I always say it’s the air, right? Well, it’s true. Here’s what it looks like. Monsoonal skies all afternoon long. Cloudy, cool—near 70°F—with rain falling overhead (according to the radar) that never touches the ground. Hasn’t yet today at this location, anyway. Very quiet, too. There’s a rodeo in town. Is that where everyone is? Or at Solarfest? Not that we’re complaining. The peacefulness is very restorative. We’re eating weird stuff as we empty the cabinets post-trip. Nobody wants to go grocery shopping yet! I don’t mind, though. It’s a small price to pay for gentle re-entry.
Colorado Highway 10 into Huerfano County today »Buy This Photo!«
Oh yes, got back today around 2:30 p.m. My God, what a week for me, you, and America. I’m in shock. Everything continues to be…different… Once again, the transition from where we were to southern Colorado and northern New Mexico is a ripping blast. Among other things, I can’t believe I live here.
iPad photo from a speeding car
Yes, we made it to Dubuque! (The image above is from southeastern Colorado.) The trip was long and arduous—approximately 1,200 miles in two days on the backroads of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa—where the confluence of grazing and cultivation has so essentially altered the original landscape, I’m sure no one living remembers the way it was.
Lewis and Clark are my longtime heroes. They didn’t traverse much of where we drove—that would be farther north and west—but reading their accounts of what the unspoiled country looked like over two hundred years ago along the path of the Missouri River will stir your soul, just as awareness of the gift of this planet has a way of dissolving parochial concerns. Interesting word, that, “parochial,” referring as it does first to churchly concerns and then to “having a limited or narrow outlook or scope,” and how notable the outposts of the faithful that dot the battered plains.
The driving was a wonder, though, on mostly empty roads through huge, impossible spaces almost all the same, the landscape like a frozen rolling sea. But for the grasshoppers and butterflies colliding with the windshield every now and then, you might think you were piloting a spaceship to another world. To stop and piss along the road, you stop and piss along the road. I’m reminded of another great account of travel west of the Mississippi by Mark Twain in Roughing It, where the all-male passengers on the stagecoach stripped down to their underwear and rode on top to feel the breeze.
Annointed, as it were
We’re leaving soon for Iowa. A road trip like no other, given the Wild West and the roads I choose. Never an Interstate highway, all mostly empty two-lanes. None of that dances-with-semis bullshit and pulling off to fart and piss in herds. Yes, of course it takes a little longer, but not much, and the tiny little insane towns are so amazing and appalling. We’re going to take a scenic route along a river I’ve never heard of deep in darkest Kansas. I’ll bet no one who doesn’t live there ever takes that road, but there we’ll be with wine and tuna sandwiches. Just before we head up to Nebraska, we’ll pass by a place called Speed. I wonder if we’ll notice? The population was only thirty-two as of the 2010 census. I hope there’s a sign, at least, so I can take a picture. My notion was an ironic tribute to my cancer-ridden meth addict brother Bill. Tuesday morning I heard things I’ll never unhear, just before they rolled him into hospice at the V.A. hospital in Tucson, psycho toward the end and then the morphine. He lasted fifteen hours and died a little before midnight—after I’d already started writing this post!
It’s impossible to overestimate how big this is. The “Bill problem” has been part of my life from the very beginning. For the last thirty years, it was almost all my mother ever talked about. As a guilt-inducing bludgeon, her perception of my obligation to his salvation had no equal. I tried—oh, how I tried… “What to do about Bill” was surely the greatest trial for me after we finally locked her up, as I kept him going with monthly payments from her accounts that I knew would partly go for drugs that only helped to kill him. Even as I protected him, I sometimes wished he’d get arrested so the Pima County sheriff would take over. Together with my parents (both now deceased), he was a major component of the Tucson black hole of despair and grief that exacted such a psychic, emotional, and financial toll over the decades. For my entire life, in fact. And now he’s passed over, on the night of the new moon.
Onward through the West, with miles and miles of prairie and the open sky! And may the Great Unclenching finally begin…
Late night visitor in Llano Quemado
I was sitting at my desk late the other night when something started bonking against the window. That would be this fellow here. With a wingspan of about five and a half inches, the polyphemus moth does make quite a commotion on the window glass. This is one big moth, ladies and gentlemen. I suggest we do exactly as he says.
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