Something new I’m working on

I’ve posted a unique image here.  I’m looking for what it brings to mind. 

I’ll post my answer (by no means the correct one) in 2009.

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.

Itineraries, chokecherries, queries?

Time to turn to page 24 of our Farmington Visitor guide, for a section about itineraries. The first itinerary is eight days of recommended sights, spots, and directions. It sounds quite inviting, especially to someone like me, who can barely comprehend taking a week off, much less eight days that far away from home. It isn’t that I get homesick easily. I just don’t like taking time off from work. My job is often more enjoyable than it is insufferable. Also, in spite of being blessed with a low self-esteem, I often feel like my place of employment needs me on a daily basis. I’ve taken time off before, and every time I come back the building is still standing, we’re still profitable, and it takes me a few days to snap back to worker bee mode. I’m not sure if the itinerary is the ideal one, but I must give props to the writer of the visitor guide. They sold me on making Farmington the center of any eight day trip around New Mexico. Now, if only I was making an eight day trip to New Mexico.

For the more reasonable trip around the New Mexico area, they follow the eight day trip with several day trip ideas, and once again each one deftly described with Farmington as the center of all you’d need to see. First up are the visits to American Indian Culture centers of the area. As an eleven year old, much of what I knew about American Indians was a mix of what my less-than politically correct mom said, and my interactions with a few Native Americans in school. I’ve had some years to think things over a bit, along with a read of Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins. I think I’d enjoy a tour of several of these areas now, but as a fifth grader it would have been me looking around trying to look interested. While not a worldly fifth-grader, I was a polite one.

The next set of day trips revolved around the Four Corners area, and the looping around to get to it that can involve seeing other sights. I don’t remember knowing about the Four Corners as a kid, which is odd considering how I spent many afternoons. My brother had a complete set of Collier’s Encyclopedias in High School, and he left them behind once he departed for college. They were in decent shape, and there was even a yearbook with new info for 1964. I’m not going to say I read them all of the time, but I did get some use out of them. I often would grab one at random and flip through to the maps, which were on easy to find glossy paper. I didn’t memorize many state capitols that way, but I did learn what countries were where. Along with countries, I also had a pretty good grasp on the states, but I don’t think I realized that only one spot had four states meeting until much later.

My propensity to remain indoors is mostly deserved, but if I get the opportunity to visit Farmington again I’ll spend a great deal of time taking in a lot of what the area has to offer in the outdoors. One of the last really good times I had in an outdoor setting was a few years ago in Pierre while making a rare visit to my brother. After arriving, I was told that the men of the family were going to pick chokecherries. My mom’s lake cabin had a ton of wild chokecherry bushes, and often I’d find myself helping her with them, even though I’d rather be in the cabin playing with whatever toys I brought, reading a book I brought, or watching the one channel that came in on the old black and white TV we had at the cabin. I was never a fan of picking chokecherries. My sister-in-law must have known this, and she reminded me that I didn’t have to go along. For some reason, I did go along. I picked chokecherries with my brother and nephews for maybe an hour in a grove of trees near the Missouri river. Not only did I pick them, I had fun picking them. Just thinking about this now, along with thinking about my mom’s old lake cabin makes me realize how lucky I was, and how much I didn’t appreciate my mom keeping that old lake cabin a lot longer than she probably wanted to, in hopes that I’d get something out of it. I didn’t get as much out of it as I should have, but I treasure what I did get out of it. I should just be happy that I’m not growing up now. Between digital cable, the internet and my iPod I might never have picked chokecherries, gone wandering around the lake alone, rolled and tumbled down hills, thrown rocks in the water, and actually done a bit of fishing, before I decided that fishing was one of the most boring things one could do. I think I could do it now, but only if my iPod was charged and I wasn’t worried about dropping it in the lake.

The query part of the subject deals with the fact I will soon have my own child, and what opportunities I can offer him/her. I can’t afford a lake cabin, I don’t know how to swim, and I’d be in big trouble if I ever got lost in the woods. I didn’t like my mom forcing outdoor life and exercise on me as a kid, but now I’ll be forced with wondering how to involve my son/daughter in things like this. I’ll accept them whether they’re wilderness scouts or computer programmers, but I want to make sure they have every chance to figure out what they are, and how to make it a integral part of their life. Maybe one of them can teach me how to swim someday, or at the very least can help me pick chokecherries so my wife can try her hand at my mom’s chokecherry jelly.

