Or, more literally: “It’s been another year of regrowth there in your valley, are there any pictures of what it’s beginning to look like now?”
Why, yes. Yes, there are. I found this, which seems to have been taken in the past couple weeks:
It’s the barest of improvements, but when its this vs. ash, I’ll take this.
Here’s an… interesting shot which was taken from a rock formation visible from the ranch:
That explains the slight greening we see in the first picture. This area was once pure forest. But although the trees are gone, life is returning to the former undergrowth in the form of grass and wildflowers.
The marked difference has, of course, raised the question I asked myself last year at this time: Do I want to go back? Ever? Or only in the winter, when snowy white lies will protect me from the truth of destruction and adulthood? Should I shield the childhood memories of a place which are perhaps even now glossed over by intense nostalgia? Or do I layer in new experiences in a real landscape which could alter or completely consume a well-worn mental escape? Are these questions I should have been asking myself even before the fire? Where is my Percoset?
Well, it’s not really an issue at this point; for our second wedding anniversary, Josh The Pilot and I have plenty of budget-directed choices: We can take a romantic stroll around the Wal-Mart parking lot, or we can plunge our heads into the bathtub in celebration of our deeply underwater mortgage. Even if I wanted to go back, I can’t. The issue is in the hands of… of… whatever the current name of our bank is.
It’s a convenient debt.
Some of the online photos I found create the illusion that from a few angles, it looks as though nothing has happened in Pike National Forest at all. But that, I know, is self-delusion of the most destructive kind. I still feel like I miss a place which doesn’t exist anymore, like I’m loving a dead person.
Then again, I expect heaven has sunrises much like these.
aren’t you glad you asked at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com
It’s a tradition here at Blonde Champagne to run the vintage post “The Last Week in June,” circa 2000-and-something, at the proper time. This year, a twist to the plot: The addition of its follow-up post, “Lost,” which first appeared in 2008.
The Last Week in June
This week was, in my childhood, what kept me alive throughout the other fifty-one. It is what pulled me to Colorado, horses and dust and pine trees and creeks of freezing mountain runoff. Even if I’ve been conducting my June unconsciously aware of the anniversary, I suddenly will feel a strong rugged pull as the Fourth of July approaches and look at the calendar and realize, “Oh. The Week.”
Although it’s now priced right out of this world, it wasn’t back in those days, and from the year I was six until the year I was thirteen, this was It. I have never known a place I was happier. College comes a close second, but four years are impossible to conduct without at least some semblance of tears and heartbreak. There were no tears in Lost Valley except for the following Sunday, when there was always near-hysteria. One year I sobbed as the plane departed from Colorado Springs at the thought of another twelve months of waiting in Cincinnati: Were we going to Ohio for a funeral? the woman sitting behind me wondered to my mother’s horrified humiliation.
A part of me is literally seared there, burned into the walls of the main dining room. Each family creates its own brand as it passes through, adding checkmarks each returning year. Our brand sits high on a far wall overlooking the mountains and the hummingbird feeders. The brand is a boot representing the brief fact that we all rode that first year, even my mother, who bravely lasted until Wednesday, when she gripped the saddle horn of Colt 45 so tightly that tendinitis followed. Our initial stands in the middle of the boot over wavy lines representing the Ohio River. As I was fully lame even at an early age, this was my civically proud suggestion.
When I grew up and went to stay with my then-boyfriend in Colorado Springs for a month, he drove me there along a narrow shelf road I thought wondrous at the time and now, returning as a driver myself, recognized as terrifying. On one side is a drop of many thousands of feet through trees and jagged scenery; on the other, pure mountain. When two cars meet going opposite directions, one driver has to back up, slowly and with much tense cursing.
“This place is kind of cheesy,” the ex announced as he got out of the car and looked upon cabins named “Jessie James” and “Diamond Lil.” And I knew then, somehow, although the end was yet months away and much sobbed over, that I could never, ever marry this person.
It is kind of cheesy, in a City Slickers sort of fashion, the way the wranglers greet the suburbanites at the cattle guard entrance on horseback and canter away in front of the car to guide these unleathery dudes to the check-in lodge, but when you are six and you are miserable, this is wondrous to behold. It announced horses to me, the very ones I write about today, and it brought seven days of the social acceptance I never found in the classroom. I heard God in the pines and I inhaled; this was where my soul has lived for so long. This was where the kid picked last for the kickball team won rodeo awards for booting her quarter horse around the barrels the fastest.
