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bourbonboredom · 6 years

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Silver Lining Chapter 3

If you’re ever gonna find a silver lining, it’s gotta be a cloudy day

A ClydexReader fanfic

Word Count: 2,243

Warnings: mention of drug use, a lil angst

Silver Lining Masterlist

Tag List: @oh-adam @kyloren-supreme-ben @xis23 @elsablackswift @ladygrey03 @grey-reylo-solo @givemelifeorgiveme

She showed up the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. Her promise to be out of his hair in a couple weeks had long passed by the time spring came to Boone county, but Clyde didn’t mind one bit.

April marked six weeks of her working at the bar. Six weeks of setting-up and closing-down times being cut in half. Six weeks of that downtime being used to shoot the breeze and learning more about one another. He liked to drink beer when he wasn't at work, she liked her Jack and Cokes. He had smoked in high school but quit after joining the military, she couldn't stand the smell of cigarettes. His brother had made him try out for football with him and he got tackled to the ground in the first ten minutes of practice and he swore off sports forever, and she had a different sport for every season in high school. They both liked to read.

It was after the first week that she started to come in to her shifts with different clothes. The zipped-up hoodie was exchanged for flannels with the buttons done all the way up. Clyde thought maybe it was for a religious reason but as the weeks progressed, her sleeves were rolled up and she’d unbutton to a more casual level. She would comment that the weather was warmer here than it was back home.

In the middle of the second week she came to work with a cellphone in hand. It was a simple pre-paid model, but she asked him for his phone number in case she needed to reach him outside work. In the later weeks, they’d taken to texting one another cocktail recipes to try out. The Logan siblings had noticed their brother using his phone more often, and took to teasing him whenever his phone would chime.

His siblings also took to coming ‘round the bar more often. At first to check up on their brother, who had basically hired a girl off the street. They were just making sure she didn't rob him blind. But as the weeks past they’d warmed up to her. It was around week four when she was joining the Logan circle during her down-time on shifts.

“Don’t spend all that time around them darlin’, their luck’ll rub off an you,” one of the barflies yelled to her one day.

“Everyone’s got their misfortunes, I’ll handle what comes my way like anyone else would,” she said back simply. Jimmy and Mellie gave their brother an approving look after that.

Despite seeing her almost everyday at the bar, Clyde never saw her around town off work. Not that he was looking, of course, but the thought was there in his head. It would seem she worked and didn't do much else. She never missed a shift, never asked for time off, and was always aiming to please. She’d make the customers smile, and even found ways to make her rather-stoic boss crack a grin.

He wasn’t much for smiling but she found ways. It usually involved mimicking his accent, which was followed by him mimicking hers, which she loved. She’d make a point to remember his favorite songs and put them on the jukebox first thing when she turned it on. She even helped string up some lights to the porch one day before Clyde came in to work, after she heard him say he wanted to do it in passing the week prior.

He was snapped out if his thoughts of her by her voice calling across the bar to a customer.

“Here on a Thursday Lorie? Must have been some kinda week,”

“You know it was,” Lorie Ann, a local in her late-twenties said as she cozied up to the bar. “The ER at Charleston was no joke this week,”

“You want the usual then?”

“Nah, get me one a those Blood Moon things you make for Ashlynn. I need somethin’ strong tonight,”

She made the drink without missing a beat as she carried on conversation with the nurse who was regaling her with the amount of overdoses she’d had to treat that week. Come to think of it, she hadn’t made a mistake at the bar yet. Drink orders were always right, no names were forgotten or glasses broken, Clyde was starting to think she was made for this job.

“We had one from Boone County, he had been holed up in the Super 8 down the road on some kinda binge. His face was all swollen up and the EMTs told us the needle was still hangin’ outta his arm when they got him,” They both grimaced at that.

“Well, you’re off shift now, do yourself a favor and take a good break, that’s hard work you do everyday.” she said, sliding over Lorie Ann’s drink.

“Thanks darlin’. Hey, are you still staying at that Super 8? I don’t know if you should be hangin’ out around there with that kinda activity goin’ on,”

She gave a tight smile, “I haven’t found anywhere besides there yet, but thanks for your concern,”

That weighed heavily on Clyde’s mind for the rest of the evening. He’d never thought to ask if she was still staying in that motel. It would make sense though for that few weeks she thought she’d be there for, but it was well over a month now. Was she planning on moving soon? Moving away?

