Remember the Yippies? Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, et al.?
The wildmen who lit up the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago may have a descendant in the City of the Big Shoulders — a cyclist who gave the old razzle-dazzle to La Migra and seems to have gotten away scot free. (A tip of the Mad Dog Red Zinger cap goes out to Digby and Tom Sullivan.)
I emailed Grant Peterson about getting him a sponsorship through Rivendell Bicycle Works — a Charlie Gallop would be just the thing for Charlie Hustle there — but no deal so far.
Following the news was starting to feel like losing a shit-eating contest, so I stepped away from the Mac and treated myself to a little expedition down to the bosque.
It was something of a whim, actually. I just grabbed the Soma Pescadero and without a plan in place took the Paseo de las Montañas trail down to I-40, rolled up and over the bike-ped bridge, and then risked life and limb riding Indian School and Washington to the brief I-40 Trail at Carlisle, which leads to the North Diversion Channel Trail.
But instead of turning northward as per usual, to head back to the Mac via Osuna-Bear Canyon, I swung south. What the hell? I thought. Why not? Let someone else gnaw on that shit sandwich for a few hours.
Ridden south the NDCT has an exit onto Indian School, which becomes Odelia as it traverses I-25. It’s the sort of auto-friendly shooting gallery that bicycle advocates call a “stroad,” with a bike lane, and drops past Albuquerque High School (pay no attention to the graveyard on your right). To avoid the equally dicey Broadway at the bottom I hung a left off Odelia onto Edith, then a right onto Mountain.
This is the same route I ride to collect the Forester whenever it needs a little love from the Subaru wizards at Reincarnation. But Mountain also winds through Old Town to the Paseo del Bosque trail.
Mountain can be a little sketchy, being a narrow two-lane shared with street people and gas-guzzlers. A seemingly endless construction project that I first dodged in June added a small degree of difficulty, taking me off the street and onto a series of sidewalks from Tiguex Park to the Albuquerque Museum. After dodging a dog-walker, dropping off the sidewalk onto Mountain, and crossing to the opposite sidewalk to punch the bike-ped button at Mountain and Rio Grande, it was smooth sailing to the bosque trail, which I joined just south of I-40.
The Rio Ground in fall.
Then another whim: Check the state of the Rio Not-So-Grande. Up the Gail Ryba Memorial Bridge I rode. Yikes, etc. Back to the bosque trail.
The cottonwoods weren’t showing a lot of fall color so early in the season. Just a hint of yellow here and there. No matter; just happy to be here. I brought arm warmers but never needed them as I cruised along at a pleasant skull-flushing pace.
I shared the trail with kindred souls. E-bikes, recumbents, mountain bikes, gravel bikes, even road bikes (how quaint). One long lean type on a flared-bar, fat-tired gravel bike ahead of me was riding no hands, swaying gently to some music in his mind.
They call me the breeze / I keep blowing down the road
Was he was thinking about ways to drag hapless strangers into unmarked vans and out of the country, or into court to fight some half-baked rap, strip them of their jobs, health care, and reputations, sic’ the thugs in his cult on them, or simply shoulder his way in front of a cluster of cameras so the rest of us have to look at him and listen to his bullshit? If so, I wasn’t seeing it. Just another dude on his two-wheeler, enjoying some fresh air between shifts in the barrel.
As I turned north off the bosque onto the Paseo del Norte Trail and headed for home I thought about how the barrel is with us always. We need a broader view than the one we get through the bunghole.
Me and the Pescadero, just blowin’ down the road. Trail. Whatevs.
Full moon? Two consecutive days of medium-hot posole for dinner? Whatever … Herself and I both had weird dreams last night that seemed to peak around 2 this morning.
In these dreams both of us had lost our phones. Herself was able to borrow one to have an extended chat with her dead mom.
I had a gun, which trumps the phone in anyone’s game. You got a gun, you can talk to anyone and they have to listen. That’s a call doesn’t go to voicemail, y’follow me, Skeezix?
I was talking to someone in a Batman mask without the ears.
Hoo-boy.
To flush that out of my skull I went for a 5K run right after toast and coffee, lifted weights when I got home, and following a more substantial breakfast hit the Elena Gallegos to ride a few trails I’ve been neglecting.
If that doesn’t hit the reset button I don’t know what will.
The usual nightmares continue in DeeCee, of course. But we can’t blame them on posole. Maybe the moon. …
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.
