The backyard maple is still with us, megadrought be damned.
The arborista with the tree service we use recently sent out a customer-tips newsletter about balancing responsible water use and tree care. Top of her list? “Plant better trees.”
The trend has been hotter and drier for many years. I don’t see drought conditions going away. There are plenty of shade trees that are not water-hogs and many desert trees that complement your landscapes. Cottonwood and maple are so out of fashion in drought conditions.
Sigh. Naturally, we’ve got this doddering old maple that endures an amputation or six every fall. And there’s a giant-ass cottonwood across the arroyo.
The Turk standing watch in 2008.
We had a beautiful maple in the front yard back in Bibleburg. Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Defense Regiment) loved that tree, when he was still an indoor-outdoor cat. He’d take up a position in the crotch of it and make himself look even longer than he was, like a giant furry albino alligator.
Once a killer hailstorm hit that tree like Spooky working out with its Vulcan minigun. Maple-leaf salad all over the front yard and porch. Tree bounced right back, maybe even better than ever.
But it rains and snows in the B-burg. Or it used to, anyway. A tree can get a little love up there, whether it’s Earth Day or not.
Hell, I do this a couple times a year. Drop the Subie downtown for a little love at Reincarnation, ride a bike back to El Rancho Pendejo. Repeat in reverse to collect the old warhorse and drive ’er home. Ain’t no thang.
Except Tuesday, it kinda was.
God damn, but it was cold.
I had been expecting a temp in the low 30s, which for some reason sounds a lot warmer than high 20s, which is what it was. So I wore a jacket over a long-sleeved jersey over a long-sleeved base layer, tights over bibs, wool socks, cold-weather shoes and gloves, and tuque.
Wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. And I knew it at 9 a.m., a half-block into the 14-mile ride home.
O, lawd, I will never be smart. I had Buff neckwear, beefier tights, an old balaclava, and an even older pair of sure-’nough winter gloves … and they were all in a drawer back at the Rancho.
“Well,” I thought, “at least it’s all uphill.” And so it was, 1,200 feet of up, not including a long stretch of that fabled “invisible hill,” which is to say a damp, bitter wind out of the NNW and straight into Your Humble Narrator’s chattering choppers.
Whoever coined the phrase “What can’t be cured must be endured” was probably not thinking about stupidity. But I was as I grumbled my way up the North Diversion Channel Trail, whenever possible sitting bolt upright with hands tucked into armpits.
At Montgomery I came upon a street person’s smallish campfire underneath the bridge. I couldn’t decide whether to report him or join him. So I did neither. Onward!
By the Arroyo del Oso Golf Course, with six miles to go, I had gained some altitude, caught a soupçon of sun, and warmed up just a bit … so much so that I began contemplating some extra-credit stupidity, to wit, leaving the pavement at Juan Tabo for the trails that wind through Bear Canyon Open Space to the Embudito trailhead.
Now, in my defense, we’re talking extremely non-technical trails here, and I was on the Soma Double Cross with its 42mm knobbies. Easy breezy like a cover girl! Assuming she were properly dressed for conditions and had a pro mechanic to get her rolling again in 30 seconds after a puncture.
I, on the other hand, was dressed for conditions that existed only in my head, which was up my arse as per usual. I would be fixing my own flat with half-frozen fingers, only 80 percent of which are fully functional when warm. It would take longer than 30 seconds. Finally, there was the absolute certainty of some rapid evaporative cooling on the 1.5-mile paved descent from the trailhead to the Rancho.
So for a change I did the smart thing: took the pavement home, slammed a steaming mug of tea, and spent way too much time in a hot shower. Around 3:30 I got back on the bike and zipped down to fetch the Subie. Didn’t even need the jacket for the return trip. Ah, the desert Southwest, with its 30-degree temperature swings.
This is hardly the stuff of legend, or even unpaid bloggery. There was a time when I would drive for hours in much worse weather just to race bicycles in it, then tidy up at the car wash afterward. But that was when I was a man — a slightly better insulated man — instead of whatever it is I am now.
Plus my auto mechanic was only 14 minutes away by bike. Sometimes I’d just run home.
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.
Yes, they let this work at the Gazette. I guess they really were libertarians.
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.
Paging Graham Watson. …
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.
My Steelman puddle-jumper, sans puddles.
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.
The O’Grady family mansion, circa 2025. I like what the latest owners have done with the place.
When someone asks me, “Where are you from?” I reply: “We were an Air Force family. Moved around a lot. I’m not really ‘from’ anywhere.”
But if I am “from” somewhere, it’s probably Colorado Springs.
Several versions of me have lived there off and on since 1967, when the old man got transferred for the final time, from Randolph AFB, Texas, to Ent AFB, Colo.
The Mitchell High School swim team in 1970, the year we went 11-0. Find the dork, win a prize.
