My camera-battery charger finally arrived, the other day, in a not-very-well-protected white envelope from Hong Kong that had bird stamps strewn over the front. It works, even though I put the battery in incorrectly the first time I used it, so that’s $7 well spent. I should really buy another one to take with me on trips, so this doesn’t happen again. I haven’t been able to use my camera in about three weeks.
(Photo of one of the windows at Capitol Hill Books in Denver.)
So, it’s been a while. I’m back in ABQ after two months in various parts of Colorado, and when I arrived, I had lots of welcome-home presents. My phone (along with my cheap-Luddite dialup internet service) wasn’t working; my air conditioner refused to adequately condition my living environment; the water pressure in my shower had dwindled to the point where showers felt less like a refreshing torrent and more like having someone pee on you; and I seem to have misplaced my camera-battery charger somewhere. [1] On the positive side, I can sleep in my own bed again, and have access to more than two pairs of shoes. So it all works out in the end.
My vacation from ABQ was fun, productive, and, at times, frustrating. I spent a few weeks in Grand Junction in June, seeing my family, hanging out with Hank the Dog, and drinking a lot of beer:
There was still snow in the higher elevations in June, due to the cool spring up there, so I was able to do some snowshoeing. My dad and I helped a family friend open up his cabin for the summer, and we had to ski/snowshoe for a few miles to get there. It was enjoyably strange, requiring some sartorial schizophrenia: my feet were clad in thick socks and Sorels, to keep the snowshoes on, but on top, I was wearing a thin short, and after some exertion, a tank top: it was that warm on top of the mesa.
Other outings: my dad and I traveled to Utah so that he could put together a road log for an upcoming geological field trip. He drove, and I wrote things down, noting every side road, arroyo, underpass, giant boulder, and other roadside attractions down I-70 and up into Sego Canyon, home of several cultures’ worth of petroglyphs and the ruins of the mining/railroad town of Sego, Utah:
(The above photo is of the company store/bank that was once the economic center of Sego.)
I haven’t been in Utah in a while, other than briefly passing through, but I noticed that some places, familiar to me from childhood trips, really haven’t changed much. One of these would be the rest area/visitor’s center on I-70 a few miles west of the Colorado/Utah border:
I swear that this sign (and, presumably the scenic film it advertises), with its faux-Bauhaus-y typography, has been in the same place since the 1980s. Green River, Utah, also seems much the same. People still eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the Tamarisk restaurant overlooking the river, the West Winds truck stop (a place friends and I drove to occasionally in high school, late at night to eat pancakes and to be able to report that we’d been in a different state, for thrills) is still open 24 hours, and the town still essentially looks like opportunity passed it by.
An old ambulance just blocks from the remnants of downtown:
“Root” hastily added to the word “beer” advertising a now burned-out pizza restaurant. The letters denoting “Frank’s Pizza,” if you look closely enough, seem to be made with black electrical tape:
However, if you do find yourself in Green River, you should stop and eat at Ray’s Tavern, a bar and burger place on the west end of town. It looks unpromising from the outside, but the food (mainly steaks, burgers, and hot homemade fries) is great and there’s a decent selection of Utah beers. Going by the decor inside, it seems the only people that ever eat there are river rafters and geologists. You should stop in, too.
Then, it was off to Denver for what promised to be weeks of research. I did my academic duty while I was there, getting to the library when it opened, spending all day in the archives (or the government documents section) working, and then closing the place down. A battle between intellectual enrichment and monotony. I took numerous pictures of documents (the picture below is a representative sample) and typed up notes on box after box of city documents (interoffice memos, scrawled notes that don’t make any sense, fun stuff). I’m still processing this data in the back of my brain (while I’m doing more important things like shopping for things on the Internet or zoning out while riding the bus).