Terrible fires raged five years ago all aroundthis little green valley I have always thought of as cupped in God’s palm. The ranch was evacuated, the horses herded to safety. I was reunited via phone with one of the kiddie supervisors who cared for me twenty years ago and have exchanged Christmas cards with ever since (it is that kind of place) and she described to me what happened.
“The fire got to the cattle guard,” she told me, “and it split. Burned everything around it, but the ranch was untouched. The areas in the mountains where you rode as a child are scorched, I’m afraid.”
I would be scorched, too, if I returned right now. I know towering pines and thick tangles of wildflowers, and I prefer to keep them alive inside of me rather than replacing them with black and charred reality.
The regeneration has already begun, I am sure. It will be well underway a few years from now, when Jim the Small Child Nephew will be old enough to ride with a plastic cowboy hat on his head and a face full of sunblock. We will go, I think, the last week in June.
****
Lost
Even though we’re well past the last week in June, Colorado has been much in mind lately. Perhaps it’s because I applied to, and was promptly rejected for, a day job which would have made a great deal of financial trouble go far, far away, even leaving space in the budget for such absolute necessities of life as leather-fringed garments. Perhaps it’s because I’m doing some intensive aunting right now and had a very serious conversation with Jim The Small Child Nephew concerning horses, and whether or not one’s butt hurts after riding one.
For some reason, until this week, it never occurred to me to search YouTube for recent videos of Lost Valley, even though I’ve whiled away entire days thoroughly enjoying entertainment of this caliber. I suppose I’ve put a subconscious prohibition on the endeavor: There’s no way to get there from here, so why tighten the screws on the Wistful Writerly Yearning?
Then again, I’ve never subscribed to the “staring at it won’t help anything” school of thought. Ask my college freshman crush, poor soul, who always seemed to run into me at the library: “What, you’re into eighteenth century upholstery techniques too?” So I started typing and clicking and watching and… oh.
The perennial “Last Week In June” post mentions the 2002 Hayman forest fire. I knew it happened, I knew it was awful, I knew the areas where I rode as a child had been deeply affected. I knew the ranch itself escaped with only miraculous intervention–that the fire reached the property line, split for precisely the 500 acres of the spread, and continued with all proper furor on the other side of the valley. Blackened trees here and there, a few pockets of wasted vegitation: That is what I expected.
What I did not expect was Afghanistan.
.
O my people, this used to be all green. It was green.
The emerald splash along the lower gulch in the first picture– that was the entire landscape, everywhere, forever, and the quiet was alive with it, and the horses and the sun, they picked their ways through it– it was the kind of green you could smell. And this brown, it has its own stark loveliness, I suppose; Buzz Aldrin, as he stood upon the surface of the Moon, called it “magnificent desolation.” Even when nature has rendered nature barren, beauty quietly runs along the breaklines.
But not when your body has lived there, and your mind returns to it on a constant basis as a touchstone for peace and dreams fulfilled, the memories well-known but no less sharp for the constant returning.
I know this place. I know Lost Valley; I know it as mine.
But I don’t know this:
Where… is this place? Low Ridge, right, yes, I’ve been there. The caption on the video makes sense, it’s all very proper, but my eyes… don’t… register the land where these horses are cantering.
And then there’s this:
“You’ll have nightmares,” my mother warned, watching me watch it. I shook my head and stared the thing, all eight minutes, a hand at my mouth. I didn’t cry and I wasn’t in shock. Still haven’t, still aren’t. I was riveted by the truth, the mesmerizing cocktail of terrible danger visited on images which I usually turn to for motivation, nostalgia, comfort. It was so close. It was so close. At the 2:45 mark, a grinning firefighter holds aloft a charred metal “LOST VALLEY RANCH” sign, one attached to the cattle guard, one my family likely drove past for nine years in a row. The other half of the cattle guard isn’t shown, because, I am told, the other half was completely untouched.
That…sky, which I never fail to picture as rock-steady blue, to see it a flickering, furious orange– the same shades I pumped my fist at when pouring from the double tail of the solid rocket boosters. Those colors belong in Florida, shifting and gaudy and loud. They are not meant for the singing creeks, the humming birdsong of Colorado. A late-fall slide show looks odd, too–I was last at Lost Valley for a one-hour visit in the early spring of 2001, and the muddy remnants of a recent snow were melting down the silent mountainsides. Even though I’ve never seen the ranch in full winter finery, I prefer these images, prefer the cold and the fact that the swimming pool would be of absolutely no use. The landmarks are frosted and silent, not burnt, gone.
