Memoirs | Bill's Views on Most Everything

Category Archives: Memoirs

A Book Review

Posted on June 22, 2014 by Bill 2 comments

This week is a book review. Roz Chast, a cartoonist for The New Yorker, has come up with a graphic memoir. I enjoy her cartoons, all quirky, EMOTIONAL, and full of insight about people. Her new book is about her parent’s last years and death, a big subject for me. Carol, her sister Judi, and I did a blog about caregiving for elderly parents. The elderly parents are dead, as is our active blogging, but the website is still up. www.desperatecaregivers.com

So when “Can’t we talk about something more Pleasant” came out, I bought it. I think I am fairly typical for persons my age-I’m not a reader of graphic novels. I have read some graphic stories, but this was my first full-length graphic anything. Ms. Chast is a master at communicating feelings with her work and caregiving for dying parents is full of feelings. Often children of parents who are at the end of life don’t really like their parent, and all sorts of feelings come up. Guilt, shame, resentment, anger, sadness, fear, anxiety, and a sense of futility are some of the feelings. The book evokes them all.

I am having trouble writing this review because the book brings all these feelings up in me, making it hard to get any flow in my writing. I have been working on this review for three days and have 230 words written. When we did the caregiving blog this happened to me. Writing about subjects other than caregiving is easy.

Roz Chast does so well communicating her feelings as well as her parent’s feelings that I feel like I know them personally. I appreciate her ability to express her reactions to her parent’s denial and show the dynamic with her parents that shaped her life and the way she dealt with their declines and deaths. Her memoir must have been more painful to write as it was to read.

I tend not to read or write about books that I found painful to read. This one is an exception. I recommend it to anyone who has aging parents or is a parent. Roz Chast deals with a difficult issue in a creative and intensely personal way.

Posted in Books, Memoirs, My Story, Pain

If it Doesn’t Hurt, it Itches

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

I have reached that age where parts of me do not work quite as well as they used to. I have aches and pains. I have a titanium knee. I am short a finger on my right hand. I wear hearing aids. A tooth is missing. A LOT of hair is missing on my head. My right shoulder, both wrists, left knee, and right foot hurt. My left little finger has this hitch where it doesn’t want to straighten out and sort of snaps past a point when I do straighten it. That hurts as well.

I have sinus headaches, acid reflux, a bad disk in my back, and an ass that is so small my pants won’t stay up. No ass, no hair, no little finger, what is going on?

When I was in my forties (I am 72) I did a career change. I went from being a desk bound bureaucrat to working in the water business. My first job required water treatment knowledge and a lot of physical work. I laid pipe, repaired manholes, cleaned sewer lines, pumped a lot of water, read meters, and did a lot of pick and shovel work. I remember thinking that I could do everything in my forties that I did in my twenties.

Then I hurt my back carrying an unbalanced load up a ditch bank. I learned about physical therapists and chiropractors. I am still learning. Up to then I had taken my body for granted. I did what I wanted to and mostly got away with it. From the back injury on, it has been downhill.

Since then, my body tells me when it does not like what I am doing to it. Usually it uses pain. The other strategy it employs is the itch. My head, back, legs, and arms itch. It is seasonal. I itch spring, summer, winter, and fall. I have recently discovered that some of the itching may be from ultraviolet light. I am eliminating UV light in the house. I take Benadryl and Allegra. They help. I still itch.

I have had prostate surgery, hernia surgery, a knee replacement, several colonoscopies, several endoscopies, a finger amputated, and an optorectomy (severing the nerve from your butt to your eyes to get rid of the shitty outlook). I have high blood pressure. I get migraine headaches.

I don’t do some things I used to do. Run, jump, carry heavy loads, mess around on roofs, or think. I have ADD. Therapy and medication help a great deal, but I still forget, get crabby, and do impulsive stupid things. I have been able to do some writing, however. That is, if you can call this writing.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining. That is a lie. But, I can still do a lot and have fun at it. I have the limitations of an aging body, but I remain active and can work with the school kids at Four Mile. They seem to like Mr. Bill. Life is good.