That thought made his heart sink a bit. It was closing time when he decided to ask what her intentions were.

“You’d said to Lorie Ann that you were lookin’ to move?” he started as he stacked up the chairs. “Are you leavin’ town?”

She didn't respond for a moment.

“I wouldn't want to overstay my welcome anymore than I already have. I’d told you a couple of weeks but it’s been well past that. I dont want to take advantage—“

“You’re not,” he said, maybe a little two quickly. His eyes locked with hers and he lost is breath for a moment.

“You’re not. You- you’ve been nothin’ but helpful since y’started. Doin’ everythin’ I ask, and even things I don’t ask for. You did tell me you’d be here for just a couple a weeks but— if you wanted to stay, I’ll keep you on here,”

She kept staring at him, working her bottom lip against her teeth, as if to stop words from tumbling out. His ears felt like they were on fire and he was grateful his hair was covering them.

“I can’t keep stayin’ at the Super 8, it takes up a whole days pay sometimes—“

“I can pay you more. A real salary. And one’a the houses by me and Jimmy just went up for rent. The landlord is a friend, I could probably work down the price a bit,” he hoped he didn't sound desperate, “If you’d want that,”

She moved towards him so quickly, he didn't have time to react as she pulled him into a hug.

“You’re too kind to me,”

“It’s nothin’,” he hugged her back awkwardly, hoping she didn't feel his heart thundering in his chest where her head rested. “Does that mean you’ll stay?” he asked a little quieter.

She let go and looked up at him, smiling so wide that the spot where her tooth was missing could be seen.

“I reckon I could,”

She was getting better at the accent every day, he thought to himself as he gave a small smile.

“We can see it as soon as tomorrow,” he told her.

———————————

Clyde had texted her the directions as soon as he’d gotten home that night. He was in the kitchen with Jimmy when his phone chimed with her response. Clyde reached for his phone, but his brother was faster.

“She’s thankin’ you, with a smiley face?” his voice was full of mischief “Now what’d you do to deserve that?”

“Nothin’ don’t worry about—“ the phone chimed again, still in Jimmy’s hand.

“She wants to know if she needs to bring anything tomorrow?” A grin grew across his face. “You gone an asked her out didn’t ya?”

Clyde wanted to sink into the floor. Jimmy always knew how to push his buttons when it came to women. He knew he wasn’t doing it on purpose, but being the younger, less-popular, less-attractive, less-charismatic, less-everything Logan brother— he was a little sensitive when Jimmy talked to him about the opposite sex.

“If you must know, It’s not a date. I’m helping her find a place to live. She's been living in the motel off 17 and she wants somewhere a little more permanent,”

“Does she now? Would this have anything to do with the neighbors movin’ out and the place next door freein’ up?”

If Clyde could roll his eyes back into his head any further, they’d get stuck there. Jimmy saw this, and still continued on talking.

“Havin’ her next door could be nice, but remember how easy it was for us to hear the last couple who lived there? Especially during the night? Remember that if you an her decide t—”

“I’d appreciate you not finishin’ that sentence,” Clyde said in the frighteningly even tone he used when his brother would go to far. “An I’d appreciate you givin’ me my phone back,”

Jimmy handed his brother back the phone.

“All I’m sayin’ is its been a while since you had someone in your life, an she's really somethin’ Clyde. Mellie and I like her. She’s helpin’ you,”

“It’s not gonna be like that an thats the end of it,” he went back to his room, shutting the door behind him.

He sunk onto his bed, feeling disheartened. He had girlfriends in the past. A couple in high school, and one that was with him through basic and his first tour but broke up with him soon after. After the accident, Mellie set him up with one of the girls from the salon but that didn't last beyond a few dates on account of her treating him like he was fragile. She’d look at his arm too often. He hadn’t been fitted for the prosthetic yet, he had to wait months for his limb to heal before that. Pity oozed out of her mouth no matter what she said.

Since then, he was making his peace with being alone. He sat up on the edge of his bed and unbuckled his prosthetic. He placed it on his dresser and removed the sock from his limb that protected from chafing. He ran his fingers over the scarred flesh, he didn't care to acknowledge the area too often. He’d try telling himself that he was lucky that more of him wasn’t lost, that he could have died instead. But that was hard to remember when he’d see the look of pity on peoples faces when they saw the plastic in place of his left hand.

