In the mountains

I drove up to Buena Vista over Kenosha Pass for a few days in the mountains. Crossing the pass into the huge open snow covered space of South Park is always dramatic. Urban life is left 4,000 feet below on the front range. It is quite unlike the drive up I-70 and through the Eisenhower Tunnel where urban and commercial sprawl follow you over the Divide. The drive over Kenosha brings you into a different world.

I stayed at the Cottonwood Hot Springs, sharing the loft in the dorm room with Tim. He was living further up along Cottonwood Creek at 11,000 feet. He is in a camp tent for the winter, wood stove for heat, and working on a house he is building at the mouth of an abandoned mine. The land is part of a mining claim he bought a few years back. His claim is three miles up the mountain; he gets there by snowshoe or snowmobile depending upon the weather. When he has business in town, he spends the night at the Hot Springs where he works in exchange for board. His wife, not too surprisingly, is living in Texas. We share evening and morning conversation and coffee in the lounge. I marvel at the ways people come to create a life for themselves.



But I had come up mainly for alpine skiing. I'm not sure what I love the most: the sensation of swooshing downhill over fresh powder (like gliding on silk) or the simple feeling of being high in the snow covered mountains at places where only lifts or snowcats can bring you. Ski Cooper, outside of Leadville (highest incorporated city in the United States at 10,152 feet), was just opening for the season. The sides of the groomed trails were three to four feet deep in powder. And if the lifts seem slow (this ain't Vail), they give you a chance to take in the spare beauty of the far mountain ranges and the simple pleasure of being outside in the snow on a bright sunny Colorado day.

Public Space

On my last day in DC, I visited the Pension Building, now the National Building Museum, the most astonishing public space in the capital. It was built after the Civil War to house the pension offices for the veterans and civil servants. Now receiving a pension (probably from a computer system housed in some cubicle-laden dreary office complex), I feel a deeper affinity with this magnificent edifice...its gigantic columns lifting the roof skyward. Groups of school children come into the space and sit or lie on the floor with their teachers looking up, up, up.

One of the exhibits on display in the columned interior was on the history of the parking garage. And one of the statistics cited dealt with the period before the advent of the automobile when cities were filled with workhorses carrying people and goods. It is estimated that in New York in 1900, the city held about 100,000 horses which produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of, most of it probably dumped into the river. Now that was an environmental pollution problem. So the automobile was responsible for cleaning up the city, parking garages replacing stables.

Ahhh....magnificent museums...places for learning and gaining perspective in space and time.

The National and Other Galleries

One of the joys of urban life is being able to move through its collections of art and architecture. In Washington for a few days, I was able to catch a few of the new exhibits at the National Gallery...small French paintings on one floor of the East Wing and photography in the West Wing. Walking through the vast public spaces of the museum is always a treat...as much for the paintings on the wall and the sculptures on the floor as for catching the manner in which people interact with the art, how they become part of the exhibit themselves, how they add color and light and movement to the art, blurring the lines between themselves and the objects.



Earlier this year, I made a trip (pilgrimage?) to Chaco Canyon, the site of extensive Anasazi ruins in northwest New Mexico. The isolated canyon contains the largest collection of Pueblo sites north of Mexico...sites that were used up until the mid 1100's when drought caused the massive migration out of the region toward the Rio Grand valley.



The same creative impulse to communicate through forms and shapes is found on the canyon walls and in the now-deserted plazas. They communicate a sense of place beyond the place itself. The images chiseled into the canyon walls, the doorways opening onto doorways, the design of rock walls all indicate a universality in the human desire to move us beyond our day to day existence.

Thanksgiving

We arrived at Kent Island on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay on Tuesday, beginning to settle into the house we rented for the holiday. A strong wind blew across the water for the next few days, but it was no matter as Ingrid, Geoff, Haile, Tom, Jose, Jens, Ben, Teddy, Margaret, Tony, Christian, Kendall, Rink, Rob, Dan, Vanessa, Chase, Drew, Claudia, and MJ showed up over the next few days. But we in turn traveled back to the western shore of the bay for Thanksgiving Day with Margaret and Tony...enjoying the fresh oysters, the company, the back deck.



Though, of course, this is a holiday of food, wine, and hanging out. Time for catching up and expanding the sense of family. Christian Werge, a cousin from Mexico working now as an architect in Alexandria, joined us (we share the same great-great grandfather) and later again with his girlfriend, MJ. Ingrid and Geoff brought bikes to try out the trails on the island. Teddy was preparing for a trip to the Gambia to do photojournalism for a nonprofit "Riders for Health," combining his interests in motocycles, photography, and exploring the world. So we catch time with one another...no other agenda than to enjoy one another...well and the pies.





So the days slip along like waves across the bayfront. We held a final feast of crabs, oysters and shrimp on Sunday afternoon after the winds had died down and the sun had broken through. A truck had parked down the street with "fresh crabs, fresh oysters" posted on cardboard signs in the morning. And a neighbor lent us a huge kettle for steaming the crabs. So it was a classic Maryland afternoon meal on the deck overlooking the bay.



