I was thrice blessed as I prepared to leave Bibleburg last Wednesday, an hour earlier than I had planned.
First, I had slept in a bed, in a room, not in my car parked in front of the hotel. I gave a thumbs-up to the stealth camper I spotted as I left to get coffee, for hiding in plain sight in the rain-drenched parking lot. But s/he got two thumbs down for being so obvious about it: a towel tucked into the top of a cracked rear window; clothing, water jugs, and other “not a guest here” hints strewn all over the front seats; and so on. Respect your adversary, dude.
Could’ve been a hotel employee, times being what they are. But still, style counts.
Second, the Starbucks across the road had that very morning begun opening at 5 a.m. instead of 6. Ordinarily I brew my own coffee on the road, but lately the hotels inflict these Keurig monstrosities upon us instead of mini-coffeemakers whose carafes can be repurposed for an AeroPress brew.
Pity that the smoke detectors dislike my little MSR IsoPro camp stove. “Outside use only,” kids. Just ask the guest in the Honda Hilton.
And finally, third: I was leaving Bibleburg an hour earlier than I had planned.
I always like leaving the B-burg, and leaving early is even better than not going there at all. I find myself in sympathy with my mom, who when we were transferred there in 1967 looked at downtown through a prism of memory from the 1940s and recoiled.
Ten years later a colleague at the Gazette would say that anything east of Hancock Avenue wasn’t Colorado Springs, and mom would’ve agreed. I certainly did.
In my Gazette years I was living in an old Victorian carved into apartments at Cascade and San Miguel, right next door to The Colorado College, just north of what was still called “downtown.”
But when the O’Gradys first arrived we set up housekeeping east of Academy Boulevard, 3.5 miles into the prairie from my colleague’s Hancock border. Nearly six decades later, South Loring Circle feels almost urban.
The town goes ever on and on, to paraphrase Bilbo Baggins. In this instance toward Kansas, not Mordor, though the differences between the two may be undetectable to political scientists. (Hint: Mordor had mountains.)
I’ve left the place more times than anywhere else, which probably says more about me than it does about B-burg. And this trip I was ready to skedaddle again after just four days. The rain, the postapocalyptic state of the roads, the endless high-speed conga line of traffic — two final tallboys of Starbucks and I was on my way.
• • •
It was hairy from jump. Pitch black and still raining, with fog to boot, and despite mopping all my windows and mirrors with a towel before leaving I was flying blind for a few scary minutes until the a/c defogged the glass. Not optimal when you’re merging onto I-25 from Briargate Parkway at 75 mph with a few thousand of your closest — and I mean closest, as in halfway into the hatchback — friends.
The weather remained gloomy. I didn’t bother putting on sunglasses until I was past Raton. Creeks had become rivers and rivers were inland seas. Ponds appeared magically like Brigadoon. Folks who parked their trailers in low-lying areas found themselves with rudderless houseboats.
There were enough sunflowers at roadside for a regiment of Graham Watsons, guarded by ravens perched on fenceposts. Lots of fat black cattle living large in the tall salad. I fought the urge to stop at McDonald’s and instead yelled “Go home!” at vehicles with Texas plates.
Skidmarks demarking various unscheduled off-ramps to left and right with “Damaged Guardrail Ahead” signs for headstones. A giant shitbox bearing a plate reading “IH8UALL.” Making America great again, one vanity plate at a time.
In six hours flat, with one stop for gas, I was back at the ranch. My training-log entry for the day reads, simply, “Nothing.”
But the next day I was on the old Steelman I’d hauled with me to Bibleburg, tooling around the sun-splashed Elena Gallegos Open Space, a smile on my lips and a song in my heart.
Home again, home again, jiggity-jog; the desert’s the place for this salty ol’ dog.
Mad Blog Media 
“Creeks had become rivers and rivers were inland seas.”
Look up the Eden Train Wreck for a true-life story of such a day, way back when. The man who became my grandfather lost most of his family to the Arkansas River, outside of Pueblo. He, Frank Gartland, had stayed in Denver while Mom took the rest of the kids on a train ride to St Louis with plans to see the Worlds Fair. Rain ensued. It took out a bridge. Still one of the worst disasters of its kind. You can find a passel of Gartlands in the list of the dead.
If grandpa – “Papa” – hadn’t stayed home, I wouldn’t be here to tell you about it.
Wowsah. I lived in Pueblo and I don’t remember hearing that story. The Chieftain was way off the back even then.
The power of water is mind-boggling. When we moved to the B-burg I noticed all these big chunks of concrete studded with rebar cluttering up the drainages around the eastern ’burbs. I asked WTF and some old-timer said, “Aw, that’s what’s left of the bridges from the big flood of ’65,” or whatever year it was, just before we hit town.
My buddies and I kept playing in the drainages and storm sewers, which may explain why so many of us failed to amount to much as adults.
You prolly don’t remember’cause it was 1904.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_train_wreck
O, I knew that. But remember, Pueblo’s CF&I was a titan in the rail industry. You’d think they’d remember a choo-choo getting sideways like that. They sure remember Ludlow. And the high-paying union-steelworker jobs they used to have. …
As a native born Coloradoan, I especially like the manner in which you describe the californication of Colorado. Every time I leave Cheyenne, WY, I look at the road south as the road to perdition because I remember Colorado as a, nice place not frickin Anaheim with mountains. I remember marching in the Peggy Fleming parade after the 68 Olympics., Fort Collins as a sleepy town and the stench of Greeley. The cloud over Pueblo and the Springs was an aspiring metropolis and Security was a Burb. As we get ready to book our butts out of Montana. Colorado ain’t home no more. So heading out to New Mexico. Looking to rent before we settle for surfe. ABQ looks good me esposa wants to look at Santa Fe. Probably end up in Rio Rancho a Burb. oh well.