It would still feel unreal at times. He had gone though almost 23 years of his life when it happened. He didn't realize he could take a body part for granted until it was too late. It was four years later and he was still processing it. Talking about it with the Veteran Affairs therapist up in Charleston had been too hard at the time. Most days he could barely get out of bed, much less travel the half hour to the city. And now he was too busy to get up there.

Learning how to do things one-handed was incredibly frustrating, leading to him lash out a lot. He was angrier back then, said hurtful things that he didn't mean to his siblings who he knew were only trying to help. He made an effort to never yell at them again after he calmed down. It was Jimmy who helped him get a job at Duck Tape. The old owner was a Vet himself, and never treated Clyde like he was any less. He taught him tips and tricks and having someone with shared life experience helped him mellow out and realize things were going to be okay.

The owner retired and moved to Arkansas to be closer to his grandkids about 2 years ago, leaving the bar to Clyde. He didn't know if he could do it at first, run a bar by himself, but he’d hire people on to help him out. Most didn't stay long for one reason for another, but Duck Tape still stood and he was proud to be the owner. Mel had once told him that he could do more with one hand than most could do with two, which made him smile when he was doubting himself.

He picked up his phone to see her name still on the screen. He texted her back saying that she didn't need to bring anything special and put his phone down on the nightstand next to his prosthetic.

He thought about his brothers words as he lay in bed. ‘She’s somethin’’, he couldn't deny that. ‘She’s helping’, she was doing that too, though he suspected Jimmy meant something else by that.

She never treated him different, which he appreciated. Some of the other employees he had hired would ask intrusive questions, or would act like he couldn't do anything helpful. They never lasted long at the bar. But she’d done well so far. Made his life a little easier, a little happier. He felt his eyes grow heavy with sleep, and soon fell asleep with her on his mind.

#logan lucky #clyde logan #clyde logan x reader #clyde logan/reader #clyde logan x oc #clyde logan/oc #silver lining

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trendingnewsb · 6 years

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The Right Can’t Fight the Future

It seems axiomatic that the past and the future cannot exist at the same time. Thanks to the space-time continuum, people from different centuries cannot live simultaneously. The same goes for a nation, which cannot survive pulling toward the future and toward the past at once.

The United States is at a fulcrum. We are two countriesone lurching for the future, one yearning for the pastthat cannot live together, because we cant be both things. Donald Trump may have brought on the breaking point, but he didnt create the schism. It was already there for him to exploit. It was there during enslavement, when President Lincoln declared that the country could not survive half slave, half free, and it took a civil war to force these two nations: one brutal but pastoral, the other urban and focused on finance and technological innovation, often with its own kind of cruelty, to remain under one roof.

Today, Trump is speeding us toward declinethe very decline his supporters so feared. His imperious leadership; his familys grubby pretense at royalty and the apparent mad dash among members of his cabinet and White House team to hawk their positions for cash and luxuries have the feel of a decrepit regime looting the palace in its final days; stuffing the silver in their coats as they flee into exile.

Trumps announcement of anachronistic trade tariffs this week was portrayed as out of the blue, but it was no such thing. Trump ran on ending multilateral trade agreements and recreating an America of the distant past that culls every human and material resource from within. Republicans who are now in full blown freakout over a potential trade war voted for exactly what theyre getting.

In every way, Donald Trump is a president built for the past; a benighted, late 19th Century figure who spun his supporters a tale that he could restore a bygone era when coal fires burned, factories hummed, steel mills belched out soot and opportunity and a (white) man with a sturdy back, a high school diploma and a song in his heart could buy a little house, marry a little wife and have 3 cherry-cheeked kids he didnt ever have to cook or clean for, plus if he can afford it, a hot mistress on the side. Trump is the slovenly but brash, gold-plated emblem of a time when in the imagination of his followers, black women hummed a tune while they cleaned your house or did the washing, black men tipped their hat on the street but didnt dare look you in the eye, and neither would dream of moving in next door. A time when women asked their husbands for an allowance, not their boss for a promotion, men were allowed to be men complete with ribald jokes and a slap on the fanny for the pretty secretary at work, and there were no gays, no trans people, no birth control they somehow just didnt exist! The rural folks were the salt of the earth and we only let in a certain kind of immigrant whose only goal was to shake off his ethnicity and assimilate. Everyone went to (separate) church on Sundays and everyone got along. Its a plasticine world that for many must feel like it truly existed, though of course it never did.

