robwergeontheroad

Bike Ride

2012-02-07T06:35:00.000-08:00

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

2012-02-05T09:16:00.000-08:00


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.

Leadville

2012-01-26T06:31:00.000-08:00

View from Mineral Trail

Through the 19th century slag heaps above Leadville winds the mineral trail...a bike and cross-country ski loop that takes in the town's mining history. Leadville is one of the few towns in Colorado that started out as a mining site (gold, silver, lead) and has continued to be a mining town (molybdenum).. Early morning customers in this coffee shop include mine administrative folks who are heading up to the Climax Mine at Fremont Pass.

Mining Camp in the 1880s


Sellers Mine in Leadville

The town has a sense of authenticity missing from places like Vail with their ersatz European veneer. It is cold here at 10,150 feet; life is hard. Leadville has never really recovered from the closure of Climax Mine in the early 1980s. Winter and summer sports (bike races, ski joring, skiing at nearby Ski Cooper) can only bring in so much.

When I pass through town, sometimes staying a few days, I stay at the local hostel, run by Wild Bill and his wife. They run a "tight ship" and there are always interesting folk sharing the ample space (a woman getting "in condition" for a five month trip to Nepal, an African doing work at Colorado Mountain College, men doing temporary work with road crews)....a cross section.


Road Sign Outside the Hostel

Bric-a- Brac in the hostel living room

In Norwegian, "kosilig" means cozy, warm, friendly. Doubt that term would have applied to this town during its early mining days. Still the hostel, just down the street from the mine ruins, has that feel after a day of exploring the winter snows.

Trees

2012-01-02T17:43:00.000-08:00

So off we went, Kris Turner, a UK visitor living with us for a while, to the Roosevelt National Forest to get a Christmas tree. The Forest Service opens up a section each year for two weekends for folks to come and cut their own tree. The SUVs and four wheel drive vehicles make a long parade on the county roads to get "the perfect tree."


Joining the parade of cars in search of The Tree

We found a small tree (to walk around when we sing "Nu hav jul igjen"...a Danish tune stating that "Now we have Jule again" and a 14 foot one to fill the front of the living room with light and decorations.

The Small Tree


And the Big Tree

So we bring it home on top of the old Ford Explorer, up it goes in the living room, and then out come 35 or more years worth of globes, baubbles, bangles, beads, garlands, figures, dolls, strings of lights, and one angel. They don't all go on, but most of them do.


In the Living Room

So what does it mean, this form of installation art? Once a year, transforming our ordinary living spaces into colorful dens, magical places? A custom inherited from Germanic tribes centuries ago....celebrating the solstice, infusing the dark winter with light, creating a festive scene to counter the cold... Perhaps it is just a way of saying that, whatever the change in season, we are here, we will create our own space, we will find our own joy and peace.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year

Museum day

2012-01-02T17:01:00.000-08:00

On the roof of the Museum of Contemporary Art on 15th Street

My friend, Patrick, and I went down to Denver last week to check out a couple of museums. The Museum of Contemporary Art is a fine piece of architecture with a great roof garden and cafe. It was hosting a series of exhibits on the folk arts of the "counterculture" communes and collectives which sprung up in the late 60s and early 70s throughout the west. These included light shows, psychedelic paintings, costumes, performances, posters, and inflatable sculptures.


Inflatable sculptures from the Ant Farm Collective

Having seen the documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, we spent some time in the museum's gift shop. I came across a book, Huerfano, written by Roberta Price, a memoir of her life on a commune in southern Colorado. A copy of the book was given to me by my son's college roommate some years ago. His parents were part of an adjacent commune...after its dissolution, they stayed on and worked a wholesale nursery. Roberta, now an intellectual property rights lawyer, is coming up to Denver for a panel discussion at the museum in a few weeks.


Cover of Roberta's Memoir

Patrick and I then crossed over downtown and went to the new Clyfford Still museum. Still was an initial founder of the movement of abstract expressionism in New York in the 1950s. His will stipulated that on his death all of the works in his possession would be given to a city that built a museum solely for his paintings. Denver finally won the right to build the museum. It opened a few months back. Four of his paintings, donated by his wife, had been sold in New York for $114 million to support the operations of the museum.

Galleries at the Still Museum

So this clearly is not folk art but rather the rarefied "high" art of billionaire collectors, glossy art magazines, and auction houses. No inflatable sculptures here. The contrast between the two museums' shows was stark. And, yet, both come from the same desire to create, to express one's self or a collective's spirit, and to share that by interacting with an audience. Or at least with two guys on a day trip down from Fort Collins...expanding their sense of the world they live in.

North Bergen

2011-11-26T16:20:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-18T06:39:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-18T05:26:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-16T08:11:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-02T18:13:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-29T20:38:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-11T08:42:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-09T06:23:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-29T10:35:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

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....

2011-08-29T08:12:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-29T07:17:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-29T06:48:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-11T15:49:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-18T11:15:00.000-07:00

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.

Road trip

2011-07-18T10:55:00.000-07:00

Charlotte and I decided to take a road trip west...a time "to bond" given that this fall will see her on the East Coast for extended periods of grandmothering. We called friends in California, planned a short stay, and headed northwest to Wyoming, then west on I-80.

Day one we came to Green River...the place where John Wesley Powell started down river in his 1869 exploration of the Colorado. He rode out from Chicago on the just finished Union Pacific railroad whose tracks still carry the weight of rail cars. In the picture above, a line of cars can be seen just on the far side of the river. The interstate runs parallel to the railroad in most places. Where rivers run, the railroad rides its banks...skirting the deeper canyons where necessary. The railroad follows earlier wagon wheel roads...pioneer wagon trains needed water to survive. Railroad engines needed water to create the steam to pull the passenger and cargo cars. So the trip is one of geography and history...even if automobile drivers, tuned into their Sirius satellite radios fail to notice.

Mosquito Pass or rather Mosquito No Pass

2011-07-07T18:37:00.000-07:00

A made-up day. Got up around 5:30, put on some clothes, walked down to the admin building, made some coffee, sent out a blog, caught up on email.... Car battery dead but OLT is used to that happening all the time so they just rode me up a charger and it turned right over.

Decided to drive to Leadville...on the way, studied the maps, and decided to go home over Mosquito Pass....a 4 wheel drive road that extends from 7th street Leadville to Alma on the road between Breckenridge and Fairplay. I knew the lower part of the Mosquito Pass Road, having used cross country skis to make tracks this past winter. So I headed up and up...

And the vistas opened and then opened again. Amazing.

But that did not happen to the road, however, which was the width of my vehicle in places. A road of rocks...granite boulders...ain't no biking lane here....

It was just around the bend on the photo below that I came to a snow drift whose depth I could not fathom and over which no tires had ever passed. A sense of relief because I was beginning to doubt if the Explorer was really up to it...e.g. what is its history on tipping over on high mountain passes?

On the way back down I stopped at an old mining operation....tailings from mining tunnels dot the lower hillsides. This was The Diamond Mine. Don't know what they found....probably I could find out from histories and old records in the town hall. For now it's just stuff rusting away under a hot sun. Oh well, time to take another road home (hey how about I-70?)

Watching the weather

2011-07-07T05:40:00.000-07:00

Distant thunder rolled down the pass in the late morning. From the back porch, you can see slow dark clouds pulling a narrow line of rain across the valley floor. Like a gigantic gray shower curtain. The clouds come out of the north-west, not a massive storm this...just some drops for a very dry land.

The back porch has a few metal chairs. No pillows. No dynamic other than the sight of clouds, forming and reforming, thunder rolling louder. At first a scent of rain. Then a few drops. Then more. Then hail. Not everyone was watching...some folks caught up in the day to day, e.g., gotta get the tent up...alas a bit too late.

And then it is over...sun comes back. A group of three sisters occupy the front porch...having an annual get together...playing cards, eating cherries, laughing...enjoying being with one another. Enjoying the day. No rain can dampen this party.

2011-07-06T07:51:00.000-07:00

My writings have become more peripatetic of late. I continue to write in my journal, if not daily, every few days to capture the experience and try and make some sense of it.. But to blog requires some combination of photograph and narrative that requires a kind of story line. And these lines seem to become tangled at times.

And which is why, after only having finished my Bike Tour of Colorado (55, 66, 84 and 91 miles…the longest day was my best), I spent a week at home. Then came back up to the mountains. Spent the night at the hostel in Salida…wandered downtown in the early evening…got some ice cream at Safeway. In the morning, I got to the Café Dawn around 6:30. Ordered my latte then went outside again to take a picture on this patriotic 4^th of July…and into the viewfinder walked Steve and Tamara…owners of the house I had rented this past February. Salida...a small town.

Then onto the Orient Land Trust….checked in….set up my tent on a slope open to the wind to cut down on mosquitoes. Spent time in the sauna, the swimming pool, the party pool, the top pool, and the newly accessible Meadow Pool. There is a natural quality to the pools here...the way they are constructed...low rock walls holding the water heated by deep faults in the earth. It is not crowded...this week after the 4th...no fireworks here. Just pools that you can have by yourself...you, the pool, the hillside and the valley beyond.

A long time...a long road

2011-06-30T19:47:00.000-07:00

Riding a bicycle in the Rockies you never know what to expect. The third day of the Bicycle Tour of Colorado meant cycling from the town of Granby to Steamboat...about 84 miles...mostly uphill against a hot headwind. I admit to being unprepared....not keeping hydrated enough, not carrying enough food between the aid stations, not having trained. Still it beat the previous day.

The route the day before was Trail Ridge Road, the legendary highway through Rocky Mountain National Park. The road tops out just above 12,000 feet. On the morning of the ride, the road was closed due to a snow storm. Many of the cyclists, however, hoped it would open later in the day. We all sat around Estes Park High School (where we had camped the night before) and waited for news.

Not me. I had ridden the road three times before in good weather. I knew about hypothermia. So when the aid stations 1 and 2 were open along the route, but the road remained closed, I chose to sag in one of the ride's vans. While sagging can mean "to droop from pressure," in this case it meant "stay alive."

The road finally opened around 10:30 am...in part because the cyclists massed behind the road's closed gates were suffering from the cold. Of course some did not realize that the closed gates were still below tree line and that shortly after they would be exposed to the full blasts of wind, sleet, snow, and rain. So they rode on. As they got above tree line, sleet covered their glasses so that many could not see the road (only the white line going down the middle), hoping they would not collide with cars. Hands froze...they could not feel the grip of the hand brakes. The cold broke through whatever covering they had (one fellow with whom I talked had worn his kayaking gear....he could not stop shaking).

The snow banks along the side of the road were, at times, 15 feet high.

As our van drove by them, I felt something like a voyeur....watching a kind of sport porn that was painful to look at. At the highest aid station, vans and trucks filled with cyclists who could not go any further....and with some who warmed up and then headed on. The rumor was that once you got off the high pass the sun would be shining all the way to Granby. Not true. It pelted rain once the cyclists got below the snow and sleet.

