North Bergen

So the home town...about half way between Washington and Providence...high on the Palisade Cliffs overlooking the Hudson River and "the city"...as we refer to Manhattan.  The cliffs rise some 300 feet over the river front.  They were a playground, a place for exploration and "dares," such as swinging from a rope tied to bridge girders...swinging some 50 feet over open space.  In quieter moments, the cliffs were a place to find a convenient rock ledge or cave and sit there reading a book, looking up from time to time to note the ship traffic on the river.  As kids, the cliffs were a big part of our "open space."


I had gotten the train into "the city" in the morning, then caught the bus (through the Lincoln Tunnel and along Blvd. East).    It had been decades since I'd ridden that bus route and, somewhat embarrassed, had to ask how you request a stop.  The cord that passengers used to pull to ring a buzzer for the stop was missing.  A woman in the seat in front pointed to a small, red button over each row of seats.  I got off at 74th Street and walked up the hill.  According to Wikipedia, North Bergen, after San Francisco, is the "hilliest" municipality in the United States. 

Robert Fulton Elementary School

101 74th Street North Bergen NJ

So there they all still are:  my old apartment house (101 74th Street, apartment 1A), Robert Fulton Elementary School....two blocks further up the hill..., Woodcliff Community Church....further up the hill and two blocks over on 77th Street...the buildings and institutions that structured my early years. But what came into my mind as I walked (a beautiful fall day) were the names of old neighbors, family friends, and kids with whom I went to Robert Fulton.  Agnes Wright who had worked with my mother as a secretary in New York before my mother had to leave since she had gotten married...couldn't be married and take the bus every day into "the city."  Agnes had remained single.  Astrid Johnson...a Norwegian woman who spoke Norsk with my parents after a few highballs.  June Shanloogian (we got caught by a policeman picking flowers in the park when we were about seven...."How would you like someone to take off YOUR head."  Ted Doll....his father was Mayor; his Mom taught our cub scout troop.  Never made it to boy scouts. 

But it was not memory that had me catch the 166.  Or was it?  I had come to have lunch with some of my kindergarten friends...friends whose old apartments, like mine, still hold multitudes.  Well some of us actually had single-family houses...funny but I never sensed any class difference in this.  We were all part of the same neighborhood, often the same "block."  When we were kids, the bar on 75th Street was called the Colonnade, an Irish pub.  Now it was The Havana Mambo.  A happening spot.

I am not certain that we (Sheila, Nancy (who still lives off 78th Street), and Bernadine) added to that sense of "happening"....but we were loud in our laughter.  Sheila is going to host a 50th Class Reunion (of our high school not the kindergarten class....that would make it the 62nd Class Reunion) in June.  We met to "plan" the occasion but really we just shared our lives to date...what we'd been doing, what we'd come to believe, and who knew what about our classmates. 

So the quick trip to North Bergen was about the present and the future, as much as it was about the past.  The neighborhood is vibrant, as it was when we were young.  And, somehow, we are still vibrant along with it. 

Portraits

When you go to the National Portrait Gallery, you meet all these people.  People you might have known before.  Like Pocahontas.  Painted 1616 from an engraving.  But there she is.  You wanna say "hi" or something, but you feel she has other things to think about.

And then, around the corner, John Singleton Copley, the early American painter who made this portrait of himself.  Somehow I imagine him holding a cell phone, stretching out his arm, snapping a photo, and sending it up to Facebook with a note "Decided to move to England...wish me luck."  Which, of course, he had for a while.  I wonder "Who does his hair?"

And, then, not really a portrait (don't know how it fits into this gallery) but a detail of a painting by Ryder of Jonah, about to be swallowed by the whale.   Now he looks scared....   So it's not just all portraits...it's people in all kinds of situations. 

And, then, around another corner, new acquisitions.  Bill and Melinda.  Looking good.  No worries about whales here. 

Still the best portraits are of our own.  Tom, home after a long day at the magistrate's judicial offices, a good-bye luncheon for one of his colleagues, a happy hour for an intern leaving next week, interviews with new intern applicants, telephone calls from clients, an evening visit from Rob McDowell, an old family friend, and, finally, just a moment to sink back into the couch before packing for a flight tomorrow....well, all portraits of people at a time in their lives.  And all of them in my life too. 

