Occupation of Independence

For a second or two it felt like a real punch to my stomach when the waiter told me that the little cafe would be closing soon. I cherished stopping in on the way back from a standard summer bicycle ride. The food was surprisingly good here, just a few pedal kicks from the continental divide, on the edge of an old mining town.  To actually get pleasure from a restaurant is so rare for me that it is worth dwelling on this wonderful little cafe. Normally I consider food at restaurants to be mediocre, tasteless, and obscenely over-priced. Oh, and the background din. This year they had added a overhead shelter made of galvanized, corrugated steel, one of the building materials used in decaying New Mexican dumps, a great favorite of mine.  Red chiles hung dried in bunches next to my table. The rafters of the structure looked like de-barked pine logs, and made me think of the ponderosa forest I had just bicycled through. Off in the distance was a pair of mountain peaks which some frie

Arkansas River Valley, Colorado, a couple summers ago. Over the years I have learned how to turn some of my dislikes into advantages. Much to my surprise the result has been melodrama, performed on an outdoor stage. A melodrama needs a villain of course. The consummate outdoor-villains are forests, especially if they are dark, thick, and buggy. Going into a forest on foot or wheel takes some real effort; you have to imagine that the suffering will eventually turn productive. Just when I start to give up hope I see some brightness, some gap in the forest canopy opens up. The sun breaks into that gap and becomes the stage-lighting for a small performance stage on the forest floor where flowers and bugs run riot. The star of the show is that wing-artist, the butterfly. Sometimes a flutter in La Mariposa's dance coincides with a flutter of aspen leaves, as if they are applauding her performance.   One day there were at least eight different types of butterflies within a few ste