Thoughts on Travel, Part II
Posted by: Archimedes on Oct 04, 2008 - 11:43 PM
archies_thoughts
|
Denver, Colorado
With the sun coming up behind us and the mountains in front of us, we roll through the burbs spotted with trailer parts and junk yards, testaments to the poverty that clings to the edges of our industrialized, commercialized and “civilized” nation.
These are the things our nation’s leaders have forgotten about. These are the truly forgotten ones. It’s not so much the stereotypical families like mine who are part of the cogs that make up our country, buying cars, and small, “respectable” houses and leading what we consider to be our American Dream. We’re heard, if only barely.
But these people, these that sit on the outskirts of the powerful, the rich, the elites that spend millions to revamp abandoned factories into condominiums with underground gated parking garages for their Mercedes SUVs and exotic sports cars. Meanwhile, on the outskirts of their society, these are the ones left behind, the detritus of a fast moving world of “progress”. Old car lots adjacent to wrecking yards, surrounded by small old houses and run down trailer parks.
Then you come to towns buried deep in the Rockies like Winter Park (Frazier), which one can see was once a booming mining town before it nearly died. Then came the tourists. Then came the opportunists. Just off the tracks there are lines of small, old, squat houses with old cars and used tires in the yard. The giant building that once served as the train depot so many years ago now stands empty, a “for rent” sign in the window. And not one hundred feet behind the desolate little streets that line the railroad tracks, brand new condos stand out in start contrast with their high priced SUVs out front or peaking from under the cover of their attached four car garage.
Having taken lunch in the dining car, we now follow along the Colorado River as it winds down through the Rocky Mountains, weaving its way westward and southward away from the lee side of the Continental Divide. This is my first real view of the Rockies and I am NOT disappointed.
Jagged, forbidding and at the same time awe inspiring and beautiful – warning you to stay away by their very ominous nature, yet speaking to your heart in their beauty.
While the river itself is spotted with people fly fishing, rafting, kayaking and canoeing, the land is still amazingly pristine for all of man’s presence.
Every now and again along flat areas of the banks of the river, a town will spring up, a kind of resurrected settlement turned tourist trap for people to stay in “rustic” buildings along the Colorado River to take rafting or fishing guided tours. For as touristy as these little make-believe settlements are, and as commercialized as they obvious have become, they actually don’t seem terribly out of place. Usually on the outskirts of these little towns, people will congregate to create small tent villages. It’s amazing how much stuff people can pack or haul in a Tahoe or Explorer.
But the telltale signs of man are not always so intrusive. Every now and again along some ridge or some low lying and flat shoulder adjacent to the river, you see an old footprint of an old log home from what looks like a hundred years ago or so.
It’s a strange and foreign land. And we humans seem so bent on calling it home. It seems the more wild and forbidding it is, the more vehemently we try to tame it. No matter how hostile it may be, the more we want to contour it to our desires. The more inhospitable it is, the more we want to call it home.
And as you wend your way trough these venerable, silent giants, you can see those who were the pioneers, those who toughed it out before it became popular. Old cabins and small ranches with a few horses, their yards littered with defunct vehicles, battered old trucks mostly. Then alongside of them you see, nestled into the mountains, the palatial houses nearly as magnificent as the mountains in their background.
Glenwood Springs, Colorado
This has to be one of the most picturesque (if not touristy) stops one could find. But you can see its mark on the land. On the hills above stand multilevel homes halfway up the mountains while giant stone structures, including the train station, greet the nonstop flow of visitors looking to wear out their cameras.
Meanwhile, as the silver cars slide by like quicksilver bullets, they pass by old freight and tanker cars pulled by orange Union Pacific locomotives towing massive amounts of raw materials to the other side of the mountains. Freight cars filled with various products and materials, tankers filled with oil, gas and chemicals, and hopper after hopper filled to capacity with coal headed east, their empty counterparts one track over.
Grand Junction, Colorado
Yet another growing community replete with all of the signs of the same disease that plagues our nation, the desire to expand. As the train rolls in, a beautiful old stone structure looms ahead on the tracks. And from the distance it speaks to you of men in waistcoats and pocket watches with fobs. Men wearing horn-rimmed glasses and sporting handlebar moustaches and parting their hair in the middle. And it speaks of women, elegant and beautiful in long skirts and petticoats and parasols. Like an old sepia photograph come to life, it’s like a window to the past that speaks so clearly that you can almost hear the slow rhythmic “chunk, chunk, chunk” as the steam engine idles at the station and the hiss of the billowing, white steam clouds that belch from its sides. You can hear the clear ring of the brass bell that sits on the front of the engine and the high pitched cry of the steam whistle while a conductor bellows out, “ALL ABOARD”!
And then as you approach, you suddenly note the seven foot tall chain link fence that surrounds the old monument, its beautiful old stained glass windows broken out by vandals and vagrants, its once beautiful and ornate double doors and rounded over windows boarded over and is majesty reduced to memory.
And to replace it? A squat, long, cement block building with about as much character and charisma as the mortar and cement blocks that make it up. Like all of those things that have “outlived their (proposed) usefulness”, the majestic old structure like others of its kin are swallowed up by the “modern” and “efficient”.
I asked one of the Amtrak personnel if it was ever going to be restored as I remarked at what a beautiful old building it was.
“Don’t know,” he answered. “It’s been that way for at least ten years now”.
In all of our haste to move forward, in our never ending quest to expand, we leave behind so much of ourselves and allow ourselves to waste away in excess and complacency while at the same time we lose our sense for beauty and craftsmanship. It seems that there is little value in nostalgia these days. And for all of our being so “proud of our past”, it amazes me how hurried we are to move away from it, to divorce ourselves from it.
But some things never grow old. With a weighted heart and a small bag full of postcards and trinkets, probably all made in China, we slowly plod through and away from the little town, past their old mine, their Main Street. Past the palatial houses on the foot of the mountains that serve as the seasonal homes for the wealthy. And past the small ranches and trailers of those who have been here since before the town was discovered.
And on we travel past it all into the most untouched wild of the Colorado canyons. Timeless. Breathtaking.
Sculpted by God and painted by Mother Nature, it’s easy to see why the Native Americans considered these canyons and plains and buttes as spiritual, holy. Chiseled away by the Colorado River hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years ago, they can move one’s soul as only the arts of nature can do. And as we pass down through and the canyon widens, you can look out at the mesas and jagged mountains out across the flat fields covered in scrub.
Every now and again a desolate little town flits by, home to those scraping out a living by whatever industry that can be found in these harsh lands. Towns rejected by the rich and the Walmarts for development and “progress”, they live their lives simply, if hard. But perhaps in that simple, quiet life, they find the peace that this progressing society so often seeks and so often only finds by prescription from a doctor in the form of mind numbing drugs that temporarily abate the human element within us with a false sense of “peace”.
|
|
| |
|
