone turned in all their income to the Bishop's Storehouse and then received only what they needed, so that those who made less were equally provided for. In short, Utah's conservatism is built on a historical model of economic inclusion, and so there is not a significant portion of generational poverty, while Mississippi's conservatism is built on a historical model of economic exclusion, and so generational poverty is rampant.
Texas was built on that same Southern exclusionary economic system, and poverty is everywhere. On top of that, the Dust Bowl left its own trail of gutted out towns as small, privately owned farms collapsed, never to return again, eventually replaced by large, automated corporate farms that require so much less labor.
Twitty, Texas is not only a town; it is a symbol of things gone wrong. It is also probably a symbol of so much gone right, but those stories are not visible on Google Earth, in demographic tables, or my armchair political analysis and social theories. Those stories are told around the dinner tables--not the dusty ones in the vacant houses that remain in Twitty, but in the lively dinner tables of the descendants now living in places like Amarillo, Oklahoma City or Wichita Falls. I have no access to the real stories, and so instead, I give you my politics. I may be a genius, or I may be a nincompoop. One thing for sure is that I'm not a Twit. Although, I don't think I'd mind being one. It'd be fun to fix up that old gas station/store there on the corner as a residence, set some lawn chairs under the shaded covering, and just sit out there and watch time pass while sipping lemonade. Life is not where you spend it, but how you spend it. The stories about how we spent our days we mostly take with us to our graves. Little bits perhaps are passed down a generation or two around the dinner table, and then they're gone, dust in the wind, like Twitty, Texas.
References
Anderson, H. Allen. Twitty, Texas. n.d. 4
February 2019. <https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hlt40>.
National Constitution Center. Centuries of
Citizenship: A Constitutional Timeline. 2006. 4 February 2019. <https://constitutioncenter.org/timeline/html/cw08_12159.html>.
Pariona, Amber. U.S. States by Poverty Rate.
1 October 2018. 4 February 2019.
<https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/us-states-by-poverty-rate.html>.
We were on the road again, headed south on U.S. 83 towards Dallas. If I remember right, the day started off somewhat overcast, but the clouds burned off soon, leaving white wisps. The only topography south of Garden City were some low, grass-covered dunes, but that didn't last long before everything was game-board flat. From the air, it would look like a patchwork quilt made with scraps of different poke-a-dotted cloths pieced together. This was due to the big, circular irrigation sprinklers that run off central pivots. Of course, we didn't see anything from anywhere close to a bird's eye view, forever trapped on a two-dimensional plane. I just use the metaphor (and the Google Earth image below) to get across how flat and unnatural the landscape was. I could probably add boring as well, but I'm generally a boring person, and so I sort of liked it--at least for a while.
However, I didn't like it near as much as when I first moved to Texas with my parents when I was in 9th grade. Then I was absolutely mesmerized by flat horizons. Growing up in the Inter-mountain West, I had a false notion that earth always meets sky along a jagged edge. That there are naturally flat places astounded me. I was a smart kid, so it's not like I didn't already know that. It's that I didn't know it where it counts--through the senses. It's like right now: I know I would weigh less on the moon, but of course, I don't really know that because I have never felt it. We never fully grasp something until we experience it first hand. The abstract always remains just that, abstract, until we know it concretely. I was floored the first time I knew flat. What an amazing thing!--to go miles and barely change elevation--to change elevation so slowly, it is imperceptible. I came from a world of constant up and down.
Our route through Texas when we moved to Dallas from Utah was along I-40 to Amarillo and then down U.S. 287. Amarillo flat stunned me. Back then, the perfectly level fields almost met the glass skyscrapers of downtown, other than a thin but dense trail of billboards, gas stations, hotels and retail centers following the freeway. So, at certain spots one would look out and see great flat fields with a gleaming glass skyline behind. It seemed so cool.
On this trip across the plains, I realized how lucky I was to live in the jagged West. Yes, I was still fond of the flat fields, but the views clearly did not compare to to views I left at home right outside my door. I live on the lip of an alluvial fan where two creeks and two canyons converge--one maple filled and one cottonwood filled. Behind that stands a 10,000 foot range. I step out my door and I'm in the wilds. For nine months of the year, I'm very aware of that--for more often than not, I startle five or six deer in the process, and once in a while many more. There are times though when I forget how wonderful my life is. There was one day a couple of years ago when I had an especially hard day at work, and on the 35 mile drive home across the nothingness between work and home I became depressed that any sort of night life (dinner, movie, etc., was over an hour away). There are no nights on the town for Marci and I, especially since our movie theater closed down. Still, except for rare moments of insanity, I would not give up what I have to live anywhere near Broadway. I certainly would not give it up for the flat fields of Kansas.
