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This past week, I went looking for trails, passes over the mountains, to scout out for snowshoeing or cross country skiing.  Sun and warm temperatures filled the valley...one had to drive or hike into the hills to find snow.  Or ice as in ice fishing...a sport little understood by your blogger.  

And on these hikes and drives come constant reminders of how the economics of natural resources has shaped the human ecology.  Recreation and mountain aesthetics...that is tourism...have come to dominate the upper Arkansas Valley.  Along with ranching and some farming. The growing season for crops is very short.  And the land is dry without irrigation water that is increasingly expensive.  

But ranching and farming, after all, developed in support of the mines, the smelters, the railroads that brought boom prosperity to the land.  The mountains are dotted with the ruins of those mines and some remnants of the industrial past have been preserved...a single smokestack climbs skyward in Salida marking the site of a major ore processing plant that employed hundreds.  It was built to try, unsuccessfully, along with eight others o move into higher air waves the black and toxic pollution that sickened cattle and men.  

  So the landscape is a kind of artifice...with reminders of the past scattered along the roads and the trails that snowmobilers, skiers, hikers use to "enjoy the outdoors."  Old mine buildings form points of interest in the higher snow covered valleys.  

 

and there is always the possibility that some part of the landscape, some fragment of its history, can be bought and made into one's own.  Me?  No.  This landscape can not be owned anymore than time can be owned.  It can only evolve as economy and culture change in ways that are not quite predictable.  After all, what would the future be if it could be known?  

Salida - Saturday night

So it's Saturday night.  I walk downtown along First Street.  It's not just any Saturday night.  It is the 2nd Saturday.  Art walk evening.  A chance to check out the galleries without any obligation to buy.  A community social time...wine and chips at the larger establishments.  .

So people drive downtown...lots of good sized SUVs and new car models...past the sculpture corner at First and C.  Wine and chips along with the pottery and paintings.  

Not everyone is into art.  I pass Denny Lee, 50ish, carrying his kayak up from the river after spending a few hours dodging the small ice flows, testing his skills.  Salida is not just about art.  It's about the outdoor life writ large.

But when the sun goes down...the outdoors recede into the darkness.  The galleries shine with their bright wares.  

I grab a bit to eat at the local hot dog place...60s motif.  Or is it the 50s?  The only other customers are the cartoon characters painted to the walls.  Company enough for a Saturday night on the town.

Small town stories

Stories in small towns are sometimes told or hinted at in storefronts.  Salida storefronts are changing...more galleries, more restaurants, fewer retail stores, fewer barber shops.  Fewer barbers. 

I was doing some swimming at the rec center today...taking a day off from skiing.  I was the only one in the pool...doing laps.  Then noticed a group of people coming in, old and young, but they did not go to the dressing rooms.  They followed on a man in his 50s in a wheelchair who was being pushed to the handicapped changing room across from the warm pool (the warm water comes from a hot spring up the road in Poncha Springs).  One man, however, had cut away from the group and went into the men's changing room  He shortly emerged in a long white robe.

It was a baptism.  The man in the wheelchair came out and several people assisted him in also putting on a white robe and getting onto the lift that helps the disabled in and out of the warm pool.  He was lowered into the water.   The preacher got into the pool.  It was total immersion...right there in the Salida hot springs and pool rec center. 

I spoke later to the preacher in the changing room as he took off his sopping robe.  He said the baptized man had been a soldier, then retired, had served as a deputy sheriff in the county and had suffered a stroke about a year ago.  From which he was supposed to not recover.   But he did in part and had communicated to the preacher that he wanted to be baptized.  But it would not work in the church baptismal pool...he had no way of getting in or out.  So on this sunny day, he and some of his fellow parishioners came to the rec center and lowered him away. 

Just one of the stories in Salida today.  







The

Then and now

I'm working on a project here in Salida...to go through my boxes of slides from the 60s and 70s and convert some to digital form and throw most of them out.  A discovery is that the ones to convert are most often those of people: friends, family, even myself.  And out go the scenery shots except where they add context to what we were doing as people. 

In this case, sitting around on the front porch with my roommates, Lee (left) and Ron (right), in Corvallis, Oregon in the sunshine of the spring of 1970.    I was 26.  After coming home from teaching in Ethiopia (Peace Corps) the previous fall, I was studying agriculture at Oregon State.  And trying to find my bearings back in the States.  

You might notice the cast on Ron's leg.  The result of a ski accident.  At the time, it never occurred to me to go skiing...didn't even register as either a desire or a possibility.   From the photo, it looked as if I was just concentrating on being serious.   Funny now to think I am the one doing the skiing.  And I wonder about Lee and Ron.   Hmmmm....

So perhaps being on the road is just as much about going backward in time as it is going forward in space...and somehow maintain the links between the two. 

Hello again

So you must think I have disappeared into the clouds.  No. 

Just spending time contemplating the snow, the music (Mozart for Morning Meditation), the fall of light on the wood floor, the order of my life.   Woke up this morning in Salida (been here since Feb. 3, 2011).  The city's first real snowfall of the year.  Surprise.  The ground here has been brown and dry...no snow cover to keep the moisture in.  So this was a good sign. 

. 

But I had gotten up at 5:00 am (actually woke up before then but I make myself stay in bed until 5:00 am so that I don't develop a habit to wake up earlier and earlier.   So I waited for sunrise at 7:09 and then till 8:00 to decide if I would go up and shalom at Monarch Mountain or stay here and cross country ski on the other side of the river.  I'd seen people walk their dogs there.   

So after putting together a newsletter for Fort Collins Religious Society of Friends (Feb-Mar ch edition), I donned my ski clothes (finally figuring out how to affix the hood to my ski coat....I could take all this time using the mirror to help me find the right snap and its correctly corresponding holder.   Got my skis from the car.  Cleaned snow off the car (it fell like powder).  Put on the skis and went down the street, crossed through the small park to the bridge, and went down the other side of the river. 

Past this shipwreck of an old industrial building, designed to process limestone from the mine up Route 50...it remains an operating mine, though the processing now takes place in another place and, well, construction here is way, way, way down. 

The buildings have an industrial aesthetic of another time.  A masculine integrity.  Rough, tough.  No way around it.  Move that ore through the grinders and separators.  Don't need nothing fancy.  Just do it.

And that aesthetic is so lost these days when so many people want to believe it is just all about skiing and mountain biking and kayaking and a pristine mountain retreat.  But it is also history.  And the struggle to make a buck from a harsh and unforgiving landscape.

But then I head back to the townhouse...enjoy the play of light off the buildings across the river...enjoy the warm hues of the house, its furnishings, its openness to the hills.

 




So then I do a yoga routine (my own variation of a theme on what muscles and tendons need stretching after a couple of days of skiing.  They all do.  So I vary it depending upon the amount of, well not pain, but the amount of feedback from the particular ones involved. 

A shower.  A bit to eat.  And now spending time with friends.  More stories to follow.