Hjemme at the yurt

This is the seventh (give or take a year) that I've gone up with friends to the yurts in the State Park by Cameron Pass. We pass the days cross country skiing, sledding (some years), chopping wood, melting snow for water, sharing cooking and cleaning. We live simple for a few days. The yurt has two bunk beds, a wood stove, a gas stove (thank goodness)hooked up to propane tanks, a gas light over the stove, a cupboard of games and maps, some dishes, pots and pans, and hooks, lots of hooks, to hang backpacks, ski gear, sacks, and foodstuffs.


The yurt is set at about 9600 feet in the Medicine Bow range of mountains that form the eastern boundary of North Park. The mountains have broad meadows, steep mountain trails, thick forests and open glades for skiing (no snow shoes for us). And they have vistas that open onto other mountains to the west by Steamboat Springs and to the south to the Never Summer Mountains. From the porch, we can watch Mount Richthofen, the Nokhu Crags, the Seven Utes catch the morning sun, the afternoon storms, the rising and falling of cloud banks, the setting sun...the scene changes from minute to minute as we make breakfast or take off our gear from an ski trip.



We all bring books. I'm reading "Out Stealing Horses" (in Norwegian "Ut og stjele hester"). "Hjemme", by the way, means "at home" in Norwegian...for some reasons I don't quite understand, I feel at home at the yurt, each year as I unlatch the front door, take off my skis and begin to fill the large bucket with snow for melting, it seems as if I have arrived back at the place I come from.

Library of Congress

I walked over from Tom's house on Capitol Hill to the Library of Congress, this great 1893 monument to knowledge, to learning, to art and architecture. A relief it is there after eight years of an administration that put so little value on these keys to the human experience. And imagine having this edifice a few blocks away from one's home. Anyone can get a library card. I suspect there was some competition between this building and the public library on 5th Avenue in New York which must have been built around the same time. But, hey, Congress could just pass a law that a copy of every book published in the country had to be sent in. That's one way to stock the shelves. As stunning as the building and its holdings are, more impressive were the hundreds of school children who visit the library, who see the kind of glorious investments governments are capable of making when their heads are on straight (or not as the case may be).


I was reading the other day (yes, reading) that Socrates was strongly opposed to books and to reading. He felt that learning only really occurred when people were in dialogue with one another. And now we are at a time when books are being joined and perhaps jostled by other forms of communication (videos, blogs, an interactive web). Yet these monuments remain to remind us of the essential commonality of all these forms.

Another train, another culture

Came out to Washington to go to a memorial service for Marita. Caught the Acela train from Baltimore airport to Union Station. On the train, a culture shift occurs: white shirts, ties, jackets, business folks, lawyers, expensive cloth...it ain't Colorado (ahhh, the feeling of being a bumpkin). But, then, anyone can buy a small bottle of white wine in the club car to settle down into this new world.

And then one arrives, twenty minutes later, in the heart, well one of the hearts, of the District of Columbia (yes, DC does have a heart). The great hall of Union Station, reminding one of how the rails once tied the country together and still do and may do again.



I met Tom with time to share another glass of wine under the barrel vaults of the great hall, before grabbing a taxi to his place on Capitol Hill. And settling in with Charlotte and Halie for an evening meal.