Going backward, to a world without ambiguity on race, gender and work is a powerfully attractive idea, particularly for those who fear losing their cultural and social hegemony as the nation browns, and their economic ascendancy as technology creates new industries they scarcely understand.

But heres the thing: the past really is past. Coal is still a dying industry and America will never again have an industrial revolution. Its other countries turn to do that now. Black and brown people arent giving up our dignity, including the right to protest and to survive mundane encounters with police. Immigrants arent going away (and in fact we need them to keep the economy and the safety net flush). LGBT people arent going back into the closet. And women are staying in the workforce, with many aiming to become the CEO, while insisting on hanging onto our reproductive liberty. There is indeed a sizable minority of Americans who want to go back to the old times. But we arent going back.

Neither is the world.

While we regress, the rest of the planet will go right on trading without us. Tariffs on other countries will invite tariffs on us (Europe is already considering levying them on everything from Levis to Kentucky bourbon to Harley Davidson motorcycles). And protectionism will protect zero American jobs, while hiking the prices of everything we buy thats made with aluminum and steel, from cars to washing machines to pots and pans. Donald Trump, who never built a building with American steelpreferring the Chinese variety insteaddoesnt care about any of that. He only cares about the show. And he always gives his people a good show. But the economy does care. And America will pay a price for their P.T. Barnum president and his temper tantrums.

Meanwhile, there is another America, which is busy concerning itself with the future. Its the America that produces two-thirds of this countrys economic output, though it represents just hundreds of counties versus Trumps thousands. Its the America that objects to Russian interference in our elections, that welcomes immigrants and their economic contributions, that recognizes that even ancient institutions like marriage can modernize, that views womens full equality as a boon not a threat to civilization, that doesnt want to be ruled from Biblical texts or by a savage gun lobby, and that wants America to be a part of the world, not its creaky, cranky, lonely adversary.

In particular, young AmericansMillennials and post-Millennials, have had enough of our tired wrangling. Theyre sick of the Baby Boomers social agonies and the clenched grip of the World War II generation on American social and political life. They want an end to throwback rigidity on guns, gays, and religion. And they neither respect nor revere the current president of the United States.

Far from becoming more conservative with time, young Americans are staying right where they were when Barack Obama was first electedon the left of centerif not growing more progressive. Its why Republicans are so keen to suppress their votes. Where my generation, Generation X, polls at 51-41 percent blue over red, for Millennials the Democratic-over-Republican preference is a daunting 62-29, while Boomers are 48-46 D versus R and their parents, in the Silent Generation, tilt Republican 51 to 45 percent. The main reason for the increasing liberalism of the younger cohorts? These generations (including the youngest group, Generation Z) are chock full of young people of color. They are the most racially diverse generation in modern American history. And by next year, Millennials will be the single largest generational group in America, with their ranks swelled by immigrants (which explains the urgent right wing push for mass deportation.)

Does anyone really believe they will somehow morph en-masse into NRA-obedient, Fox News-zombie, anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-immigrant, maniacal healthcare destroyers wholl vote for serial sexual predators? Sure, the so-called alt-right can nab some Millennials to conduct their meme wars and more extreme members for their torches and khakis brigades, but truth be told, the majority of their peers are abandoning them or even refusing to date them. Young Republicans are more likely than their older counterparts to have left the party after Trumps election, with nearly a quarter of those aged 18 to 29 doing so during Trumps first six months in office. They live within a popular culture that tilts overwhelmingly to the other side; one where NBA players are hanging out at the museum rather than going to the White House, and openly calling the Republican president a bum.

With its broad and seemingly absolute power over the country, the Republican Party may not feel like it is dying, but it is dying nonetheless, at the hands of youth and multiracial population growth. The GOP can rush to install voter suppression traps and other restraints on change to try and keep the tide from coming in. But it will come anyway.

For the Democrats, the challenge is that they havent exactly built themselves for the future either. They will benefit from the coming wave because they are the default vehicle for the futurists ambitions. But that doesnt mean they wont have to change as well, by delivering on the soon-to-be largest generations demands, so they truly believe that political participation is a meaningful path to progress.

