Big Springs, Nebraska

This part of the journey has been tough for me to write about, but not because of anything that happened that day.  Rather, I’ve been putting it off because of my mind now.  Specifically, I don’t remember the exact road we took to go north to Big Springs, Nebraska.  I remember so much of the trip vividly, but this is the one big gap I have.  What do I remember?

I remember waking up to a very, very chilly morning in Alamosa.  The cars all had a bit of frost coating their windows.  It wasn’t something I expected to see while it was still technically summer.  We wandered over to the restaurant at the hotel and had some breakfast.  I seem to remember not liking a lot of the breakfast offerings, but I’ve never been the biggest fan of breakfasty food.  I think I settled for cereal, or maybe it was pancakes and sausage?

After breakfast we were back on the road heading East, putting the Rockies firmly in the rear view mirror by midday.  I remember it being very sunny that day, no matter where we were.  I remember buying some postcards at a small town gas station of some various scenes in Colorado.  I don’t remember what town it was, or if it was even a town at all.  It might have been a gas station without a town.  Some of my favorite gas stations aren’t in towns, so it is entirely possible. 

With mom at the wheel and my eyes on the scenery and map, we went East, until we went North.  This is the part that is tricky.  I have no idea when we veered North.  Since I started this blog (and oddly enough, bought a new atlas) I have been racking my brain trying to remember when we turned left.  I do know my mom hated Denver with venom she usually reserved for…I don’t even know what, so I’m thinking it was the option farthest from Denver that kept us in Colorado, and on course for the Interstate.  That leaves US-385 and Colorado 59, with Colorado 63 and 71 as long-shots.  The more I look at US-385 the more I think that’s the winner, but I’m not willing to totally give up on Colorado 59.  The towns on US-385 barely ring any bells, but I think I’d remember some of the names on Colorado 59.  Either way, we headed North most of the afternoon, and finally we reached the Interstate.  My mom doesn’t like Interstates very much, and she was in no mood to stay on one that night.  I really wanted to spend the night in North Platte, but that would have been a few hours away.  Instead, she saw a Best Western in Big Springs, Nebraska and that was that.  We pulled off the Interstate and soon we were eating at the hotel’s nearby eatery, which was a fine slinger of trucker-inspired cuisine.  They also had a Tron video game, which I did alright on, considering I had no idea what I was doing.  By the end of the night I was watching the rebroadcast of the finale of the first “V” miniseries and my mom was just resting and mentally preparing for the last leg of the journey back to Veblen. 

Looking back (or trying) lights up a few parallels in my own life today.  My wife and I had a semi-argument today about how much I’ve been looking for a new job.  She thought I was looking a lot, when in fact I’ve not looked all that much, or that hard.  With a baby on the way, now really isn’t the time to change locations anyway.  Even without the coming arrival of a newborn, I probably wouldn’t look too closely.  Sometimes I talk a good game about trying new things, being adventurous or whatever.  It’s rare I talk, and even rarer when I truly mean it.  I wanted to stay in North Platte that night because I remembered it, and I wanted to be someplace familiar with a breakfast I’d actually want to eat.  I didn’t know anything about Big Springs Nebraska.  Heck, I totally missed it on the way to Denver just thirty days prior to arriving.  I’ve tried to stray off the path life tries to send me on now and then, but sometimes the path is there for a reason. 

It also hits hard on just how my memory isn’t as good as everyone thinks.  I have a small reputation among my friends of having a great memory, and the fact I don’t remember the road we took on this one part of a journey taken twenty-four years ago really bothers me.  My memory isn’t really as good as everyone thinks.  Sometimes I’ll convince somebody of something, then do some research and realize I was slightly off (or totally off) on some kind of sports/entertainment/general trivia.  I’m also as guilty as anyone of occasionally embellishing a bit when spinning a yarn.  The sad thing is sometimes I don’t realize I’m embellishing until it’s pointed out, or I remember it later (for some reason).  It’s not just the road I don’t remember.  This leg of the journey really is lost in my mental archives.  I don’t remember the towns, the roads, the scenery or even anything my mom and I talked about.  Every other part of the trip has some real standout memories, but this part was just ordinary, unremarkable, and not worthy of remembering. 

Which is how I feel about my own life sometimes.  In college I wanted to take the world by storm by doing…something.  I wanted to be rich, famous, and make my last name something truly historic.  All these years later, and I’m ten years into being a radio DJ and half the time the listeners don’t even know who I am when I’m on the air.  Part of me yearns for the hunger, but part of me is satisfied in what I do have.  I have a job that is steady that I enjoy, a wife that loves me for who I am (something I couldn’t fathom just five years ago), and I have…stuff.  I seem to have a lot of stuff, and sometimes I think the stuff owns me rather than the other way around.  The problem is that the stuff is also my only lifeline to some memories.  My mind seems to be willing to let go of things that aren’t tethered to my brain by old letterhead, cards, letters, and other papers and mementos.  Without some of the stuff, those memories would float away, never to be seen again.