And so by the time we reached Liberal, just over an hour (75 miles) down the road, we were already bored enough to stop for a soda at a Love's Truck Stop. For some reason it was a magical experience to get out of the car with Marci, my woman for twenty years, and go in and get a soda. Maybe there is something transcendental about following a black line across a flat plain that makes you appreciate what you have. I don't know, but for whatever reason, stepping out of that car with Marci, I felt like we were back in college out on a date, which back then was usually a drive up in the mountains.
Sure, there were no aspen trees fluttering in the breeze, no alpine wildflowers, no stunning views down into forested valleys, no distant snow clad peaks, no little tumbling streams, as there often were when we dated many years ago. There was just the asphalt apron of the truck stop and two highways meeting on the outskirts of town, and that perfectly flat horizon broken only by grain silos, but I felt young again.
We were trying to budget money, and so we were avoiding snack and drink stops; maybe I just really needed a soda. Anyway, the Love's Truck Stop on the outskirts of Liberal, Kansas will always be planted in my memory, even though I had to spend forty-five minutes on Google Maps to find it now because I didn't remember where it was. It was, after all, all Kansas, which is all the same.
If, like Marci and I were, you are wondering why there is a town in Kansas named Liberal, I'll tell you, although it isn't that exciting. According to Wikipedia, S.S. Rogers, the first settler there, gained regional fame by giving water to thirsty travelers, and "Liberal gained its name from the common response to his acts of kindness, 'That's very liberal of you'" (Wikipedia). Now you may say, giving someone in need good water isn't really that liberal at all, but then think about Flint, Michigan and Governor Rick Snyder. By Republican standards, giving someone good water can be a very liberal act in deed. However, if you're some geriatric hippy thinking of moving to Liberal, Kansas to join a nudist commune and grow pot, don't hop in your VW bus yet. In the last presidential election, 62.7 percent of Liberalites voted Republican; only 32.3% percent voted Democrat (Best Places). No flower-power, magic-crystal vortex here. However, your water might not have lead in it, which isn't bad, considering the recent Republican track records.
2. Oklahoma
Not long after Liberal, we were in Oklahoma, or sort of. We went across the Panhandle, which is only 34 miles wide (Wikipedia), and the only town we passed through (if you can call it that) was Turpin, Oklahoma, where I assume, based on its name, the water has turpentine in it. The unincorporated town only has 467 residences (Wikipedia). However, it does have a Panhandle Pizza. I have no idea if the food is good, but the name is great. Nice ring. Effective alliteration. Generally strong sounds. Panhandle Pizza. Just don't drink the water.
3. Texas
And then we were in TEXAS. Finally, you think, you have arrived at the content of this series of blog posts after suffering through twelve other posts just to arrive at the state line. Don't worry, I'm sure I'll be able to stretch out the remainder of the series to feel as long and tedious as the epic drive across the state itself feels. Fun fact: Texas is 790 miles long and 660 miles wide at its most distant points. That's as the crow flies. On Interstate 10, you can actually drive 878.6 mind-numbing miles and never leave the state. You are, to say the least, in for one hell of a road trip. I hope your play list is as good as ours was, because as Chris Rea sings, "Warm winds blowing / heating blue sky / and a road that goes forever." We're going to Texas.
Texas, my home for 11 years, although, because I was in my teens and twenties, when I formed much of who I am, it seems like I lived there longer than that. Time is so much more expansive when we are young. It flashes by faster and faster as we approach our departure flight from earth. However, I'm not going to wallow in existential melodramatic self-pity here. If you want that, listen to "Time" by the Allen Parson's Project.
Texas, at first I couldn't tell it from Oklahoma, or even Kansas. It was one continuous journey across a flat, that if you could get up above it all, would contain one giant circle crop after another, thousands upon thousands of green, ocher and gold bulls-eyes, until you know longer know what one to shoot at. If this were a film, I'd insert here a clip of the sea of holes from the movie Yellow Submarine dubbed with the ringing of the piano at the end of "A Day in a Life".