In the snow, the fire never happened.
Am I sorry that I went there? Have the memories been altered, the tiny slow ache which has been a part of me since I left it for the last time? I’m not, they aren’t, and the ache is lessened now, replaced with a hard, stubborn knot of denial. It’s good that I can’t afford to go there, because there… is not there. It’s better that I not see it like this, limiting myself only to returning when the place is frozen in temperature and time, safely covered with a blanket of white lies.
Pictures on the ranch’s official website are as verdant as the day I was first set in a saddle, and while the FAQ page gently addresses the fire, it ends on a cheerful note about refreshing rains and reappearing wildflowers. No doubt, no doubt there are some cacti and other hardies around, aspens rustling in the wind. I am quite sure that any person booking a trip to Lost Valley today would have a perfectly dudetacular time, and take little notice of the difference. They’d have no measure of comparison. But when I first heard that the ranch had been spared, that undergrowth was slowly returning, I very happily allowed it to guild the mental pictures I had already generated of a slightly crispy, but largely untouched, childhood. I want to be there, that Lost Valley, the one I know. The green one. The soil of memory does not provide for wastelands of needleless, stripped-down pines.
I have YouTubed myself into honesty.
In the ’80’s, the Lost Valley wranglers used to take us to ride in a pocket of Pike National Forest called “the burnout”; it, too, had suffered a forest fire. The wind was stronger there, and the scattered carcasses of whitish stumps and logs made for good jumping practice. A few new trees, little twigs in the ground, dotted the landscape. Every now and then, we’d see deer or birds or bugs. There were flowers. It was scarred, long ago scarred, and hugely different from the other places we rode, where the tangles of pine branches whipped in the faces of the rider behind if we didn’t hold them properly and the sun dappled down through the thin, wispy sky.
“The burnout,” I said to my father last night. “When was the fire that left the damage, do you know?”
“Counting back from the time we were there?” He thought for a moment. “Twenty years, I’d say.”
Perhaps I’ll one day I’ll conduct a very long conversation with myself, or just spread some jelly on slice of wheat some ordinary morning and settle into it all: It’s gone, the place I knew. It is gone.
I’ve seen devastation and pain on a far larger scale, seen New Orleans just months after Hurricane Katrina raged through. But I did not love New Orleans. I couldn’t have. I had never even seen New Orleans before that day, seen it as others knew it and lived it. I felt for New Orleans as a human being feels for another human being in the hospital, bare bones sticking out, tubes for every vital organ. You go for a wet washcloth and make soft noises of comfort, but you don’t let it interfere with the mechanisms of the inner soul. And I imagine that’s what 99.99% of you out there are experiencing at this moment: “Sucks. Really, that sucks, but… seriously, now. They’re trees.” Four dollars and seven cents for a gallon of gas, yes, and a The Pilot of my very own and a roof to call mine, and these… are trees. You don’t have to say it.
I know.
Jim The Small Child Nephew saw me staring out at air molecules today as he watched his daily dose of Curious George, thumb in his mouth. He offered me half his blankie.
“You hold it like this,” he instructed, gathering it in his fist.
Josh The Pilot and I saw a commercial for Transformers 2 some weeks ago, and he was very excited about the idea, and I was very excited about the idea of never seeing it, ever.
Then the production went and filmed on location at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum at Udvar-Hazy, where I do education work, which meant I had no choice but to watch the thing so I can answer every single fifth-grader’s question about each individual floor tile Shia LaBeouf set size-eleven shoe upon. (And yes, they’d know that too.)
There was a major physical challenge involved. Not only was I required to traverse a whole entire movie lobby on a post-op knee, I was also honor bound to avoid lumbering away to pee, lest I miss the five-minute Smithsonian scene, which would mean that I’d have to do the whole $8.00 thing over again. That was problematic, as our two matinee tickets came with a free small popcorn and drink, and.. what are you gonna do when free is involved. I watched the first 90 minutes with crossed legs.
So what have I learned? (Spoilers of LOUDNESS):
-Sometimes, alien robots have testicles. But only sometimes.