So it was a quiet evening that night at the camp ground surrounding the high school in Granby. The clouds cleared. Most of the cyclists had sagged...taking buses from Estes Park over Berthoud Pass...an alternative route across the continental divide. But they also were quiet after a memorable ride....even for those who deserted their bikes for a seat in a warm vehicle.

But we all had stories to tell. We just talked real quiet.

And the Arts

2011-04-04T20:13:00.000-07:00

But Washington is a city of the arts and formal culture. The Smithsonian with its 19 free museums provides an overwhelming choice of exhibits, objects, interactive environments. So one walks from the outdoor sculpture gardens to an exhibit of Southern Indian bronzes to a show of contemporary native American painting and craft to Chinese cave art from the early Buddhist periods.

All seen within a single space...museums connected by underground passages. I had been reading a history of Venice and, then, in the National Gallery, an exhibit of the Venetian painter, Canaletto and his rivals...paintings of the scenes I had been reading about. The museums bring the world to you....ok, kind of out of context, but a lot closer than the words in a book.

And the art of a more political nature...the memorials to past presidents, historic figures, and wars (lots of memorials to wars and, yet, it is the memory of peace that needs to be preserved). Washington occupies a central space in our political psyche...but also as a repository for part of our aesthetic sensibility.

Of course, other forms of art abound....the brightly painted hotdog stands for example. Art with a more commercial and utilitarian bent. Still one is as valid as the other...and often more fun, if not enlightening.

The Neighborhood

2011-03-23T04:23:00.000-07:00

I've been staying at my son Tom's house on Capitol Hill in Washington...six blocks in back of the Capitol Building, the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court. It is a dense residential neighborhood of row houses, manors, modest frame dwellings...most of which lie within a tightly regulated historic district. The district ensures that almost no change can be made in the exterior of the houses. So each trip around its many blocks reveals its many shapes and forms; each residence having its own unique story and lore.

But besides the structures, the neighborhood ("near""dwelling""place") is the people who live there. The children who ride in wagons for their afternoon "walk" from the local day care center. The woman trying to decide on flowers in Eastern Market, built in 1873 and still housing all range of food vendors. And folks in their houses and flats, sorting out their lives and possessions and networks. The neighborhood is a kind of tapestry of structural and human interactions, played out in a live street museum, set just in back of the major institutions of our federal government. A place for people behind the people's courts and legislative bodies.

Skijoring

2011-03-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

So you put together horses, cowboys, skis, and snow in the middle of the downtown business district and you get Leadville's version of skijoring. "Joring" comes from the Norwegian word for "driving"...and in some parts of Scandinavia, it involves skiers being pulled by dogs over long race tracks.

But in Leadville, a horse and rider pull a skier on a rope to launch him over a series of jumps. The skier has to snag bright rings which are lined up between the jumps by putting his arm through them (which involves switching the hand holding the rope). The skiers, at least those who complete the jumps, are timed. The winner is the skier with the fastest time and the greatest number of rings.

These horses move fast, around 40 miles an hour down the flat center of the course. The jumps and rings are arrayed on each side of this center aisle. The skier must move from side to side, jumping and grabbing rings. Times for running the course average under 20 seconds.

Of course, not every skier makes it to the end of the course still on his skis. Some wipe out entirely after the first jump. But the competition has been going on since 1949 and is one of the central winter festivals of this small mining town (which boasts at being the highest incorporated city in the United States, located at 10,152 feet more or less). And the color of the event is not just the competition itself, but also the spectators who line the main street, the sometimes colorful horses (spraypainted?), and the setting in this old mining town.

As the competition came to a close, it seemed a fitting end to my month of skiing in the mountains. Tho' at no point did I think it was time to take up myself this "new" sport.

Art from the sidewalk

2011-03-01T15:29:00.000-08:00

Salida has a strong presence in the arts. Evidence is the number of art galleries per capita. Wallmart and other businesses line the strip along Route 50 but the historic core of the town forms the art gallery-coffee shop-yoga studio-bar-restaurant center of urban life.

What is more striking, though, is the integration of folk art and ornamentation into the many small houses that fill out that urban core. Small home owners decorate their houses with ornaments, found objects, small statues and architectural fancies, probably extending out a Victorian tradition that was the rage when in 1880 trains arrived to make the town a commercial and industrial success.

So a walk down the street asks the visitor to move slowly...note the small works of art and artifice that populate the yards and add color and design and life to function. Form does not follow function here...form has an individualistic small-scale artistic sensibility of its own.

Price reduced

2011-02-21T19:16:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-14T20:07:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-11T20:10:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-10T05:49:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-08T14:40:00.000-08:00

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.

Fish Camp

2011-01-25T18:59:00.000-08:00

Charlotte and I drove down to East Texas, the Piney Woods, to stay at a fish camp on Lake Fork. Lake Fork is known as a major bass fishing lake. I spent time talking with a guide who knows the lake…the places where the bass and rich guys from Dallas congregate or where you can find all the croppies you could eat that evening even though 18 people were living in your house. Times are hard. Families have to double up.

Janice, mother of Halie (Tom’s wife), turned 60. From Washington, Halie orchestrated a surprise party for her mother…over 40 (almost all local folk) attended…Halie and Tom flew in from DC…Halie’s brother Drew and wife Stephanie from Chicago, Roger's brother Willey was up from Houston with a huge amount of fresh seafood…and we drove down. Held at the Lake Fork Marina. We held the party in the upper balcony of the maria’s dining room and dance floor. Karioke (like really, really good singers) pros sang country songs; people showed their pleasure by getting up and dancing (the two step).

And East Texas, well, kind of hard to figure out. Flat…piney woods… it has its own culture…like the more well-known Cajun culture of southern Louisian. In some ways, the piney woods represents an extension of that Lousiana west-ward movement. It is a place of small houses, lots of trailers, and, then, every once in a while, you see a castle, a huge private residence, down a long, dirt driveway. But mostly it is low-lying pine scrub land...good for some patch farming...and lakes for fishing.

Like popular Cajun culture, much of life is enjoyed in the company of food. Mostly fried. Breaded oysters…OMG…just the right amount of spice to make you reach for a glass of brew… Breaded fish. Breaded mushrooms. Breaded bread. All good. Lots of peppers on the side (grilled peppers). Red skinned potatoes, yellow corn on the cob, small onions. And cooking. Timing is critical in the art of the boil…timing when you put the potatoes, the shrimp, the onions into the boil. And sensing when it all is ready. And having the tools to make it all come together.

On the way home, back onto 287 that stretches from Port Arthur, Texas to some obscure town in Montana, the landscape is elemental. As you head north toward Oklahoma, though, the flat plains (pancakes) give way to canyonlands where seasonal streams have cut deep canyons. Small low hills appear…scattered at first…sometimes in the form of a spire, sometimes a long tableland…then it breaks up even further. Underneath lies one of the earth’s largest fields of natural gas …first exploited in 1917.

So the landscape exists on parallel lines…the scape that we see and then the one underneath where the geologists map out hidden ridges and pools. Then a long patch of dry (but not quite desert) lands before hitting I-70, 79, 52,I-25 and the more populated higher plains. Small low hills appear…scattered at first…sometimes in the form of a spire, sometimes a long tableland…then it breaks up even further. Underneath lies one of the earth’s largest fields of natural gas …first exploited in 1917. So the landscape exists on parallel lines…the scape that we see and then the one underneath where the geologists map out hidden ridges and pools.

And then 2149 miles later, home.

Jul

2011-01-14T20:26:00.000-08:00

Ok. I have decided to write again after way-too-long away. About Jule. Because I used to be into Christmas, this one day spiritual focus on birth (of all of us, of god, of God, or all in the past) that took place At One Moment In Time, after which all time was changed. You know. And, then, we get all this stuff. Amazing amount of stuff. Made mostly in China. I mean, has anyone noticed the mixed message.

But Yule (or Jul in Norwegian, the pronunciation is the same) is a pre-Christian concept. Jul is the period of celebration that the Germanic peoples held when the sun began to return north...having reached the furthest place away...but it was a somewhat unbounded period. A Danish Jule song goes: "Now we have Jul again...Jul goes until Easter." But the second verse states: "Not true. First comes the fast." (meaning Lent). So there is this ethic ambivalence. During the 13th and 14th centuries, the Church (ruled from Rome by the Pope) tried to change the name of the holiday from Jul to "Kristmaas" or something like that. But it never took.

So Jul is an extended season of being with family and friends...it goes on and on as long as the relationships last. People come, people go, people remain. Our cousin, Sally, came for a few days before joining her daughter Erica's fiance's family in Denver. Sally lightens our life.

We held a few parties...our friends from the Key of Joy (Mason and Lauren) did their jazz for an early audience. Then the DJ arrived and a Latin Dance Party emerged and took over space. Dancers formed a circle...then took turns letting their stuff show in the middle. And (what was his name?) in his turn, he came to the center, estimated the radius of the encircling dancers, jumped in the air, and did a complete back flip. Twice. No picture. It was that kind of party.

But the season is also the time to go to the mountains, to find snow to play in, to watch that incredible interplay of snow and sun that form Colorado's winter. So there is celebration out of doors also...I mean, after all, it is the sun that is returning north. It takes a while to get back. And a good part of that while is Jul. Enjoy.

boston - end of east coast swing

2010-11-30T15:47:00.000-08:00

So at the end, we came up to Boston...another train, another bus, another shuttle to the hotel. In the morning we went to the JFK Library. IM Pei designed the building set on the waterfront of Boston Bay...on University of Massachusetts landfill...across from the center of the city. Charlotte went through the exhibits while I spent time in the atrium, under the US flag, reading the day's New York Times. And watching visitors as they came from the museum areas (JFK's inauguration in 1960, the Cuban missile crisis, the civil rights movement...remember integrating the University of Alabama?..."segregation now, segregation forever" George Wallace said, and his death), they would come into this high atrium, overlooking the bay and the city. And pause and reflect...under the huge flag hanging from the roof.

In the afternoon, we went to the Institute of Contemporary Art, also on the bay, also overlooking the city center, also mixing inspiration with reflection. In this case, Mark Bradford, an LA artist working with paper, old billboard materials, found objects to create vast "maps" and patterns. Some of his work can be found at: http://www.pbs.org/art21/slideshow/?artist=172 Like the JFK Library, the ICA combines the interior exploring our human experience and the exterior exploring our relation to the world, the water, the larger city.

This has been a good swing east. Tomorrow we fly west, far from the sea, close to the mountains.

The Cape

2010-11-29T17:26:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, we drove over to the Quaker Meeting House in East Sandwich. The current Meeting House was built in 1810 still with separate entrances and sides for men and women. The Meeting, however, was established in 1657...it's the oldest continuing Quaker meeting in North America. Ten members gathered around the wood burning stove during worship...the previous Sunday was a "work day" in which they came to chop wood for the winter services.

So while we think of Thanksgiving and Pilgrims at Plymouth...just up the road from East Sandwich...the traditions are found all over the landscape.