Posted in Memoirs, My Story, Pain, Stories

Four Mile Historic Park

Posted on April 17, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

The House at Four Mile

When I give a house tour, I always say, “This is a museum. What’s the rule?” “Don’t touch!” is their response. All through the house I have to remind them, “Don’t touch.”

I work part time at Four Mile Historic Park. I help with elementary school field trips and birthday parties. Four Mile was a stagecoach stop on the Cherokee Trail from the 1859 Pike’s Peak Gold Rush until the railroad came to Denver in 1870. It is four miles from the Intersection of Colfax Avenue and Broadway, where the Colorado State Capitol building stands.

The Cherokee Trail came down Cherry Creek to Denver, then went north to close to the Wyoming border, then west to Fort Bridger and on to California. The stage line came west from Leavenworth, Kansas on the Smoky Hill Trail across Kansas to where Limon now is. It then came across present Elbert County and down Smoky Hill Road to the Cherokee Trail and Denver.

The Four Mile station operated from 1859 to 1870 when the railroad came down to Denver from Cheyenne. It then was a farm and informal neighborhood center until around 1940. Today it is owned by the City of Denver and operates as a nonprofit.

The original house dates to 1859 and is the oldest standing structure in Denver. It is the museum I referred to in the first paragraph. We have horses and wagon rides, a stagecoach and several other wagons. There are goats, chickens, a tipi, a trapper’s cabin, wells, barns, gardens, and lots of places to picnic.

Our goal with school trips is to give students a taste of life in the nineteenth century. They are often shocked to find out that people managed to survive without iPads. Another goal is for them to have fun doing some of the things children did in the 1860s. They cook over an open fire, make butter, feed chickens, wash clothes in the washtub, pan for gold (fool’s gold), and play some pioneer games.

I tell stories about my pioneer family, tell them that the horses favorite food is third graders, that trolls live along the creek, and that the children emptied the chamber pots, brought in firewood, carried water, gathered buffalo chips for fuel on the trail, and fed the animals. Yes, they get some tall tales as well. Second graders are too little, fourth graders are too tough, but third graders are just right for horse food. I tell the girls the secret: “Girls are smarter than boys.”

Four mile is a fun place to work and the kids make it so. Of the hundreds of kids I have worked, only two seemed like they were headed for big trouble. I have as much fun as they do.

Posted in Current Activities, Memoirs, Stories

It’s Not Easy Being Green

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Bill 2 comments

I chose this title because Kermit and I are kindred spirits. I went through most of my life thinking I must be green or something because things just did not go as well for me as for others. An ADD diagnosis and treatment has made my life easier. Poor Kermit, however, is still green.

I do try to be green in the other sense of the word. I am something of an environmentalist. I give money, feel self-righteous about environmental issues, write about issues, and live a typical American consumer life.

Note: the American consumer life is not very green. Two people, two cars. We are so committed to two cars we are replacing our one car garage (with no room for a car) with a big two car garage with room for two cars, three bicycles, workbench, emergency generator, power lawn mower, and all the tools.

You know the formula for the number of bicycles: n+1. N being the number of bicycles you currently have. That is the American consumer way. Spend to the end. When I was growing up in Fruita, I thought we were pretty well off. Car (even if it was a Nash), travel trailer, two week vacation and several weekend jaunts every year, a good TV, a remodeled kitchen, and all our needs met. The closets were not jammed with clothes, we didn’t get ten catalogs in the mail every week, the furniture and carpets were worn, and the garage had a dirt floor.

The consumer society was in operation in the decades after the war, but it has drastically accelerated in the last thirty years or so. I am sitting in Starbucks with my $4.00 cup of coffee looking at the Mercedes SUV’s parked side by side. The customers are served by well-educated Millennials glad to have a job in the service sector so they can pay their rent.