One final odd note about the Farmington itineraries. One of the points of interest listed in one is the power plant. It seemed a bit odd, until a few pages later. The power company bought a half page add, which makes the power plant destination not seem as far fetched. After all, Farmington is only about 30,000 people, and visitor guides don’t pay for themselves.

Location? Climate?

First off, I want to apologize for the 404 links in my last post. It seems I saw the top URL and thought that by changing the number in the URL, it would go to different pages in the guide. It turns out the number is the year, not the page number. So, I fixed that, but I won’t be able to link directly to pages in the visitor guide. I’ll just keep linking to the actual PDF (leaving anyone curious to actually find the right page), so I hope all your Adobe Acrobats are up to date.

Page ten talks about Farmington’s location and climate, and while location wasn’t a big deal when we moved, the climate was. Before I can talk more about August of 1984, the December of 1983 deserves a mention, because it is what led us to our new home. The years may have caused me to embellish a bit, but my mom will back me up to this day that the high never rose above the -20 to -30 degrees Fahrenheit for almost three weeks solid. It was probably the coldest winter I can remember, but I don’t remember much of the cold. School was called off a lot during that stretch, and part of the stretch was during Christmas vacation. Another reason I don’t remember much of the cold is that I was a rather sickly kid who was prone to a lot of colds and flu bugs. In fact, during that run of bitter cold I barely remember going outside. My mom made all the trips to Nelson’s Grocery solo at that time. She had talked about moving to Farmington before the cold snap, partly because she was sick of winter and partly because she wanted to reconnect with my brother. I had lived in Veblen all my life, and naturally I was resisting the proposed move away from the only town I’d ever known.

I still remember the night I stopped fighting. It was one of the last few sub-zero nights. I was playing with something, maybe Matchbox cars, maybe Bristle Blocks, maybe my collection of Star Wars figures. I thought I heard something in the bedroom. I knew my mom had gone into the bedroom a while ago, but this sounded…different. I walked over and slowly opened the door. There was my mother, lying on the bed face down, with her head in her folded arms. She was softly crying, and hearing her cry was something I wasn’t accustomed to. She’d had plenty of reasons to cry before then. She’d lost her husband in 1979, her father in 1981, and her mother in the fall of that year. I’d only heard her cry a bit once before, and that was when my dad died. She did all of her crying before she told me what had happened. She somehow managed to do all of her crying for grandma and grandpa when I wasn’t looking. I never thought of her as cold or unfeeling, far from it. I just thought of her as a very strong woman who was doing the best she could, and seeing her crying really shook me. I walked over and asked what was wrong, and she lifted her head. I can still hear her half-cry, half-scream to this day. “I WANT TO GO SOMEPLACE WHERE IT’S WARM!” She went back to crying and I walked out of the room in a daze. I remember just sitting in front of my toys, not knowing what to do or say. Eventually it warmed back to the zero degree mark, and while I never actually said I was willing to move, that night seemed to be when my mom had decided that next winter we’d be elsewhere, whether I liked it or not.  It was also the night I stopped fighting her on that, and other things, namely her future plans with my future step-father, but that’s a blog for later.

Page ten also lists the distances to other major cities, but once we were settled in there wasn’t much need to travel to Vegas, Albuquerque, or Phoenix.  Page ten also shows a bridge surrounded by a lot of greenery, which runs counter to my brother’s statement earlier in the trip of “saying goodbye to green”.

Page eleven goes on to list the various highs and lows, on average, for each month.  My month in New Mexico was in August, so that put me right around the mark of 88 for highs and 59 for lows.  Those temperatures seem to fit, since I remember the days being quite warm and the nights providing many a cool breeze to sleep in.  That also put me in New Mexico in the second wettest month, where monthly rain averaged just over an inch of their yearly eight and and a quarter inches.  I only remember it raining once, but I’m sure it rained a bit more than that.  One other thing that page eleven mentions is how the elevation affects the sunlight.  One thing my mom mentioned during our departure was that she couldn’t handle the sun in New Mexico.  I have reason to believe there were other factors in us moving back to Veblen, so I never gave her thoughts on “the sun being too bright” a second thought.  I am talking about a woman who still refuses to buy a microwave because of “the radiation”.

Next weekend I plan on visiting my mother in Veblen.  Perhaps I’ll bring up the trip back and inquire more about why we left so soon.  I don’t expect to hear anything but the official story, but she is full of surprises.