Junior-high dork. High-school swimmer, gradually making the transition from dork to drinker and doper. College dropout sampling the blue-collar lifestyle. Rookie newspaperman. Rookie freelancer, freshly married, the two of us trying to make a few bucks while riding herd on my demented mom for free rent in the family castle. Pro freelancer, in our own home, the wife having reinvented herself as a librarian after a whirlwind tour of the University of Denver’s masters program. The drugs were long since in the rear view, and before we left for Albuquerque in 2014 the tonsil polish would be history, too.
I make my tour of duty there about a quarter-century, all told, which may be a long-enough stretch for Bibleburg to qualify as a hometown. For sure I have a love-hate relationship with the place.
And isn’t that practically the dictionary definition of “home?”
The place has a reputation for conservatism, which is ironic, in that the last actual conservative to run the joint was its founder, Gen. William Jackson Palmer, who saw to it that his successors would not be permitted to plant endless hectares of ticky-tacky rooftops and retail on every square inch of the place when he was gone.
Monument Valley Park, briefly the home of the Mad Dog cyclocrosses.
His legacy includes the donation of land for Monument Valley Park, North Cheyenne Cañon Park, Palmer Park, and Bear Creek Cañon Park, all of them stellar places for riding the ol’ bikey-bike or just hanging around in. He founded the Gazette, too, but we can hardly blame him for what happened there.
The place has been a haven for Birchers, Klansmen, and Nazis in my own lifetime, along with various tribes of generic libertarian fuckwits whose fontanelles closed up too soon (see Doug Lamborn, et al.). Indeed, there was a time when our cyclocrosses in Palmer’s parks drew about half the entrants typical of a Boulder or Denver race, because those posie-sniffing tree-huggers were afeared someone might beat some Jesus Goldwater into them if ever they dared venture south of the Palmer Divide.
In the Springs, “conservative” means “penny-wise, pound-foolish,” or in the vernacular, “We ain’t paying for shit until it breaks, and maybe not even then.”
Back in 2010, the city was shutting off streetlights — 8,000 to 10,000 of them — to save money, suggesting that anyone who liked to be able to see the muggers creeping up on them should “adopt” their friendly neighborhood light.
The adoption fee “may be tax-deductible,” one city mouthpiece noted, suggesting donors “consult a tax expert.” Because nobody wants to pay taxes to keep the fucking lights on, amirite?
Part of our old circuit in Bear Creek Regional Park.
During my most recent visit, it seemed nearly every street in town was either broken or being rebuilt. Whether this was due to decades of “conservatism” or the ravages of an unusually wet summer remains a mystery. I know the town pretty well and have more than one way to get from point A to point Z. But this trip all the letters of the alphabet were buried under orange cones.
Happily, Palmer’s parks seemed in great shape as per usual. In Monument Valley Park, I saw hard-hats using the trail-maintenance equivalent of ice-rink Zambonis to groom the goo right out of them.
Classic Bibleburg, man. Can’t keep the lights on, the fascists out, or the potholes patched, but when it comes to Gen. Palmer’s parks, it’s nothing but happy trails to you. He must’ve written it into his will.
Never tease the Snow Gods. They will take a frosty dump on you from a considerable height.
True, it wasn’t much of a dump; just a few heavy, wet inches. Still, during round one on Thursday the roads got so slick that Herself refused to take me back down to Reincarnation to collect the Fearsome Furster after its semiannual pulse check. And even I could see the wisdom in not tackling the trip on two wheels, especially after I nearly faceplanted on an icy spot while shoveling our ski jump of a driveway.
Round two overnight was strictly a broomer, but the icy bits remained, and I checked my footing as I swept this morning.
“I break a hip and she’ll put me down for sure,” I mumbled to myself. “She’s a sensible woman, albeit a bit ruthless, won’t let the Medical-Industrial Complex suck the nest egg dry rehabbing an ill-tempered ould villain who’s months away from the brain fleas even if he gets back to limping around the property, acting out all the parts in whatever noxious play he’s producing in that scabby, hairless head. Hire some 19-year-old stud-muffin to handle the shoveling and other personal services. …”
Speaking of jobs of work, I see Joe reared up on his hind legs and talked some smack, so I guess he wants to keep the job after all. Christ only knows why. He has to have enough tucked away to sweep Jill off to a white sandy beach somewhere, let the SS boyos fetch the umbrella drinks and fajitas, take the weepy calls from Hunter in gaol. No, no newspapers, thanks all the same. And keep that TV turned off.
Meanwhile, Wayne LaPerrier, that fizzy little firearms fancier, is stepping down from the NRA to spend more time with his lawyers, guns, and money, because the rest of that wonderful Warren Zevon lyric.
And I guess Doug Lamborn finally got tired of being the King of El Paso County. Surely some worthy Democrat can finally snatch that House seat from the cold, cruel clutches of the GOPee hee hee hee haw haw haw haw as fuckin’ if.
The Duck! City may have frozen over but Hell hasn’t. I just checked The Weather Channel.
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