Most current middle class families are two income families struggling to support lifestyles centered on spending. Cars, computers, smartphones, iPads (I’m writing this on one), Italian granite countertops, 30 cubic foot refrigerators, Viking ranges, 52″ TV’s in several rooms, It goes on and on. This debt-ridden opulence is in contrast with the debt-ridden Millenials in the service sector and the millions trapped in poverty.

There is too much income disparity and entirely too much wasteful consumption. The consumption, fueled by all the demand created by sophisticated marketing, is socially and environmentally harmful. I look around, and I am part of the problem. As the Buddhists say I am trapped on the wheel of desire. The gasoline I burn in my 4×4 comes from Alberta tar sands. The cheap natural gas heating my home is produced by fracking. Most of our food is produced hundreds or thousands of miles away.

We try. We recycle, compost, use drip irrigation, have a small lawn, and a small house by current standards. We just upgraded our attic insulation to R50. We are adding LED light bulbs regularly. We have to avoid fluorescent bulbs as Carol is sensitive to the UV light they emit.

We are buying more organic produce and dairy products. We buy meat from grass fed livestock raised using sustainable methods, and it’s local. We are cooking more at home and when we do go out, we are picky about the restaurants we visit.

Are we green? Not so much. We are working at it, and we may someday be as green as Kermit.

Posted in Energy Policy, Environment, Geology, Memoirs

Kodel’s Canyon

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

Kodel’s Canyon

In the late 1950’s, some friends and I liked to go to Kodel’s Canyon. The canyon is in the Colorado National Monument about five miles from Fruita. We would get a ride from a parent and with our .22 rifles, hike on the relatively flat desert area between the Colorado River and the National Monument, laying waste to any number of unsuspecting rocks with our .22’s.

Sometimes we would climb over the Park boundary fence and up into the canyon. It is the first canyon west of Fruita Canyon, where Rim Rock Drive climbs, and the scenery is as spectacular as the rest of the National Monument, but at the time was seldom visited. Carrying firearms into the National Park and firing them was illegal, but we never worried about getting caught. No one went there but the local kids.

The canyon has the sheer sandstone cliffs the Monument is famous for, but the lower end is black Precambrian granite, schist, and gneiss, black and weathered into narrow cracks and rounded humps. A demented miner who gave the canyon its name worked a mine in that rock for many years, never finding any gold. It should have been clear to him there was no gold; there is relatively little quartz in the rock, which is associated with gold, and Kodel’s canyon is far from the Colorado Mineral Belt, which runs from the Golden-Boulder area to Telluride. Most of the state’s minerals, including gold, are in that roughly 20 mile wide belt. The big exception is Cripple Creek, a volcanic neck with a rich gold deposit. Nevertheless, Kodel persisted for years, giving the local Fruita kids a place to risk their lives.

We would poke around in the mine, and its mystery. We didn’t go too far in, as we never had a flashlight. The big attraction was the climbing. In some places the 1.4 billion years old rock is broken and crumbling, but for the most part is so smooth and rounded as to look polished.

We had no climbing shoes, just our tennies. We had no helmets, ropes, or the hardware climbers use today. We got good at mostly unaided climbing and went up places that trained climbers attempt only with ropes and hardware. The only climbing aids we used were our .22 rifles, using them to help one another up especially steep pitches or as support. The climbing was somewhere between bouldering and free soloing. Not for those afraid of heights.

Years later, I climbed Long’s Peak with some friends. Lee had a bad knee, and Danny was helping him as we went up the Cable Route, which traverses the top of The Diamond, that sheer northeast face of the mountain with a 2,000 foot high cliff. Years ago the route had a fixed steel cable leading to the top that climbers could hold on to. When we climbed, there was no cable and some of the rock was wet. I just climbed up, doing what I learned in Kodel’s Canyon.

Danny would move up a pitch with the rope and belay Lee as he climbed on that bad knee. Danny remarked to Lee as they crept up with their rope that I was single-handing. It was steep, but I had good shoes and walked up, using one hand to occasionally support myself as I chose each foot placement. Proper safe climbing technique calls for having three support points on the rock, moving one hand or foot at a time. I was not ignoring the rule, I didn’t know it existed.