Before sunset and folks beginning to make their way home.

Riding the east coast line

Charlotte and I caught a mid-morning train in Providence, heading down along the coast to Maryland. The sky was lead-gray, light drizzle against the Amtrak windows. The train was full with folks getting an early start on Thanksgiving, with businessmen on their cell phones "I meeting next week with the European head of Coke in London and I need those reports by noon....", with students working their laptops.



The train runs close to the shore along the Sound. Wetlands stretch out to the flat, gray sea. Houses line some of the coves. Towns come into view where rivers run down to the sea. And, moving west, the towns come closer together, converge, and factories, warehouses, offices, apartments move upwards, towards each other and towards the gray sky. We ride to, through, and down under the City, stop briefly at Pennsylvania Station and then are out onto the Jersey meadowlands, moving south toward Thanksgiving.

Family even cats

But Thanksgiving is about family and eating together and hanging out. So that is what we were doing in Providence, hanging out and helping to paint the living room of Ingrid and Geoff's new house. And after painting, reading on the sunporch ((I kjølvannet or In the Wake, learning Norwegian by reading in translation). And heading out to the local beach restaurant for chowder ("chawda").







And going for bike rides. And even coming home again after the bikeride to find that one of the cats, Hops, had climbed a tree at the end of the block and Ingrid, because she weighed less, had to climb the wobbly ladder to bring her back to earth and the comfort of the new home. All in the order of "hanging out."

Pawtuxet

But then you arrive in a different world. Walking to the village coffee shop in the morning, you pass Dr. Carpenter's house (1720) and other reminders that Rodger Williams and his followers settled the area in the 1660s. They had been thrown out of Puritanical Boston...the descendents of those moral guardians now rule in Colorado Springs. The town celebrates an annual festival when the local militia burned "the hated English revenue schooner," HMS Gaspree in 1772...I guess the British must of thought of them as terrorists.

So there is this depth of time along the East Coast...from a period long before Colorado was picked up as part of the Louisian Purchase (at least the part that was north of the Arkansas River)...and that time is reflected in the architecture, the way of life. Though the way of life has changed: Pawtuxet was a small harbour, then a mill town, then a resort, now a small collection of wine bars, restaurants, and occasional farmer's markets placed wedged by the river between two younger suburban towns. But what is impressive, so impressive for someone from the West is water, water, water everywhere. I have as much guilt about letting the water run when I brush my teeth as do the swans, gathering in the lee of a jetty, enjoying the late fall sunshine and picking at the water weeds.

The Airport

I had never really studied the people at Denver International Airport before...they had always seemed mere bodies in motion. Or bodies in non-motion, waiting, mildly anxious or relieved after going through screening and waiting now to see if their plane shows up on time. Introspective, focused on an arrival or departure, they now seem participants in some global form of alienation, neither here nor there, simply in transition, refugees caught between places, at the whim of weather, mechanical breakdowns, and fellow passangers. Tedium plays a large part in the traveller's experience...it is written on faces, on bodies slumped into chairs, on half drunk cardboard cups of coffee left in the food court.

White Rim Trail

Our mountain bike ride began in a thunderstorm as we descended 1,100 feet on the Shafer Trail. The guidebook describes the switchbacks as "dangerous or impassible when wet." Though cold and mud splattered, we evaded the instant waterfalls pouring off stone ledges. We made all the sharp turns but brake pads thinned rapidly. At the bottom of this initial trail, faithful Dave had set up a soup kitchen in the support vehicle. I tried to shake the cold by draping myself across the still warm car engine. Then we headed out ten more miles to set up our first camp site. So began day one of our ride on the White Rim Trail in Moab, Utah.



We were on a 92 mile, three and a half day mountain bike trip, riding across one of the earth's most spectacular landscapes...the series of deep, arid canyons whose deep formation go back 280 million years. These canyons follow the course of the Colorado and Green Rivers which join just below the White Rim Trail. Once joined, they move as one to carve out the Grand Canyon further south.

The scale of the landscape creates miniatures of our selves and bikes and tents. As in "Can you find the biker in the picture below?" Or " Find Bob standing on the rock rim" or "See the group of bikers resting on day two of the ride."







There they are!



The white rim rocks reveal another scale. Here the occassional downpours form small pools. The wind and water push soil into shallow hollows. Here plants take root and form diverse desert colonies of goosefoot (once collected for their edible seeds), yucca, saltbush, and Indian ricegrass. So the trail exists on both a macro and a micro scale...the latter being harder to find but just as satisfying as the depths and distances of the canyons and mountains beyond.





And then the human scale. The trip was organized by the PEDAL club of Loveland, CO on a volunteer basis (the chief volunteers being Ed and Dave....Dave the cook, support vehicle driver, chief transport official, water and snack supplier, and general bon vivant and Ed the chief financial and administrative officer). Eight cyclists (some occasionally falling off their bikes and some more commonly pushing their bikes up hardscrabble hills) followed the jeep trail made by ranchers and uranium miners.