After Meeting, we drove back to Sandwich to a Catholic church (built in the 19th century) and now converted into a bistro with Sunday brunch....another way of preserving tradition...using the soft light coming through stained glass...to fall on glasses of mimosas and plates of brunch fare. Cheers.

Thanksgiving

2010-11-28T14:12:00.000-08:00

So Thanksgiving...my favorite holiday...it's about being with others, making food (a new generation of "foodies" to make the fixings), eating food, drinking drink, reinforcing and reinventing our ties to one another. No presents to open...just time to spend with one another.

To eat together and, then, to recover together. Did I mention drinking together?

And the requisite family photo...my how we have grown.

Cape Cod

2010-11-28T13:49:00.000-08:00

We swung back north on the train to Providence and, then, by car to Cape Cod...a kind of separate state of geography and mind. A canal linking the bay with the Atlantic cuts the Cape off from the mainland...the canal is crossed by three bridges, the most spectacular of which is for trains (the mid-section lowers to the land-based tracks when needed).

I was in a lobster market in one of the small towns along the canal. The owner was talking to a friend, one of the customers who lined up to get fresh seafood, and asked, "So where're you going for Thanksgiving."
"We'll be home." And later added, "We're going to Falmouth" (a small adjoining town).
"I thought you said you were going to be home."
"Well, I'm not leaving the Cape." That is, not going to cross the canal.

The lobster mart was located one of the Cape's "working" harbors, filled not with sailboats and yachts, but with fishing boats with nets, pulleys, and gear for bringing "home" food from the sea. The towns along the canal are working towns with year-round residents, not like the beach houses which seemed at this time of year to be empty of their owners and renters.

A quiet time for celebrations of family ties.

robwergeontheroad: Philadelphia

2010-11-24T16:50:00.000-08:00

http://www.philamuseum.org/

Philadelphia

2010-11-24T16:39:00.000-08:00

Heading south, we rode the train to Philadelphia to visit friends, Brad and Pat, in their town house just across the river from Central City. I walked across the bridge early in the morning, capturing a painter, his easel and brushes, and his bike...he intent on capturing the boat houses along the Schuylkill. "to capture"...hmmm...is that why we take pictures...to capture what can not really be captured? to make permanent what is impermanent?

On the other side of the river are Philadelphia's great monuments...including the Museum of Art at the end of a long boulevard. The boulevard was full on Saturday morning with runners about to start an 8 K race. The lights of the police cars blocking the road and the roar of the loudspeakers sent the pack off with a great start. I did not stick around to see who came in first...clearly it was a morning for outdoor exercise.

In the afternoon, I went back to the museum. I love the interaction of art, architecture and people. The way in which they dissect or just glance at the paintings, pinned to the walls, or sculptures, placed in the center of halls is a kind of discourse on reality. So what does the artist mean? And why is it in this room? And how do I feel reacting to what is put before me? I guess it is a kind of question, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" "What is the meaning of this painting if no one sees it?" So it is the interaction, the point of contact, taking place in a stage-managed setting (the museum is, after all, the sister of the theatre), that most engages me. On a sunny day in Philadelphia.

And then you step outside...looking the other way down that long boulevard, into the center of the city. The runners have run home. The sky is darkened...traffic has thinned...and it is back across the bridge, back to Brad and Pat's...we are going out for dinner. Lebanese food.

Side Trip to New York

2010-11-23T14:07:00.000-08:00

I took a day off from staying with family in Connecticut and took the commuter train down to Manhattan. My initial objective was the renovated Morgan Library on 36th Street. Its three buildings had been recently tied together by an open Scandinavian atrium designed by Renzo Piano, the architect, and Morgan's library and study had been restored to their original brilliance. Alas no photograps allowed, though I did sneak one of the Morgan Dining area (ahhh...the marriage of art and food).

And the treasures Pierpont Morgan had stored for himself and, now, for us. In just one display case in the library were the following:

a letter from Elizabeth I of England to her stepfather telling him, ever so gently, to "buzz off" - 1538
a letter from Galileo declaring his innocence (you know, that the earth moving around the sun was not heresy but that was the way the planets did move) - 1635
first draft of Alexander Pope's "Essary on Man"...."know thyself, presume not God to scan/the proper study of mankind is man" - 1733

and later, Bob Dylan's first draft notes on the words to "Blowin' in the Wind" (acquired long after Morgan's death)...but it shows the library is not a tomb but a living institution.

The most interesting encounter in the library, though, was in Morgan's study...walls draped in heavy red velvet with Renaissance paintings, brilliant in their coloring and composition, all around. I asked the guard what his favorite painting was. He looked around and pointed out one with several saints, including Saint Barbara holding a replica of a tower in her arm (she had been locked in a tower but had become a Christian. She refused to marry a pagan chosen by her father and was murdered by him but the father, in turn, was killed by a lightning bolt accompanied by a loud clap of thunder). The guard explained that she was also identified as Shango, a West African (Yuroba) goddess, who is identified with thunder. And he had studied African religion at times...so he identified with her. His favorite painting. And clearly one of Pierpont Morgan's also.

East Coast Swing

2010-11-20T17:38:00.000-08:00

We are riding the trains on the east coast...visiting friends, families, museums and city streets along the way. Charlotte has figured out that if we buy small bottles of wine before getting on the train we could save large amounts of money...given the inflated prices of Amtrak club cars.

The itinerary is: Boston, Providence, Westport, New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, then back to Providence, Thanksgiving on Cape Cod, Boston....then home.

But some of the best time is on the train...watching those marsh lands and coastal towns speed by. As you can tell by Charlotte's expression.

Providence

2010-11-20T17:24:00.000-08:00

Providence was founded by Roger Williams as a refuge from the intolerant Puritans of Massachusetts. So there is the First Baptist Church founded by him in 1638…right next to the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University…the present church having been built the year before the Revolutionary War began. Sculptures in the university gardens; students studying sort of. Lots of good energy in the damp morning air.

Student energy. Providence is home to Brown University...a sunny day, studying on the garden wall, studying the statue's contours and feeling the sense of late fall.

One of my favorite places around Brown is the Athenaeum, one of the first lending libraries in the colonies, founded in 1753. Its rooms are lined with books, ahhh books…such portals to other worlds, with desks and chairs scattered about for study and reading or just looking at pictures. Or just sitting down and thinking about all the books yet to be read.

Short journey

2010-10-16T05:11:00.000-07:00

Don and I arrived at our campsite in the late afternoon, just after a front of rain and cold temperatures had pushed through from the northwest. A few RV campers had parked nearby but most of the sites were empty...this being a weekday in late September as the weather was turning. As we set up the tent, a brilliant rainbow formed...its northern end settled into the low hills at the edge of the lake. Rays of the setting sun hit the rainbow, lighting the mountains in a brilliant yellow haze.

As the rainbow faded, we set up our tents, unpacked a tablecloth and some food, sat in the tents to get warm, told stories. We half-planned some hikes for the next day. But in the half-light of the next morning, we spent several hours watching a bald eagle hunt for fish in the lake...swooping down from his high perch, sending the ducks squawking in a frenzy, hitting the surface with his talons extended, and heading off....if he took off down the lake flying low we assumed he had made a catch, if he soared easily back on high, we assumed he had missed. Only he know.

'

Joyful Journey

2010-08-25T05:44:00.000-07:00

The San Luis Valley has at least three established hot springs, but I suspect there are others hidden away on private lands here and there. Joyful Journey is located on the valley floor just off Highway 17 south of Villa Grove. Water comes from the spring at 140 degrees Fahrenheit and is cooled by water from other wells. It has three main pools set out in open space on a 500 acre ranch. The pools are oriented east, toward the eroding western slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

In the afternoon, a sudden storm…harbinger of a cold front…rushed down the valley from the north. The rain and hail pitter-pattered and sometimes slammed on the canvas roof of the yurt I had rented. But when the rain (and hail) stopped, the earth was quiet. Large clouds (and probably some snow) remained on the high mountains…looking like vast wooly herds of sheep driven down to the valley pastures by an advancing winter.

Other travelers stopped to the ranch’s small cluster of yurts and teepees. A couple from Boston built a fire; another couple from Denver lit a bowl of “mother’s finest” and passed it around. Then folks went off to soak in the hot pools (open til 11:00). The moon came up from behind the clouds…looking for a moment as if it were caught in the teepee’s lodgepoles. The earth became very quiet.

Creede

2010-08-25T05:29:00.001-07:00

I came down to the San Luis Valley thinking my journey would then move onto Lake City, Silverton. But time unfolded its bedspread here so I stayed. The Orient Land Trust Hot Springs , filled up over the weekend...they keep their human carrying capacity low so that people do not get in the way of the natural surroundings.

So I headed cross the valley floor and up a side canyon to Creede, former mining town….the largest silver mine going when the silver market collapsed in 1893. In ’93, the Federal Government decided to no longer use a silver standard. Washington would no longer buy the metal at a fixed price. Ahhh…government intervention in the market place…my, my…sometimes we forget that the current recession/depression is simply part of a cycle of capitalism. Towns and lives often twist in the wind. When it was going strong, Creede had over 10,000 residents. Today it is just a tad above 350.

Steep cliffs, remnants of an ancient caldera, rise up at the end of Creede’s main street. A 17 mile loop road goes past some of the main mines but the regrowth forests cover many a forgotten entrance to the smaller sites. The road made for a good morning bike ride. The main business in town during the summer, though, is the repertory theatre…they put on a very funny production of the “Putnam County Spelling Bee” on Saturday night. And tourism. And tourists sunbath beneath the cliffs that hold inside dark abandoned tunnels in which so many thousands of miners labored to make other men rich (as long as it lasted).

Valley View

2010-08-21T06:39:00.000-07:00

The dirt road stretches east across the San Luis Valley floor...leads up to the hot springs in the foothills...always gives me pause as I take those final miles. The road reads like a thin introductory chapter in a book read many times over. A collection of short stories, pieced together from people sitting around the pools, from the hiking trails ranging around the old mine and miners' camps, from the formations of the clouds at dawn and at sunset.

Yesterday I hiked past a small memorial to the miners who died in a collapse of a tunnel (tunnel number four)at the Orient Mine, a mile or so from my cabin. The memorial is a recent one, composed of a tin marker and rocks, bones and random small objects left by visitors. In 1893, the roof of the tunnel fell on six workers...their bodies were never found but in 1893 they perhaps did not search as diligently as they might today. Foundations of the miners' homes (it was a company town) line the slopes below the mouth of the mine. The mine continued to operate until the 1930s, sending some 2,000,000 tons of iron ore to Pueblo during its time of operation.

At sunset, Brazilian free tailed bats - as many as 250,000 - fly out of the mine from a vast hole in the side of the mountain. The hole was created by the collapse of another section of tunnel after the mine had been abandoned. The bats mainly feed on insects on the agricultural lands on the valley floor. The bats bring new life to the old, cold, dark tunnels under these warn foothills.

