Category Archives: Travel

Travel, US History

The West

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Winter                                        First Moon of the New Year

Residuals from Denver.  Gabe saying, “Oh, no.” as he pushes his toy trains over the edge of the table.  Ruthie dancing with her stuffed horse while the US Junior Olympian dressage quadrille performed.  Jon at work on the renovation, painting doors, grouting tile.  Jen and I headed out to A-basin to pick up Jon after his head banging.

The more we go out there and, specifically, the more I go to the Great Western Stock Show, the more intrigued I get with the West.  Cowboys.  Belt Buckles.  Rodeo.  Horses.  Ranches.  Brahma bulls and Longhorn cattle.  Rhinestone belts and Stetson hats.  There is an America here that I know little about.  A part of the country’s history born in pioneer expansion and Indian oppression.  A hardy, land and livestock oriented life necessitated by land unfit for traditional agriculture.

Both the new West and the old one intrigues me.  Even the very old one.  The Anasazi west and the gunfighter and outlaw west and the rancher and cowboy and pick-up truck west.

Not sure right now what to do with this intrigue, but something will come.

Code of the West

  • ·         Live each day with courage
  • ·         Take pride in your work
  • ·         Always finish what you start
  • ·         Do what has to be done
  • ·         Be tough, but fair
  • ·         When you make a promise, keep it
  • ·         Ride for the brand
  • ·         Talk less and say more
  • ·         Remember that some things aren’t for sale
  • ·         Know where to draw the line
Cinema and Television, Family, Literature, Travel

1Q84, Girl With Dragon Tattoo and Dancing Horses

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Winter                                     First Moon of the New Year

Buddy Mark Odegard told me he just finished 1Q84.  Me, too.  Last night, in fact.  This is a good, maybe a great novel.  Time will tell on the evaluation.  It has a good mix of magic realism, Kafka, contemporary product placements, love story and a peak inside Japanese society at this point in the new millennium.

It affected me in a deep way, wondering about the nature of this reality and alternatives to it.  Wondering about the origin of religious beliefs.  Wondering if the Japanese appear as similar to us as they do in reading Murakami.  1Q84 will have to set with me for a while, perhaps a long while.

Also saw David Fincher’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Long and beautiful, it recreates the mood and jarring character of Lisbeth, the mystery of Harriet Vanger and the investigative tenacity of Mikhail Bloomfield.  We were part of a small crowd of gray haired folk, a quartet of women in front of us who had one woman explaining the ending to her friends.  Over and over.

We’ve also seen the Swedish version, a grittier piece with lower production values.  Naomi Rapace seemed to inhabit the angry side of Lisbeth better than Rooney Mara, though Mara exposed her gentle side.

We’re off to Dancing Horses tonight, for something completely different.  The last night here with the Denver Olsons.  Tomorrow we pack up and return home.

 

Art and Culture, Travel

Pacific Northwest On the Front Range

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Winter                    First Moon of the New Year

The Denver Art Museum (DAM as it describes itself) has a wonderful Pacific Northwest gallery.  Undergoing reinstallation when Kate and I visited the museum last year, I saw its bones and wanted to see what I though was a new gallery.  Turns out it’s an old gallery newly installed with several new works added.

There are two sets of two large story poles (totem poles) which have hung between them on a braided rope a puppet by Richard Hunt, creator of the MIA’s raven/sisuitil transformation mask.  A wall between them has many masks, some from the late 19th century, but many from latter decades of the 20th.

A bear clan living space partition is huge and has the usual womb located space for the chief to enter through wearing and carrying clan regalia.  The collection also includes several bent wood boxes and two story poles from the 19th century, weathered and furrowed, haunting in their quiet presence.

If you’re ever in Denver, this is a real treat.

The new DAM buildings, I’m afraid, are not so fine.  Now three years or so old, they include many dark areas with little natural light, oddly shaped galleries that draw attention to themselve rather than the art.

