Continental Divide

Our faithful bus will never die. It can smoke and choke and boil over, but it gets us around all the same. The mountain roads we faced yesterday were a trying experience for out little yellow home on wheels, and not just one steep mountain grade left us powering up the shoulder at 15 mph, flashers on, exhaust pipe billowing white smoke, as the engine carried three tons of steel and her resident tribe up into the lesser-touched regions of the atmosphere.

Summer snow melt transforms the alpine slopes and valleys of the Rocky Mountains into a cold and rocky marsh, sending a fury of clear and frigid water raging with such elogant aggression over polished boulders and logs, between Birch and Pine and accoasionally across the road. The entire air is filled with the raging whisper of snow melt on the move.

We stopped along side a white and rapid river to wash our clothes and ourselves, although only the clothes were ever clean after the water temperature proved to be prohibitively awful for human contact.

Coming off the interstate, we hit the Byway at the Top of the Rockies, a road that would lead us to Independence Pass, the highest point in the mountains passable by anything less that a tank. We ate lunch parked near an expansive tangled of mountain streams that rushedly snaked through and across one another as they rolled over their bulky boulder bedding.

America has always seemed so tame. It's two well known - too well documented. People have made if as far as they can, and then they built houses and schools and Walmarts and Starbucks and McDonalds, and it doesn't seem like there's anything left to discover. That's the view from the interstate, the glimpse that most of my countrymen have chosen to make their own out of interests of speed and simplicty. We drive solo, our surroundings completely void of any other human presence, and we wonder, were these roads just built for us? Up the mountains we see alpine towns built of rocks and logs, and Birch tree thickets about the rushing water that overload your sensory perception with such an unbelievely complex construction of the roar of the water and the bright and saturated green leaves sprouting from the straight white trunks of a million trees packed like a sardine forest. The beauty is endless, and I feel like I coluld sit and stare out the window for days, just as long as the bus keeps trucking.

Then again, there are other ways of exploring. Even in the places where vehicles pass, we can twist the situation and really be there.

Near the top on Independence Pass, we found a spot on the edge of a sheer and rocky cliff, along side a grade cut straight into the side of the mountain, where the road clung desperately to the rocky slope. From our lookout, we saw straight out and above a glacial valley at 12,000 feet - the source of the mountain streams where 15-foot-tall blocks of snow, compressed into miniature glaciers, creeped out from the mountain to face the road.

We pulled out our chairs, paints and sketchpads (I ground some mineral-laced rocks into nice little pendants), and sat from what we can only assume to be mid afternoon, until the black sky did well to expose the celestial drape of stars, hung over the mountains, that the daytime blue hides always from view. We felt close to the stars, like all it took was 12,000 vertical feet to get just close enough that we could see all of them, each and every one.

We built a fire in a pit we dug by the side of the road, and feasted on some delisciously steamy hot grilled corn and Chicago-style hotdogs (per the requirements of our own culinary construction techniques). Then we sat, boiling pot after pot of chai tea over our fire, and keeping warm as the night-time cold took hold on our valley for the night.

So maybe we're learning well how to be. There's adventure out there to be found, if not in where we go then in how we get there, and in how we make our way and keep warm and full in the places we discover.

We caught many a grinning glance from passing motorists catching view of a school bus on the side of an alpine cliff and three dirty kids crouched around a fire for warmth.

Goin' Places That We've Never Been

 Willie Nelson plays the Rocky Mountain air, and we sit peacefully awaiting our bedtime in the RV parking lot of the Red Rocks Park, just up the mountains from Denver, Colorado. We'd seen an add for the show while wandering Denver yesterday, and made the drive out to the natural mountain ampetheater to see if we could find a way to catch the show, or maybe get ourselves in.

The stage is set in the side of a bulging red cliff, facing directly up a Rocky Mountain foothill in between two massive rock formations sporting 200 foot sheer drops on each side facing inwards toward the ampetheater. They parallel eachother as if a 300 meter wide swath of red rock had been scraped clean from the side of the mountain, and a stage was built in between.

Around back, you can climb some boulders and a wall to enter the ampetheater, assuming an abscence of authority at the time of entry. I did so, leaving Christian and Mark behind with fears of potential interactions with security inside, and agreeing to meet them back at the bus in time to leave and meet Mark's friend Olivia back in Denver. We met back up, but our meeting fell through, so we headed back to climb the mountain face that looks down directly on the stage. We climbed and sat and waited for Willie, then heard loud and clear, projecting from between the monumentous walls of the earthy sound tunnel, Whiskey River, take my mind. A couple songs in it got what we deemed to be dangerously dark to make a descent, and thus we now find ourselves huddled, waiting to sleep in the chilly mountain air that carries the high and lonesome voice of our own Texas idol. He'll sing us to sleep tonight.