Vigeland

2010-07-17T09:29:00.001-07:00

OK, so I'm back in Fort Collins, sitting in the study by the window, but there are still some things I want to write about from the trip...so here goes.

The Sculpture Park in Oslo designed by Gustav Vigeland is an expression of Norwegian culture. The park covers 80 acres and contains over 212 sculptures in granite and bronze. The theme is the human condition: children, men and women in the full exercise of their lives, moments of joy, struggle, play and anger. Like "having a bad hair day" and "boys, you stop fighting...I'm in charge" and "sometimes I think our relationship is just going round and round."

And the afternoon sun was shining. The park was full of Norwegians taking in as much sun as possible. (On their northward evolutionary path, they gave up their pigment, melanin, to make Vitamin D...their sunbathing is adaptation at work). Vigeland's statues and the people seemed to became one experience...a single expression of life.

At the center of the park is the monolith...granite figures of all generations struggling toward...the sun? truth? understanding? The figures at the very top are small children. Around the base are statues and people who seem, again, to share the same form.

I wandered around the park for some hours. A final statue lies at the far end of the complex...again the struggle and the joy of life. But standing there and looking back toward the city, the monolith aligns itself with one of Oslo's many, generally empty, churches In some Norwegian sense, I think the church steeple and the monolith represent the same phenomenon...one in an older religious sensibility and the other in a modern, secular, humanist form. Vigeland's park is a rhythmic hymn to the human experience. The melody lingers long after you bike back to town.

And, of course, the fjords

2010-07-12T09:42:00.001-07:00

The fjords are really all around...inlets that are long and narrow, broad and flat...shaping the coastline and people's lives. As many as there are mountains in Colorado, there are fjords forming the water's outline on the land of Norway.

In Bergen we took a cruise on a cloudy day...the fjord was lined with houses and cabins near to the city, but these gave way to long stretches of woods and rock with occasional farms.

The spectacular fjords, though, are the ones that stand high above narrow tongues of the sea. Like Preikestolen in the first photo which is a ferry, bus, and hike away from Stavanger. The hike is longer than the guide books imply...up about 340 meters but quite steep in places...and begins at the two lodges that look over a wide lake.

Taking the cliff route leads you up and around to the main rock itself which drops straight down 600 meters (just shy of 2000 feet)into Lysefjorden. Once there, some folks dangle their legs over the edge. Others (like me) lie on their stomachs and just peek over the edge. On a sunny morning like this one, folks sunbath and enjoy the warm granite beneath them.

And me, I was happy to have made such a classic hike and to find some folks on the trail with whom to speak Norwegian and, afterwards, to share a beer.

Harald Hårfagre

2010-07-11T08:19:00.000-07:00

Got up early this morning and, still having time on the 24 hour bike rental, pedaled around and over some of the bridges that link the city of Stavanger with the surrounding headlands, islands, and fjords

Wandered around some of the old port areas where small boats and sailing ships get restored with loving care. I was surprised by the number of such boats in the marinas and along docks and the very few that were out on the water. Being summer, I guess the owners must be on vacation in Morocco.

After breakfast, I got on a ferry to Haugesund, an hour and a half north...fell asleep on the ferry (in spite of the coffee) but did manage to wake up when we docked (though I had slept through landing at the two previous towns). I was awake enough at the beginning of the trip, though, to note the oil platforms

and much older lighthouses.

With backpack firmly strapped on, I managed to find the guest house...in spite of forgetting to bring its address or a map...and then set out on a quest for Harald Harald Hårfagre (Harold the Fairhair or, more literally Harald Hairbeautiful). I'd come to see the monument (one of several) erected in 1872) to mark the place where he is presumed to be buried. He died of a plague about 933 and is credited with being the first chieftain to unite a good part of Norway...probably to control the western waterways along which trade and Viking raiders moved. In the 1200s, Snorre Sturlasson wrote this down based on his visit to this site and to the reigning kings as part of his Icelandic saga. (Snorri himself was murdered in a blood feud back in Iceland...but that is another story).

The monument was erected as part of an effort to promote Norwegian nationalism at a time when it was ruled by the Swedish King. But the site is also archeologically significant not only as a burial site (the Norsk term was "hauglagt" or laid in a mound/hill...the chieftains were buried in mounds found all over coastal Norway) but also for a cross and church built around the time of his death.

The cross had broken apart in the mid 1800s and was put back together with iron rings in 1869. It is believed that it was erected around 950 to honor the death of Harald's son, Eric Bloodaxe (don't ask how he got the name).

But the area around the monument has modern uses: sheep grazing,a campground filled mostly with visitors from Great Britain, and neat lines of snug Norwegian homes.

We sometimes think of the Vikings only as "raiders" but once they got religion (which was used by the "Christian" chiefs to control the "pagan" chiefs), they got it good. Numerous ruins of churches and monasteries are found on these rocky shores. Times do change...just witness those oil platforms out on the sea.

In the harbour

2010-07-11T00:36:00.000-07:00

The view from my hotel room in Stavanger looks out directly on a small "visitors" harbor, the Skagen. The city has history (first cathedral in Norway from 1125), active night life, and a busy harbor filled with ferries and ships supplying the North Sea oil wells which have brought such great wealth to this country. Norway is the third largest oil exporter in the world. It also has the highest cost for a gallon of gas, currently $7.75 per gallon. They want to keep people using public transport.

But I was not so interested in the economics as the harbor life. Yesterday was sunny and warm. The wharf restaurants and bars were full. Drinking and eating continued long into the evening. And the evening lasts all night long as midnight comes and goes with the sky still bright.

And then there were activities like trying to roll yourself around in the water in an airfilled plastic bubble.

Or get married.

Janteloven or Jante's Law

2010-07-10T09:39:00.000-07:00

After I saw this painting "jeg" in Trondheim(the word means "I" in English), it occurred to me that in English, "I" is always capitalized. Even in the middle of a sentence. That is not the same in other languages where "i" is just another word. Like in Norwegian.

But in Norway "i" is not as important as "I" is in English. And this relates to what is sometimes referred to as Janteloven or Jante's Law...that is a law which governs social behavior. Since my son Tom has recently graduated from a law school, this may be of particular importance.

While Janteloven has ten principles, I shall mention only a few. They are written in Danish but since Denmark ruled Norway for so many centuries and since the current king comes from a Danish family, they also apply here.

1 - Du skal ikke tro, du er noget.
You shall not believe that you are somebody.

2 - Du skal ikke bilde dig ind, at du er bedre end os.
You shall not imagine that you are any better than us.

3 - Du skal ikke tro, at du duer til noget.
You shall not believe that you are good at anything.

4 - Du skal ikke tro, at du kan lære os noget!
You shall not believe that you can teach us anything!

Now as the painting "jeg" proposes, there is an anti-Jante's law movement...fueled perhaps by American consumerism as much as anything. And these principles...some which if you live in the United States, you might have heard in your kindergarten class or in your psychologist's office as an adult.

1 - Du er enestående.
You are exceptional.

2 - Du duer til noget.
You are good at something.

3 - Der er nogen der er glad i dig.
There are someone who love you.

4 - Du har store ubrugte resurser.
You've got a bundle of unused resources.

So now what does that look like. Well I have two pictures from my trip to contrast. Which one is Janteloven and which is anti-Janteloven?

Dear Reader, I will let you decide. Of course societies are composed of both the law and the anti-law, but, in fact, one does predominate. I just wonder if we stopped capitalizing "i" in English, what would happen?

Reunion

2010-07-09T11:59:00.000-07:00

We came to Norway this year principally for a family reunion of my father's mother's...in Norwegian "farmors"...family. About 115 people from Norway, Mexico and the United States came We were all descendants of two brothers: Johan Edvard Werge and Thomas Werge. They were both sea captains in the last part of the 19th century. They were born, and their children were born, in the small village of Statehlle on a bay on the western side of the Oslo Fjord. During our reunion, we visited their homes which are still lived in by local residents, though thoroughly updated to modern Norsk standards.

The reunion was held at a small hotel complex on the rocky coast of the fjord. It was organized by several cousins, Arne and Kristin, who devised a set of activities and dinners that provided formal and informal opportunities for all these cousins of multiple generations to hang out and to be with one another to explore...well, who we were, who we are, who we are going to be. A massive chart stretched along one wall of a meeting room...defining the relationships between all of us and those who had gone before. One activity was posing for an official portrait...below some of us were getting ready.

But it was the open time and the informal activities, the picnics on the beach, the dinners, and the drinks on the back porch, that allowed us the space to understand how it fit together.

So we had time to understand how some of our parents' parents' parents' (depending on the generation we were now in) moved to new continents but kept certain traditions. Like naming children: my great grandfather was Thomas, my father was Thomas, my brother is Thomas, my son is Thomas. My father's younger brother, Halvor, died as a child in a fire in Jersey City around 1915, but here again I met a Halvor Werge, about 13 years old, and I imagine that they may have looked and smiled alike. And I could get caught up with my cousin Doris whom I last saw 50 years ago when she and my father's mother's brother and his family came to visit us in New Jersey.

Bethany Werge, 18, my grandniece (if there is such a relationship) had come wondering if there were going to be any people there her own age. There were. Norwegians seem to be held together more tightly by family ties than in the US where the generations tend of identify much more strongly with their age group.

The reunion leaves me with a profound sense of the passage of time...the movement of generations...not just the list of who begot whom...but the sense of history that we carry in our genes and often unknowing act out the past. And how the future is to unfold in the young people and the children who came to this moment in time. I find much to consider in terms of my own past, present and future...though my past now is much longer than my future...and how our lives extend far past our lives into those of others.

Apartment in Bergen

2010-07-08T12:09:00.001-07:00

From Trondheim we flew down to Bergen, bringing our cousin Sally from California who had flown into a few days before. We had an apartment which was directly on the water. A narrow deck in the back provided space for a small table and chairs...great space for wine and chips. And for watching kayaks in the fjord. Then my nephew Eric came with his wife Renee and my brother's granddaughter Bethany(my grandniece?) on the afternoon train.

Then cousins from Honefoss, Vegaard and Eivind came by. They were back in Bergen to pick up furniture after finishing their school terms at the university.

Charlotte had prepared a Norwegian dinner....we had gotten wine from the local State Wine Monopoly Store (more on that later)...with local produce. She was being at home...far away from home.

So there was a lot of serious hanging around going on which ended that evening with a hike (and partial run by Eivind and Bethany) up the Fløyveien, the trail leading up to the main overlook of the city. We got there around midnight...sunlight still spilling out of the sky.

Water, water everywhere

2010-07-08T11:38:00.000-07:00

One morning, I biked up the hill from the Trondheim apartment, following one of the bike paths that crisscross the city and its roads. A fine morning. Eventually the path gave out onto a narrow winding but well paved road. The road led up to a large lake, Jonsvannet (John's lake), which I remembered from a map. I stopped biking and sat for a while on a beach by an old boat house.