One thing I noticed, though, that I put out there for other grad students doing urban history, is that mayoral archives rock. If there’s something going on in a city, be it a concept plan for a new neighborhood development, a community festival, a fire hydrant bursting down the street, dogs barking in someone else’s backyard, or a city councilman that comes to an important event without a tie on (remember, I’m looking at 1950s and 1960s documents here, and you’d be surprised at how upset this made some people), someone inevitably will complain to the mayor about it, often using the long, rambling, illegible letter as the method of communication. This is what makes mayoral archives interesting and valuable, since they contain a lot of crap that other city archive collections lack. (One of the mayoral archives I’m looking at, for example, contains five boxes of crank letters to the mayor, which I totally want to look at sometime.) On the other hand, it makes you wonder why anyone would actually want to become mayor, since they and their staff spend so much time replying to such things. (”Dear Mrs. Jones: I share your concern about the values of today’s youth…”)
My search for a decent sublet, chronicled in earlier entries, was unsuccessful, so I did end up staying in a hotel. However, I think this was ultimately preferable, since at the end of the day, I could return to a place where I didn’t have to talk to anyone, where the air conditioning was bracing, and the cable channels numerous. I forgot how frickin’ chatty Denverites are. I rode the light rail every morning while I was in Denver, from my hotel to downtown, and most days, I had random conversations with other riders, about the book I was reading or why is it hot or those are nice shoes or look at the traffic out there. The same at restaurants (”You must really like roasted chicken. Let me tell you about some memorable roasted chickens I’ve eaten lately”), or just walking down the street (”Hey, I like the ‘I Hate Helvetica’ button on your bag — what’s that all about?”). Then you get the the library, where the super-helpful librarians who are excited about your project are all wanting to show you things. Honestly, this is great stuff, and I generally enjoy such interactions — I’ve never lived in another place where people wanted to chat so much — but at the end of the day, I was ready to go to my suburban hotel room where no one wanted to talk to me.
(On some days, though, the highlights involved finding random things left on the seats on the light rail, like this inexplicable Cheney souvenir:)
I decided to go back to Grand Junction over the weekend of the Fourth, since the library would be closed. I planned to return to Denver a few days later, but then I fell while on a hike, spraining my ankle, tearing a ligament in my foot, a ligament that took a chunk of bone with it when it succumed. This was fun — limping back to the car, sitting in the ER, getting fitted for a boot (which actually did nothing to help the situation, since it lacked compression straps in the area of my injury — I stopped wearing it after a few days), going to the orthopedist’s office, dealing with the insurance. It wasn’t that serious an injury in the long run — I’m walking around fine now, only four weeks later, with no plain — but it did stymie my research and plans for other fun (such as seeing one of my favorite bands play their first-ever show in the Mountain Time Zone [2] or biking the entire length of the Platte River Greenway, for research as well as for pleasure). Instead, I spent a lot of time with TV and pills, entertaining myself with numerous marathons of every show on Bravo as well as plying Hank the Dog with treats (in this case, part of a granola bar, which he inexplicably loves):
When I did get a chance to return to Denver later last month, I was even more busy. I did a lot of harried research, paid for a lot of expensive archive copies, and was generally too stressed by being behind on work that I didn’t even take the time to drink beer or go shopping. The horrors. I took the long way on the drive back to ABQ, stopping back in GJ to pick up my stuff (but inadvertantly leaving a lot of stuff behind), then driving back through Telluride, Cortez, and Durango. On the drive back to ABQ, my car reached the 200,000-mile mark, somewhere between Dolores and Mancos, Colorado:
(I am only responsible for the last 25K of those miles, though. But now the car feels truly broken in — it, like other aging early-1990s Toyota 4-Runners still on the road, can be festooned with stickers from ski areas and beer companies, were I the sort of person who would do so.)
Now I’m back in ABQ, just in time to leave again — I head to Portland, where it is fifteen degrees cooler, this weekend for a few days of…something.
[1] And, as you can probably guess, the outlay for a new battery charger is similar to that of an entirely new camera.
[2] For a lot of the bands I like, any show they played in the MTZ would be their first show here, unfortunately. Such is life in America’s Forgotten Time Zone.