Circle, circle, circle; same, same, same; tedium, tedium, tedium--until, perhaps, a great song arises out of the sameness, a song where meaning builds ever so slowly, as in Ravel's "Bolero". If it does, that song is of sustenance, of bread, of life. Here in the heartland, America feeds the world. It starts off in a quiet field, the tufts of a single corn stalk waving against a white, wispy sky. Then there is a small white grain silo down a rutted road, a windmill idly turning ever so slowly. The camera zooms out, and up, as the music builds. We see three or four of the great living circles of green. And a highway makes a long horizontal across the bottom sixth of the screen, a semi-truck pulling a trailer of silage moving to the right. We zoom out; the volume of both music and landscape multiplies, circle after circle, the details getting smaller and smaller, the music rising and rising; it continues as the circles become dots, thousands and thousands, broken only by the occasional highway, pencil thin lines running directly east and west or north and south. The sun gleams over the curving horizon.
And then there is a rupture. All is broken. Admittedly, it's not much of a tear in the fabric, but there are definitely claw marks, gouges and gullies in the otherwise perfectly smooth earth south of Perryton, Texas. After all that mind-numbing flatness this interruption in topography feels very significant. It is even visible from the air:
The claw into the fabric of the plains here is Wolf Creek. Why it created such an eroded imprint on the otherwise featureless plain, I'm not sure, as it isn't a significant stream. There is one small reservoir to the east of where we crossed called Lake Fryer. It is a pretty little body of water, important enough for a county park but nothing else, in a state deprived of natural beauty. Here is everything you will ever need to know about Lake Fryer and much, much more: "Located in Wolf Creek Park in Ochiltree County, approxamately 12 miles south of Perryton; surface area: 86 acres; maximum depth: 25 feet; average depth 13 feet; impounded: 1939, dam rebuilt in 1953" (Texas Parks and Recreation) Truth is you don't need to know anything about Lake Fryer or Wolf Creek. But in a landscape so deprived of significance, a little gouged earth takes on significance. The beauty is in the details, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that it was beautiful.
We didn't see Lake Fryer, as I didn't even know it was there, but now I kind of wished we'd taken a little side trip.
If there's one thing I've learned in this life it is this: often the greatest meaning is found in what most view as insignificant details. Mies van der Rohe coined the expression "God is in the details" when talking about architecture. The same of life. Beauty is everywhere. It's just that so many eyes--often including my own--are too blind to see it. I love small knolls, small canyons, small valleys, and small bodies of water because they make you aware how intimate our encounter with nature is. Sometimes in search of grand awe we miss these little vignettes that make up the tapestry of life.
Although we didn't make that side trip Lake Fryer, I did stop at a little roadside table down the highway a bit on the edge of the flood plain of the Canadian River, which has also eaten its way a bit through the plains, and there are some low bluffs and gullies associated with it. However, what is amazing is that the erosion of that major river doesn't seem any more extensive than that of Wolf Creek. I wonder what it is about that little creek that has such a bite.
Anyway, the roadside at the junction of U.S. 83 and Farm Road 6 is a typical Texas picnic area. A couple of sturdy stone tables in the shade of big trees trailing a water source across the plains. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of such stops across the highways of Texas, all wonderful. It is something the state should be mighty proud of. The state also showcases many large rest areas along the interstates and other major divided highways, many of which are architectural masterpieces, but it is these tiny, hidden picnic areas on the back roads that I'm most fond of, and so I stopped even though there was no restroom and we weren't yet ready to eat.
Rest Area, U.S. 83 and FR 6, near Canadian, Texas
Just down the road from the picnic area, U.S.83 ends at U.S. 60, and there was a small gas station, the Oasis Truck Stop, so we stopped to use the restroom and get snacks. Had I realized what a unique town Canadian was for Texas, I would have waited until we were in town. The town actually has hills--steep ones!--as it is built at an angle on the eroded edge of plains just above the flood plains of the Canadian River. That was my first regret. My second regret is that we didn't stop even though we'd just stopped at the gas station. The town is really quite beautiful. Perhaps, I was getting road weary, because despite the town's beauty, we drove on through, not even stopping for a picture. If life ever throws you on a long road trip headed through Canadian, Texas, don't make the same mistake we did.
References
Best Places. Liberal, Kansas: Politics. n.d.
25 January 2019.
<https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/kansas/liberal>.
