I spent the last three days camping with friends up on the Arapaho National Forest.
I have done a little deep-winter camping before, but never before on skis with a sled.
I learned that my sleeping bag is not really warm enough for -18 F. (-27 C.) nights. Must remedy that.
Even after that short time, it is hard to make the transition back to the writing life. And things like Facebook–or even blogging–seem so trivial.
But I am developing some new blog posts, so check back after a couple of days.
Anne Hill has her annual Brigid Poetry Festival going—check the comments for linkage.
Me, I just had to get Out. Cabin fever was setting in, and walking the dogs close to home or going up on the ridge to cut firewood just was not curing it.
So we strapped the touring skis to the Jeep, loaded the dogs, and drove up to a higher, snowier place to ski a few miles, get sunburnt, and have one minor dog incident when they discovered a partly eaten snowshoe hare (maybe a bobcat’s leavings).
Naturally they ate it. They need to demonstrate now and then that they understand that dog food does not always come in cans and sacks.
We stopped at Amicas in Salida for pizza. I found myself watching a grey-haired couple waiting to order. He looked to be in his eighties, yet he was wearing up-to-date “powder overalls” (like this).
I wondered if he just wore them for practical reasons, or was he someone who tore up the slopes at A-Basin or Winter Park in his younger years? Or even one of the fast-dwindling group of old men who wear sun-faded 10th Mountain Division patches sewn to the sleeves of high-tech ski jackets?
The earth keeps spinning.
After a couple of pints of Headwaters IPA (me) and some cabernet sauvignon (her) and sufficient pizza, we feed some crust to the dogs back in the Jeep, as a promise of the dinner (from a sack) waiting for them at home.
We started down the canyon of the Arkansas River, and M. remarked that it was not yet dark at 5:30 p.m.
The earth keeps spinning, whirling us on to the next thing.
Earlier this month, I was reading the Cañon City Daily Record—a humdrum piece about a city council meeting in the nearby town of Florence—when this jumped out at me:
“We are welcoming to a great variety of spiritual seekers who would classify themselves in many ways, including alternative spirituality, metaphysical, holistic wellness, new age, neo-pagan Earth religion, ecospirituality, native American tradition, Buddhist, Sufi, meditation and yoga practitioners, tribal drumming musicians, feminist Goddesses spirituality, and Kabbalah mysticism.”
Whoa! I thought. Pagans in Florence? (Actually, there are a handful.)
It turned out that the Beltania festival, which had been in northern Colorado, is moving south. We are, after all, a less-fashionable and hence cheaper part of the state.
The Florence Mountain Park hosts a couple of mountain-man rendezvous each summer, and if the city is OK with those guys firing full-size blackpowder cannon, then they should be OK with all-night drumming too.
I mentioned last October how the closing of the private Wellington Lake campground southwest of Denver was forcing at least three Pagan events to seek new venues.
If this trend continues, M. and I won’t have to drive so far to attend some of them.
A recent “cattle mutilation” report had the gang at Querencia turning to me, because evidently I am their go-to guy on weirdness.
After a couple of weeks had passed, I cranked out a four-part blog post series at my other blog:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
But I left something out: what I called my “Berlitz full-immersion summer course in occult weirdness.”
I did write about that aspect of the experience for Fate magazine back in 1988. But I seem to have outsmarted myself and “filed” that issue in some very special place. It is not in the Box of Magazines in Which I Published Articles.
Naturally it is not available online, being from 1988. Too bad, because I had thought of scanning the pages and putting them on the web site.
Perhaps I could find a copy somewhere if there was sufficient demand.
I was walking around today in Manitou Springs, once a spa-resort town, located in the foothills west of Colorado Springs.
You should know that there are no springs in Colorado Springs–real-estate developers lied in the 1870s too. The springs are in Manitou.
But Colorado Springs has several important military installations: Fort Carson, NORAD, and so on.
Manitou is in a tight valley, and Ruxton Avenue, one of the main streets, goes up a side canyon, where the sun rarely clears the snow and ice, so you step carefully past the little storefronts where various hopeful artsy types open galleries and craft shops and then are gone six months later.
I looked down at one of the Victorian houses across the creek, and a memory of the Cold War years came back.
It was winter then too. M. and I, not long married, lived elsewhere in Manitou.
One night in the early 1980s, I was visiting friends who rented that particular house then, and I came out around 10 p.m to see a narrow view of the sky to the north.
The sky was glowing blood red.
Faster than you can read these words, I thought, “That’s it. Soviet missiles have hit Denver. We’re next. We’ll all be dead before I can get home to say goodbye to her.”
Then my rational mind belatedly suggested, “Maybe it’s the Northern Lights.”
At 38 degrees-something north, we do not see the aurora borealis often—in fact, almost never.
Had it not been for the planetarium shows I had watched as a kid at the natural history museum in Denver, I might not have known what I was seeing.
I went home then to find M. also a little shaken by the sight. After we reassured ourselves that we were still alive, we watched the aurora until it faded. It was front-page news in the next day’s local papers.
It all came back to me as I walked back down to the main thoroughfare to look for her Christmas present. We’re still alive.
I opened the Cañon City Daily Record on Monday and learned that M. and I have been dining above the dead.