I only know of one serious injury in Kodel’s Canyon. Jerry badly sprained an ankle on the approach to the canyon and had to have help getting back to the road. He hobbled around for weeks, not getting much sympathy from us. In retrospect, we were serious risk-takers, but we just went where we wanted to without thinking about the danger. Those experiences in the hills and canyons south of Fruita made us all willing to accept challenges with little hesitation. We also gained confidence in our ability to overcome difficulty. We acquired life skills there. In our safety-oriented society, kids may be missing some important lessons. We need to test ourselves in the name of fun, and risk is part of the test. For me, it was a fun thing to do. I think I will go back, a bit more carefully this time.

Posted in Geology, Memoirs, Stories

Desert Surfboarding

Posted on March 25, 2014 by Bill 4 comments

The Grand Valley Canal Near Grand Junction, Mt. Garfield and Grand Mesa in the Background

I am a child of the desert. Fruita, Colorado has no more than eight inches of annual rainfall. Growing up in the late 1950’s, we were surfers before the Beach Boys made surfing famous.

The Grand Valley of Western Colorado is irrigated farm country. Two big canals bring Colorado River water to the valley farms. One of those canals had a place we called Karp’s Hole, after a nearby farm family. The hole was created by a concrete flume, narrower than the rest of the ditch, that created turbulence and eddy currents downstream that excavated a deep hole about 50 feet wide that was perfect for swimming. There was a diving board made from a 2″x12″ plank and an old car spring. That board was as good as any swimming pool diving board and was there for years.

With plenty of parking spaces, it was a popular summer party spot. The water, “too thick to drink and too thin to plow”, was good for tag games. A person could duck under and follow eddy currents to other points in the hole without being seen. The other side was lined with willows tall enough to provide hiding places. I had a scare when swimming in an underwater tunnel that surfaced behind the willows. I got stuck. My shoulders were a bit too wide, and my hands were in front. I wriggled and squirmed for what was probably only a few seconds, but it seemed like a long time to me before I was able to back out.

The road to Karp’s Hole ran alongside the canal for about 1 1/2 miles from the nearest county road. Built when the canal was dug, it was used for maintenance and by the ditch riders who patrolled the canal, adjusting the head gates that sent water to the farm fields.

For surfboarding, we made 4′ x 2′ plywood boards with two ropes with a handle coming back from the front of the board to the rider standing on a piece of carpet tacked to the back of the board. Another rope yoke led from to the bottom of the board to the tow rope which ran about 50′ to a post in the bed of a pickup truck. The driver and a spotter were in the cab and the rest of us rode in the bed. With the tow rope tied to a stake secured in the bed, the surfer shifted his weight from side to side and swung from one side of the canal to the other and back, sometimes bumping into the bank, and throwing a rooster tail of water onto the road.

We went about 20 miles per hour, any faster increasingly dangerous and less fun. The sport was illegal, we were trespassing, making it even more fun, but no one ever got arrested. After my first time at about 16, I came home and told my parents about our new sport. My father laughed, saying he surfboarded in the 1920’s behind Model T Fords. We were just keeping a Grand Valley tradition alive.

Our surfboarding parties were usually fueled by Coors 3.2 beer. There was no other beer for us. Given the muddy road, the beer, and adolescent hormones, accidents were rare. One time, the ditch company had mowed the willows lining the canal. Alan hit the bank with the bottom of his board a little too hard, and flew face down onto the willows. Bright red stripes.

The worst surfboarding accident was when a girl riding for the first time hit the bank and sort of flopped. She broke one of the bony processes on a spinal vertebra. No nerve damage, but she sure was sore for a while. The worst injury is when Don, my neighbor across the street dived into the shallow sand bar while drunk. He broke his neck. He was in a big cast from his chest to his chin and the back of his head. To drive, he put the top down of his 1955 Chevy convertible (the envy of every guy in town), parked his butt on the seat back, leaned forward, and drove. The cops never said a word.