Perhaps the biggest challenge future-facing America faces is that past-craving America has a dogmatic and consistent voting base and a determined and persistent ally: Russia, which alongside its embedded mercenaries from the so-called alt right are harnessing maturing modern tools like social media to keep the futurists at bay. But we wont have a president who cuddles up to Russia and neo-fascists forever. Eventually, the fight against them and their propaganda will be joined in earnest and won.

The future is coming. It cannot live alongside the past. And in the end, it cannot be stopped.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-right-cant-fight-the-future

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scatterbrainedscholar · 6 years

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Spring into Never Summer

In early June, the school year ended and I bid farewell to the windswept prairie outside Vista Academy and the quiet paths along Sand Creek. My idea to aimlessly tour the western United States via bicycle was quashed for the time being by some lingering hip issues so I spent the first few weeks of the summer housesitting for a friend across town in Arvada. While carefully carrying out my duty of monitoring the automatic lawn watering system, I sold or donated most of my apartment furnishings and replaced my grandma’s Altima with a used minivan. I spent a few days converting the 12-year-old soccer-mom mobile into a micro-RV ready for an extended road trip. In other words, I took out the seats and threw a sleeping platform together using lumber from my buddy’s garage. For someone whose furniture building experience was so far limited to Ikea products, it felt like an engineering feat on par with building the Golden Gate bridge.

Arvada is a pretty interesting place. On the map it looks like just another municipality swallowed up by the Denver sprawl, but when you’re there it feels like you’re in a rural town with its own identity completely separate from the city (at least in the Olde Town section). I think this has to do with its location up on a ridge above Clear Creek, Highway 70, and the rest of Denver to the south and east. A particularly interesting aspect of Arvada is its water “ditches”. These are little canals running through the city’s properties that divert water from the rivers coming out of the mountains to the west. They are apparently irrigation ditches left over from Arvada’s agricultural past. These days, the residents still have rights to a certain amount of the water passing though their property so most of the yards around Olde Town Arvada have a large pump, sometimes disguised in cute and clever ways, to access this water which is free and in addition to the normal municipal water service. I don’t know how common that is these days, but it sure makes me wonder about the history of water infrastructure and water rights in general….

II.

One day, instead of fumbling around with screws and 2 x 6’s, I hopped on my e-bike and headed back east across town to make good on a promise I had made to a couple students. Several weeks earlier, I had ordered eclipse glasses and was planning to hand them out to some of my students but the school year ended before they arrived. Two of my disappointed students, who also happened to have worked quite hard on the water pressure rocket project, gave me their addresses and I promised to get them the glasses.

The trip to their houses ended up being quite the exploration of the Denver waterways. It was early summer which is kind of like a monsoon season around Denver, and the river was swollen and intense, almost frighteningly so in places. I started off heading northwest on a bike path alongside Clear Creek. The creek was definitely not clear and calling it a creek seemed comically inaccurate. On more than one occasion, I went under overpasses where it seemed the bike lane was minutes away from being flooded out. I went over a bridge at the confluence with Ralston Creek, which also flows through Arvada. Massive rapids formed and I wondered whether anybody ever kayaks or rafts down these streams when they are flood like this.

Besides bike paths, these waterways are also adjacent to interstate highways and other major thoroughfares but are mostly out of sight from the motorists roaring by on their own concrete rivers. This seems very unfortunate. You could drive all over Denver and never realize that these rivers — the whole reason Denver is where it is, — were even there. The bike lanes allow for much more intimate contact. I had seen numerous water birds like egrets, kingfishers, and herons and shortly after the Ralston-Clear Creek confluence I came across the biggest turtle I had ever seen outside the ocean- a behemoth snapping turtle lying on the bike bath perhaps getting some respite the turbulence of the river.

Eventually, I came upon the confluence of Clear Creek with the South Platte flowing north from downtown. I stopped to take in this wild scene of raging rapids with a fellow DIY e-biker (although he had motors on both front and rear wheels – better for riding in the snow, he said). I crossed and headed south and upstream, towards the spot where the much more placid Sand Creek joins the South Platte. This section of the ride took me through a broken industrial landscape including the recycling plant that had caught fire the previous week and the massive Suncor oil refinery. I passed by huge flare towers and under massive pipes leading to a maze of other pipes and tanks. Breathing the air there did not feel healthy. At one point, I was approaching what I thought must have been an old abandoned wooden train track, with its decaying and rotting timbers and rusting nails, until a small train of oil tanks shot across it right as I passed underneath. I felt like I was on some sort of Big Oil-sponsored Six Flags ride.