Family, Retirement, Travel

Free Time

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Winter                    First Moon of the New Year

The grandkids are back in school today;  Jon and Jen back in their classrooms, so we’re on free time.  I want to go to the Denver Art Museum and see a Pacific Northwest exhibit they were installing last time I was there.

Due to Kate’s impending retirement this may be the last time we travel out here together for a while.  Too expensive to board all the dogs.  While we won’t be on a fixed income, it will be less plastic than during Kate’s employment years.  Unless, of course, I finally push a novel over the transom.  Then we could a little extra cash.

Limitations are part of life so I don’t find that prospect daunting, only something new to take into account.

That’s all from the Mile High City for today.

Family, Travel

Jumping Horses

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Winter                            First Moon of the New Year

Sometimes you do something for one reason and have an unexpected outcome.  Tonight was like that for me.

The Great Western Stock Show, Colorado’s winter State Fair-like celebration of things Western, has become my time to visit with the grandkids.  I take the kids to a couple of shows, walk through the exhibition hall with them and get down into the stock barns, too.

This afternoon at 5 we boarded a shuttle here at the Best Western, making it out to the show around 5:15.  Gabe had his picture taken on a Clydesdale.  3 year old Gabe and this giant horse made quite the shot.  Very big horse, very small Gabe.

After a dinner of polish, briskets and chicken nuggets we wandered the merchandise and exhibition halls, seeing John Deere implements, cattle chutes, Western clothing, candy, baby chicks, several cages filled with chickens, a bee exhibit (I chatted with some Colorado bee keepers) and bought Ruth a lavender cowgirl hat.

Before going to the main event, we wandered through the horse barns, stopping to communicate with a few.  On the wall opposite the last of the horse stalls were some larger stalls.  In two of them  were Texas Longhorn cattle.  One came out of the stall while we watched, he had to angle his head to maneuver those huge horns through a three foot + opening.

Then we went to the event center for the Grand Prix, a $40,000 steeple chase, which pitted 27 horses and several riders against an 80 second clock and a series of jumps designed by the top steeple chase course designer in the US.

I’d never seen horse jumping live.  It amazed me.  These huge animals and their relatively small riders approached jumps of various heights, widths and construction.  One had water and another had a brick wall, both difficult for horses to cross.

The horse would gather itself in stride, then leap, stretching out those four legs, legs meant to have contact with the earth and follow their momentum across the obstacles.  This is an act of courage, skill, athleticism and beauty.  On the part of both rider and horse.

I would do this again.   Never occurred to me I might like it.

 

 

Family, Travel

The Triangle Hotel

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Winter                        First Moon of the New Year

Worked this morning on the novel.  Finally finished editing all the stuff I’d written before and got back to actual writing.  A bit of stop and go, flushing out the pipes, reorienting the fiction side of my brain, but a page or two got put into bytes before lunch time.

Kate was over at Jon and Jen’s helping Ruthie clean her room.  Lunch at the Renaissance Hotel, a ziggurat inside with open balconies narrowing as they get toward the top.  Plants dangle from a few planters, the paint is an egg shell gold.

Gabe and Ruth refer to the Renaissance as the triangle hotel, a landmark visible when returning from Ruth’s gymnastic practice.

In the gift shop you can buy Stetsons, belt buckles, items carved from deer antlers and many accessories decorated with large flared crosses, studded with rhinestones.  This is Great Western Stock Show memorabilia and disappears when the horse and cattle trailers pull out headed for Wyoming, Montana or Texas.

Faith and Spirituality, Travel

Jon and the Big Picture

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Winter                              First Moon of the New Year

Jon and I went to the Yak and Yeti, a Nepalese place in Denver.  We had the buffet, talked of politics and generations, family and China.  Jon’s a bright, well-informed, guy whose political views have nuances.

He’s worried, for example, about a currency collapse if the dollar is no longer the world reserve bank note.  I haven’t followed the argument closely, but from what I know of it, it imagines a scene in which China pulls back from the dollar, suddenly giving the privileges of the reserve to some other lucky money.

Here’s my two cents.  As the world’s largest economy, it is in no one’s self interest to torpedo the US markets, especially for China.  The interlocking nature of trade reduces the likelihood of hostilities, whether fiscal or military.

