A few miles past Silverton there is a sign on the highway we’ve ignored every time we pass it on our trips to and from Durango. It indicated that something called Andrews Lake was somewhere over there on the left and out of sight. On Wednesday we arranged to rendezvous with the Hurley family at exactly that place.
It’s a pretty little body of water formed by an earthen dam put up some sixty years ago. The views of the mountains on all sides are beautiful. We ate a simple picnic lunch and then did the 0.8 mile walk around the lake itself. Cool temperatures up there at 10,750 feet, with no flying/biting nasties to spoil the day.
Coming back home, Robin and I noticed a replica of an old wooden-wheeled cart at a roadhouse bar whose owner had obviously watched too much Monty Python episodes at some time in their life. A few miles further on we pulled over to watch three moose meandering along a ravine. All in all ’twas a fine way to spend a day.
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Robbie Robertson passed away this week. He was one of the founders of the music group The Band, and went on to make significant musical contributions once the group broke up.
The double album Rock of Ages, and the epic “rockumentary” film The Last Waltz, were personal favorites of mine. The Last Waltz was directed by some guy named Martin Scorsese, and I never heard what happened to him after that. Wonder where he is now, he seemed so talented.
There are many differences between the lives of the truly creative and we Ordinary Mortals. One that stands out today is that Robertson is just as alive to me now as he was last week. When an O.M. passes, those closest to them grieve, but no one else in the universe is the wiser or feels any sense of loss.
I never met Robbie, was not his friend or relative – all of my connections to him were through listening to his music, and all of those works remain behind for me to enjoy as his legacy, unchanged. I can sit down with my iced coffee this afternoon out under the ash tree in the backyard and crank up his playlist and – lo and behold – time and mortality haven’t intruded. That part of him will never die for as long as recorded music is played.
I do have one anecdote involving The Band’s music. In 1972 my family and I went camping on Kelley’s Island, Ohio. We took the ferry from Toledo to the island on a Thursday and enjoyed two peaceful, sleep-filled nights in our tent after spending the days exploring the area.
And then came Saturday, which is forever ensconced in memory as Black Saturday. All afternoon the ferry kept unloading boatload after boatload of revelers who moved into “our” campground, which was by evening filled to capacity with loud people and cases of Budweiser. At 4 A.M., as I lay unable to sleep while the speakers on the roof of the Volkswagen camping in the space next to our tent played The Band’s first album over and over, I contemplated violent acts.
The first such series of acts would be to take my (imaginary) sniper rifle equipped with a night-vision scope and begin shooting all of the boomboxes I could locate. The next series would involve picking off the owners of those pestilential boomboxes, one by one.
Looking back I am glad that I had no firearms with me, as I would probably still be a guest of the state of Ohio, in a barred-window accommodation that would almost surely afford me fewer opportunities to choose the music I would like to play than I now enjoy.
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Thought I would share with you a t-shirt I saw advertised recently. I broke out laughing when I first saw it, recognizing the basic truth of its statement.
Then I felt guilty for taking delight in what is really a depressing story behind the phrase on the shirt. That we are now down to a 1.3 party country, instead of the much preferable 2.0. That has been true ever since the GOP leadership joined the mob section of their party. (We all know who the guy at the head of that mob is, so we don’t need to dwell on him.)
Now what the mob section of either party wants to do is to burn everything to the ground and then build it back the way they would like it. Their problem is that they are so fractious they can’t work together or with others, having discarded compromise as a way of doing business.
So I won’t be buying the shirt. Why wear something that makes me sad … even if I would look damn good in it?
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From time to time I’ve mentioned bringing home the groceries via bicycle. If it’s just a few items, I will use panniers (saddlebags). But when it’s a full-bore trip I fall back on my trusty Burley Nomad cargo trailer.
We bought it nearly fifteen years ago when we were making plans to bike the Mickelson Trail in South Dakota (a beautiful trip, I might add).
It will carry 100 pounds of whatever, keeps some of the rain off the contents, weighs only 15 pounds and is easy to tow. It is covered with a coated fabric which will, of course, eventually need replacement, but it’s been fifteen years so far … . Its only real drawback is the price – $349 this year. About double what I paid way back when.
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We have a crisis at the hummingbird feeder. A pair of rufous hummingbirds are driving all of the others away. This in spite of the fact that the rufous species is much the smaller one.
In fact, they are famous for their aggressiveness, especially around feeding areas.
I went looking for what could be done and the only real suggestion was to put up multiple feeders spaced as far apart as possible, making it difficult for the little brawlers to be in all those places at once.
That seems like a lot of work to rectify a problem that I created by putting up the feeder in the first place. Surely in these enlightened times there is a hummingbird whisperer somewhere who could be called in to work with us. The rufous duo may have unresolved fledging issues, perhaps dating from that awkward time when they had to leave the nest.
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Little Home In The Valley 