Meeting in the gallery

Fine, well bred museums abound in Washington.  Aside from being with family and friends, one of my joys in visiting the city is to wander rooms and galleries filled with painting, sculpture, video projections and other works that stimulate the imagination.  A favorite so far on this trip is a portrait of Gertrude Stein made out of spindles of colored thread hung on long chains suspended from the ceiling.  Gertrude would have loved it.

Besides the interplay of light and shadow in long corridors, I love the interaction of museum-goers with marble figures and sculpture...the way the present and the past juxtapose one another.  People moving among these immovable objects and, in some way, communicating with them.  Communicating with the figures itself.  "Who were these people?"  "Who are these people?"  An idealized beauty alongside our ordinary beauty. 

And is the message between these marble figures and ourselves?   It could be a message of beauty alone, of harmony or, equally, of disquiet and protest, of love or violence.  This communication is what touches us, causes a reaction, brings us toward the object or away from it.  Perhaps it is a form of communication not that far off from the early cave paintings....leading us to reflect on something quite beyond ourselves.

But even in these galleries and rooms, we are drawn back to our daily lives....a cafe set up amidst the elegant figures attunes us more to the possibility of food than of a deeper communion.  And that is part of the fun of these museums....the way the timeless interacts with the present moment.

traveling

Snow fell in the "high country."   Most of the ski resorts had not opened but with cross country skis all you have to do is park your car and head out onto a trail.  I skied at Berthoud Pass and at Cameron Pass...snow still being spotty lower down in the Middle Park valley.  At Cameron, I took the short trail up to Zimmerman Lake, skiing along its shoreline, looking up from time to time at the Medicine Bow Mountains in the not-too-far-away distance.

Yesterday I arrived in Washington at Dulles Airport...far from the wide spaces of Zimmerman Lake into a different scene.  But this man-made landscape was also filled with light, an interior illumination designed to move people between airline planes, between arrivals and departures, between countries and continents.  On the lake, I had to move myself though a "natural" space (though the lake is actually a man-made reservoir)...at Dulles, I was moved by trains, escalators, moving sidewalks. 


Both of these were experiences with space, with movement, both of them visually stimulating, both of them liberateing in a sense.  But vastly different in how my individual energy at the lake was not channeled to become part of a vast, collective energy system structured by architects and engineers hired by governments.  And how the private experience at the lake (no one else was on the trail that day) became a social experience shared by thousands of fellow travelers.  Interesting how we can move between these zones, these geographies and somehow remain the same.  Or do we? 

The weekend

Drove up to Salida for the weekend with Charlotte and our long-time friends Jane and David.  We stayed at the house by the river, across from the old mining industry mill, down the street from art, coffee, and consignment shops, and close by the Joyful Journey Hot Springs (to the south over Poncha Pass) and Mt. Princeton (to the north up Chalk Canyon). 

 
I was doing some stretching by the hot spring pools and Charlotte asked if I were happy.  "Well," I said, "I guess I am." 

We soaked at the hot springs, we hiked (a bit), we ate (a lot), but mostly we hung out...reading the morning papers, watching a few movies, mostly just being with one another.  Like most mammals, I guess, enjoying the sense of one another's company...our humor as well as aches and pains.  In short, a weekend in the mountains...one of those quiet joys you get by living in Colorado. 

First snø

 

Woke up this week to the first snows of the fall...heavy, wet snow.  About eight inches...lots of fallen tree limbs since many leaves were still on their respective branches.  The branches could not support the weight.

 

But the following morning, the snow had dried out with the evening freeze.  My cross-country skis got their first tour through the park, around the pond, and out into the broad lawns all covered with eight inches of white powder.  A mist had formed above the park land....the morning air heated by the rising sun and the frozen ground created a fog through which the trees could be barely seen.  

 

And, then, it was over.  The sun rose still higher.  The mist burned off.  The snow softened and  the snow began to melt.  Wet snow began to adhere to my skis.  Just a few hours on a silent morning....a good start to winter.  

 

Bob's cabin

Their cabin is located on the slopes of Long's peak, up a steep drive and up further a steep hike.  The cabin was originally built about 100 years ago...now it has electricity and even a telephone, but no running water, no bath, no heat except for an Franklin stove insert into the massive fireplace.  Bob and Roz have had it in their family since the 1930s. 

