Occupation of Independence

The Little Poodle and I "paddled" upstream -- on the mountain bike -- along the popular Arkansas River, near "Byoona" Vista, CO. We saw one river rafting company after another. As luck would have it, we made it in time for their mass 'descension' of the Arkansas River. (If balloonists at the Albuquerque festival can have a mass ascension, then rafters in Colorado can have a mass descension.) It seemed like a documentary about the D-Day invasion of World War II. Actually it all happened quickly and smoothly. It has always been a poignant experience to watch people enjoying any water sport. I tried to connect with the water over the years, and nothing really worked. So I surrendered to my fate as a land mammal. The little poodle, not being a Labrador retriever, feels the same way. So we turned away from the river and biked into an area dominated by foothills of spheroidally-weathered granite. The road was actually just a dry wash of decompo

You just can't beat a ride up a spiral, candy-striped mountain. There aren't many of them. In part the fun is purely whimsical, like something from a Dr. Zeuss book.  You get a 360 degree view from a spiral road. Salida, CO, has a small mountain of this type that overlooks the town. It was only a short ride, but it reminded me of a grander ride, spiraling up to the top of Steptoe Butte, in the magnificient Palouse of eastern Washington. Having opted to stay south this year, for fuel and other reasons, I won't have a chance to do my annual ride up Steptoe. I found a few old wrecks to photograph. What a relief! Perhaps I have misjudged Colorado; I was afraid everything would be modern, affluent, and sterile. The second surprise occurred when a woman in a dress got on her woman's-frame bicycle and pedaled off on some errand. They still make such bikes, with a chain guard, fenders, and a little shopping basket. I never would have expected a unisex grin

Driving from New Mexico to Colorado yesterday was fun because the differences were detectable. I had forgotten how large and agricultural the San Luis Valley was. I went into the Big R hardware and ranch supply store in Alamosa. It's funny how your first impressions in a town mean something. They had a sign telling people that the restrooms were in the northeast corner of the store. Information like that is useless to most of the human race. Who besides a few sailors or midwesterners navigate according to the compass? Looking the town over more carefully, I noticed more baseball caps than cowboy hats. Hmm? It was impressive to see a place out west where the agriculture was as serious as in the midwest. First day in Salida, CO: The little poodle and I biked into town this Sunday morning. The first building of significance was the LDS church. I groaned. Well after all, Colorado shares a long border with Utah. Downtown, near the Arkansas River, there was a real su

The other day I was watching a Star Trek episode when they quietly slipped something by: someone found that the computer records were mistaken. He didn't say that it was intentional or malicious; just mistaken. I'm not sure if I ever saw that before in a sci-fi story. I wish I knew of a hard-core sci-fi reader to ask if he has ever run across this. Today, people tend to believe whatever the computer says. Did it ever occur to them that few if any people make their living by correcting errors stored in a computer? Have you ever taken a trip with a map or gadget junkie? He can be staring right at a road, but if his high-tech gadget tells him the road isn't supposed to be there, he won't trust his lying-eyes. He would never question the computer in the sense of 'garbage in, garbage out'; instead, he thinks he will solve the problem by punching his way through the menu system. Before there were computers for people to have blind faith in, there were books. For 50

I can't quite brag that I survived the Fourth of July in the epicenter of New Mexico tourism--Red River--but it was close. I bailed out on the weekend after the Fourth and headed for Colorado. In part I was inspired from that scene in "Jurassic Park," when the idealistic vegetarian girl expressed disgust about dinosaurs eating meat. The paleontologist shrugged it off by saying, "They just do what they do." Indeed, 'free moral agency' is a pernicious doctrine. Why not just think of tourists as one more species of animal life that behaves in a way that is genetically determined? Why not stop judging them as moral beings? Unfortunately I can't seem to extend this equipoise to merchants in a tourist trap. They are as voracious as a new insect hatch in the brief summer of the Canadian Arctic--and for pretty much the same reason.  I sat down in a nice coffee shop, spread out my laptop computer on the table, and then ordered my drink. The pro