Texas Parks and Recreation. Fishing Lake Fryer.
n.d. 25 January 2019. <https://tpwd.texas.gov/fishboat/fish/recreational/lakes/fryer/>.
Wikipedia. Liberal, Kansas. 13 January 2019.
25 January 2019. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal,_Kansas>.
—. Oklahoma Panhandle. 20 December 2018. 25
January 2019. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_Panhandle>.
—. Turpin, Oklahoma. 13 January 2018. 25
January 2019. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turpin,_Oklahoma>.
Perhaps the reason I struggle so much with writing fiction is that I'm not that much into people. Don't get me wrong, like most everyone, I'm a social creature. I lived alone for a few years and it sucked. My family means everything to me as well as do a few good friends I've made over the years. However, the moments I fully live are the moments I'm alone with no one around except my creator. Silent places. Still places. Very unsocial places. Right now, writing this, I know it's probably 18 degrees outside the black window, a gritty, granular low-moisture snow spread across the field. It's silent. There may be a few stars poking through breaks in the clouds. If there are, they are piercingly clear. Knowing the moon-like landscape is outside my window comforts me. A party, on the other hand, leaves me feeling like the last fall leaf of a cottonwood tree dangling over a turbulent river. I cling desperately to anything not human--Oh look at the plaid on that tablecloth. Lovely, Oh so lovely! It's not that I don't like people; it's just that I don't like how they make me feel. They always want to converse. It would be so much easier if we could just stand and stare into each others eyes with kindness. Now, that I can do. I get along great with my dogs, and even the deer out in the field. That is all they expect--to look into your eyes and see you mean them no harm. I mean no harm, and nature knows it. I'm not so sure about people. I'm awkward, and I make them feel awkward, which just makes me feel even more awkward. But people are always part of the narrative. So, here we go, a night with Marci's sister and her family, wonderful people, who, none-the-less make me aware that I'm shy.
The sun was getting somewhat low when we approached Garden City. We were suppose to arrive around 4:00, but it was more like 7:00. We kept that up the rest of the trip--always 2-3 hours behind schedule. When we got out the car on a tree-lined suburban street, I was greeted with the familiar riot of cicadas that I know well from living in Dallas, but Marci, on the other hand, stepped out onto another planet.
"What's that noise!" she demanded. She did not like it.
We walked up to the door and knocked, hoping we had the right house. The porch had a Mexican-styled tile that I liked--shiny blue, yellow and white if I remember right. About to greet people, I was seeking security in the visual details. Charlsea answered and followed us out to the car to help us bring stuff in. Along the way she showed us a weird pink Styrofoam looking thing that appeared to be growing out of her lawn. She said it was a weird mushroom, but of course, we didn't believe that. It was spongy and pink and had the consistency of one of those Styrofoam pool noodles you use to keep afloat. However, she insisted that it was indeed an organic thing.
When we got inside, we consulted Jeff. He agreed that you cannot grow Styrofoam. I liked this. It kept the focus off the normal conversations that give me the heebie-geebies, things like, "How was your day?" "How was the trip?" or worst of all, "How are you?" Things that you can either answer with "good" or actually describe in detail in a meaningful way. If you go with "good," the conversation quickly plummets into an awkward silence. If you actually describe things well, the way any good writer would, people become terribly bored. They want something in between--something that has a flow back and forth between speaker and listener. I just don't do that well. However, a debate on whether a pink erectile jutting out of your lawn is organic or manufactured, well, I can jump on that train. For one thing, it doesn't involve me. It's like discussing Ezra Pound's "In the Station of the Metro." You just go with it, add your two cents, even if you don't know what you're talking about. "How are you?" on the other hand--what a loaded question?: Well, see I once thought life was completely meaningless, and I drank a lot so that I wouldn't have to think about it. I fervently believed there was no God and swore at him just the same. Now, after a slow, tortuous but glorious conversion, I believe we are sent here for a specific purpose and that the fact you and I are standing here in front of each other probably has eternal significance. Now, don't let that put any pressure on you though. We just have something to learn from each other that will continue on into the eternities.
See how terribly damn cruel the question "How are you?" is. Just don't use it. For people like me, if there are others like me, it's a minefield. But discussing pink pool noodle mushrooms--that's a grand thing! Perhaps that's why I have always liked Charlesea. She never has a normal conversation.
In fact, frequently she doesn't even put her sentences into standard grammatical order. It creates a lot of entertainment and a certain amount of poetry. For instance, she once meant to tell her mother, "Your laugh cracks me up." Instead, she said, "Your crack laughs me up."