Garden of the Gods



In the last days, we've hit Colorado Springs, Manitou Springs, and Denver, meeting Olivia and Jonson, two of Mark's friends from Chicago, along the way. For the past two nightsw we've, by necessity, woke up before daybreak to move the bus and avoid confrontations with either suspicious property owners or parking guards that would be out in the morning.

Two days ago we woke up near 5 and chugged into the Garden of the Gods outside Colorado Springs, where we waited for the sun to come out and the rain to leave before starting our day fresh, scaling the huge rocks formations that penetrate the ground like lawn ornaments of the divine, and create somewhat of a dwarfing walk-about sculpture garden. From there it was onward to Denver, and a missed connection with a friend of mine who had warned me that she was not going to be around, and yet we tried to find her anyway. Oh well.

Denver was a nice place to wander, and we sought out Colfax, the road that I had previously been warned was the sight for all thefestering of low-down and dirty business that went on in the city. It was nice. They like bars on that street. Bars and thrift stores. It was, by chance, in the window of one of these bars that we caught word of Willie's show, so after a night spent parked infront of someone's house and a ham and egg sandwhich dinner cooked in a city park, we woke up to head to the mountains. And thus, we find ourselves here.


From this point onward our pace will slow. We've made it out of the plains and into the mountains, so movement westward will grind down to a crawl as we make the time to stop and cook and bath and explore that paths we chose to follow. Tomorrow morning we'll head across the mountains.

Meeting the Road

Hot tea at sunrise

Half way through our second day of driving, we've pulled off by the side of a Colorado mountain road, giving the bus some time to rest so as to prevent overheating. It's already happened once. In a desolate West Texas dust bowl, 30 miles outside of Big Spring, we pulled off to the side of the road to release a good five minutes of spewing vapoprized coolant erupting from the engine's cooling system.Coolant boils at 260 degrees F. To be fair, our mercury thermometer inside the bus was reading just above 115, so after 10 straight hours of turning those gears, we probably could have seen it coming.

We let it cool, filled the coolant resovoire with water, and prayed to make it as we pitter-pattered down the flat and sandy highway west to the end of Texas.

We fell asleep on the side of a dirt road in New Mexico to the inhuman vocal outbursts of the cows on either side of us, and woke up naturally before the sunrise to boil some hot chai tea on a cool prarie morning. We've crosse

d desert and planes - places so flat and expansive that you get a sense of the giant spherical form of our planet at the horizons dip down out of sight.





Off to the side of a New Mexican highway we took note of some particularly attractive cliffs and rock outcroppings, so Christian and I crossed the barbed wire fence and wandered off to climb the rocks while Mark stayed behind to draw what he saw. That's always how people stayed healthy and fit before - just getting places. The simple energy required to get from bottom to top or east to west or one side to the other was all the stimulation that the body took to do what it does. We don't do that anymore. We just drive places. We don't just go places, we get there, making a way between one point and another.

We stick to the back roads, navigating by map through tiny towns, made of tin roofed wood and brick houses, the occasional historic bank or town hall, and not a McDonalds or Walmart in sight. People out here take care of themselves.

In the suburbs where I've grown up, the all-american ideals of liberty and freedom have become distorted and mistaken for what is actually just security, born out of their ability to rely on other far away people for everything. Americans flock to the vast expansive suburbs to have their water, their power, their law, their infrstructure, supplied to them, always minimizing their actual involvement in their own livelihood. Inspite of the mundane, monotonous, maybe even boring as hell life that we see as we roll through these 200 person towns, it may have merit far beyond the one we've constructed back home.

We watch the sunset from the roof.

Dedicating yourself to a career means monotonizing your life. You become an accountant, get a good salary, and that's all you have to do. Instead of growing food, you do your work. Instead of finding water, you do your work. Instead of working your land, building your house, and making your home, you do your work. Instead of dealing with disputes between strangers and neighbors, you do your work. Pay your taxes and the police will do it for you. Maybe for ease and simplicity, people have twisted the system of human life into a way that, aided by the concept of currency, you can do the same thing all day every day until you die, always with your mind and efforts dedicated the singular fountain of paper and its imaginary value. And in this way, you don't actually have to do anything for yourself, or trouble the mind with all the bothorsome tasks involved in keeping people alive. Just give your paper to an endless beurocracy of far away people, and you can get everything you need to live. No need to ever think about anything else ever again.

Anyway, our engine temperature has receded to a healthy hundred degrees, and so we're off to hit the mountain roads that'll take us to Colorado Springs, where Mark tells us he has friendlies awaiting our arrival.