In Norway one is always close to water...the sea, fjords, lakes, streams, ponds...reflecting, when the waves are not breaking or when the sun is gone, the sky above. An constant reminder that I live in a desert where we call our small stream, the Poudre, a "river." Yet some of my cousins expressed surprise on how much water we use in the United States to shower, for example, or to flush the toilet. In hotels and many homes, for example, there is a large and a small setting for flushing the toilet...using one or the other depending upon whether you just urinated or dumped a load. In the case below from a hotel in Drammen, there is a big circle and a little circle which lets you decide each time. Excuse my reflection as I am not used to photographing toilet fixtures.

I guess the point is that the value of conservation is not related to how much of some resource you have but rather conservation has its own intrinsic value in and of itself. At least in some societies.

People

2010-07-05T13:08:00.001-07:00

Guidebooks usually list the buildings, the places, and the landscapes that you are supposed to see and to lodge and eat in when you travel. But many times you simply want to see in a cafe and watch people...people waiting for a bus, people walking or biking to work or school, people meeting their friends. Street life in places like Trondheim and Bergen are vibrant...owing to the density of housing and the design on public transport to bring people into central areas for their shopping, entertainment and work.

You do pick up a few things about Norwegians from watching them on the street. While they do sometimes make eye contact, they make no formal greeting, no head nods, certainly no "hi" or brief exchange the way they do in towns like Fort Collins...not even in the small coastal villages. Yet if you do make contact, asking for help with directions for example, they respond openly. If they sense you do not know Norwegian, they respond in English. They each seem to be going about their business...unless, of course, they are having a drink together at another table. They dress functionally, practically. They walk at a good clip, but some will stop for music. And they are almost all fit...well, after all, they walk everywhere.

Another aspect of street life, though, is that Norwegian towns and cities are very unfriendly to automobiles. Parking fines begin around $100 for overtime. Pedestrians, buses, bikes all have right of way. A tank of gas for a small Toyota cost us $90. And cars themselves are tremendously expensive...hence the side business our cousin Eivind has of importing used cars from Germany, shining them up, and selling them on ebay. One way to put yourself through the university...even if it is tuition free, you still have to earn your bread and board.

An Artist in Trondheim

2010-06-27T12:05:00.000-07:00

It rains. So we go to the museums. And sometimes I am blown away by an artist, an exhibit, a new way of looking at life.

The Trondheim Kunstmuseum has a summer exhibit on its second floor by Anne-Karin Furunes, a Trondheim artist who teaches at the local university. She creates works based upon archival photographs, often of young people who have been institutionalized at some point in their lives.

She creates her works on huge stretches of dark canvas which she perforates with round holes of different sizes, allowing the white walls on which they are hung to come through to varying degrees. This creates images of great depth, that alter their appearance as you move toward or away from them.

And after wards I walk out into the rain again. We go next door to the museum's cafe, order smorbrod and white wine...light pours in through the windows...the northern light that fills the room with a soft luminescence. And here are other works, bright colors against white walls. But somehow the images on the museum's second floor stay in my mind...creating a different memory of my time in this city.

The sun

2010-06-27T11:02:00.000-07:00

Trondheim lies at 63degrees north, about the same latitude as Fairbanks Alaska...somewhat below the Arctic Circle. The relatively warm waters of the Gulf Stream create a climate favorable to agriculture. Along the Trondheim fjord are large verdant pastures and fields of potatoes and grains.

But the climate is more typified by rain, snow, and cold, cloudy weather. So the brief summer (late June through mid-August) is tremendously important as a time when bright sunshine and blue skies break through the rain clouds. Keith our American friend who lives here tells us that further north people will stop their cars if the sun comes out strong and will get out and just raise their fair faces to capture some of the precious rays.

Now the sun is at its high point, setting at about 11:30 at night and coming up at 3:00 am. But the sky is bright throughout the night…it never becomes dark. Which I have found is great for driving because you never have to worry about driving in the dark. But of course this is all reversed in winter when the sun is up only up for three or so hours a day.

And so, to encourage the sun, we celebrate St. Hans’ Eve on the 23rd of June (almost exactly half way from Christmas). Bonfires are lit; traditional sour cream porridge is eaten (but others have hot dogs); and dances are held. We attended such an affair at Sverresborg, an outdoor folk museum, just outside the center of Trondheim. Once lit, the pyre of wood blazed and, then, fell over. This did nothing to quell the crowd’s enjoyment of the evening sunshine and the sense that summer had again returned for its brief but very anticipated appearance.

Trondheim

2010-06-27T10:46:00.000-07:00

Charlotte and I took the train from Oslo across the breadth of Norway to Trondheim. Trondheim recently celebrated its 1000 year anniversary. It has a deep harbor at the mouth of the Nidelva, a broad flowing river, making it an ideal trading place. Also an area for warfare as evidence by the ruins of the fort at Sverresborg from the 11th century and Germany’s plans to make it the base of its northern Atlantic submarine fleet during WWII.

Trondheim is also the site of the most northern cathedral in Europe. It was built to commemorate the death of Olav Haraldson, better known as St. Olav, who was the first “Christian” king of Norway. Of course that did not keep him from killing as many of his enemies as any other chieftain at that time. But when he was finally killed himself in a battle north of the city, he was quickly elevated to sainthood. The cathedral became a center of pilgrimage which judging by the numbers of tour buses, it continues to be.

The front of the cathedral is filled with statues telling stories. There is Adam and Eve trying to cover themselves after being tossed out of the garden …was it really all about fruit? And lots of kings…but who is the guy holding the basket with three heads? The cathedral is a great tapestry of stories to I guess both enlighten and strike fear into the hearts of believers.

But it also provides, these days, a great backdrop for the site of bike races, people watching, and just general hanging out which have been a few of our much more secular activities this week.

Neighborhoods

2010-06-22T00:42:00.000-07:00

Learning to live in a neighborhood is one of the ways of getting to know a country. In Oslo, Charlotte and I have been sharing an apartment in Sagene, a neighborhood once devoted to housing workers from near-by factories. Sagene has gentrified and is filled with young people pushing lots of baby carriages (Norway has the highest birthrate of any EU country). The old factories are converted to offices for small companies. Coffee shops abound. Buses and bikes get folks downtown. And while cars do line the streets, they seem to be used infrequently.

Fort Collins, a town built on a north-south, east-west grid, doesn't prepare you for the twists and turns of the streets that cross streams, run down hills, and feed back upon themselves like growing grape vines. Even with the "where am I" function on my Blackberry, it takes days to figure the layout around the apartment. Learning the high price of food (lemons for $1.20 each), learning how to buy the 24 hour bus pass (only $8), figuring out which local restaurant is affordable (less than $100 for two), learning how to get into the local gym for free (they took pity on this poor foreigner), understanding how the newspaper gets delivered to the apartment door (the paper delivery folks have keys to the apartment houses), reading the signs on the local stores (smadyrklinnik = small animal clinic), ordering the morning latte in Norwegian...it's all part of the experience...actually more interesting often then "seeing" the local sights that tourists are supposed to see.

Vikings, then and now

2010-06-18T08:13:00.000-07:00

So you get onto a plane, assuming you make it through the TSA herding procedures, and fly to Oslo...well, with some plane changes. On the way across the Atlantic, you monitor progress in the lite screen built into the back of the chair in front of you. You look out the window at 39,000 feet but there are only clouds below and you wonder when darkness will come and then you realize you are too far north for darkness to come, that light will shine all night and that, for the Vikings who sailed in the waters below you some 1,000 years ago the light may have helped avoid icebergs but then the, again, the stars would not be available for guidance on the long voyages.

Today you visit the Viking ship museum in Oslo and the ships are so elegant and spare in their design and you wonder if the Vikings felt as annoyed with the crowding on their decks and as anxious about possibly falling to the bottom of the ocean as you were on your flight. And did the beauty of the curved design of their prow give them as much reassurance as the 24 media channels provided by Scandinavian Airlines. And is there, perhaps, more similarity than difference between their voyages and ours today...their search for new lands, resources, experiences and our flights to discover new lands or acquaint ourselves with old ones.

Graduation time

2010-06-08T19:20:00.000-07:00

So who knew? After three years in Miami and then in DC, we celebrated Tom's graduation from Georgetown Law School. A night out at the 930 Club downtown, watching his boyhood friend, Mick Coogan (of Dance Party), perform. Perhaps not quite in Tom's honor, but we could make it seem that way.

Then a gala dinner dance at the National Building Museum, the old Pension Building, that was the site of Lincoln's second inaugural dinner dance. I had always thought this as one of the great, sometimes overlooked, buildings in Washington. And here we were, dining and dancing and carrying on...as folks, I guess, had been doing for a long time.

Then a formal awarding of degrees and diplomas...only a blurred photo of Tom (really have to learn how to set my camera better to capture these fleeting moments in time, but perhaps also blurring may be appropriate to life that moves so quickly. And then hors d'oeuvres and a final party. Congratulations, Tom. Who knew? I guess you did.

The people

2010-06-08T18:52:00.000-07:00

Like any city, New York is its people. Walking, riding the subway, taking the ferry, catching a cab, the city is about people in movement. The movement is interspersed with moments of quiet and anticipation…like the silent intensity of commuters waiting for the ferry to dock in Staten Island so they can catch the bus to home or work.

And then there are the vast collections of people in space….Times Square, for example, which has seen its vehicle traffic reduced to a trickle by the introduction of new passenger areas. So people now spread over the former streets, creating vast sidewalks and esplanades, creating that sense of intense, dense human movement.

Such intensity is not for everyone…Books, ipods, magazines, just staring ahead, all provide an opportunity for a quiet time-out from the constant stimulation.

Art in the Park

2010-06-08T18:40:00.000-07:00

Years, perhaps decades, had passed since I had walked up that huge flight of steps leading to the front entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tom and I headed to the glass enclosed Temple of Dendur, where the walls open through glass to the fields of Central Park.

The scope of the museum had so greatly expanded since I last roamed its halls and galleries. Many of the new galleries and additions were glass enclosed, opening the vast inner rooms to alternating courtyards of sculpture and architecture (entire facades of buildings built into the sides of soaring atriums). The “traditional” galleries also filled with light…lighting up the faces of people, especially the children, who had come to enjoy the lavish collections that the wealth of New York provides for the world.

Tom and I wandered up to the roof sculpture garden where “Big Bamboo” was under construction…a work “in progress.” The flexibility and strength of bamboo allow creation of pathways up into the structure; small groups of tourists thread their way up and around the poles which appear to be growing out over other portions of the museum’s roof top. Workers (or are they architects) add new elements to this growing organic work….quite unlike the finished stone and metal works in the galleries below. Beyond “Big Bamboo,” the city rises along the southern rim of Central Park.

Tom and I drink mojitos from the bar on the roof garden and share a ham and cheese sandwich, watching the bamboo unfold its wings above us. We stand up and look over the edge of the roof to the skyscrapers along Central Park South. No other place is quite like this on this sunny spring morning.

