Perspectives

 

The mountain landscape through the upper Arkansas Valley is one of open wide vistas and great distance.  It reminds me of the lines of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay...."the world stands out on either side, no wider than the heart is wide....above the world is stretched the sky, no higher than the soul is high."  These land forms force us to extend ourselves beyond the confines of streets, towns, highways, buildings...the structures of daily life.  

But the mountains also contain intimate spaces...below tree line are dense forests, places to lose oneself in micro-climates where sight lines are limited.  Sometimes these are in juxtaposition to one another.  I was cross country skiing on a mountain road, enjoying the silence, watching the tread of my skis as the layer of new snow was thin on the gravel surface.  As I came around a bend, I looked up and saw a high mountain wall above the forest...defining the edge of the canyon where I was skiing.  

  This brusque convergence of small-scale and large-scale perspectives is one of the on-going joys of this mountain valley...narrow canyons leading away from the broad ranches on the valley floor. 

Across the River

Across the river from our winter rental is a large industrial building, falling each year into further disrepair.  The building was an engine maintenance facility for the Denver-Rio Grande Railroad.  Salida was founded by the railroad in 1880,  Shortly thereafter, the town became a central transfer and repair center for trains heading south to New Mexico, north to Leadville, west into the San Juans, and east down the Arkansas River canyon to the mills and smelters of Pueblo. 

The texture of the metal sided building, the clerestory with its broken panes, the contours of the water tanks, the colors as they change with the angle of the sun,  these features have always captured me.  An abstract of form, texture, color and shading.

 

 This remnant of the industrial past is a healthy tonic for those who come to Colorado and look at the mountains and who believe that skiing and ranching is all that happened here.  The energy, the smoke, the rail yard rhythms of metal being beaten, of engines being torn apart and being put back together, of workmen and passengers crossing over tracks to change trains...that sense of energy and capital coming together to move, to move, to move people, freight, minerals across the State, the continent.  All that is missing. 

Salida's library has a book on railroads containing a painting of the scene as it looked in the last century.  A train engine running at a good clip past the repair yard.  But now it is quiet on the opposite shore...the only sound is that of the Arkansas River still flowing down to Pueblo and beyond.  

Bike Ride

 

Salida Bike Trail

Yesterday unfolded slowly so in the afternoon, I went for a ride down new paths, new at least for me.  Out into the fields, alongside new developments  ("Craftsman style from the $290s),  along an old ditch carrying water to the farmstead below.   The path was a straight line...cutting west for the Sawatch Mountains...defining connections between places,  people, birds, mountains...

.

The Canada geese fly by into fields, recycling their turds back into the soil, taking off to swirl in the skies, looking, always looking, for that greener pasture...all now just shades of brown.  

On the way back into town, I study the wind blowing through the passes on the Sangre de Cristo Range south of town.  Watching the clouds that form as the wind whips through its passes and encounters the warmer air on the eastern slopes.  Feeling glad not to be climbing their heights in this wind.  

Then biking back to town...back to my own species...not unlike the birds...walking through the streets...older folks looking out for younger folks...making them fit for the world.  

And, finally, at not quite the end of the bike ride...just before getting milk at Safeway...sitting for a while over a latte...contemplating how "local" coffee can get given its origin in the tropics.  Some say that roasting at this high altitude gives the beans a certain zipp.  Am not sure about that...but when I got back on my bike, it was with a new clarity as I headed around the block for that milk.  

Flash from the Past

 

 

Working on the Yearbook

OK so it's senior year at North Bergen High School.  I'm sitting around with susan, Iris, Carol and Leslie....are we doing layout or just b.s.ing.  Don't quite know but we do seem to be having a good time.  As we are now planning our (hold your breath) 50th class reunion...you have to be really old to go to one of these.  But it is still fun...albeit a bit more long distance.  Am going to scan more pictures...more from the high school and then from the reunion itself, but I will not bore you with more of these.  Will keep this photo and the others in a more personal account.  All of this is quite before I went on the road.