We came up to cut down some trees, logpoles infected with pine beetle.  The beetles moved into this area some years before, killing huge swaths of trees.  Better to take the trees down than to wait for them to fall....better to clear out the underbrush and slash than have them feed a forest fire.  Bob uses a new chainsaw, a present from one of his sons, to see how well it works.  Better for us to come up to the cabin, get in a day's of work, move around in the forest, collect brush, than to lift dumbbells in the gym in town.   We add a few pieces of firewood to the rows he has built up over the past months. 

Afterwards we sit on the porch, talk, drink beer.  I take small breaks from the conversation to examine the plants that at 9,500 feet have established themselves in the silver plume granite that forms the bedrock of these plant, animal and human communities.  A friend, Patrick, has gotten me interested in the way that these "natural" configurations provide inspiration for planting on my rock gardens at home.  I am most impressed by the lichen and grasses which begin the initial breakdown of these boulders into small packets of soil.

But then looking up from these small packets of life, I see the tall shafts of Long's Peak some 5,000 feet above us...turning color as the daylight shifts.  It's all a question of scale, I guess, the forming of tiny botanical life forms on the boulders, the uplifting of 1.2 billion year old granite from miles under the earth, the cabin in the woods providing families with shelter and a "home."

But we get a sense of these scales of time and elements from the perspective of our own brief existence.  for me, these tree cutting days, this examination of plants and mountain peaks, this sitting on the porch are reflections of my membership in the human community, in a web of friendships and relations of which Bob provides the access point.  There is a kind of wholeness in such days...linkages to rock, plants, trees, and other people...all part of a web of life, our lives. 

Clouds

Clouds form an infinite variety of shape and color to the west as the sun settles beyond the Cochetopa Hills.  A small group stands on the back porch of Oak House watching the slow transformations, the unfolding of patterns.  Some, like me, have cameras...catching the moments, trying to somehow freeze and possess the spectacle.  Others only watch..someone has forgotten her camera...a good thing she says since she must now concentrate on each movement...like listening to a symphony instead of taking pictures of the orchestra.

 Sometimes, though, you have to pull back and take in more of the sky, more of the land.  The San Luis Valley here is about 30 miles across from the western foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountais to the early eastern slopes of the San Juans.  The sagging boards of the back porch are attached to those eastern foothills...we think of ourselves as being high above the valley floor but behind us the snow covered peaks rise another 6,000 feet.  Keeping perspective is not easy.

 And then the final drama...the final rays of the sun spread red, gold across the sky.  Behind us these bands of color reflect off the high mountain snows, hence the name for the range as "the blood of Christ."  Ahhh...those early Spanish explorers were so tormented.  And how, in turn, they tormented the those who had been living here prior.  Yet the earth continues its daily spin...spinning the cloud formations as it turns.  Turning us on the back porch away from the sun...moving us into the darkness of the night sky.

Coal Camp

Sugarite Canyon State Park is located just east of Raton Pass where Colorado crosses into New Mexico.  The park holds the source of Raton's water supply and the ruins of a coal mining camp.  The camp was founded around 1894 and continued to operate until 1941.  The camp produced coal for domestic use.



The camp was actually a substantial community, housing up to 1,000 people, with school, post-office, baseball teams, household gardens, and the company store.  Miners were immigrants from Italy, the Balkans, Japan...and local Hispano families.  Their houses were substantial...impressive ruins of house foundations neatly line the hillsides.  To the east of the canyon, small farms and ranches supplied food stuffs, meat and other produce to the mining families. It was hard, dangerous work...to cut down on the coal dust, a cause of explosions, water was sprayed in the mine.  The water was cold...men often worked while standing in cold water up to their knees...at least five were killed during the time the mine operated...those who got injured simply lost their jobs, but the company had a doctor on site. 



It helps to be reminded of how difficult life has been for so many people.

Of course part of the reasons for closure may also have been that the coal was marked under the Swastika brand....a brand name most unfortunate in a country about to go to war with Hitler.  "High in heat, low in ash" just didn't cut it.  Where were the advertising mad men when we needed them? 

