Back to Beauty

...amidst one of the darker passages of our lives.

I felt bad leaving “Holler at the Squalor” up for so long without some sort of follow-up or reply. I don’t mean to be down on my town. I don’t mean to be down, period, but it’s been impossible to avoid these last few weeks.

Riding the county road towards the main highway.

The atmospheric magnification of the San Juan Mountains is impressive today.

I joked with my wife that I missed those days when I was depressed for no good reason at all. She didn’t take that well. Inappropriate humor aside, I think fondly upon those sleepy late summer days of 2016 shortly after we moved to the San Luis Valley. For all my gloom at having to move (it was not much of a choice) and adjust to new surroundings it was truly another world in which we didn’t have anything to seriously worry about. 

All that changed in November 2017 when my friend Steven died unexpectedly, and then I was diagnosed with cancer the following April. Any time I see something online with a byline of 2018 I think, “My Cancer Year.”

I was able to get more or less past that transitional phase, though. More than I’d thought I would, given what’s going on now. 

The view from the road behind the supermarket on the far west side of town.

The thing about living around mountains is they look different every day, at any given time of day, due to clouds and the position of the sun.

I liked how the snowfield shone with reflected sunlight.

The bills are coming due, though, so to speak. I’d written last month about our elderkitty Otis and how he’s entered his last days. As expected, he’s gotten worse. 

It was Thursday morning, 20 February, when my wife and I watch as Otis voided his bladder on the floor. That was bad enough, but it was seeing his once magnificent, fluffy tail dragging in the puddle that did it. We’d sworn to each other that when it got to the point that Otis was lying around in his own filth, we’d have him put down. We wouldn’t want to live this way. This is no way to spend one’s final days.

Or so we keep telling ourselves. I put off driving to a recommended local veterinarian for consultation on Friday because the idea of setting our 18-year-old cat’s last day on Earth was too much. 

I might have stitched these two photos together but we’d lose out on the beauty of these peaks. Pretend you’re looking from left to right, and note the strange, almost perfectly conical peaks you only see west of Monte Vista towards Del Norte.

It was bad enough thinking this would be his last weekend with us. After all, we had to set the date for sooner than later. We have to clean his waste from the floor every day. He doesn’t always hit the pad we put down for him.

I’ve had to come to terms with the ugly fact that my grief is more for me than it is for Otis. He’s a familiar sight of nearly two decades that’s going away. In his elderly decrepitude, he reminds my wife and I of what’s shortly ahead for us.

Meanwhile, we can’t be cleaning these messes up three times or more a day. Otis may well wear us down before he finally wears out.... 

Oh, enough of that. Of course he won’t. We’ll call the vet. The vet will carve out time from his or her schedule to drive the mile and a half to our house sometime over the course of the week. I rather like that I won’t know the exact day.

Also, the bill for having our first family pet professionally murdered at home won’t be too large. I also have a specific credit card for such emergencies, new tires, oil changes and so on.

I’m grateful we can do this much. One might as well approach this from a position of gratitude, because no amount of tears and grieving will reverse the natural aging process few (if any) cats in the wild are afforded. This was a bill due, a corner to be turned. We knew these days were coming. We’ll do the best we can.

These are the same peaks and ridge we see behind the supermarket, but two miles west down the highway out of town. I think this mountain is called Pintada, with Windy Mountain to the left and behind it, but that’s as best I can do from the maps, and I probably stink at this.

This, I’m sure, is Green Ridge.  It blocks a lot, but by no means all of the weather coming up from New Mexico.

We can wallow in the misery and squalor, or we can lift our eyes and hearts up to the beauty and love and life that also endures in the world. Otis won’t be here to enjoy the coming spring and summer with us. But the spring and summer are coming, whether any of us are here for it or not. There’s a comfort in that I can’t articulate, so I won’t.

I’ll just take in as much joy and life and beauty and love as I find available and do the best I can.

By the way, my work-in-progress is going well. There’s that. More on that later.

