Sunday, July 31st, 2011

The next morning Celeste brings the campers across the road some coffee and I show them the tub. Some time later they thank us again and leave. "They're well within their rights to stay there," Celeste had said the night before, after we'd brought the last of our bags in. "That's public land over there– they can camp anywhere they want."

As the white Toyota disappears we pull out the tools Jim left and start on the front wall, staining and prepping. We finish all the siding and about a third of the deck when the first drops fall. We retreat into the cabin and I take stock: when you combine the beer the Vanderhoofs left, the order from Liquor Mart and the cider we brought from Portland there's enough to stock a cooler case.

While Celeste cooks up some pasta I acquaint myself with the Victrola and seek out all the 78s that promise dividends: The Volunteer Firemen, the Original Dixieland Band, Arthur Fields, Harry Lauder. Sometimes the crank runs down during a side and the tune wheezes like a deflating windsock puppet. I wind the crank and the tune swells again, bobbing and marching crazily. I match its rhythm with my own internal wind-up and it's a relief almost to leave them behind and eat to the hiss of the creek and the aspens outside.

After a sigh of fatigue and a pleasant tingle in the feet, it is sweet to lie there with the forest closing us in, standing between us and all the uncertainty and grinding routine of the lands beyond.

Saturday, July 30th, 2011

I dawdle over my blog posts while Celete visits with JoAn downstairs and Jim curses quietly in his office. He relies on internet service that seems to have the same reliability as a regularly-shelled World War I telegraph line. Meanwhile the Vanderhoofs return with the cabin key and Deborah injures herself on a heavy piece of furniture. It's a painful bruise and Jim and Robin agree she should see the M.D. It's a somber time; Deborah's already loaded up with several obligations, including us, and I feel self-conscious about adding to the burden. But it turns out O.K., and Deborah and Jim see us out, and we drive to Boulder to pick up supplies for the cabin.

Boulder is a smaller Portland of the Rockies– an attractive little town with a strong tang of sanctimony. We eat at a stiff, dark restaurant called Mateo– purportedly French, where the waiters have to keep one hand behind their backs while they pour your water. I have an expensive burger which they serve with fries ("frites") in a sawed-off paper bag. The drinks, too, are expensive and I'm not surprised to see the prices listed as whole numbers, no decimals, no cents column– an affectation of hip restaurants that is wearing really thin.

The burger is excellent– and the waiters are almost too eager, but friendly enough– and we're fortified for our trip to the Liquor Mart, a building the size of a Safeway stocked with nothing but beer, wine and liquor. I'm strangely underwhelmed; the depth of inventory is impressive but the breadth isn't much better than many of the neighborhood liquor stores in Portland.

McGuckin Hardware, however, is a different matter. The typical customer is dazed and freshly distracted each time they pass a new aisle. The building is at least as large as a typical Walmart and completely stocked with hardware, tools and related items. We go there for a vinyl repair kit, a coffee carafe for the cabin, and my Holy Grail for this trip: a puffy cap that will make me look like James Sikking in Outland. We score on all three.

The cliffs over the South St. Vrain River are purple and a rich red as we make our way to the cabin. By the time we turn onto the Ski Road it is quite dark; so when the white Toyota shows its trunk to us it is a surprise. Celeste climbs out and I see a headlamp bobbing out of the trees to the left. It's a young guy with his hand up in a gesture of assurance. He says they'll move right away and Celeste is apologetic but negative. They are in the clearing across from the cabin. I see few huddled shapes of luggage, a fire, a guitar case. While the guy's friend waits for him to turn the car around Celeste relents. "I mean, they took their guitar out and everything," she says. I say it's okay with me and she climbs out again. The guy is surprised and very pleased; they promise to be quiet and douse their fire. Later Celeste brings out some marshmallows the Vanderhoofs left and I ask them if they'd been in the creek yet. "It's not warm," I warn them. They laugh in a way that makes it clear that they knew this.