More than 50 years later I can remember the sensation of speed, of spray in my face, the movement of the board under my feet as I dug one corner in to make a turn, zooming across the canal and digging in the other corner as the bottom of the board bounced on the bank. Spray flew 20 or more feet as I sped to the other bank and turned to make another run to douse the road. It was best when I could spray another car meeting us on the ditch road. It was usually some friends coming for their rides on the surfboard.

Water sports were big, but we had a mechanized winter sport as well. Two brothers had what we called a toboggan that had been around for years. It had steel runners at each corner and a deck that could hold four or five people. After a snow we would haul it out to the desert north of the farm area and tow it behind a pickup truck, preferably four wheel drive.

No going on the road or in a straight line, the driver’s goal was to turn sharp enough to throw everyone off. Speeds were a bit higher, close to 30 miles per hour. At night. There was lots of screaming and laughing as we rolled through the snow and mud.

I don’t remember anyone ever getting hurt, but we would get home tired, cold, wet, and muddy. Parents would just shake their heads. After all, they had done it themselves.

Posted in Memoirs, Stories

Sandstone Solitude

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

I like to do solo trips in the Southeastern Utah canyon country. I began going there in the 1950’s with my parents, then with friends, and by myself. I go there for the scenery and for the solitude.

The tourism centered around Moab has made finding solitude more challenging, but the crowds of four wheelers, dirt bikers, mountain bikers, and other rabble tend to go to the same places, leaving vast areas empty. Even in well-traveled areas all I need to do is walk about 1/4 mile and I am alone.

Bare rock, deep canyons, intense light, vertical spires, and the starkness leads me into myself. My mind empties of the clutter of civilization. I return refreshed and at peace. My trips there are pilgrimages.

There also is the danger. All the Park Service literature emphasizes safety. Traveling with others, taking the proper equipment, having communications, carrying water, and leaving an itinerary are all good advice. I carry water and the 10 essentials along with nylon cord, a trowel, and a poncho or space blanket. Sometimes I travel with others.

Newspaper Rock

I go into slot canyons, climb over the ridge to the next canyon where the cattle could not go, follow winding canyons to the pourover that stops me, scramble up to the rim, and ramble in the slickrock. I look for ruins of the people who lived, hunted, and farmed here. They left pictographs on those stone walls that tell of the hunt, of the gods. Life must have been hard, but they were surrounded by beauty, and they had time for art.

The Needles District

I especially like the slickrock. Entrada sandstone, ancient sand dunes turned to stone, it has a sensual feel. There are rounded humps, steep drops, curves and hollows, and those inviting bowls. The bowls are the best. In the couple of weeks after a rain they hold enough water to support life. Tadpoles, water striders, and other insects have a brief time in the sun until the water dries up and they go dormant. I like to drink from them when the water is fresh.

The bowls range in size from a few inches to hundreds of feet in diameter. The larger ones have a sandy bottom, sometimes with desert vegetation. Other bowls have an outlet, a crack or joint in the rock that is wide enough for an exit. Many are true bowls, no outlet, with steep, smooth sides.

What is it about boys and holes in the ground? We just want to go into them. I do, often without a thought about how I am going to get out. More than once I have found myself in trouble.

5162011-Devils-Kitchen-Canyonlands-Campsite

Devils Kitchen Campsite

One time I was in the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park. There is a challenging four wheel drive over Elephant Hill; a misnomer because the hill is solid rock. I camped at Devil’s Kitchen, an area where each campsite is under a sandstone overhang. The view is across a park to the pinnacles surrounding Chesler Park, a magical place.

Everyone goes to Chesler Park, so the area around the campsites is little-traveled. I climbed around for a while, seeking the high points to look west across the Colorado River to the spires and cliffs of the Maze District. It’s a panorama of varying shades of red rock, tilted and broken into fins and spires that should exist only in the imagination, but there they are.

Hiking a bit farther east, I came across one of those bowls, a big one. I climbed down to the sandy bottom, admiring the grasses that manage to survive in that dry place. Rain runs off the rock and waters the edges of the sandy bottom promoting more growth there. I looked around and thought, “I wonder if I can get out of here?”