Things calmed down after turning east to ride along Sand Creek as the refinery gave way to warehouses. After about 15 miles, I finally rolled out of the riparian bike path and made my way to the students’ houses.

II.

While staying in Arvada I made my first forays onto the road in the newly outfitted micro-RV up highway 285 to the Rocky Mountain Land Library in South Park – the intermountain valley west of Denver and site of the headwaters of the South Platte, not the fictional Comedy Central town. The Land Library is on the site of an old cattle ranch (which was on former Ute and/or Arapaho land?), complete with abandoned 19th century buildings preserved in the dry mountain air. The library is a work in progress but the idea is to eventually serve as a residential library focused on connecting the literature of the western landscape with the landscape itself. I tried on two occasions to volunteer to help clean up some of the old buildings but showed up too late each time and ended up just walking around and talking about birds and books with Jeff and Ann, the founders of the Land Library. They were kind enough to let me park the van there for the night and camp out.

The ranch is separated just enough from route 9 by an old railway berm so that you don’t hear the already infrequent car traffic. Besides one large cottonwood near the cluster of old ranch buildings and the willows edging the river, the surrounding landscape was a flat, treeless basin. I wondered how different it looked like there before a century of over-grazing by cattle and sheep. On the second occasion, I had two days out there with all 1,400 acres of high and dry steppe (correct geographical term?) to myself.

After taking an icy bath in one of the curves of the winding middle fork of the South Platte, followed by a nap amongst the wild irises and willows, I hiked across the basin and up the eastern ridge to see what I could see. There is a unique sense of freedom felt when walking in such a massive open landscape without a path to follow. From atop the ridge, I could see to the east was more treeless basin and ridgelines to the horizon with some snowy peaks to the southeast. Looking north and west across the basin of South Park, the sun was setting behind the Presidential Range. It’s fun to think about water melting from those peaks and starting a journey that would shoot down and out of the mountains, through Denver, and eventually pass under the Daniel Boone bridge that takes highway 40 over the Missouri River back home in St. Louis. Interestingly, the Land Library leases it’s land from the city of Aurora (queue more wondering about water infrastructure history).

As the wind picked up after sunset and the temperature dropped, I made my way back to the van, trying not to twist an ankle on the old bleached cattle bones that were scattered in the grass. I made some dinner and waited for the stars to come out while listening to the end of Edward Abbey’s classic, Desert Solitaire. I was already a big fan of Abbey’s from reading the Monkey Wrench Gang, a fun story of some anarchist environmentalists disrupting mining operations and running from the Man in the Southwest.

Desert Solitaire is a series of Abbey’s musings from his time spent as a Park Ranger for the National Park Service at Arches National Monument (now National Park) back in the sixties. His romantic odes to wilderness and his tirades against car culture make the book worth a read. However, as much as I sympathize with his anti-authoritarian sentiments pervading the book, his particular brand of anarchism is a little too misanthropic and arrogant for me. It is not the destructive, racist misanthropy of right-wing libertarianism but it’s still frustrating. Also, his take on technology and population growth is thought-provoking but a bit simplistic. It’s often very clear that he is speaking from a place of white privilege. That said, I would’ve loved to hang out and hike through the desert or burn down some billboards with the guy.

After finishing the book, I tucked into my sleeping bag on my creaking plywood platform and fell asleep to the sound of coyotes yelping and howling from the ridge I had hiked to earlier that day. I spent the next morning lounging around the ranch, exploring a little and reading parts of the Land Library’s copy of The Natural Navigator by Tristan Gooley. I was inspired to try and draw a topographical map of my surroundings but the sun and heat became a little too uncomfortable so instead I got in the van and drove nine hours to Kansas City.

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III.