Friday, July 29th, 2011

In the gloom of seven A.M. I savage my foot on a piece of flat, jagged sandstone that serves as a door stop. My toe burns and the pain signals overwhelm all other warnings, remembrances and questions and I lay there squinting my eyes shut and breathing hard for a while. Celeste offers a variety of over-the-counter solutions but I just lay there throbbing.

Later that morning the pain subsides while I'm uploading photos, and a tension begins across my shoulders as the tedium of cataloguing sets in. I really should be posting this travelogue but there is no time; our plans have become definite and cut across my intention like a flash flood. Soon we will be isolated in the cabin and internet connection is impossible.

Jim drives Celeste JoAn and I to the cabin and JoAn notices all the yellow ovoids that mark the cut pines off the ski road. "Did this burn?" she asks. "No, the beetle," Jim says. In a clearing on the left side of the road we can see the blotches of rusty red on the mountainsides: thousands of beetle-killed trees.

When we meet the Vanderhoofs and we're standing around the fire across the road from the cabin, the disaster seems far away, and Celeste says she's not convinced this part of the forest is in danger because of a major fire in 1906 and the subsequent reforestation by young, healthy firs and aspens. And the forest around the cabin does look green; when I take the trail to my bath hole I must slalom around tender fir and spruce saplings and giant stalks of cow parsnip. The creek is just as I left it, a beautiful confusion of silver and black logs, pink cobbles and white and gold gravel. The water looks gold deepening to brown in its bed; but when I put on my trunks– in deference to the Vanderhoofs and the rest who may be around– the water is clear– clear, clear, clear. The cold and motion surrounds me and supports me; there is no distraction or temptation, just cold and sand and quivering aspen leaves. I really want to stay and make minor improvements to the hole, maybe a bench, splash around building dams and altars of rock; but I must be visible and normal for Celeste, so I put on my dry clothes and climb the hill back to the fire pit, where Russ Vanderhoof, his daughter Danielle, Jim and Celeste are talking.

Danielle's husband Al arrives while we're there– a tall, amiable guy wearing glasses and a baseball cap with the face of Cookie Monster on the crown. The group talks of trees on your property, including our confrontation with the owner of the lot to the north over a butchered fir– old friends of Jim and Russ– Richard Brautigan.

Later, we all go in to join Russ' wife Robin, JoAn and Danielle's little girls for a profusion of picnic food– all of which Robin lays out cheerfully and efficiently. Russ, Celeste, Al and JoAn stay in the darkened kitchen and Annabelle, the youngest, half-sits, half-squirms at her place. Russ talks about canoeing in the Boundary Waters and Celeste recurs to the idea of buying a canoe and using it on the Yampa. A picture of a cliff filling our view as the green carries us along and the far-off yellow shape of a mountain lion tracking across its upper reaches occupies me for a moment.

Before we leave, Al gets us all to stand in a photo and I manage to shoot the group before I have to climb up on the deck with the rest. Jim, I think, is ready to go. We pull into his driveway when the sun is orange. Deborah is worried about Kobe, their cat. He's been making weird noises and now sits behind the couch looking morose. Jim, Celeste, Deborah and I group around him, talking to him like an infant, before Deborah can't stand it anymore and looks at the ceiling and laughs with a kind of resigned disgust.

We watch a biopic of Frida Kahlo and that night I have a heartbreakingly elusive dream about a beautiful black dancer who's enamored of me.

The next morning my toe hurts again.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

The next day Celeste is up, it seems, at dawn and I fully intend to turn over and go back to sleep but instead I pick up my notebook and begin writing. Jim is up, too, and soon I hear him in his office. I hear him and Celeste talking softly. I shower and dress and find the coffee. While I lay in bed and write Celeste comes in and uploads her photos; Jim passes through occasionally to drop amiable complaints about his work and offer simple hospitalities.