See. Wonderful!
If everyone could talk this way, I'd be laughing so hard, I wouldn't have a moment to be ill at ease. Instead, they ask things like, "How was your trip?"
But at Jeff and Charlesea's we discussed mushrooms, which is what I will also do here:
It turned out Charlesea was right. I bet that is often the case. She makes a lot of self-depreciating comments about her intelligence, but she seems like a deep thinker to me, who cares deeply about others.
Anyway, either Charles or Jeff--I can't remember which one--Googled the pink Styrofoam erectile sticking out of the lawn, and it is indeed a mushroom. I'm not sure of a genteel way of putting this, but the name refers to a dog's genitalia, or at least part of it. A post on Michigan State University's Extension blog words it this way: "It looks like a certain doggy part protruding from the soil" (Voyle). Although not necessarily genteel, Grandma would probably be alright with that wording, so I'll go with that here.
The common name for this uncommon fungus is dog stinkhorn mushroom. Its scientific name is Mutinus caninus and according to the article, "the fetid odor of the mature mushroom has been described as being associated with the contents of a cat litter box" (Voyle).
Clearly not an adored plant. However, unlike the cicadas, I don't think they are regular inhabitants of Garden City, Oklahoma. I don't think you can quite say, "Don't go to Garden City; they grow stinky dog genitalia in their lawns." That would be unfair. Much of the plains were experiencing a very wet summer and autumn, and it probably was due to that, rather than just a regular state of living in Garden City.
As exciting as mushrooms are, they can only carry a conversation so far. There were moments of awkward silence. Charlesea did make a comment about how quiet I was. I said something like, "Yep, that's me." I had the clicker to open my car to fiddle with though. It is broken, but we thought the battery was dead, so I spent a good amount of time trying to open it, put the battery in, close it up, then open it again, to see if I put it in wrong. That took up some time.
Eventually Jeff turned things to politics. Jeff and Charles are Democrats, as are we--the only ones in Marci's very Republican family. So, it a was time to talk about how crazy and misled the rest of the family is. I'm sure the rest of the family has the same sort of discussion when we're not around. Such is life living in a divided America. It was nice though, not having to stifle my desire to say what I really think for the sake of family continuity.
Jeff then made an amazing dinner. He is king of the grill, even when using an oven. The meat master. We had pork, but it might as well have been steak. It was that good.
Then Marci and Charles talked into the early morning, Jeff coming in and out of the conversation, now and then. Me too--very occasionally. Their kids, Cameron, Maddison, and Tristan, now all but grown up, popped in now and then to ask questions unrelated to the "adult" talk or to join in with some interesting detail. Maddison has a lot of Hispanic friends, and apparently there is a lot of racism in Kansas, so she has become quite political at an early age.
Much of that racism I'm sure is rooted in shifting demographics. According to Wikipedia, "In 2017, Albert Kyaw, a translator of the Garden City Public Schools, stated Garden City was the most ethnically diverse community in the state of Kansas" (Wikipedia). I've always thought of the plains as white, rural America until you get at least as far south as Amarillo. This trip taught me otherwise. It makes sense with so many Mexican Americans employed in agriculture that the opposite would be true for all of the plains, but perception and reality seldom align. According to the U.S. Census Bureau Quick Facts (which, accessed on 1.12.19 came with the warning, "Due to a lapse in federal funding this website is not being updated"), it is currently (or almost currently) estimated that Hispanics comprise 49.9% of the population of Garden City (U.S. Census Bureau). I never would have expected that.
Finally, conversation died out, not out of awkwardness, but just because we were so tired. Jeff peeled off first. Then Marci and I headed over to the motel Jeff had reserved for us. Being a pilot, he racks up a lot of travel rewards, so he was able to use those to put us up in a very nice room. We didn't expect that, but it sure was nice after two nights of camping.
References
U.S. Census Bureau. Quick Facts: Garden City.
n.d. 12 January 2019.
<https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/gardencitycitykansas>.
Voyle, Gretchen. Stinky Dog Stinkhorn Mushrooms.
19 November 2014. 10 January 2019. <https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/stinky_dog_stinkhorn_mushrooms>.
Wikipedia. Garden City, Kansas. 5 January
2019. January 14 2019.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_City,_Kansas>.
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>.
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.
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