Guggenheims in Leadville and Beyond

2010-06-08T18:29:00.000-07:00

It was raining when Tom and I got to New York last month. The heavy rain drove the tourists (like us) inside to the museums. After getting into our apartment, we wandered into the Guggenheim and joined them. The Guggenheim family had made its initial wealth with investments in gold mining in Leadville, the Colorado mining town. They had come to open a mercantile store and invest in the boom of the 1870s and 1990s. They poured their profits into smelting the ore, first in Leadville and then in Pueblo. And money begat money. A few generations later, the investments were in art and in museums that are themselves works of art, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for the Guggenheim on 5th Ave. A long way from Leadville.

The museum was jammed, damp with tourists’ wet clothes and umbrellas, but the building, as always, shown for its originality and form. The current exhibit, though, entitled “Haunted” was frankly (sorry Frank) terrible…I am still haunted by how awful it was. Random collections of photos, intellectual pomposity, artistic clap-trap. An elderly couple approached one of the guard-guides who attempt to keep the public from taking photographs (of the photographs) and asked in the most polite and refined manner: “Could you tell us where the art is?”

Time Out

2010-06-08T18:22:00.000-07:00

To get to Colorado's Orient Land Trust and its hot springs, you turn east after coming south off Poncha Pass from Salida. Leaving 285, the road is dirt. Great clouds of dust swirl up behind the back tires. Sunday evening at 7:00 pm, the place is quiet. Weekend folks have left. A few families with children play in the pool.

Even after my second retirement and the greater access to my own use of time, the last few weeks have been intense. And I have not had time to write and reflect. So I will spend some of my time here this morning to let my body catch up with my mind. And get ready for the journeys ahead. All of which will require some backtracking, some posting of people and places that occupied the last month, even months. Maybe I should have stopped off here for a week.

Horizontal and verticle

2010-05-24T09:44:00.000-07:00

I came up to Manhattan with Tom for a few days. We were taking a road trip prior to his graduation from Georgetown Law School.

The landscapes of New York, the city, and Colorado have always seemed so similar. The horizontal lines of the rivers and New York Bay parallel the lines of the plains that stretch from our mountains east a thousand miles to the Mississippi. And the upper floors of upper east side apartments in Manhattan...they seem so like the heights, still snow-covered, of the mountain peaks. And both landscapes invite exploration and hiking...walking in the canyons of the city are a form of urban hiking...one is always encountering the unexpected around a corner or, in the Rockies, around a sharp turn in the trail.

I grew up across from Manhattan on the cliffs that line the western shore of the Hudson. The horizontal of the river sets the lower frame of the skyline of midtown...the skyline changes as day gives way to evening and the lights of the city come on and reflect in the dark waters. The juxtaposition of sight lines reaching to the sky or to the horizon provide a landscape frame for finding yourself.

home

2010-05-24T08:22:00.000-07:00

At home for a while...catching up with friends, neighbors, family, dog, not to mention leaky faucets, overgrown lawns, and a garage in desperate need of being cleaned out. But then there are projects...new porch in front of the house, hanging up a "spring" sign in the kitchen, getting my neighbor John to help put in a new toilet, even paying bills. Being not on the road means getting in touch with my base camp, the home pivot around which my life and wanderings revolve.

And then you do a pilgrimage to some ruins

2010-04-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

So one morning you wake up in the canyon, look out of the tent and you are the first one up so you get up and piss in the river (that is what is recommended because the land is so sensitive) and make some coffee so that it will be ready for the others.

And a day later you are walking along the hiking path around Hovenweep, an ancient (for our country) ruin from 1300 or so...before the drought forced them to leave and to move in with the pueblos along the Rio Grande (whose headwaters are in a different range of mountains)...and you can not help but to be moved by their presence and also by their absence.

So then you spend the night at the Strater Hotel, built 1889. Such a comfortable place with a bar downstairs, the Diamond Belle Saloon, in which an long lost friend, Gary Smith, played honky-tonk piano music at a distant point in his life. It was the closest I had felt to him in a long time.

But I thought of all of these places as sites of communal gathering...we in our rafts, these folks in their rock canyons, and us again in the bar. All places where we can gather as a species. We like being together...if we did not, we would probably not have gotten anywhere as a species because we need one another for defense and for identity.

On a slow river day

2010-04-21T18:12:00.001-07:00

A rafting trip on the San Juan...low water level, fair sunshine bounding off the canyon walls, pulling at the end of the journey hard on the oars against a sudden strong upriver wind, setting up camp each evening in settings 300 million years old, trying to find the mayonnaise in some 10 food containers carried between two rafts and a canoe, learning to spend the entire day with another person in a small space in an immensity....

Meeker again

2010-03-17T16:05:00.001-07:00

Richard and I were out for a drive after doing a presentation for the White River Electrical Association in Meeker (mainly known as the site of Meeker Massacre after which the Utes were pushed out of Colorado into Utah...of course no one mentions how many Utes were killed...ahhh ethnic cleansing long before the term was coined). The presentation dealt with a small hydroelectric plant they are thinking of building.

We went up over a rise beyond Meeker and followed the road around a bend and we pulled over at a set of markers explaining how a series of battles let to the expulsion of the Utes in favor of those who would "civilize and settle" the west. The valley stretched below us.

The pastures had been plowed clear in certain spots so that the cows could reach the natural pasture underneath. And then we noticed the calves, some of them days old, lying on the ground, absorbing the rays of the overhead sun. A few of them trying to stand for the first time...some giving up, deciding that laying down was really better. Spring comes to the valley quite regardless of what peoples live here now.

Barneløpet 2010

2010-02-28T18:48:00.000-08:00

The Sons of Norway lodges in Colorado sponsored the annual Barneløpet or "children's race" at Winter Park. Something about the combination of snow, outdoor sport, young people, competition (for some), medals (for all), and the mountain landscape makes me joyful. The races are organized by 1K, 2.4K, and 5K and participants range the gamut from Nordic teams from Boulder to first time skiers.

The groomed trails at Snow Mountain Ranch and the lodge buildings make for an ideal setting. In the past few years, I helped to organize an afternoon orienteering course, but this year an orienteering club set up a circuit with electronic interfaces and ability to upload results to the web. Whew. Enough of paper and pencil.

As the Olympics bring home, good Nordic skiing requires great athleticism. During the past few years, a growing number of free groomed trails, like those in Leadville, have opened up for the public. Maybe next year I'll get me a pair of those thin skis and long poles and really cool outfits.

But then maybe I should leave that for the next generations, some of whom can't yet quite make it around the 1K course.

Friends and Family

2010-02-24T19:03:00.000-08:00

A good deal of hanging out skiing in the mountains for a month (or more) has to do with hanging out with other people, skiers and non-skiers. So, thus far, Charlotte, Ingrid, Geoff, Pacha (dog), Jerry, Eve, Katlin, Bethany and, soon, Matt, Shannon, Harris, Addi, John and Teresa have been/will be here to enjoy this space: the house in South Main, the river running alongside, the mountains, Monarch Ski Area, and the hot, hot springs. The house breathes easier when human warmth is added to the heat put out by the furnace.

After taking Bethany and Katlin back to the airport (Why do the drivers in Denver honk at me on the sidestreets? Is it so clearly an SUV from the mountains covered with snow and road dirt? Or have I forgotten how to drive in a city?), I was listening to a radio discussion of a book on Eric Weiner's book "The Geography of Bliss" which, like some other recent publications, looks at happiness ratings of different countries. And, well, it generally all comes down to "relationships"...which would seem to indicate, given the nature of the health care debate, that the United States is not a happy country.

But snow and ways of playing in it along with mellow warmth inside a house or in hot springs can greatly increase the happiness ratings. Maybe that should be part of any comprehensive bill?

Cottonwood Lake

2010-02-12T18:29:00.000-08:00

A few miles above Cottonwood Hot Springs along Cottonwood Creek a thousand feet or so below Cottonwood Pass is Cottonwood Lake. I went out there this afternoon to do some cross country skiing, expecting to find a trail, but only found deep, deep snow, too deep to plow through with my back country skis. So I headed out around the lake. The ice was thick, judging from the depth of the awls of the guys doing ice fishing on the far side. And the snow was windswept in many places, making for a smooth glide. In spite of the strong wind and snow falling through the late afternoon light.

It was a contrast to our house a few miles across the Upper Arkansas Valley where the sun was shining and folks were watching tv and quilting and preparing supper. The east and west sides of this valley provide such contrast in terms of snowfall, temperature, and conditions. And differences in how to experience the day...all of them good, but marking the kinds of choices we are able to make when our time is open-ended and our ability to experience life presents so much choice.

Mineral Belt Trail

2010-02-07T18:03:00.000-08:00

The Mineral Belt Trail runs for 12 miles above Leadville through the ruins of the mines that brought, for a while, great wealth to this town. And to families like that of Meyer Guggenheim (as in the art museums in New York, Bilbao, Abu Dhabi) and Horace Tabor (multimillionaire, US Senator, who lost it all in the crash of 1893 and whose wife, Baby Doe, froze to death in a shack by their mine). Legends and stories line the trail. And such stories: the violence and back-breaking work of the miners, the ethnic-based mining camps (as in Finntown where, surprise, the Finns lived), the bars, brothels, the instant unimaginable wealth.

Mining in Leadville survived after the silver gave out...the last major operation, the Climax molybdenum mine (check the periodic table of elements), shut down only in 1982 (and was to open again before the latest recession hit). The closing of the mine devastated the town's economy. Many folks living in the town now ride buses and cars each day for low wage labor in the ski resorts of Copper Mountain, Vail, Keystone.

In winter, the trail is groomed for cross country skiing...the skate skiing kind...and the Leadville Nordic club is serious about their technique. Its members have read all the historic markers years ago; no reason for them to stop as they glide by me. But besides the historical texts, there's that view out over the town, Turquoise Lake, and Mt. Elmo, the tallest peak in Colorado. The beauty gives me pause...will have to work on technique another day.

Skiing

2010-02-05T19:37:00.001-08:00

So what is it about skiing? Why all this time (the month of February) at Monarch and Copper Mountain and Winter Park? Well a bunch of reasons. Like the beauty of the mountains in winter...riding a lift (and that in and of itself is fun...sitting on this open seat suspended above a steep mountainside)to a high ridge and taking in the mountain ranges...some close, some far.

From a ridge line at Monarch this morning, you could see the Collegiate Range over which Monarch Pass is the only open road in winter, to the west the San Juan Range, to the southeast, the Sangre de Cristo Range.

And then there is the sense of focus that comes when you are racing down a groomed slope or skiing the trees (gotta avoid those logs and those low branches) or making your way through choppy powder, cutting curves in the snow. This focus is purely physical...your senses feeding information to the brain, the brain sending signals to the hips and knees...keeping your body pitched forward down the slope or around the obstacle, using the skis and poles as extensions of your body...no time to be thinking about health care reform...just a kind of basic survival as you test yourself against the pull of gravity and the conditions under your skis at this moment and looking ahead for the next ten moments. That's what this towhead (well I assume he's a towhead under the helmet)is just beginning to get a feel for.