Eventually Celeste walks downstairs to visit JoAn and presently I follow her. The three of us sit around the breakfast table down there and the subject of Celeste's Iran Flickr set comes up. She had scanned them from a set of slides JoAn had kept from the late 50s of a long-awaited visit of President Eisenhower to Tehran. The photos, I said, were rare objects from an era of friendship that neither government cared to admit right now. JoAn regretfully shakes her head. She remembers diplomacy and even amity when she lived in Shiraz with her husband Bill, an officer for A.I.D., and her kids Jim and Janet. There were concerts over which she presided as a then-untried voice teacher and even a cultural exchange with a pop singer whose song she can still remember; she sings a bar or two, but the rest is gone for now. Later Deborah comes downstairs with a pitcher and asks who wants to join her in a wine cooler. We all say yes and Celeste takes an inventory of the refrigerator. There's sweet white wine and a mango nectar blend and ginger ale; it's all poured into the pitcher and the result is pretty good.

Celeste says I don't like mangoes and Deborah asks me "What don't you like about them?" "It's their fibrous texture," I say. She assures me I haven't had a good one. "In Mexico we had a mango tree, a lime tree and an avocado tree. There was a man who helped us and he would go that way to get the laundry. He would pick some mangoes and they were real firm and smooth." "Like a peach," Celeste puts in. "Yeah, like a peach– just slightly more dense than a peach– and they were delicious– and not at all fibrous." I finish the pitcher after everyone else declines.

Later we get into some red wine over dinner– a pasta dish– and Jim and JoAn talk about Nigeria and Botswana. Politics comes up and Jim says that the best features of Botswana's self-government endured while Tanzania's socialist experiment remained as an uncomfortable legacy, a jacket that didn't fit. Celeste says that Nyarare's policies led to better health care and education in the long run. She complains loudly about the diffuse, shrill May Day rallies of years past and the lack of any clear source of concentrated anger. Jim agrees that there's an apathy problem but thinks that the next round of elections will reveal a new geography that may point to a way out of our gloomy swamp.

I seem to be even more tired than the night before, so much so that I can't remember any of my dreams.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

When we returned from our swim in the Yampa the next morning their gear had not shifted, but the isolated piles of sacks, crocs and water bottles had multiplied– the chatter never stopped, only varied in volume. I thought of the captain in Typhoon– wondering what the people in town could be talking about. They must say the same things over and over, he wonders to the mate. So must these people endlessly iterate while a world seethes around them.

As we flatten a trail through the stiff grass of the flood plain the arhythm of their voices is replaced by the peer, peer call of a nighthawk and the hysterical trill of a plover. A terrific splash marks the loss of another wheelbarrow-load of riverbank. The cottonwoods stand aside to reveal a brown shoulder pushing into the water, littered with polished stones and a great driftwood log grasping a tangle of cottonwood branches and a battered palette. The wind is up and the clouds of mosquitoes that have already covered my body with a blazing itch have blown away with it. We wander along the topography of mud, sand and and pebble until we find a calm spot to lay our shirts and towels and we wade into the swift water. The velcro straps of my sandals open in the water and I march stiffly along a submerged ridge, looking with my feet for that ideal depth. We find it in mid-channel and wheeze involuntarily as the cool water covers our bodies. I dunk my head and glimpse a gold swirl of mica and bark that cuts to a hollow rushing of water, then clouds and sky. I drip into the river and look at the cliffs. I still cherish a hope that one day I will see a yellow form questing just under the canyon rim, a big cat finally completing this great loop of his demesne.

On the way out we stop at the Cross-Mountain viewpoint, a partly washed-out gravel drive backed by a sheltered sign and a thicket of willows screening the water. Behind the green band of the Yampa rises the great stacked cliffs of these canyonlands, endlessly perforated, endlessly reticulated, a vertical city of sage, leathery desert trees, bats and swallows. Here a notch has been carved by the river and the sides have become immense orange and yellow pillars. I thread my way through the willows to stand at the base of one of these stanchions and look at the bleached talus rising to the galleries above. The undulations of the rimrock are sharp and hard against the morning sky. On my way back I spot a big green dragonfly hiding in a sage bush.

