Grandma Said …

A hot summer evening on my grandparents’ farm. Way off in the west there are flashes of light in the clouds on the horizon. Silent flashes. Grandma Jacobson looks at them and pronounces them “heat lightning.” Being a cautious eight year-old and not wanting to appear unusually doltish, I simply nod.

But I file away the information that there was regular lightning and there was heat lightning. Since the latter sort was always far off in the distance, I decide that it was harmless and not a source of those frightful and seemingly random killer bolts from the sky. I can safely forget about it entirely.

Later on I learned that heat lightning was not a separate genre after all, but just the regular old kind which was so far away that the sound of the thunder was lost. Here in Paradise we don’t seem to have heat lightning. Perha ps because the mountains prevent us from seeing those long distances. It was more of a prairie thing.

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You know when you go on a tour of a cave or mine the guide will at some point turn off the lights to show how dark real dark can be? That was what greeted me just before midnight on Sunday when Poco’s voice woke me and I found myself in total darkness. Only half conscious, I picked my way to the living room by feeling along the walls.

No electricity. Not in the house, not in our part of town. And the rainclouds took away the light from the stars. Like in a mineshaft.

The utility company was obviously having a night of it, because the juice came back in and then went out twice more before the show was over. It wasn’t until three a.m. that the electricity was steady on. And then it was nearly time to get ready for a trip on a steam train.

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From The New Yorker

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The Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, often abbreviated as the D&SNG, is a 3 ft (914 mm) narrow-gauge heritage railroad that operates on 45.2 mi (72.7 km) of track between Durango and Silverton, in the U.S. state of Colorado. The railway is a federally-designated National Historic Landmark and was also designated by the American Society of Civil Engineers as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1968.^[3]

The route was originally opened in 1882 by the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad (D&RGW) to transport silver and gold ore mined from the San Juan Mountains. 

Wikipedia

The dry description above is of the steam train trip Robin, Aiden, and I took on Monday. The three of us rendezvoused at a nowhere place called Rockwood, a brief stop on the Durango to Silverton route. It is nothing but a wooden platform alongside the tracks. No buildings, nothing to sit on. If the train knows it should stop for you it does, otherwise it rocks past and into the canyon carved by the Animas River.

The morning was blue/white skies and cool temperatures. We had purchased tickets on one of the gondolas, which are open-air platforms whose seats face toward the side, where all the scenery will be. Each car has a canopy to ward off rain and bird droppings, but that’s about it. You can ride in much more luxury in other cars, but I ask you … why would you do that? Sit in a stuffy box, facing forward, with nothing to smell but the other passengers, while the gondola riders are inhaling mountain air so bracing that the elderly are advised to go into one of the enclosed coaches in case they start to feel too healthy for their own good.

Now it is true that on the return trip it did rain, and some of that water did gain access to our persons, but when the sun came back out that brief sogginess was quickly forgotten.

I won’t bother trying to describe what one sees on the trip, there are a few photos in the gallery to whet your appetite. I will say that it was well worth the cost of the ticket, and who knows … I might do it again, perhaps in autumn, when all those aspens begin to glow.

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I tried to buy one of those camo print caps with the Harris/Walz embroidery and was disheartened to see that delivery dates are now moved out into October. How can this be? This is America, the land of the baseball cap. We invented the darn thing. Foul play! Fake manufacturing!

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