Denver

Catching a 6:00 am flight from Dullas to Denver, giving me a morning in the city before heading to Santa Fe, checking in with a friend, having an early lunch at my favorite Ethiopian restaurant on Colfax...  Ahh, the air is dry.  The sun shines.  I feel like I am back in "my" part of the country. 

Washington again....

We took the train from Providence to Washington to see Tom, Halie, Robin...more offspring.  A quick side-trip to Annapolis to check in with family including a musical interlude with Tony. 

I found a few afternoon hours to take one of the bike-share cycles down to the Washington Mall to visit the museums...but which one?  Ahhh...the range of artistic experience in the capital's museums....endless.  More endless than the need to find shade from the summer's high heat and humidity.

So just a short time to check out the Hirshorn...an exhibit on "time and space" featuring wall-size video screens of an elephant moving slowly in a bare museum gallery...and then part of the permanent collection. 


 

 

 

Getting reacquainted with paintings viewed in art books and, many decades ago, in art history courses.  Edward Hopper, Joan Miro...attempts to express life, movement, on canvas. 

Freya

Freya Marie Werge Whitehead, last names sometimes combined as Wergehead, was born to my daughter Ingrid August 11 in Rhode Island.   What more to say.  Another leaf, then twig, then branch on the tree of life.  Beautiful, amazing, "best baby in the whole world" according to the mother. 

Sharing her first week.  Observing that over the course of three-four days her learning that if she opened her eyes and...here's the hard part...kept them open, she could see things.  And, also, that she could focus...though as I left she would really only focus when she heard her mother, saw her, smelled her milk.  And as I and Charlotte would hold her for times, I realized just how many songs I knew...melodies for Freya as the different parts of her brain began making those initial connections.  So sweet. 

 

 

We will be seeing more of Freya in the future. 

Catching Up

Rain fell most of the night but morning has dawned clear.  Am looking over the San Luis Valley from the Orient Land Trust hot springs...writing in the administration building.  I have taken a day and a half to see if I can let my soul catch up with my body. 

I've been moving through space at a fast clip: driving back from San Francisco, going to cousin's wedding in Vail, camping with one grandchild in Colorado, seeing a new grandchild in Rhode Island, visiting sons in Washington, DC, flying back and camping at Raton Pass, going to meetings and the opera in Santa Fe...now on my way home.  But stopping first to collect my thoughts and impressions...taking time to make them part of myself, not just surface experiences that will slough off as I go through the next months. 

I'll just share a few impressions of some of the people and places...not necessarily in chronological order...ruminations as I've rested on the air mattress in my tent, sorting out these days, listing to the sound of rain on roof, keeping warm and dry under my poncho. 

The bay, the ocean

So here I sit in Vail Colorado....trying to have my soul catch up with my life...and thinking of where I left off my last post.  We were heading west...and we made it to Larkspur, a small old hippy town on the San Francisco Bay.  Visiting friends, taking the ferry across the bay to the city, riding some of the best bike trails in the country, feeling the soothing calm of fog which, like snow, slows everything down.  We stayed four days.  Time to get reacquainted with old friendships, urban streets, and water.  So little in Colorado and here, along the bay, water just hangs in the air.  

Windsurfing must just be a variant on the impulse to go fast on the earth's surface...as old, perhaps, as running through tall grass chasing an animal, seeking the meat.  But now just the sense of movement for its own sake. And perhaps the road trip has something in common....moving through space with a purpose, maybe without a purpose.  

Across the Great Basin

The Great Salt Lake Basin....under the blazing sun and into the brilliant white reflection from the salt, folks walk out to test its substance.  I could not stand the burning rays more than a few minutes.   On the way, we had passed at least two cars that had ventured off the highway to test their ability to drive on its surface.  Both were immediately mired in sand beneath of hard baked surface....we gave them a "tsk, tsk" as we sped by on the paved surface. 

But, then, beyond this flat land drive, the western hills emerge.  Nevada that funny antithesis of Mormon Utah...maybe not funny, maybe sad, to judge from the faces of slot machine players early the next morning in Elko.  After getting my own smart phone, I could sympathize easier with those folks who seemed frozen, visually stupified, by the rolling lights, the loud "ching, ching", the constant stimulation, the jarring lights of the uncrowded casinos.  So much to occupy the neural pathways...so many synapses to load at one time...so many ways to lose active consciousness.