Sunrises and sunsets photograph the same, in case that means anything.

All photographs Copyright © 2020 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.

Holler at the Squalor

When the snow and ice has been around so long, it doesn’t just melt. It rots. That’s a thing you know now.

It was a long, drawn-out week at Big Pink as another phase was entered in the writing of my latest novel, The Wrong Kind of Dead. Progress made on other fronts as well, namely, weight loss. With time, I hope to accumulate enough accomplishments to talk about either one in a separate post. 

On Sunday, I got enough photographs of the melt-off from the last couple of balmy days to complete a post I’d meant to do sometime last summer after a rain. Save for the slight washing out in the middle of some photos due to burn-in on my 10-year-old pocket camera’s lens, these shots turned out to be more representative of what I was going for.

What I was going for was maximum ugh. As in, “For Pete’s sake, Monte Vista, would it kill ya to put some drainage in?”

When even a small potato farming town like ours rocks that Big City aesthetic.

I like how the wheel rut makes a straight canal between the two bodies of water.

With the exception of the eye-bleach at the end, all of these photos are of alleyways in town. If I drove around I could get shots of the vast ponds swamping parking lots along U.S. 160. Parts of this high desert valley town look like the Louisiana bayou after a long summer rain or a winter melt-off. 

Mosquitoes obviously aren’t an issue in February where we are, but the water itself is. The nearby Rio Grande needs as much if not more than is taken out of it by the county. As part of the water rights agreement we’re bound to in our part of the wild, dry west, we have to put so many gallons of treated wastewater into the river each season for the benefit of farmers downstream.

Storm drainage systems don’t come cheap but water is far more dear. All this water left to make mud and slowly dry away into the atmosphere is money left on the table. It says much that after so many decades of agricultural expansion in a land given to drought, no one has bothered making better use of what little comes from the sky. Someone in Denver did make sure a law was passed prohibiting individual property owners from collecting runoff from their roofs, though, so there’s that.

Ah, well, as the ancient saying goes, whaddya gonna do?

Gotta love these lakefront view dumpsters.

We’ll gradually dry things up here, then apply the eye-bleach.

This is one of the worst alleys for water retention. Fortunately, the breeze was aimed this way today. The heck of this is the alley does have a storm drain behind where I’m standing. It’s just that the alley isn’t graded in that direction. It might look that way from this angle, but it’s not.

Remember movie drops? Pepperidge Farms is struggling.

I like the arrows here. Nothing a general sandblasting and a coat of paint won’t fix. Yeah, I wouldn’t want that bill, either.

Another perspective.

May the blessings of unobstructed sunlight shine upon your alley....

Honestly taken on this very same walk. Oh, you bet it stood out.

...and a well-accessorized cheeseburger await you at the end of your travels.

For all you cats out there.

All photographs Copyright 2020 © Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.

The River Over the High Valley, the Mountains of Mid-January

After my bilious last post, let’s chill.

My tires, brand new as of last September, were all but flat on the passenger side earlier this month. It turns out that leaving my Jeep parked in the same position with only one side facing the sun in sub-freezing, sometimes sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures will do that. After pushing a small stack of quarters into the air pump at the gas station down the road and getting all four back up to specs, I resolved I should take off in the peak heat of each day to warm the vehicle and its tires on the high-speed parts of the road on either side of the town where I live.

I drove west out of town and turned around on the cemetery road. Blanca Massif stood tall and proud, magnified from 50-60 miles away as I drove back in.

It’s made for a nice, relaxing break in the middle of the day. If I get a notion to explore, I might run into something worth photographing.

I knew I’d gone a little far north on the country road when I encountered the frozen remains of the fourth longest river in North America. I turned around and took these photos.

Squinting back towards the source of the mighty Rio Grande in the San Juan Mountains.

I passed by this view of Blanca Massif on my way back to federal highway.