So the joy was to be in this landscape with friends who cared about each other's welfare and who experienced this wide space in his or her own way. So we rode the final miles to the edge of the Green River, camped for a final night at Potato Bottom (oh, the ice on the tent on the cold, damp last morning), and rode (or pushed) up 1,000 feet of switchbacks back to the top of the mesa.



We shared the long car ride back to Loveland and Fort Collins, bikes strapped to the back of our SUVs, our heads filled with memories of these vast lands and the beginnings of plans for our return.

Back porch stories

The back porch of Oak House at Valley View is a platform for hanging out...watching clouds across the valley, reading one of the books from home, playing music, drinking a cup of tea on a cold afternoon. You meet people hanging out. You hear their stories. The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.

A long-haired man in his early 60s saying that the first time he came to Valley View was in 1957 when he was 10 years old. He came up riding on a horse with his Dad from the valley below. The area around the hot springs was deserted. He most distinctly remembers that his new Levis chaffed his legs badly against the horse's back on their return to the valley floor. His parents had first come here on their honeymoon in 1935. He remembers his Dad playing the piano at the small ranch where they stayed. The ranch couple dancing to his music.



The back porch, the hot springs' pools are places of stories from folks coming here for decades and folks coming for the first time. The land itself holds stories. The canyons are filled with crude, stone artifacts made the small hunting and gathering bands that first sought game and plants in the valley wetlands. The Orient Land mine is over the next ridge, its gaping mouth the result of a huge explosion in 1893 in which a dozen miners died. The stones and the mine tell silent stories. The couples in the hot pools speak of more current stories: of their comings and goings, their wounds and their healings, the beginning and the end of relationships, their memories and their imaginations.

And from the back porch, the clouds tell their stories...across the valley, evening storms compete with the dying sun in a thunderous struggle of light and darkness. Ben builds a bonfire by the large pool up the creek. Folks gather to soak under the stars. And to tell old stories and create new ones while the earth and sky continue to create their own, long narratives.

Valley View

The Oak House at Valley View had only one dorm bed available last night, so I took it. The cabins and private rooms were all taken...somewhat surprising this late in the fall. Arriving in the late afternoon, I did some hiking, a bit of mountain biking, but mostly soaked in the hot tub and baked in the sauna. Had a simple meal, read, went to bed early. Got up around five...one of the dorm mates snored insistently.

This part of the earth curved toward the sun around 7:00. I was having coffee and doing some e-mail as the dark night lifted. I got on my bike, took my camera, and rode up the trail to the old Orient mine. The clouds formed and reformed in horizontal lines along the San Luis Valley floor. They rose high over the far San Juan mountains. Toward Poncha Pass in the north the clouds dipped low and filled the valley. In the south, the clouds stayed above the fields and wetlands...perhaps a stronger wind was blowing from the southwest. The sun rose higher striking the upper rims of the clouds and slowly, as the earth rotated, sunlight filtered lower to the valley floor.



The wind came up; my hands got very cold. I got on the bike and rode down for another cup of coffee. Early morning at Valley View and the Orient Land Trust.

New landscapes

So the marmot was wondering why we were there...on top of Flattop Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park referred to by us locals as simply "the park." Well actually Patrick, my neighbor and friend, and I had climbed the trail to explore the landscape before winter closed in with its deep snows. Patrick had been here before and had taken refuge in the rock pile that is home to this marmot. So we had kind of come back for a visit.



Flattop rises about 12,000 feet, 3,000 more than the lakes which lie at its base to the east. The trail up is somewhat steep, rising through the alpine forest and then through the transitional stunted growth of small, wind blasted trees to the world above treeline. This world is an alpine tundra...tundra, a word from the Sami language of the peoples living in the north of Norway, Sweden, Russia. It means "wide, treeless plain" and is found where cold temperatures, wind and short growing seasons limit plant growth.



The morning was bright sunshine...no wind. The silence on top, only the chirping of marmots and pikas, occasional whirl of helicopter blades flying materials into the park on a maintenance project, and our own spoken words. We were partly on a search for the blinds and game runs that the Utes built to capture the game that still wander up to the tundra in summer, following the ripening short grasses. But it started to rain and, then, hail. We strode through two inches of hail on the trail on the long way down...arriving soaked and cold at the car. But, then, that's high country weather in mid-September: some sun, some rain, some hail. The snow not far behind.

And so, at the end of a journey....

Since coming back home, I have been trying to find a picture or set of pictures that summarize our trip. And, of course, the experience is just too diverse for that. And yet, there are a few.



Having breakfast at Erik and Helga's farm house in Nørre Alslev, a kommune in Falster, one of Denmark's major islands in the south of that country. Staying with cousins...the trip was about our families in Norge and Danmark...and about art...and about food.






And it was about history and landscapes...varied landscapes but usually with the ocean...these are maritime societies with strong farming, business and energy economies.



And it is a journey, a moving through space and time and culture, navigating places and relationships, crossing the currents of oceans and lands.

But mainly, like all journeys, it was about us...finding more about the world, our past and our present, and our place in it.