After celebrating the 4th of July with my brothers’ family and dumping some superfluous belongings in their basement, I blasted back west to Denver. I picked up Joey, my comrade in noticing and wondering, at the Denver airport and we immediately set about gathering provisions for a weekend camping trip in the mountains. We picked up our standard aged gouda, dry-cured meats, granola bars, and dehydrated soup and headed up to Boulder. For a physical and mental warm-up, we went for a short walk and scramble up El Dorado canyon, where we got to work fawning over the stratigraphy of the rocks, the lichens growing on them, and the plants growing at the base of them, including some delicious raspberries. That night with fellow St. Louis-transplant Peter and his family, we feasted – appropriately for Boulder – on grilled local veggies, artisanal hot dogs, and homemade non-dairy ice cream while planning our trip.

We decided we would head to the same trail that Peter would be hiking in September with my brothers. The trailhead into the Never Summer Wilderness was not too far from Boulder and we would be able to get to an alpine lake after hiking only 5 miles into the backcountry. Also, since it was Forest Service land, we would not need a permit (although the trailhead was technically within Rocky Mountain National Park, strange).

After a hearty breakfast the next morning, Joey and I headed out for the trailhead. We stopped a few times to look at some elk, go to the bathroom, and take pictures of the map and a wildflower field guide at a visitor center on our way up and over Rocky Mountain National Park. After descending into the valley to the west, we were in the midst of a vigorous debate over the exact allosteric mechanics of hemoglobin or something like that and I missed the turnoff for the trailhead.

After several miles of backtracking, we eventually made it to the trailhead, packed up our backpacks, stretched, and started plodding along on the trail. Somehow it was already 3:30 pm. We crossed a vast meadow then headed into the trees, an almost park-like stand of similarly aged pines with a couple wild roses here and there alongside the trail. After less than a mile, we began the streamside ascent.

Once we were deep in the backcountry, I felt an intense sense of relief and return. It had been too long since I had breathed heavily in fresh mountain air filled with the aroma of warm pine sap. As we went deeper and higher into the fir and spruce, we were soon surrounded by a cornucopia of wildflowers – groves of Columbine, paintbrush, larkspur, lupine, buttercups and all kinds of other colorful, ephemeral little flowers it was impossible to keep track of, much less identify (for our untrained eyes). We zigged and zagged our way up, never completely out of earshot of the gushing stream, passed little cascades and flower-laden glens, aspen-edged boulder fields, and whatever you call massive swaths of trees smashed down by a winter avalanche. From pine beetles to the snow fields tucked into the north facing crevices thousands of feet above use, the noticing and wondering was overwhelming.

The last mile to the lake seemed to go on forever, and we were losing daylight quickly by the time we were above the treeline. Joey and I have been known to get sidetracked botanizing and berry-picking and not making it to camp until after dark. We were just keeping up our reputation. When we finally made it to the lake, the exhaustion immediately gave way to joy and satisfaction. With not another soul around, we celebrated and took in the scenery surrounding the lake as the sky quickly dimmed from dusk to twilight. We turned and looked back east with an expansive view of where we had just come from, and just as we were taking in the view of the distant front range peaks across the valley, the big, bright full moon appeared over the horizon. Exactly nine moons previous, Joey and I had been camping out about 9,000 feet below and a couple hundred miles to the northeast in the Pawnee National Grasslands, which should be more aptly named Pawnee National Fracklands.

We were lucky to find a campsite complete with an established fire ring almost immediately so we were able to get camp set up and a fire going as the temperature dropped. We supped on our soup, chocolate, and even a couple ears of roasted corn before heading to bed for the night. In the morning, we lazily ate breakfast under the watchful eye of the area’s resident marmots. We took some time to explore the edge of the lake, observing and hypothesizing, then took a breathtakingly chilly dip in the lake to get the blood flowing. We started our descent around midday and walked through some light rain and even hail. Despite getting hung up picking and eating wild strawberries we had somehow missed the day before, we made it back to the van well before sunset. We obtained the necessary post-hike high-calorie junk food and started the search for the evenings campsite. We turned off route 40 near Winter Park into some National Forest land and took a gravel road to a clearing right behind one of those ski-town condo developments and posted up for the night. Joey got a fire going while I futzed around in the van, then we sat and listened to some music and discussed what exactly a flame is. Good times. 24 hours later, Joey was back in St. Louis and I was sleeping in the van in a Walmart parking lot outside of Laramie, Wyoming.

To be continued….

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A Year in Reading – Part III Spring into Never Summer I. In early June, the school year ended and I bid farewell to the windswept prairie outside Vista Academy and the quiet paths along Sand Creek.

#bikes #books #colorado #travel #waterways #wilderness

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