Maybell, the tiny hamlet near the eastern access to the monument, is just the same as we left it, a welcome anchor right down to the weathered Sinclair station, where we tank up. Then it's a flat drive through the fields of Craig and Hayden, rising into the mountains around Steamboat Springs. Here we stop for lunch, lamenting again the loss of a loved restaurant, Heidi's Little Switzerland, a defiantly themed place with frantic accordion music, yodeling and immense deli sandwiches. The analog seems to be Winona's on Lincoln Street, a local hangout that offers similarly outsized hoagies, nearly impossible to eat in their split-open girth. I put on my ten-dollar sunglasses and Stockman, to shield against the radiation of extreme wealth and satisfaction from a mighty host of young couples wandering around in their cargo shorts, flip-flops and baseball caps, and wearing three-hundred dollar versions of my own cheap lenses. I have their markings, send out their signals, but I wish merely to pass through their hive unmolested. We pick up a supergoo for our punctured air mattress from some incredibly laid-back young blonde with a tanned face and turquoise necklace and drive back up to Lincoln and past the last of the goldrush storefronts. Immediately the climb begins to the Rabbit Ears, and I don't push it. Eventually we spot the notch, which to me looks more like a pair of blunt-nosed pliers opening.

From here it's a winding drive through gorges cut by angry amber streams and pink granite that seems to push the road into the canyon below. In a meadowland between peaks I spot the anvil-shaped head of a moose in a thicket of huckleberries below the road. I pull over behind a white Honda and watch the moose amble up the gravel bank and casually inspect the car. Up the road a second moose with more grey on its haunches picks its way out of the woods and onto the gravel shoulder, unconsciously staging a travel brochure when it steps in front of the national forest sign. Celeste shoots the tableaux. After another long gorge drive we descend into the plains around Loveland and follow the U.S. highway south. It's a grooved alley that funnels the 65-mile-an-hour traffic into a sort of Russian roulette with a long series of signaled intersections with neighborhood connectors– and rows of Subways, Walgreens, Old Chicagos and Big Ks.

We come out the other side on a two-lane road again, into the knowable smallness of Lyons, and turn back into the gorgelands. The cliffs have turned purple in places and the water has changed from amber to chocolate or black. Eventually we descend into another wide valley and turn the shoulder of a gold hill to see the sign for Pinewood Springs, followed by a dirt access road climbing the hill to the right. We take it and climb the hill, passing the sign that urges you to to use a "slow speed– saves roads– saves cars– saves money", then a side road that descends the hill again and crosses a creek at the bottom, then a turn down and left, then left again, into a dark stand of pines, to the low brown walls and pink sandstone flags of Jim & Deborah's. Jim meets us at the door and we file in and greet JoAn. JoAn tells me of what she's been doing in Prescott and Jim tells us about a neighbor whose honeybees drained their hummingbird feeders. A friend has felled the problem trees at the cabin, abandoning the standard chainsaw for a double-bitted axe. Deborah comes out of her bedroom and greets us with a summary of the evening's activities: the benediction of a hot shower, a good dinner with conversation, and rest in a real bed with mattress and springs. Unloading our luggage, calling home and washing off the dirt and b.o. takes longer than I expect and I sit down at the long pine table to a dinner in progress. It's a good, hearty scramble of eggs, tomatoes and tortillas and I can feel the last of my fatigue fading into a past of flickering gas pump displays, futile squirming in the driver's seat and shifting heavy bins while I kneel on the corrugated steel of the truck bed.

We sit up late talking and drinking wine and cider and when I go to bed I have the usual mild altitude headache and fitful sleep.

