This day was pure travel, pure locomotion. We went through some great open spaces and it gave me a taste of Colorado, where roads twisted like a sine wave, covering the bottoms of valleys between mountains. I well remember a prior trip to the state, visiting my childhood friend Tom in Boulder. Rock-barricaded rivers flowed below and to a side, and the trees clung to soil filled with the remnants of other trees that slid long ago on top of slowly cascading rocks. The greens were deep, playing well against the reds and browns of the underlying soil and rock. And the non-shard hunks of rock were cracked by irregular lines and spaces, some looking ready to tumble while others were already pulled low by gravity.
The strange thing on this trip was that all of the “Colorado scenes” of memory were in Utah, and what I had previously envisioned as being in Utah was instead in Colorado. We had only traveled as far east as Craig, Colorado to the El Monte Inn, so the scenes combined with reality in other areas of the state.
In Boulder, my childhood friend Tom was there. I wanted to see him, especially with us being nearby, so I called his mother the day before to get all of the details. She only had his post office box number for location, which helped little in finding him, but she did have a phone number. Calling from a 7-11, pre-Slurpee, I asked him to guess who I was. Tom got it right on the first answer, and was glad I had called.
As usual, his situation was somewhat confusing. He apparently was working at wherever I first called him, but the dishwasher had been fired the week before at a separate place called Rudy’s restaurant and he was needed as a replacement. There was some business connection between those two places and the seemingly cultish group I found him to be living and working with. When talking with his mother, she subtly slipped in her wish for me to “check out this place” and report back. The cultish tones of the ashram where he lived had probably worried her.
The letters he sent to me seemed happy with the deal, so it may have been good for him on some levels. I enjoyed hearing his voice again; it had been a long time. We left our phones with a plan: I would call Tom the next day at Rudy’s when we got near or inside Boulder. End of plan.
That post-nuclear farmland gradually livened up. Long steel irrigation pipes on wheels rolled across crops, spraying green fertilized water. I even saw green hay bales for the first time. They were fresh cut and bundled, unlike the usual stacked dry-yellow. Extremes bounced around throughout the day, though. This farmland would disappear and reappear in new shapes, frequently after unusual, non-farmable land took up some of the Earthcrust we were rolling over. Some rows of crops contoured up a hill as steeply as practical, while other areas were flat to the horizon’s mountains and had been rowed in circles to accommodate the pivoted rolling water irrigation systems. Straight lines and square plots still made their conventional appearances as well.
Extremes followed through a Grand Canyon-like scene, with its own twists. To my left were gorges formed by water both present and long gone, winding around the road and invisible around corners up into the hills. Tall, dark green trees followed the rivers and spread as far as the seeping water reached from the riverbanks. The rivers flowed over beds quietly, lit from inside like aquamarine in a ring. Immediately beyond the snaking river-dependent forest, everything quickly returned to brown-green grasses and several varieties of white-green bushes, all dry and hard.
To my right, the hills were like sand dunes of brown dirt and gray pieces of rock, all intertwined by the roots of stunted, half-living bushes.
After much distance of such passing scenes, our day ended with cranked-out miles and a more intimate feel from the land. Farms, communities, and ecosystems lived together. Still forbidding, but not as desolate.