Just like US-385.

Alamosa, Colorado

I’m going to come clean about a story I’ve stretched a bit in my life. My mom and I both like to mention how I “led” her back to Veblen at age eleven, handling all the map duties for our trip back from Farmington. The truth is, I was in charge of signs and knowing when to turn. I did not actually choose the route, and I’ve tried to relay the story in such a way that the actual trip planning part is left vague. What I usually say is something like “at age eleven I navigated us back from New Mexico”. The actual person who plotted the course is…someone who’s name I don’t remember. I only know he lived in the same quad-plex as us, and right behind us. He also owned a pickup, and he looked to be in his forties. His apartment wasn’t very messy, and he was watching some channel I’d never heard of called ESPN. He and my mom talked about the route, which bypassed the same way we came. It turns out my mom hated that route, and he knew a way that wasn’t as bad. They talked it over while I watched some baseball highlights. I don’t remember the score or who was playing, but I remember seeing Chris Berman for the first time.

Here’s where I think my brain has it in for me. I remember all that, but I don’t remember saying goodbye to my brother and sister in law. I’m sure we must have, and I kind of remember seeing them briefly the day before we left. I don’t remember seeing them the day we left, which was a Monday (I think). I remember the “V” miniseries was getting the re-run treatment on NBC, and it was being watched at my brother’s house. I also don’t remember helping load the pickup, but I think the mystery man who plotted the course home helped my mother with that. She packed what she could, and anything she didn’t want or couldn’t fit she left behind for the garbage, or she offered it to the mystery man who lived behind us. I doubt she even remembers his name, so I can’t really try to find him to confirm a lot of this.

Monday we left town, with a bit of juice and snack food, and a jar of water. My mom is notorious, even to this day, for bringing a jar of water along on trips. I’m talking about a rinsed out old pickle jar. Even this past year, when I gave mom a ride to my nephew’s wedding in Pierre, she had her trusty jar of water along. A jar we actually forgot in Pierre, so whoever made up her room at the AmericInn of Fort Pierre was probably a tad confused.

Anyway, we were on our way back to Veblen when we hit a…border stop. I don’t remember the exact reason, but it had something to do with Colorado and New Mexico having some kind of produce problem. We didn’t have any fresh produce along, so it wasn’t a big deal. I’m sure the large truck with a tarp over it did have them curious, but she got us on our way, and I didn’t even give up my small bottle of orange drink. I’m sure it’s not called “orange drink”, but that’s all it is. It came in a small plastic bottle with a foil top, and the contents were orange, and the beverage had an orange flavor, but it was closer to an orange flavor like you’d find in orange flavor-ice.  Looking back, it’s funny to think of myself in a pickup truck hiding a small bottle that was zero percent juice.

Once we crossed the border, it was a non-stop driving adventure.  The views were breathtaking.  The mountain roads twisted and turned, and the view from the road was almost straight down in spots.  My mom liked to joke that my face turned green from the dizzying heights, but I think she’s exaggerating, because I only remember being awestruck by the views, and not being carsick from the view down the mountain.  There were parts of the road where trees rolled downward into drops that seemed to have no end.  I also had to sit on the floor to see the tops of the mountains we were driving through.  My mom and I talked a lot about the scenery during the drive, and we probably kept talking so neither of us would think too much about the steep drops and winding pathways.  Of all the parts of the drive to Farmington and back, this is probably my favorite stretch of road, and probably the one part of the ordeal that my mom remembers with fondness, if only for the part where she thinks I was getting carsick. This was also the first road I can recall seeing signs indicating falling rocks.  I didn’t see a rock fall, but there were plenty that had been neatly shoved onto the shoulder by the Colorado D.O.T.

The mountain trip took most of our day, as my mom was in no hurry to get through it.  Looking at the map, it seemed that we were out of most of the high spots by the time we reached Alamosa.  So, she decided to call it a night there.  The first hotel we went to didn’t meet her standards, mainly because of the natural gas heating system in the room (her fear of natural gas was stronger than ever after the Denver incident).  We went to another hotel, and it was to her liking.  The clerk found us a room, and I remember we had to switch rooms once.  I have no idea why.  It was at this time I have my earliest memory of an actual episode of Star Trek.  I knew about it, and I’d seen a few of the movies on TV, but I had no specific memory of the show.  For ten minutes on some channel I’ll never know, I caught the last fifteen minutes of “Day of the Dove”.  The detail I remember most vividly is Kirk using “intership beaming”, which according to the episode was very dangerous and not recommended.  That night we ate at the hotel restaurant, and my mom said I could get something from the hotel gift shop.  I picked this small, fuzzy dog figurine of a basset hound puppy.  I’m not sure why, and it’s one of the few things from the entire experience I still own.  The hotel also told us it would get very cold at night, and that was as advertised, as our truck had frost on the windows the next morning.

