A glimpse of Gambella

I was riding up the interstate to the mountains to go skiing. I turned on the radio. A journalist was conducting an interview in Gambella, Ethiopia. Gambella: a small town on the Baro River in the southwestern lowlands of that country. Nilotic cattle-herding tribes: the Anuak, the Dinka, the Shilluk mixed with highland peoples, the Amhara and the Oromo, to create a distinct medley of colors, sounds, dress and cultures.


Gambella was a two day walk from Dembi Dolo, my town in the late 1960s when I was a Peace Corps volunteer teaching in a secondary school. Friends and I would walk that trail during school vacations to hang out with other volunteers who ran a dormitory for refugees from the civil war that raged in the Sudan even back then. So it all came in a flood of memory as I drove up I-70 to the snow covered mountain ranges of Colorado. We are made up of present and past; memories and the current moment collide in stunning ways.

Up the Colorado

The train to Denver follows the course of the Colorado River, down through canyons too narrow for roads or even hiking trails. Snow was falling lightly as we left Glenwood Springs. The sky cleared as we rode east. Travelers filled the lounge car chairs, carrying on conversation, playing cards, watching the landscape for wildlife (eagles, deer, a few isolated moose). Broken crosses of abandoned telegraph poles lined the sides of the tracks.

I followed the route closely on my Colorado map, noting where another set of tracks split north to the coal mines of Steamboat, where we would enter the long, dark Moffat Tunnel under the Continental Divide, where we roll eastward down the Divide toward the night lights of the Front Range.

Charlotte sewed blocks for a new quilt as we rolled along. Mrs. Child wrote in The American Frugal Housewife (1832): "Little girls often have a great many bits of small cloth, and large remnants of time which they do not know what to do with. I think it better for them to make cradle-quilts for...their baby brothers than to be standing around, wishing for something to do." No idleness even on Amtrak when one can watch the mountains and work at the same time.


It is a long way from the sea. Last month, I went out to the Jersey shore for the funeral of my Aunt Edna, the last survivor of my father's four siblings. I had flown into Philadelphia airport and then headed east, as far as the road would take me, to the beach at Point Pleasant.

A cold, rain soaked wind was blowing across the hard, crusty sand. Waves crashed. And then I saw some surfers, black in their wet suits, moving out into the sea. They moved gracefully into their watery mountains, riding more deftly than our Colorado snow boarders, but with the same verve, the same joy in being challenged by gravity, physics, the forces of the earth. I watched from the beach for a good while, making touch with the edge of the continent. Then I got back into the car to go and join my cousins (and their children and their children's children)at the wake.

Hot Springs

We spent most of the day soaking, swimming, some yoga, around the pool. The morning cold (20 degrees) turns the water to steam...the vapors constantly shifting with the wind, now obscuring other bathers, the surrounding snow covered mountains, now revealing the clear water, the historic bathhouse, the Colorado Hotel on the hill. The hot springs form a perfect tonic for a day of skiing or hiking, but sometimes like today they are just an end in themselves...the warm waters slowing the pace of life to a lingering crawl.

But, then, again you're sharing the water with folks like current drummer for Hall and Oaks (getting ready for a tour of Japan in a week or so) and Claus Obermeyer (the 92 year old founder of the modern ski ware industry). These are, after all, the hot springs just down the valley from Aspen. Hot water, like wine, proves a lubricant for conversation.

Inauguration in the Rockies

We came around a curve coming down the Fraser Valley as Barak Obama was being sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. The locomotive made the bend alongside the river. At 10:00 am, we raised a toast to the new administration. The lounge car, the living room of the Amtrak train, was not that full...being an off, off season. An Afro-American family traveling from New York to Salt Lake, at least one of whom was going to "make a new life." Karin Waltin, a friend, on her way to Portland to be grandmother to a new grandson. Charlotte and I making out way to the Hot Springs for a few days of soaking in the mountains. So what could be more appropriate, if one were not on the mall in Washington, DC, than to celebrate a new political era by riding on the the rails through the valleys and canyons of the Rocky Mountains.