One of our two favorite cafes in the nearby town of Florence, Colo., is the Aspen Leaf Bakery, which, it turns out, is the second-most haunted locale in that county. (The first is the Prison Museum, a former women’s prison, in Cañon City. Funny about that.)
According to the article, local ghost-hunters say the basement of the Aspen Leaf’s building seems to be a “meeting space” for spirits. “No one’s died there,” said one ghost-hunter. “So they’re just hanging around.”
The Daily Record offers no link (typical!) but at the Cañon Ghost Trackers web site, you can follow their investigations and listen to their audio evidence.
NOTE: If all the audio recordings start playing at once (depending on your browser settings), that does indeed sound spooky.
My own experience has been more one of meta-ghost-hunting
I noticed a couple of instances in the past month where Colorado Pagans seem to be getting fairer coverage in the news. One was the item about the Pagan Student Alliance at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
(But as a former university professor, I have seen clubs come and go. Only clubs with strong support from a department or a particular professor last more than a year or two, typically.)
A Denver Post story today describes the work of a hospice chaplain and contains this paragraph:
Her patients come from all spiritual traditions and have included a Buddhist priest, a Druid high priest and a Sufi spiritual leader. But end-of-life spiritual care, she emphasizes, isn’t necessarily about religion.
So the Druid is one of the exotic Others, but at least the Post did not put “high priest” in quotation marks.
And Tina Dowd sounds like a true priestess herself.
UPDATE: Here is one description of running a university Pagan students’ club.
A television news report says that the private Wellington Lake campground, site of Dragonfest and several other Colorado Pagan festivals, is closing for the winter and possibly permanently.
The campground was operated by a concessionaire, Castle Mountain Recreation. The lake itself is part of the Denver suburb of Thornton’s water system.
The closure would affect the nearby town of Bailey, the last stop before the lake for those coming from the Denver area.
Rumor has it that the closure is indeed permanent and that some other use is planned for the site—luxury mountain homes?
More when I hear about it.
UPDATE, October 19th: A massive yard sale of all equipment, boats, trucks, etc. from Wellington Trading Post will be held at Wellington Lake from 9-6 each day, Oct. 23-25. That sounds pretty final.
You can’t keep a good drama queen down.
Ted Haggard, the disgraced pastor of the New Life megachurch in Colorado Springs, whom you might of thought would never occupy a pulpit again, but rather skulk around Phoenix, Arizona, peddling life insurance, is ba-a-a-ack.
Ted Haggard, who proves that the Elmer Gantry archetype is alive and well in American Christianity.
Ted Haggard, who thinks downtown Colorado Springs is controlled by demons.
Ted Haggard, who, to his credit, thought that evangelical Christians should embrace environmentalism, but then got busy with meth and gay escorts.
Really, he belongs in a convertible with a sash (Drama Queen 2008) doing his best parade wave (“elbow elbow wrist wrist”).
Really, he is Colorado’s gift to religious journalism. What will he do next?
Think of a typical American small-town parade: the Apple Queen and her court in a convertible, the honorary marshalls (some respected elderly couple) in an antique car, the high-school band kids’ faces earnest and nervous under their shakos, Shriners in miniature cars, a military vehicle or two, horses, alpacas, old tractors, Boy Scouts, a gaggle of Model A Fords, local political candidates, the Christian Motorcyclists Association on their holy Harleys . . .
My foothills volunteer fire department has put our brush truck in the parade. We are four adults—two men, two women (one a firefighter and the other a wife of)—and a gaggle of kids in home-produced T-shirts with the department’s name.
We are toward the back of the line-up, so I have plenty of time to pace up and down beside the truck, wondering if such as parade fits any of Michael York’s definition of Pagan cultic practice
We are not too Dionysian here—I will walk alongside the truck tossing hard candies and bubble gum to the kids on the curb—not like a New Orleans Mardi Gras parade with the doubloons, beads, and sexual interplay.
But despite the “praise band” on a trailer up ahead and the aforementioned motorcyclists, it is more a day for the Classical virtues than the Christian ones.
If an ethnographer could write a “thick description” of the parade in the style of Clifford Geertz, how many layers there would be!
For one thing, our fire department’s participation in the parade began relatively recently, three or four years ago, as part of the asst. chief’s campaign of professionalization and getting the larger town’s dept. to take us more seriously in mutual-aid situations.
And having led the parade with their apparatus, now parked in a side street, those guys sit in lawn chairs in front of the firehouse and grin and wave as we pass by.
I spot M. on the sidewalk outside our favorite coffeehouse (just where I would have expected her to be) and hand her a sucker, which Fisher will later snatch off the kitchen counter and eat, wrapper and all, giving himself cherry breath.
When we re-unite at home, she tells me that the parade seemed “interminable” and that she had wondered awhile if she had somehow missed our unit, which in fact was 84th out of about a hundred.
And she spoke of seeing the old guys from the state veterans’ home, riding on folding chairs on a flatbed truck, how when she saw them pass by she unexpectedly broke into tears. (Me too.)
As the man said, Cattle die, kindred die, every man is mortal: But the good name never dies of one who has done well.
Those are the virtues we celebrate, proceeding down Main Street under a bright southern Colorado sun.