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

Celeste walks down the hill from the outhouse and says "You should see the pump." I can scarcely resist such a come-on and I walk a short path back from the campsite next to the outhouse. The pump looks like a robot insect designed for some sinister purpose, with a brutal square head and long beak of a pipe pointing down to a carefully-made concrete trough. From the head project opposite crank handles with grips like those on an antique lawn mower or apple peeler. The motion is like your feet on a pair of bicycle pedals, only the circles are wider and force you into a kind of half-crouch. The work is exhausting and I find myself wondering why such designs were still even in production in the early 1970s, this machine's vintage, as the typography on the manufacturer's plate makes clear.

But in the context of our long drive and this hidden gem of a campsite at its end this obscure piece of equipment becomes charming; it is certainly improbable enough. Celeste says that the camp host is intensely familiar and she feels a creeping certainty that indeed she does know him from some other place. I look for him on our way out but only his battered camper, blocked up by some crazily elaborate, plywood-covered staging, occupies his space.

In the badlands of Wyoming I once again entertain fantasies of living in some kind of cinderblock shack with brown steel roof in view of the mysterious cylinders and pipelines of a Simplot gas operation– meditating on the vast arena of the dinosaurs, maybe wandering around the hills and collecting animal skulls, shot-up cans, esoteric agricultural machinery– thinking fondly I could do whatever I do so much better out there when actually all I want to do is get away. The hills are stacked like anciently eroded ziggurats with red steps and terraces of sage and mountain mahogany. We drive through a canyon of grey/green mounds and bulges that look like bubbles in pancake batter– the flash floods carve their dendrites through this geology.

The hills open and flatten after several rugged grades. I let the Toyota find her own pace and eventually we're coasting again, down into brown and olive hills. The hills rise into a series of mesas that follow the road. Their flanks are a pale gold streaked with red and all over them the ever-present dark green pattern of scrub and sage. At a brown sign we turn left towards one of these structures and follow a long access road around one of its developments. On the other side is a low, dark visitor's center set in a marsh. We had wanted to stop at Fossil Butte on past trips, but it was too late, or we had no time, or we just didn't want to stop, infected as we were with the psychosis of freeway travel– an unsatisfiable urge to "get there". A wide walk of yellow concrete curves in a "C" around one side of the center. The railing carries a series of long steel strips painted and labelled with plaques. It is a timeline of geology and paleontology. The closer you are to the end of the walk, the closer you are to the end of the timeline. All of human history occupies the last inch and a half of the feature. This is, in part, a modern aspect of popular science, a subtle reproof to counterbalance the old idea of Original Sin: look you humans, how puny you really are. The corollary, however, is the real crux of the matter: if this idea is an alternative to Original Sin, is it not also an equivalent?

Inside a young ranger greets us and tells us about the exhibits. Later she would give us a questionnaire and color as she explained that it rated individual performance. The exhibits are expensive; the largest is a series of heavy slabs of sandstone surrounding cast replicas and originals of plant fossils– heavy steel rods hold them out from each other and at varying heights on a matrix of heavy steel grooves.

Outside Celeste sees a Say's Phoebe perched on the railing and a ranger in a straw smokey bear joins us. She says that she's been watching them and agrees that they're Say's. They are caring for a nest under the walkway. We talk a bit about our visit and I ask Celeste if we need a pass for Rocky Mountain National Park. By now we are walking towards the parking lot. "Oh, get it here," the ranger says behind us. Her smile is half hopeful, half apologetic. She explains that the center gets the revenue for passes sold there. I imagine she has to spend a great deal of time thinking about these things when she'd rather be talking to guests about the phoebes. I also think she should have more time to talk to guests about the phoebes.

As we approach Dinosaur the horizon becomes a black and grey mass pressing down. Celeste fumes. The storm seems to be centered on the canyonlands of the National Monument, where we had planned to take that steep track to Echo Park. The drive to the park is a hypnotic up and down, a searching of the seam between sky and land, an aggravated and fascinated attempt to navigate the track of the storm, to guess the intention of this grand, horrible thing.

