play and ideas: Cowboys, Colorado and Trip out West

Monday, March 27, 2017

Cowboys, Colorado and Trip out West

Family snapshots by this writer, Caroline and the kids.

The girls had a roller derby tournament in Colorado.

So we decided to stay for a few days.

Its all a part of holy America.
The Beats used to stop here on their road
trips, hanging out in Boulder,
Telluride, and Denver.

I hadn't been back since skiing on Spring break 1984,
when I played with my friends crashing on various couches,
smoking my way through the week, making friends with upper
classmen at my school. Seemed like everyone I knew was there.
And the innocence seemed to expand for a brief moment in time.

But I had not been back much.
And there was a reason for that.

America can be a scary place, especially between the coasts.

But we decided to give it a go.

Last year, we romped around the UK, looking for the Shepard ancestral roots.
This year, we'd travel west
for the kids' spring break.

Making out way out from Golden to Glenwood Springs, CO, skiing,
hanging out in the springs, and exploring the countryside, making
sense of the Cowboys and Easy Rider feeling of country as a strange land,
the mountains stretching into the sky, along the Continental divide.

When you ski here you are made accutely aware that global warming
is real.

Each year, the season starts later and ends earlier, lamented one of the ski
instructors at the Sunlight Mountain where we hung out for a few days.

But there was still some snow as we made our way up the mountain.

And ski we all did, traversing up and down the mountain over and over again,
shooting down, making our way between skiers and trees, navigating the ice
and slush, people and fears.

Our little one, took the snow board, ebbing to and from, down, never rattled,
even when we zipped past the green trail down a much faster blue trail.
There's no way to get back up or turn around. Looking straight down,
we stumbled and kept on skiing, enjoying a laugh in the lodge after the crash.

No doubt, Colorado is in a bubble, just like New York.

The place seems fascinated with its renegade history.
And you see it in their resentment of taxes.

"A fine is a tax for doing something bad. A tax is a fine for doing something good,"
read one sign outside a beer store. "Hillary for Prison!" The lack of diversity here
can appalling.

Our last day, we explored the Linwood Cemetery, where Doc Holliday is fabled to be
buried. Liquor bottles adorn the old grave, not unlike the Jim Morrison grave in Paris.
"Few men have been better known to a certain class of sporting people,
and few men of his character had more friends or stronger companions,"
wrote the Denver Republican after his passing. "He represented a class of
men who are disappearing in the new West. He had the reputation of being
a bunco man, desperado, and bad-man generally, yet he was a very mild-
mannered man, was genial and companiable, and had many excellent qualities."

In between skiing and springs, we explored the little towns, going to consignment
stores in Golden Co, drifting out to Carbondale, Woody Creek Tavern and then back to Holy
Denver for one more romp through the Red Rocks where the continental divide
meets the Ancestral Rocky Mountains, that jumped out of the ground some three hundred
million years ago, red like iron. They are still here, reminding of our short stay here.