Remember seeing the flames from CF&I’s furnaces at night? You could see them from Colorado City when headed north on I-25. Sure let you know where you were.
There are rentals scattered all over Albuquerque. It’s a university town, an Air Force town, a national-lab town, etc. I’ve seen a wide variety of rental houses during bike rides in the foothills, which is where we hang our sombreros.
It’s hard to tell what a “bad” area is here. You can have a bunch of pleasant suburban family homes side by side with Vista del Muerte apartments full of dope fiends, teenybopper cartel wanna-bes, and baby mamas. Rentals are supposed to be giving good space for reasonable prices here, but I dunno if that applies to short-termers with dogs.
Herself has colleagues who live in Rio Rancho, which our Albuquerque-born Trumper neighbor calls “Rio Rathole,” and they like it fine.
Fanta Se, on the other hand, is expensive and short of housing, IIRC. Our man Khal would know more about the town today, but when I moved to the state to work for The New Mexican, I set up housekeeping in Española and commuted 27 miles or so each way, hitting a DUI checkpoint every morning on the way home. Another copy editor commuted from Pecos.
I didn’t move to Fanta Se until Herself and I met up and decided to live together in this little dream house. We were just renting and it ate up every dime we had.
I might look around Cedar Crest, Tijeras, and other East Mountain spots too. Just a few minutes outside ABQ proper, and they even get a touch of winter weather when winter actually makes an appearance in these parts.
Like O’G sez below, Fanta Se is overrated and overpriced. It is becoming a city of haves and have nots. If you can drop 600k plus on a small house, you will do fine. Rents are commensurate. I think housing is less expensive in the ever sprawling southwest part of the city, but that area looks like any other suburban sprawl area. We stay in our little place on the north side because Casa Solana still has some charm, is walkable if you dodge the occasional texting motorist, and has good food shopping. So nice, in spite of all the issues.
We have serious homeless problems here as rents far outreach the typical service sector jobs. So if you work in the National Lab up the road, you can probably do OK here as even blue collar type jobs pay well. If you are making breakfast burritos at one of our fine restaurants, it is gonna be tough. I think the true living wage is in the thirties or forties bucks per hour.
Two thirds of our cops live in Rio Rancho and commute. The P.D. chief lives somewhere near Galisteo. Someone made the joke the other day saying that is the reason Rio Rancho is safe and Santa Fe is starting to get a little rough.
Oh, and the Californication of this city is ongoing. Locals increasingly feel like they don’t matter. The Obelisk Wars are good examples.
But hey, at least I can ride my bike to the stores and survive getting home again.
We have a Santa Fe sheriff’s deputy living a couple blocks from us here in DuckBurg. And IIRC, the managing editor of The New Mexican when I was there lived in Eldorado, as did a couple other staffers.
When I moved in with Herself I was privileged in that we were an easy cycling/walking distance from the newspaper. But damme if that wasn’t the smallest place I’d lived in since I set up housekeeping on Mill Street near Tejon in the B-burg back in 1973.
Hurricane Lorena, after becoming a tropical depression, is due to visit SE AZ mostly on Friday. Flood advisories issued. After a dud monsoon, flash flooding might be an issue due to dry and hard soil.
Yow! Keep that geetar high and dry! You don’t wanna have to be using it as a flotation device.
The non-soon has been a thing here as well. That’s why it was such a shock to my system to see the rains every day in B-burg. Some of the cricks were showing whitewater rapids. Unlike the Rio in the canyon between Dixon and Taos, which looked like a very bumpy ride indeed for the few rafters I saw on my way north.
The forecast has moderated some. Lorena will be a remnant low, not a depression, and its track may become more westerly. So, we may only get an inch or so of rain. We’ll take it, and more if the force allows it.
You want water? I’ll show you water. We’ve been trying to kayak in Lake Superior for the last two days but the wind, waves and rains make it beyond our courage levels.
We need kayaks with wheels here. And knobby tubeless tires full of sealant.
Herb, ole buddy, you’re not moving to the UP are you? I camped a couple of times around Ontanagon where I was a teenager. Seems like the UP is now a climate change bolt-hole.
Ontonagon? That’s where Herself’s dad grew up. Lord, it’s an itty-bitty world.
That is a Twilight Zone moment, heh? Was he a farmer, logger, or miner perhaps? That was a wild and beautiful place back then.
Bob Pigeon’s dad was an office manager for the state Employment Security Commission, born in Wisconsin, moved to Ontonagon in 1934; mom was a bookkeeper.
As a senior in 1952 Bob was a photographer for the school yearbook, “The Boulder,” and a lab assistant. He went on to work with the AEC and OSTI/DOE after going to school on the G.I. Bill (he did two years in the Air Force, including a stint at Lackland AFB in Texas).
So, as you see, both Herself and I spring from strong heartland stock. My old man was out of Louisiana/Florida and mom was Sioux City, Iowa.
Nope not moving here but love a visit now and then. It’s still a time tunnel in some ways with pasties readily available and NOT on strippers POG so settle down. Tons of plaid and easy going locals willing to give you directions or tow you out of a ditch.
Pasties! I might have to move there myself.
Friend of mine who is a Yooper had this magnet on her fridge.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58b066e83e00be6efbd33633/8c2a7233-b7e5-40d9-8bf1-26198b39d990/23381658-8CDA-4D06-8A00-2A2705AD5C11.jpeg?format=500w
Strong stock indeed! Thanks for the correct spelling of Ontonagon.
But, they would weep if they saw what we have done to the wonderful country and world that they left us.
Troodat. Maybe we just had strong roots but stanky flowers?