Zooming in on one of the four mountains sacred to the Navajo Indians. Which one is Mount Blanca, I couldn’t tell you. It’s mashed in there with at least three other mountains of 14K elevation plus numerous lower peaks.

Zoom Out, Zoom In

Everything’s a matter of perspective.

Somewhere in the fog of November I’d slipped these photos into a folder for use in a post that month and promptly forgot them. A mere four photos for two exercises in perspective, but a post is a post. We’ll start from a location in western Alamosa County, looking due west at Blanca Massif, home to not one, not two, but three peaks over 14,000 ft./4,267.2 m.

It’s already a little pre-zoomed out and fish-eyed with this old Canon Powershot, but that’s part of its wacky charm and I’ll cope until I can get funding for a proper DSLR. Meanwhile, I’m doing well enough. Now, zooming in:

As that ancient ‘80s pop radio hymn goes, now face north. It’s still the Sangre de Cristos and I have no idea what the individual peaks are. Even up close I don’t see how anyone can tell. It’s just one jagged line of sharp snow-covered rock.

I’ll never get over how flat this high valley is. Fun fact: no one, neither Spanish nor Anglo, took anything from the local Indian tribes when they settled here. It was simply too crazy cold for the Utes and Navajo to endure in the pits of winter. They hunted when they could and beat feet out when the weather started turning. It’s fierce enough everywhere else around here that’s not in the San Luis Valley.

I’m looking at that and I can imagine what someone coming in from the Taos Plateau to the south would think, “There’s no way through that, is there?” You’ll need to head farther south to find a proper pass.

The Shifting Decor of Our Seasons

It means something; I’m just not sure what yet.

There was a second part of a post I wanted to publish featuring images from last autumn. I may yet assemble and post it out of sheer perversity between now and the end of February. For now, as we begin the long slog through the two most loathed months in the northern hemisphere, I would have us reflect upon this image captured on Veterans Day. Behold the U.S. national ensign planted in the sidewalk in front of a thrift store in the midst of putting Christmas up in one display window while Halloween still squints against the sunlight in the other.

Something-something, the duality of man and nature, blah-blah-blah, who cares? I thought it was a neat shot.

Thanksgiving 2019 After-Action Report

It was even better than last year.

I let myself get caught in that stupid War on Thanksgiving meme, which is exactly that, a meme. In a Facebook post I railed against whatever silly people are out there (and they are out there, but fewer in number than we’re led to believe) who would condemn this most American of holidays as a celebration of American Indian genocide. 

Turkeys are the only living things getting mass-slaughtered here, and we keep breeding them so we can kill them some more. In other news, a Thanksgiving miracle occurred: this little 10-pounder pictured here fed the entire family, and we still had a little leftover. I’m thankful for how we’ve learned to scale things down. Not everything has to — or should be — three to ten times as much as it needs to be.

I didn’t delete the post at first. Upon trimming some of the angrier, clichéd get-off-my-lawn-isms out, I thought the message became a lot more effective. I wanted to make my stand. You get so sick of all this sanctimonious bullyragging and...well, that was the whole point, wasn’t it? 

Properly chastened for my weakness, I undid that which shouldn’t have been done in the first place. When it comes to these provocations, a stoic response—that is to say, no response—is best. We are always offered invitations to anger in our mass media and make no mistake, the Internet is a big part of our mass media today. Decline those invitations.

And while we’re here, do you honestly know anyone who goes out of their way to bring up politics or other discordant subjects at the holiday feasting table? Again, I’m not saying there aren’t some idiots out there, but it’s rarer and far less severe than its been promoted to be. It’s a lot like that movie that came out in October that the media insisted was going to tap into some mythical white male resentment-rage. Shootings were likely to occur at screenings. It got to the point that memes were made in which “journalists” (this should always be in scare quotes) were begging for someone to bring a gun to the theater. They were actually trying to meme a shooting into existence. 