The visitor's center is closed, of course, but a young couple from Texas tells us that they followed the storm out of Echo Park– the man tells us this. He is casual but squared-away at the same time and oozes disposable income. We thank him and resolve to at least drive up to the overlook. As we climb into the tablelands the mass presses down further, as though we were climbing up into a closing fissure– at the viewpoint all is revealed; several low detachments have separated from the mass and sweep the canyon. The road must be a smear of red/orange mud and granite gravel. Celeste smokes and fumes some more and we drive back down the access road to the highway and through another eternity of sage-studded hills. My hopes for a lonely drive are dashed when I see a black compact disappear around the shoulder of a hill. All but a very few vehicles on the road, mostly white park service Fords, are visitors to the campsite, Deer Lodge. About two miles from the campsite we see the car stopped on the shoulder. The plates are from Connecticut. They follow us into the campsite and turn off at the ranger station. The parking lot is filled with buses and SUVs and we sag, but then remember that this is a staging area for raft shuttles and the campsite could be thinly populated or empty. We would learn that the vehicles were not so much raw evidence as a symbol of suburban ideas superimposed on a wild landscape, for this activity had already begun when we arrived and was to culminate when the last of a loud, ignorant club of rafters clanged, slammed and shouted their way into the campsite. Their core had already earned the resentment of the few low-impact campers when they clogged the drive and launch with their equipment– which could have supplied a battalion– and camped out by it with several chairs and torches, drinking, shouting, bragging and insisting far into the night– just as they broke up, still chattering loudly even as they walked to their tents, another loud, bluff idiot arrived to begin the cycle anew.

Monday, July 25, 2011

This morning we put on our suits, cheerfully ignoring our aching backs and sides. A puncture in our air mattress had forced us to climb out in the middle of the night to dig out our thin sleeping pads. The unbelievable hardness of the packed and crushed granite is made bearable, but the aches remain. My allergies attack and I do everything with a sloppy kind of urgency. As we climb the hill to the tub I see some spots of color: caps and t-shirts draped over a privacy screen. I immediately recant and make noises of protest– I'm really not in the mood to socialize– but it's too late, we're already there. So we walk around the screen and join the three men already there. Celeste says something about radium springs and a grey-haired man from Lewiston tells us they're in Canada. This seems to break the ice and he and Celeste talk of Oregon's full-service filling stations with a second man, a solid hunter with spiky hair, chiming in occasionally. The third man, another solid hunter/fisher type with his tot, had already left.

The two men leave and we stay behind a few minutes, wrinkling up. Then we walk back down the hill and have our breakfast: oatmeal and coffee. Today there's no hoisting the shower tent and hot water bag, as we've had our soak.

Pretty soon everything's in the truck and we're climbing a dirt road out of the South Fork Boise River valley. The road goes on and on. But all we have is a little less than a quarter tank. Shortly the needle is at "E" but no matter, we have ten gallons in jerry cans.

We listen to Gary Numan through the green fields of eastern Idaho.

In Wyoming we descend again into the plains, into the land of half-finished, grandiose log cabins and truck stop billboards. We skirt the western border and turn off the highway at Cottonwood Lake. A few gravel miles later we come to a tee and a sign: "Road Closed Ahead." The road has been washed out. We drive down another 20 miles or so, and turn off again; this time we drive into a stand of aspens and cottonwoods and around a corner, like a character from a tall tale or nursery rhyme, steps a stocky man with a young, open face and beard. He smiles and waves. We pass under vibrating aspens to a private site with a grassy, uneven tent pad. It's the first site we see and I stop there just to get out of the truck. But we find another twice as large, whose tent pad is wide and flat. Down below the river winds through a tall meadow screened by young pines. In a fir sapling I find a large, beautiful cicada patiently waiting for his turn to sing. The next morning Celeste reports he is still there. He did move a bit. A couple pulls in a few spaces down and runs a generator for a while, but apart from this mechanical noise the place is quiet, scored only by the sound of the stream and the high buzz of cicadas.