My standard strategy is to walk up the sides of the bowl using the friction of my shoes. Too steep. I tried a running start. Failed. I went as high as I could standing, then scrambled on all fours, feet slipping and using my knees as well. By that time I was worried. No cell phone service there, so I was on my own. It took several tries, losing some skin and good blue denim, but there is no skeleton in that bowl. I will go back, but plan to stay out of the bowls.

Posted in Memoirs, Stories

Teek’s Hot Rod

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

It’s 1958, and fast cars are what we wanted. Teek, my classmate with a funny nickname, found a Ford Model A roadster body and frame, but needed everything else and had little money. He heard about a wrecked 1954 Oldsmobile with a good engine at the bottom of a canyon.

We’re in Fruita, Colorado, a town of 1800 people a long way from most anywhere. South of town is the Colorado National Monument, an area of striking sandstone canyons traversed by roads bordering the canyon rims.

Someone had decided to get rid of his car by rolling it over the canyon rim just outside the Park boundary. Teek heard about it and decided to salvage the engine in the wreck at the bottom of a 200 foot high cliff. That called for creativity and a lot of help. He and some of his gearhead friends climbed into the canyon and disassembled the engine as much as they could.

They packed the smaller parts up out of the canyon with only Jerry smashing a finger falling while carrying a cylinder head. Next, how to get that big cast iron engine block out of the canyon. One Saturday, about ten of us assembled at the canyon rim. Teek had taken the rubber tire off a wheelbarrow wheel and bolted the wheel to a long 4″x4″ piece of lumber. We poked it over the sheer rim, weighted the back end with some big rocks, and ran a 1/4″ hemp rope through the pulley and into the canyon.

Thankfully, I was not involved in wrestling that big block from where the car had rolled to under the rim. With the rope tied to the engine block, all we had to do was pull. That block probably weighed 400 pounds. We pulled. And pulled. And complained. And pulled. The little rope slowly unwound as we pulled, and we worried it would break. It sure looked skinny.

It took most of an hour with hands and muscles complaining, but we got it to the rim and dragged it to level ground. Teek had a motor for his roadster!

A few months later we showed up at his house out in the farm country north of town. The car was running, sort of. The motor was in, transmission and running gear installed, and it was loud. No exhaust system, no gas pedal, just a wire coming back from the carburetor, and no starter. The cooling system was two hoses jammed together and filled with irrigation water. Oh, no seat, just a board laid on the frame rails for seating and to hold the battery. No fenders, of course.

Teek and another guy sat on the board, he had one hand on the wheel, the other on the throttle wire. Three of us laid on the trunk lid of the roadster body with our feet on the bumper of the pickup truck start vehicle behind us, and the pickup driver started us moving. The Olds engine fired up, and off we went.

I have had fast cars, motorcycles, and flown, but never had such a sensation of pure speed as roaring down those country roads lying on the back of a roadster trying to keep from being bounced off. We would go until the engine got hot (no radiator, remember?), stop, pull the hoses apart and fill it with ditch water, push start again, and fly!

Never again have terror, joy, excitement, and sheer speed come together like that day.

High school graduation came and I moved on. Teek finished his car and drove it for years, but I never got a ride in the finished model. We talked about those days at our 50th reunion, and the memory is still fresh as the day we broke lots of laws riding on Teek’s hot rod.

The pictures are not of Teek’s hot rod or of the canyon the motor came out of, but are good representations.

Posted in Memoirs, Stories

Elegy for Tedd Brumbaugh

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Bill 2 comments

My old friend Tedd died a couple of years ago. I wrote this after his death.

We went back a ways. I used to visit him on my tricycle. We would eat mulberries in the tree behind Jimmy’s house. We would fight on the way home for lunch and make up on the way back to school. His mother served both whole wheat and white bread at meals. My family didn’t have bread on the table for meals.

In high school, Tedd wanted only to District Attorney for a day. All the county elected jobs were available, and I didn’t care which job I got, I just wanted to go, so I ran for every job and lost. The last office to be chosen was District Attorney. I won, Tedd didn’t go.