Britain, bestride the world at the end of the not so long ago 19th century, made a shift of the nature Jon anticipates, falling to second rate power status.  Yet Britain and the British have survived.

We will not suffer the same fate.  At worst, and I imagine, at best, too, we will be demoted from hegemon to co-hegemon.  China and the US, perhaps eventually India, will share responsibility for word leadership.  That’s bad for America 1ster’s but good for a world that can benefit from dilution of power in any one country’s hands.

Then we got in the rental Nissan, navigated through the blinking lights of Denver, the front range at our back and went back to  Pontiac Street.

Family, Travel

Shopping in the Physical Universe Is So Last Millennium

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Winter                                       First Moon of the New Year

Off to Joann Fabrics with Ruth.  Kate and Ruth found fabric to make several dresses, some for Ruth and some for Elizabeth, her American Girl doll.  Granpop went off into the wilds of mall land, proving to himself once again that shopping in the physical universe is so last millennium.

Searching in real time for objects that can be in one of several locations takes a lot of time and, as happened to me this morning, is not always successful.  I did get a new battery for my watch…something that has to be done in the physical world since I don’t remove my own watch backs, though I could I suppose.

Finding a camera strap and a lens cap for my camera proved impossible in the amount of time I had.  Best Buy had neither one, but I did pick up some double A batteries.  The Wolf Camera, supposed to solve my remaining problem acted like the ivory pileated woodpecker.  It just wouldn’t appear.

By the time I got back to Joann Fabrics, an hour plus later, Ruth and Kate had made it to the cash register.  They paid, we hopped in the car and went to Panda Express.  Big fun all round.

Family, Travel

Zoo Interreptus

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Winter                            First Moon of the New Year

Gabe, Jen, Kate and I settled into the Nissan rental for our trip to the zoo.  We headed down the boulevarded Martin Luther King to Colorado, took a left, south, and followed the signs to the zoo, not far away, especially not far away compared to the zoo…

This entry was cut short by the call from Jen to go pick up Jon.  The zoo faded into the afternoon as Jen and I drove out Hwy 70 into the Rocky Mountains, crossed Loveland Pass and dropped down its far side to the Arapahoe Ski Area or A-Basin as skiers here call it.

The clouds had an unreal rose and gold tint and the mountains in front of them looked like a movie set.  We drove up Loveland Pass behind a gasoline tanker truck and descended in 2nd gear.

Denver traffic coming and going from the mountains during the snow months, especially on weekends, can resemble a good-old fashioned Chicago rush hour, but this particular evening the road had plenty of space.  Ruthie and I scooted home ahead of Jon and Jen.

On the way out I noticed several vehicles with Co-exist bumper stickers, a sure sign of paganism.  Made me feel good.

Kate says Jon’s head knock is a serious concussion, the kind that, if repeated, could result in brain trauma.  Nothing to play with.

Family, Travel

Family

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Winter                                      First Moon of the New Year

Got to drive into the mountains.  I hadn’t planned on it, but Jon fell today while skiing and bonked his head, didn’t feel good enough to drive home, so he called for support.  Jen and I drove out in the rental, then Jon and Jen drove back in their car and I brought Ruth home.

It had an oddly powerful effect on me, this drive.  It felt good to support family, very good, in a tangible hands on way.  Made me rethink our decision not to move out here.  A part of me wishes we could be here, be available for these kind of ordinary family incidents, a strong part.

The other part, the rooted emplaced part, says moving still makes no sense.  Selling the house in this market.  Leaving friends and health care providers behind.  Political connections.  The museums.  Our gardens, bees and the house we’ve adapted to our life.

These are difficult, no right answer dilemmas.  Wish we could be both places.  You know. They divide their life between Andover, Minnesota and the Rocky Mountains.  That sort of thing.  But, even though we have adequate funds for retirement, we don’t have enough to bi-locate.

I imagine we’ll stay where we are, not out of inertia, because it makes the most sense right now.