The entire point of the mass media in A.D. 2019 America is to keep you on edge, miserable and trembling for the next piece of shocking news. ‘Twas always thus, to one degree or another. It’s always been more or less fake, and if you don’t consider them the enemy, well, they sure as hell ain’t your friend, either. 

My Google game is off. I can find multiple copies of this comic, including animated .GIFs, but no mention of the creator. The author deserves commendation, as this accurately depicted the media zeitgeist of the last two weeks of September 2019. Good thing most people don’t pay much attention to the media anymore. Which makes me wonder why I bother...okay, so I am entertained by all the verbal slap fights. There’s that.

My succumbing to this frippery was mortifying and, thank God, the worst thing about the whole weekend. Once again, this Thanksgiving lasted all weekend, thanks to family.

This is what it looked like Thanksgiving evening after some of the snow had a chance to melt off. It’s all very nice and aesthetic when you’re on the inside of a warm house looking out. It’s another thing entirely if home and heart are empty, and it’s even colder and grayer in your soul. Been there, done that multiple years in a row in my 20s. I’ve had appendicitis; I’ve had multiple rogue wisdom teeth giving me trouble. The memory of such pain is abstract. The agony of loneliness over the holidays, though, still runs a shudder through me 30 years later.

I don’t have many people in my life but the ones who are there count. For the first time in a couple of years my daughter was able to take Thanksgiving Day off and drive down the night before, as opposed to the night of, the big day. We enjoyed riding around in the state-of-the-art hybrid vehicle she drove down in. That the car managed to make it through a mountain pass without trouble impressed me, as well as driving the 200 miles on only a quarter-tank of gasoline.

As usual, my daughter spent most of the time talking with her mother until her mother went to bed, and then she knocked on the door of my office. We had to forego the usual YouTube indulgences as my computer was shut down after overheating once again from the latest Windows 10 update. I don’t remember much of what we were talking about—alcohol was involved—but we wound the evening up in good spirits.

The sideboard, featuring the gingerbread house my son and his girlfriend made the week before.

It was just us at the table the next day and we were all we needed. 

The Big Three sides, the sine qua non of the Thanksgiving bird: homemade cranberry sauce, sweet potato casserole with marshmallows (the first to go altogether) and dressing.

Thanksgiving Friday was Thanksgiving Friday and nothing more. My wife and daughter did go indulge themselves at one of the two big thrift stores that had a sale, but that was the extent of it—and likely to have happened regardless of the date, because my wife and daughter enjoy such things. I stayed home, looked out the windows at the cold, snowy landscape, and thought of Thanksgivings past.

After a little more time visiting together my daughter left for Colorado Springs in mid-afternoon. The next morning my son left to see his girlfriend in Denver. My wife and I were empty-nesters again. Our hearts, however, were full. We’re grateful we have the kind of children we’re sorry to see leave, as opposed to wondering if they ever will leave. Not everyone gets that.

A potato shot of the tree that I’ll call art. Hello, Art.

When you see the Jingle Bell Rock Moose and the Christmas Bear, you know it’s on.

As with last year, the Thanksgiving vibe carried on throughout the entire weekend, even with the snow that fell three nights in a row starting on Wednesday, and even with the Christmas decorations my wife had put up days before because it was late in the month and the wintry gloom was getting to her. No one got angry with one another. No one had anything to say about politicians, current events, or the latest fad crusade. We had other concerns, namely, each other, and what we’re all up to.

In keeping with tradition, I celebrated my family, and took time out in private to mourn my dead. I can’t believe my brother Steven has been gone two years ago already this November. I spoke his name and those of sorely missed others aloud in remembrance.

When my son came home from Denver on Sunday night he ate the last of the mashed potatoes, which were all that remained of the leftovers. Thanksgiving 2019 was put to bed. Here’s a prayer we’re all back here for Christmas, and back again for many Thanksgivings and Christmases to come.

Watch it be sunny and snow-free this Christmas. Which suits me, given that my adult children are driving to see us. I don’t need a White Christmas that badly if it’s putting people I love at risk