-When you die, you don’t see pearly gates or clouds or even God. No, you see a crowd of advancing Transformers.
-There are these really big speakers on, like, at least both sides of the Regal Fairfax Cineplex.
-In terms of raw rackage, I would do a WAY better job running away from a giant fireball than Megan Fox.
-Speaking of, I must get the name of her dry cleaner and ScotchGuarder. Her white slacks somehow come through a robot attack and building collapse in Egypt with nary a streak.
Many thanks to all you The Readers who asked after me in the wake of the Metro crash. The train line which parallels the Red Line is the one I take when I go downtown, and that was closed today. But Josh The Pilot and I were safely out of DC all day.
I was told I was shivering when I was wheeled out of the operating room, which might explain the lavender electric blanket on my lower extremities, but not necessarily where my desperate pre-op need to pee had gone. This was even more troubling than the plastic sea of purple over my legs. I was only slightly comforted by the fact that the pre-op nurse was highly complimentary of my hand veins. She knows that how I got my man.
In any case, my compliments to the anesthesiologist. I’d assumed a local anesthetic, which added to my furor over the solid foods ban, which, since the surgery was delayed, stretched to thirteen and a half hours. But when I was told that I’d receive a heaping helping of night-night juice, I was secretly relived. This way, I’d experience weapons-grade hypoglycemic conditions and any other potentially humiliating Medical Moments while blissfully unaware.
I remember walking into the operating room; I remember setting my arms onto a Papoose board, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since I tore my chin open after a fall in 1981; and, since this was 1981, that one had an actual Indian painted on it. I remember one of the nurses leaning over to add a load of something liquid to the saline solution which was already doing a bang-up hydration job. “This will relax you a little,” she said, because in Operating Room world, “relax you a little” = “making the world go away pretty much instantaneously.” And indeed, when the surgeon summoned Josh The Pilot from the waiting room to inform him that I would continue eating for two for the foreseeable future, he was also told I was “just starting to wake up.”
It was another hour before I opened my eyes and immediately demanded information, my husband, and some sort of liquid, but not necessarily in that order. I was also given the World’s Most Exquisite Graham Cracker and not nearly enough ginger ale, but the very best thing about all of it was that it stayed where I put it.
We departed with a wheelchair and other lovely parting gifts, including hospital-brand ChapStick, an extremely useful icepack made out of paper, and a brochure instructing me to avoid driving, chainsaws, and “major decisions” for the next twenty-four hours. Well, good thing the American Idol season is over.
there was a bag of chocolate organic graham crackers shaped like bunny rabbits, too, but they tasted like bunny poop at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com
Through reunion, surgery, and painkillers, I’ve remained unspoiled on the Belmont until I could write about it. So here we go in real time, complete with ice pack, elevated knee, and the blessed ability to ff the commercials.
-You know what, I could just watch Jerry Bailey yell via split screen at Calvin Borel all day long.
-Shot of Bob Baffert sitting in front of a wall of silks, looking as if he’s taping a hostage video: ‘If I could describe the Belmont in one word? Long.”
-The host announces that “every possible angle is covered here today.” I don’t believe him. There is absolutely no explanation, for example, as to why Jeannie Edwards finds it perfectly fine to say the following about Mine That Bird: “Nothing ruffles this bird’s feathers, but all the while, his connections are flying high, and they’re enjoying every minute of the ride.”
-Further discussion of New Mexico as the absolute end of the Earth, where they probably don’t even have frappuccinos, or soap.
-ESPN has wisely turned to Secretariat biographer Bill Nack for previewing help, but every time he finishes with a segment, I feel contractually obligated to cry.
-Mine That Bird is even money. I do not understand how a horse can win the Derby, finish second in the Preakness and still show up as even money. What does he have to do, double back and win American Idol?
-Shot of Mine That Bird hanging out in his stall, pulling his teeth back and in general looking like a tool. I find a bit of understanding.
-Shot of Dunkirk hanging out in his stall. He must win, we are informed, because he is gray, and pretty.
-There’s a three-second shot of a grandstand pole and a pickup truck. Awesome, thanks for that update, ESPN.
-Focus on a statue of Secretariat: “A couple of weeks ago, a horse broke loose and knocked it over. It’s been repaired.” Secretariat, the Rodney Dangerfield of these arrogant young horses today.