The wait

The next update will be coming as soon as my Farmington visitor’s guide arrives.  I’m hoping it fires up some neurons so I can remember a few more details.

My sympathies, thoughts and prayers have been with the citizens of Alamosa, Colorado.  They’ve had a rough patch of late.  Without getting ahead of myself, I have nothing but fond memories of my brief visit to the town, and I look forward to the day I can visit again.

Farmington, New Mexico (arrival)

Once day came (and it came very early) we were briefed on the rest of the trip. My mom and I were being split up. My mom and brother were taking her truck ahead, and I was in the backseat of my brother’s Suburban in between my nephew and niece. I think we had breakfast that morning, at some kind of Fryin’ Pan or Happy Chef kinda place, but I don’t remember the first two meals of that day. The only images that stand out are clouds, mountains and Dr. Seuss.

Clouds were everywhere all day. Try as I might, I can’t remember any sunshine that day. I don’t recall much rain either. It may have just been a cloudy day. I’m not sure if it was cloudy in my mom’s truck or not. Things had been at time strained between them since 1979. That was the year my father died. My brother married within a month of the date, and that is the subject for another blog entirely. My brother was as close with my dad as I had grown to be with my mom. It would only be in the last few years that I found out just how much the rift had grown at the time. Still, my brother’s wife always seemed very nice to me, and while it was apparent something was between my mom and sister-in-law, I didn’t let it affect me. When I look back at that day now, the clouds may have been a perfect metaphor for my mother’s mood that day. Within a span of four years, she’d lost her husband, mother and father. She was semi-shunned by dad’s family, and her feuds with her own had forced her into raising me all by herself, with no job and only death benefits and social security to live on. The fact I could be a handful at times probably didn’t help. She had moved once before, a long time ago. For a few years my dad had moved the family to Wyoming, but that didn’t pan out and they came back to Veblen within a few years. Now, she was on the move again, to a state she’d never been to, with a daughter-in-law she wasn’t totally nuts about at the time. My mom did have a boyfriend of sorts in Veblen, a very gentle man who lived across the alley. I liked him just fine, but I had been a thorn in furthering their relationship. Again, that’s a whole other blog.

The mountains were a beautiful sight, but my other memory from that day was my main focus. My niece and nephew were still in car seats, and a long trip wasn’t agreeing with them too well. So, my job was to read Dr. Seuss books. I think I read every Dr. Seuss book at least twice, and that includes the encyclopedia. The few reading breaks I had I mountain watched, but for some reason I wasn’t into the scenery. The trip so far had seemed like a long road trip, but now it was sinking in that I would soon need to make a new home and new friends. I was teased a lot in Veblen in those days, but I would still miss a lot of my classmates. I knew that Farmington was a much bigger city, so I had no idea what to expect when I arrived. I think I heard my brother say something about my class being as big as my school. That just blew my mind.

When the sun was setting in the Colorado sky, we pulled off the road into some kind of bar and grill type place. It was dark outside, but I remember the inside of the eatery being even darker. I think I had a hamburger and fries. For a fifth grader in 1984, that’s a pretty safe bet. From there we wound our way down to New Mexico, but with a switched up vehicle arrangement. My mom, sister-in-law and myself took mom’s truck, and my brother took the Suburban ahead and led the way. Around 8 PM we crossed the state line, and we were pulling into town around nine. I remember stopping for gas somewhere, and I saw the new issue of Marvel’s Star Wars comic on the rack (#88, a Leia centric issue). I wanted it, but my sister-in-law, weary and grumpy from a long day on the road, wasn’t sold on it. I don’t want to say she snapped at me, but after the ordeal that was our trip, she was in no mood to hear me whine about how I needed a comic book. I can’t blame her for that. Once we gassed up, we were off to my brother’s house. We didn’t have our own place yet, but we were going to look at a place in a day or two. So, my mom was off to the guest room, and I curled up on a couch in a small nook that I think my sister-in-law used as a sewing room. I don’t even think I changed into pajamas. Once I hit the couch, I was out.

Denver, CO

Before I write about Denver, there’s the matter of North Platte, Nebraska.