I was best man at his wedding, traveling to McPherson, Kansas for the ceremony. I painted Help Me on the soles of his shoes. A woman gasped when they knelt at the altar.

Our class Valedictorian, Tedd, and I went to a Quaker youth camp in Palmer Lake between our junior and senior years. That week changed our lives. Liberals! They didn’t exist in Fruita. I went with Tedd and his family to my first classical music concert ever. We went with our high school science teacher to Paradox Valley and the Hanging Flume.

Tedd’s last couple of years have been pretty rough. He was having some health problems then was diagnosed with brain cancer. The oncologists killed the cancer, but he began having mini-strokes. The last few months, he hasn’t been around much. Now, he’s gone.

Tedd was pretty much unresponsive for a time before he died. After watching this more times than I like, I think the dying person is doing some work in our world before moving on. I don’t know what the work is and they aren’t saying. I am not entirely sure about this, but in watching, I can see that something is going on at some level. It is more subtle than a dog’s twitches while dreaming, but it is there.

Life is a mystery, filled with joy, sorrow, and all those other times. I like to think about the mystery, but don’t ask me for any answers. I do know I felt joy riding my tricycle over to Tedd’s house.

Posted in Memoirs

Wild Night

Posted on February 12, 2014 by Bill 5 comments

We graduated high school and spent the summer hanging around Fruita before starting our new lives. Most nights we met at the pool hall and went to Grand Junction for a movie, drove around drinking beer, or shot pool.

We saw Joe park his old Power Wagon and walk in. He said, “I twisted off from my roughnecking job down at Moab and have to pick up my gear. Lee, I’ll buy the gas and beer if we can go in your Mercury. My Wagon isn’t too happy over 35.”

“Sure.” Lee said. “We can run down there and be back before midnight. Ought to be fun.”

Joe said, “Do you guys want to come along?” to Ed and me. We headed for Lee’s nice ‘56 Mercury and piled in. Joe bought a case of Coors bottles for the trip. We threw the empties at road signs.

It was 100 miles to Moab then fifteen miles of dirt road to the drill rig with Joe’s stuff. After an hour and a half and most of the beer we turned onto the narrow dirt road. It followed the Colorado River downstream in a canyon with sheer sandstone walls on one side and the river on the other.

We made it to the rig, Joe got his gear, and we headed back to Moab. About half way there, Joe yelled, “Stop! There’s a Ring-tailed Cat.”

The Ringtail, as it is now called, is a member of the raccoon family, lean and leggy for nocturnal hunting in its desert habitat. He was between the car and the cliff wall, with a little scrub to hide behind.

“I’m going to get that sucker.” Joe said as he took some heavy work gloves and jumped out of the car. The cat tried to go up the sandstone wall and Joe lunged for it. He tied into a fury of teeth and claws. The cat left and Joe bled.

Ed cleaned Joe’s bites and scratches with the last of his beer and we headed home. After lots of laughs and very little sympathy for Joe’s wounds, we all settled into the ride.

Lee was fairly drunk, but no more than the rest of us, so he drove all the way, nodding a bit. We were about three miles from town and Ed said, “Well, I’ve had enough excitement for one night…look out!” He had seen two horses in the middle of the highway. Lee was in enough of a stupor to have not seen them, then jerked his head up and hit the brakes.

Too late. The Merc hit them both head on. The horses flew over the hood and struck the roof, peeling it back and spilling their insides into the car’s interior. Ed managed to get the car stopped and we dazedly looked around. No one was hurt, but we were all drenched in blood and the contents of the horse’s innards.

A passerby saw the accident, drove to the diner in town and called the cops. Everyone in the café drove out to see the carnage. As a friend from the diner walked up, Lee went over, covered in blood, stomach contents, and shit. He said, “Can you smell any beer on my breath?”

Note: The events in the story are true, but from two events. I have changed the names to protect the guilty.

Posted in Memoirs, Stories

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