But it's not just about downhill. After skiing at Monarch this morning, I switched to my cross country skis and skied up a nearby trail to the top of Old Monarch Pass. This was the pass used from the 1880s to get horses, carts and prospectors down into the Gunnison River Valley from the Upper Arkansas. It was replaced in the late 1930s (ahhh...stimulus money back then) by a new road (Route 50 from Sacramento California to Ocean City, Maryland)with fewer tortured curves.
The old road makes an ideal cross-country route...it parallels some of the downhill runs at Monarch...but it requires work. And the reward that comes from rounding that final curve is different...a feeling that somehow you have earned that downhill that comes when you turn around and head back down.

Either way it's not about the gear. It's about what the gear allows you to do and to feel. My father came from Telemark in Norway and I've always felt I should learn that style of skiing out of respect for my traditions. But that will have to wait for another season.

View from the windown

2010-02-03T18:55:00.000-08:00

So I'm still trying to figure out this place, the Upper Arkansas Valley. I wake up in the morning, looking to the west, Mt. Princeton across the valley floor. Went skiing at Monarch...no new snow so I kept to the groomed trails, sometimes in the trees. It is supposed to snow tonight and tomorrow...could use some new snow. The signs at the base warn of "Early Season Conditions" but, dude, it's February...getting toward the end of the season. Soon the signs will say "Spring Conditions," meaning the snow is more moist, tending to melt in the April sunshine. So, like, when does winter begin?

and then on my way into Salida (where the Arkansas leaves the Valley, making an abrupt turn to the east to carve out the Royal Gorge on its way to the Mississippi), I noticed this cemetery off to the side of the road...wooden crosses...a barbed wire fence. I stopped and parked and could not make sense of the names or the dates (it seemed to be a cemetery for children...they were all so young) and then I realized it was an improvised pet cemetery...wooden crosses (are all these pets Christian...is there pet baptism?)... But it caused me to realize I'm not just in this valley...I'm in this valley with communities, with people, with history, and with pets. Hmmmm....it's not all just about skiing.

South Main

2010-02-02T19:07:00.000-08:00

Came up to the Arkansas Valley yesterday, driving up from the Front Range, over Kenosha Pass, across South Park (as in the tv program), over Trout Creek Pass, then down to this valley, turning north and then east to the river itself. The river runs through cold banks of snow, making the water seem black by contrast. I'm staying at South Main, a "new urbanism" development, being built by a group of friends who are kayakers. In addition to houses and businesses, they have built a white water course that is now ready for the spring snow melt. There is an art gallery up the street and a brewpub around the corner...but you can see the Collegiate Peaks to the west through the empty lots...an occasional house here and there. South Main is an interesting example of a created community (think utopian design meets kayaking champs...a number of World Cup finalists work with the development corp).

In the Trees

2010-01-22T18:47:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Winter Park, waiting for the sun to come up before heading over Berthoud Pass, going back to Fort Collins after two days of good skiing. The groomed ski trails were sketchy at best, lots of bare spots and rocks, but the woods harbored deep powder. Few skiers were out...the destination folks and the day trippers were waiting for the snow that would accompany massive winter storms.

So few folks ventured into the woods. But the woods harbored old ski tracks, covered with the few inches of snow that had fallen during the last week. The tracks wound between trees, under branches, around logs, catching the sloping curve of the hillside. Skiing trees keeps one totally focused...following a trail between two trees and realizing the track was probably made by a 10 year old and one just might not fit...judging the degree of slope...avoiding tree wells (spaces under trees that are deep hollows)...trying to psyche out the next couple of turns. And, then, suddenly making a new track and hoping not to shudder to a stop in some deep pocket of powder or, worse, have the skis go under a log and suddenly stop resulting in some form, hopefully non-lethal, of face plant. More commonly, I turn off an old trail to make some new tracks and wind up buried in a drift of deep powder.

In the trees it's all about figuring your next moves through a tangle of trees and branches, being grateful for the helmet as you lean forward and downward, in the silence of the forest...pure concentration.

Not at all like the Denver road traffic that I had to move my SUV through in order to reach these still, silent woods.

Snow Mountain Ranch

2010-01-07T19:39:00.000-08:00

We stayed in a high mountain cabin outside of the small town Tabernash with a group of friends from the Colorado Mountain Club. If it were not snowing too hard, you could see the western side of the Continental Divide across the valley, rising above the lower forested hills. We skied for three days, cross-country skiing, breaking trail sometimes, sometimes gliding on groomed runs, sometimes just standing breathless in the forest after a stiff climb uphill, discovering patterns in the snow.

And sometimes the patterns were ones we made ourselves in the shop at the Nordic Center. Yet they all seemed to represent a kind of structure to our experience, bringing the vastness of the landscape down to a comprehensible scale, one that could be touched and moved through. And moved on.

Parties

2010-01-02T14:40:00.000-08:00

Christmas is the one time of year when everyone gets into art installations. The tree, decorations, music...kind of like going to a museum to see an ephemeral collection of objects. So we move around furniture, string lights outside, and create an atmosphere for reminding ourselves of our traditions and for enjoying a change in domestic ambiance. And part of that ambiance is directed toward getting together with friends and family, having a "hyggelig" evening (as they say in Norway and Denmark), being warm, cozy, and glad to be together. We are, after all, a social species.

And so there is the need for preparation...food and drink and music. As in past years, we have a band. This year, The Fort Collins Blue Grass Band, and last year, the Piggies. About 80 people come by during the evening...the older boys create a game room in the study where they can hook up to the internet...the younger kids stay downstairs for crafts and movies. Age groups creating their own sense of fun. We dedicate this and every annual party to our friend, Marita Vander Have, who died a year ago from cancer. We began this annual party with her about 25 years ago in Maryland and we have carried it west with us like a well worn leather coat.

But there are also parties that change the pace. Patrick and I went down to the Acid Candy Cane event at the F/stop, a coffee house that brings life and good drink to the Center for Fine Art Photography in downtown Fort Collins. Music by Dirty Monkey. Live Art. Opening reception. Now this does change the pace...kind of picks things up a bit. Enough at least to then move onto the party at Francisco's where the dancing is still going on. Funny, though, nobody wants to make breakfast for us at 2:00 am though we did call several friends to see if they were up. And, get this, they are still our friends.

And then the more formal dinners...Christmas Day around the dining room table, the three hour meals...interrupted perhaps for a walk around the block if it's not snowing too hard...and having the opportunity to just share the simple act of being alive, all at the same time, enjoying one another's laughter, talk, observations. Sometimes just being here is enough.

Happy New Year. Feliz Año Nuevo. Glad Nytt År.

In the mountains

2009-12-20T19:25:00.000-08:00

I drove up to Buena Vista over Kenosha Pass for a few days in the mountains. Crossing the pass into the huge open snow covered space of South Park is always dramatic. Urban life is left 4,000 feet below on the front range. It is quite unlike the drive up I-70 and through the Eisenhower Tunnel where urban and commercial sprawl follow you over the Divide. The drive over Kenosha brings you into a different world.

I stayed at the Cottonwood Hot Springs, sharing the loft in the dorm room with Tim. He was living further up along Cottonwood Creek at 11,000 feet. He is in a camp tent for the winter, wood stove for heat, and working on a house he is building at the mouth of an abandoned mine. The land is part of a mining claim he bought a few years back. His claim is three miles up the mountain; he gets there by snowshoe or snowmobile depending upon the weather. When he has business in town, he spends the night at the Hot Springs where he works in exchange for board. His wife, not too surprisingly, is living in Texas. We share evening and morning conversation and coffee in the lounge. I marvel at the ways people come to create a life for themselves.

But I had come up mainly for alpine skiing. I'm not sure what I love the most: the sensation of swooshing downhill over fresh powder (like gliding on silk) or the simple feeling of being high in the snow covered mountains at places where only lifts or snowcats can bring you. Ski Cooper, outside of Leadville (highest incorporated city in the United States at 10,152 feet), was just opening for the season. The sides of the groomed trails were three to four feet deep in powder. And if the lifts seem slow (this ain't Vail), they give you a chance to take in the spare beauty of the far mountain ranges and the simple pleasure of being outside in the snow on a bright sunny Colorado day.

Public Space

2009-12-14T19:43:00.000-08:00

On my last day in DC, I visited the Pension Building, now the National Building Museum, the most astonishing public space in the capital. It was built after the Civil War to house the pension offices for the veterans and civil servants. Now receiving a pension (probably from a computer system housed in some cubicle-laden dreary office complex), I feel a deeper affinity with this magnificent edifice...its gigantic columns lifting the roof skyward. Groups of school children come into the space and sit or lie on the floor with their teachers looking up, up, up.

One of the exhibits on display in the columned interior was on the history of the parking garage. And one of the statistics cited dealt with the period before the advent of the automobile when cities were filled with workhorses carrying people and goods. It is estimated that in New York in 1900, the city held about 100,000 horses which produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of, most of it probably dumped into the river. Now that was an environmental pollution problem. So the automobile was responsible for cleaning up the city, parking garages replacing stables.

Ahhh....magnificent museums...places for learning and gaining perspective in space and time.

The National and Other Galleries

2009-12-02T04:44:00.000-08:00

One of the joys of urban life is being able to move through its collections of art and architecture. In Washington for a few days, I was able to catch a few of the new exhibits at the National Gallery...small French paintings on one floor of the East Wing and photography in the West Wing. Walking through the vast public spaces of the museum is always a treat...as much for the paintings on the wall and the sculptures on the floor as for catching the manner in which people interact with the art, how they become part of the exhibit themselves, how they add color and light and movement to the art, blurring the lines between themselves and the objects.

Earlier this year, I made a trip (pilgrimage?) to Chaco Canyon, the site of extensive Anasazi ruins in northwest New Mexico. The isolated canyon contains the largest collection of Pueblo sites north of Mexico...sites that were used up until the mid 1100's when drought caused the massive migration out of the region toward the Rio Grand valley.

The same creative impulse to communicate through forms and shapes is found on the canyon walls and in the now-deserted plazas. They communicate a sense of place beyond the place itself. The images chiseled into the canyon walls, the doorways opening onto doorways, the design of rock walls all indicate a universality in the human desire to move us beyond our day to day existence.

Thanksgiving

2009-11-29T16:53:00.001-08:00

We arrived at Kent Island on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay on Tuesday, beginning to settle into the house we rented for the holiday. A strong wind blew across the water for the next few days, but it was no matter as Ingrid, Geoff, Haile, Tom, Jose, Jens, Ben, Teddy, Margaret, Tony, Christian, Kendall, Rink, Rob, Dan, Vanessa, Chase, Drew, Claudia, and MJ showed up over the next few days. But we in turn traveled back to the western shore of the bay for Thanksgiving Day with Margaret and Tony...enjoying the fresh oysters, the company, the back deck.