When we left Pierre at around 6 AM, it wasn’t even light yet, but the sun starting coming up around the time we were on I-90 heading west. I remember being fascinated by the “Heartranch talking billboard”. I remember begging my brother to let me tune the radio to some frequency in the 88 FM range to hear this “talking billboard”. As an 11 year old, this was a rather cool idea. It feels weird to talk about how much I liked it then, since I’ve used similar technology (short range FM transmitter) for local “talking houses” (and to a minor extent, my iPod radio adaptor). The billboard gave us the talk through about twice before the signal faded out. I don’t remember what my brother did with the radio after that. I think it was either oldies or country music from there on. The sun went from being a problem behind us to a problem to the left of us soon enough, as we exited the interstate and headed south into Nebraska. I remember this part of the drive being a bit like the part of South Dakota I’m from. More occasional rolling hills and not as flat as I’d heard. Right about lunchtime, we hit North Platte. I thought it was a rather big city at the time, and it seemed to have plenty of signs, businesses and a very colorful set of grain elevators, along with what seemed to be a lot of train activity. We broke away from McDonalds for the day, and the new meal plan was A&W. Thinking about this drive now, my brother and mom weren’t talking much. My mom seemed a bit sad, or maybe that’s me projecting. Or, maybe it’s me filling in the gaps in my memory from what I now know about the ordeal. It’s entirely possible it isn’t in my head.

After a burger and fries and a smooth root beer, it was back to the interstate. This is the part of the drive that seemed long. Granted, it was a long part of the drive, but Nebraska promptly seemed less interesting the farther we drove through it. There were simply miles and miles of more miles and miles. The radio couldn’t even pull in a signal after a while, AM or FM. I remember this part of the trip being a lot longer than it probably was, since after reviewing maps and figuring distance it probably only took about four or five hours to get through to Colorado. I remember complaining off and on through this part of the drive about how boring it was, but my brother kept telling me it would be a lot better when we got closer to Denver.

While a lot of the detail about the North Platte to the Nebraska border is lost in my mind, I still remember getting closer to Denver. After a while, the road started getting a bit more interesting, then I saw the clouds in the west hanging. A few miles later, I saw a mountain peak jut up from them, and I believe my exact words were “wow” or something else an 11 year old seeing the Rockies for the first time would say. The closer we got, the bigger the mountain got, and the more of it I could see. The towns, the signs, and everything else just melted away and I just sat there totally silent, watching these massive rocks rising get closer and closer. The mountains weren’t the only thing I would soon marvel at. Denver was instantly the biggest town I’d ever been in by a mile (the previous holder of that distinction at that age was Fargo, North Dakota). We wound our way around town and found the house we were crashing at. Once there, we took a break and soon I found myself at some Mexican restaurant. I have no idea what it was called, but I remember I wasn’t into Mexican food yet (taco day at the cafeteria in Veblen was an exception). I was happy to see my sister in law, niece and nephew again.

The good times didn’t exactly last. The house we were staying at had a natural gas stove, and that was a big red flag for my mom. I swear she can out-smell a bloodhound, and she was convinced the house’s gas line would spring a leak. She’s usually overly paranoid about that sort of thing, but this time her paranoia came in handy. The gas line actually did spring a leak. I remember being roused out of bed at 2 AM to the smell of rotten eggs and a mom in total freak out mode. My brother was in the kitchen fixing the leak in his t-shirt and underwear, and I found myself outside with my mom. I sat there as I heard her tell my brother that “the smell was too bad” and that “no one should sleep there”. He tried to convince her that the leak was fixed an it wasn’t a big deal, but she’d had enough. She called a cab to pick us up and take us to a hotel. Any hotel would have done. Our cabbie was a rather funny but mildly creepy guy who indulged my mom in her rants about the dangers of natural gas while taking the sharpest turns possible. Soon we were at a Motel 6 or a Super 8. I’m pretty sure there was a number involved. I was shortly back asleep and wondering what weird adventures waited ahead, and if I’d see my new home by the end of the next night.

There and back

So, while the wife and I were cleaning the hall upstairs, I found an old atlas. That was handy, because I keep forgetting the Nebraska town we spent the night in on the way back. So, I thought I’d post the stops on the way.

To New Mexico:

Veblen, SD to Pierre, SD

Pierre, SD to Denver, CO

Denver CO to Farmington, NM

To South Dakota:

Farmington, NM to Alamosa, CO

Alamosa CO to Big Springs, NE

Big Springs, NE to Veblen, SD.

My mom didn’t want to go through Denver again, so as a fifth grader I helped plan the trip home, and I was in charge of finding all the right roads. Thanks to Yahoo maps, I discovered my route was only 34 miles longer than my brother’s route to New Mexico. That was a neat and unexpected find, as I’d thought I added a lot more in bypassing Denver (besides me thinking my route was much more scenic in Colorado).

So, that’s what I was thinking about today. It sounds like we won’t be making the trip this year, and with a child on the way it probably won’t happen for a few years. Still, someday, someway, I’ll make this journey again. Farmington isn’t going anywhere.