Though, of course, this is a holiday of food, wine, and hanging out. Time for catching up and expanding the sense of family. Christian Werge, a cousin from Mexico working now as an architect in Alexandria, joined us (we share the same great-great grandfather) and later again with his girlfriend, MJ. Ingrid and Geoff brought bikes to try out the trails on the island. Teddy was preparing for a trip to the Gambia to do photojournalism for a nonprofit "Riders for Health," combining his interests in motocycles, photography, and exploring the world. So we catch time with one another...no other agenda than to enjoy one another...well and the pies.

So the days slip along like waves across the bayfront. We held a final feast of crabs, oysters and shrimp on Sunday afternoon after the winds had died down and the sun had broken through. A truck had parked down the street with "fresh crabs, fresh oysters" posted on cardboard signs in the morning. And a neighbor lent us a huge kettle for steaming the crabs. So it was a classic Maryland afternoon meal on the deck overlooking the bay.

Before sunset and folks beginning to make their way home.

Riding the east coast line

2009-11-27T13:09:00.000-08:00

Charlotte and I caught a mid-morning train in Providence, heading down along the coast to Maryland. The sky was lead-gray, light drizzle against the Amtrak windows. The train was full with folks getting an early start on Thanksgiving, with businessmen on their cell phones "I meeting next week with the European head of Coke in London and I need those reports by noon....", with students working their laptops.

The train runs close to the shore along the Sound. Wetlands stretch out to the flat, gray sea. Houses line some of the coves. Towns come into view where rivers run down to the sea. And, moving west, the towns come closer together, converge, and factories, warehouses, offices, apartments move upwards, towards each other and towards the gray sky. We ride to, through, and down under the City, stop briefly at Pennsylvania Station and then are out onto the Jersey meadowlands, moving south toward Thanksgiving.

Family even cats

2009-11-25T17:23:00.000-08:00

But Thanksgiving is about family and eating together and hanging out. So that is what we were doing in Providence, hanging out and helping to paint the living room of Ingrid and Geoff's new house. And after painting, reading on the sunporch ((I kjølvannet or In the Wake, learning Norwegian by reading in translation). And heading out to the local beach restaurant for chowder ("chawda").

And going for bike rides. And even coming home again after the bikeride to find that one of the cats, Hops, had climbed a tree at the end of the block and Ingrid, because she weighed less, had to climb the wobbly ladder to bring her back to earth and the comfort of the new home. All in the order of "hanging out."

Pawtuxet

2009-11-21T14:37:00.001-08:00

But then you arrive in a different world. Walking to the village coffee shop in the morning, you pass Dr. Carpenter's house (1720) and other reminders that Rodger Williams and his followers settled the area in the 1660s. They had been thrown out of Puritanical Boston...the descendents of those moral guardians now rule in Colorado Springs. The town celebrates an annual festival when the local militia burned "the hated English revenue schooner," HMS Gaspree in 1772...I guess the British must of thought of them as terrorists.

So there is this depth of time along the East Coast...from a period long before Colorado was picked up as part of the Louisian Purchase (at least the part that was north of the Arkansas River)...and that time is reflected in the architecture, the way of life. Though the way of life has changed: Pawtuxet was a small harbour, then a mill town, then a resort, now a small collection of wine bars, restaurants, and occasional farmer's markets placed wedged by the river between two younger suburban towns. But what is impressive, so impressive for someone from the West is water, water, water everywhere. I have as much guilt about letting the water run when I brush my teeth as do the swans, gathering in the lee of a jetty, enjoying the late fall sunshine and picking at the water weeds.

The Airport

2009-11-21T14:36:00.001-08:00

I had never really studied the people at Denver International Airport before...they had always seemed mere bodies in motion. Or bodies in non-motion, waiting, mildly anxious or relieved after going through screening and waiting now to see if their plane shows up on time. Introspective, focused on an arrival or departure, they now seem participants in some global form of alienation, neither here nor there, simply in transition, refugees caught between places, at the whim of weather, mechanical breakdowns, and fellow passangers. Tedium plays a large part in the traveller's experience...it is written on faces, on bodies slumped into chairs, on half drunk cardboard cups of coffee left in the food court.

White Rim Trail

2009-10-25T15:21:00.001-07:00

Our mountain bike ride began in a thunderstorm as we descended 1,100 feet on the Shafer Trail. The guidebook describes the switchbacks as "dangerous or impassible when wet." Though cold and mud splattered, we evaded the instant waterfalls pouring off stone ledges. We made all the sharp turns but brake pads thinned rapidly. At the bottom of this initial trail, faithful Dave had set up a soup kitchen in the support vehicle. I tried to shake the cold by draping myself across the still warm car engine. Then we headed out ten more miles to set up our first camp site. So began day one of our ride on the White Rim Trail in Moab, Utah.

We were on a 92 mile, three and a half day mountain bike trip, riding across one of the earth's most spectacular landscapes...the series of deep, arid canyons whose deep formation go back 280 million years. These canyons follow the course of the Colorado and Green Rivers which join just below the White Rim Trail. Once joined, they move as one to carve out the Grand Canyon further south.

The scale of the landscape creates miniatures of our selves and bikes and tents. As in "Can you find the biker in the picture below?" Or " Find Bob standing on the rock rim" or "See the group of bikers resting on day two of the ride."

There they are!

The white rim rocks reveal another scale. Here the occassional downpours form small pools. The wind and water push soil into shallow hollows. Here plants take root and form diverse desert colonies of goosefoot (once collected for their edible seeds), yucca, saltbush, and Indian ricegrass. So the trail exists on both a macro and a micro scale...the latter being harder to find but just as satisfying as the depths and distances of the canyons and mountains beyond.

And then the human scale. The trip was organized by the PEDAL club of Loveland, CO on a volunteer basis (the chief volunteers being Ed and Dave....Dave the cook, support vehicle driver, chief transport official, water and snack supplier, and general bon vivant and Ed the chief financial and administrative officer). Eight cyclists (some occasionally falling off their bikes and some more commonly pushing their bikes up hardscrabble hills) followed the jeep trail made by ranchers and uranium miners.

So the joy was to be in this landscape with friends who cared about each other's welfare and who experienced this wide space in his or her own way. So we rode the final miles to the edge of the Green River, camped for a final night at Potato Bottom (oh, the ice on the tent on the cold, damp last morning), and rode (or pushed) up 1,000 feet of switchbacks back to the top of the mesa.

We shared the long car ride back to Loveland and Fort Collins, bikes strapped to the back of our SUVs, our heads filled with memories of these vast lands and the beginnings of plans for our return.

Back porch stories

2009-10-09T06:32:00.000-07:00

The back porch of Oak House at Valley View is a platform for hanging out...watching clouds across the valley, reading one of the books from home, playing music, drinking a cup of tea on a cold afternoon. You meet people hanging out. You hear their stories. The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.

A long-haired man in his early 60s saying that the first time he came to Valley View was in 1957 when he was 10 years old. He came up riding on a horse with his Dad from the valley below. The area around the hot springs was deserted. He most distinctly remembers that his new Levis chaffed his legs badly against the horse's back on their return to the valley floor. His parents had first come here on their honeymoon in 1935. He remembers his Dad playing the piano at the small ranch where they stayed. The ranch couple dancing to his music.

The back porch, the hot springs' pools are places of stories from folks coming here for decades and folks coming for the first time. The land itself holds stories. The canyons are filled with crude, stone artifacts made the small hunting and gathering bands that first sought game and plants in the valley wetlands. The Orient Land mine is over the next ridge, its gaping mouth the result of a huge explosion in 1893 in which a dozen miners died. The stones and the mine tell silent stories. The couples in the hot pools speak of more current stories: of their comings and goings, their wounds and their healings, the beginning and the end of relationships, their memories and their imaginations.

And from the back porch, the clouds tell their stories...across the valley, evening storms compete with the dying sun in a thunderous struggle of light and darkness. Ben builds a bonfire by the large pool up the creek. Folks gather to soak under the stars. And to tell old stories and create new ones while the earth and sky continue to create their own, long narratives.

Valley View

2009-10-08T07:18:00.000-07:00

The Oak House at Valley View had only one dorm bed available last night, so I took it. The cabins and private rooms were all taken...somewhat surprising this late in the fall. Arriving in the late afternoon, I did some hiking, a bit of mountain biking, but mostly soaked in the hot tub and baked in the sauna. Had a simple meal, read, went to bed early. Got up around five...one of the dorm mates snored insistently.

This part of the earth curved toward the sun around 7:00. I was having coffee and doing some e-mail as the dark night lifted. I got on my bike, took my camera, and rode up the trail to the old Orient mine. The clouds formed and reformed in horizontal lines along the San Luis Valley floor. They rose high over the far San Juan mountains. Toward Poncha Pass in the north the clouds dipped low and filled the valley. In the south, the clouds stayed above the fields and wetlands...perhaps a stronger wind was blowing from the southwest. The sun rose higher striking the upper rims of the clouds and slowly, as the earth rotated, sunlight filtered lower to the valley floor.

The wind came up; my hands got very cold. I got on the bike and rode down for another cup of coffee. Early morning at Valley View and the Orient Land Trust.

New landscapes

2009-09-16T21:09:00.001-07:00

So the marmot was wondering why we were there...on top of Flattop Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park referred to by us locals as simply "the park." Well actually Patrick, my neighbor and friend, and I had climbed the trail to explore the landscape before winter closed in with its deep snows. Patrick had been here before and had taken refuge in the rock pile that is home to this marmot. So we had kind of come back for a visit.

Flattop rises about 12,000 feet, 3,000 more than the lakes which lie at its base to the east. The trail up is somewhat steep, rising through the alpine forest and then through the transitional stunted growth of small, wind blasted trees to the world above treeline. This world is an alpine tundra...tundra, a word from the Sami language of the peoples living in the north of Norway, Sweden, Russia. It means "wide, treeless plain" and is found where cold temperatures, wind and short growing seasons limit plant growth.

The morning was bright sunshine...no wind. The silence on top, only the chirping of marmots and pikas, occasional whirl of helicopter blades flying materials into the park on a maintenance project, and our own spoken words. We were partly on a search for the blinds and game runs that the Utes built to capture the game that still wander up to the tundra in summer, following the ripening short grasses. But it started to rain and, then, hail. We strode through two inches of hail on the trail on the long way down...arriving soaked and cold at the car. But, then, that's high country weather in mid-September: some sun, some rain, some hail. The snow not far behind.

And so, at the end of a journey....

2009-09-16T20:39:00.000-07:00

Since coming back home, I have been trying to find a picture or set of pictures that summarize our trip. And, of course, the experience is just too diverse for that. And yet, there are a few.

Having breakfast at Erik and Helga's farm house in Nørre Alslev, a kommune in Falster, one of Denmark's major islands in the south of that country. Staying with cousins...the trip was about our families in Norge and Danmark...and about art...and about food.

And it was about history and landscapes...varied landscapes but usually with the ocean...these are maritime societies with strong farming, business and energy economies.

And it is a journey, a moving through space and time and culture, navigating places and relationships, crossing the currents of oceans and lands.

But mainly, like all journeys, it was about us...finding more about the world, our past and our present, and our place in it.