-Since not enough has been said about Chip Woolley’s snapped-off leg and Model T Ford, Kenny Mayne invites him into the cab of a pickup truck. This goes exactly as well, and is exactly as useful, as you’d imagine. There is singing.
-Woolley is said to have had a “major impact” on fashion in New York, having brought black hats into mode. This is announced as the camera pans the crowd, which contains perhaps two people wearing those obnoxious straw cowboy hats which are good for absolutely nothing but wearing into a Coyote Ugly.
-The winner of The Acorn Stakes, Gabby’s Golden Gal, is breathing too heavily after her race and in general pissed at the world. Water is hurled at her as she bucks and starts. Well, she’s a hot and tired three-year-old. People, I used to work at Disney World. This is mild.
-Calvin and Kent Desormeaux in the jock’s room. Pants: Still on. All’s well.
-Re-run of the outstanding fun featuring Woolley, Mayne, and the pickup truck. Oh, I was hoping to see this again. “You never know when they’ll be back,” the host threatens.
-Jock’s photo. The front row turns to the side, mugshot style. Some say it’s to display the sponsor stencil running down the side of their pants. I say it’s because the photographer, given the company before him, is a massive fan of irony.
-The talking heads like Charitable Man to win. Because they’ve been right every single other time.
-Call to post is heard in its entirety. ESPN is hereby congratulated on its ability to shut up.
-“Mr. Hot Stuff is like Bart Simpson! He will do anything! He’ll take a mouthful of hay and fling it as far as he can!” Mr. Hot Stuff should totally have his own reality show, so we can watch him flash his panties while he’s getting out of limos!
-Look, it’s Kent Desormeaux. Start the clock on how fast the words “Big Brown” and “failure” are util—oh, there we are.
-Calivn Borel is good and miked. The pictures by now are from the backstretch, which means we hear him talking while gazing at his butt. Congress should convene in this manner.
-Shot of the crowd, which features not one black cowboy hat. One guy, however, has busted out his tuxedo tee shirt. Now it’s a party.
-By the way, if Calvin Borel wins, the recession will go away.
-Is anyone else slightly impatient with the fact that a horse owned by Jenny Craig is named “Chocolate Candy?”
-Wow, fast start.
-Dunkirk setting the pace. Because he’s pretty, that’s why, and is properly prepared for his close up.
- Birdstone, not content with upsetting Smarty Jones’ Triple Crown and the Kentucky Derby with his son Mine That Bird, shoots yet another colt of his across the finish line to mar Calvin Borel’s pending appearance on The View.
-Boy, would I hate to be anywhere near the shared bunk beds in the Children of Birdstone Stable tonight. “You suck.” “No, YOU suck.” “DAAAAAAAD!”
-Inquiry light. The stewards are looking into exactly how quickly people will stop caring about Calvin Borel.
-Kent Desormeaux, after a shouted question from Bailey and several seconds of silence: “Oh, you meant me? You talking to me?” I (heart) you, wireless mikes. Meanwhile, somewhere on a stud farm in Lexington, Birdstone casually lights a Cuban and summons another mare.
-The tape is reviewed. There is discussion of whether Calvin Borel merely sucks, or totally sucks.
-During the trophy presentation, Summer Bird is referred to as “the other bird,” which is deeply appreciated, I’m sure, by every single person standing on the dais. Go ahead and call him “The One Who Made All the Small Children Cry,” why don’t you.
-The owner of Summer Bird has absolutely no vowels in his name. I’m sure he’s a very nice man. But I ain’t typing that.
-As the fade-out music swells, the very last words include “revenge” and “defeat.” One FAIL check for the road for Kent, the… victor.
Just dropping by to pass on some good news: My leg’s still on. Bad news: The doctor couldn’t find the bone chip he cut into me for, owing to “turbulence” in the knee, as though he were forced to encounter it at 35,000 feet. Good news: Percoset! Bad news: Swelling and exhaustion are rampant. Good news: Percoset!
I would write more, but I had to go both up and down the hallway to the bathroom today, which means it’s time to turn in.
My cabbages, we come to Surgery Eve. The deadline for eating passed some seventeen minutes ago, which, when you’re a hypoglycemic with a noon surgery time, is outstanding news. The National Terror Threat Level has been raised accordingly. As it is, it’s just me, the Reds, and the Nationals playing out a rain delay in front of about five people and Rob Dibble displaying his newfangled iPhone in the broadcast booth. (Please, don’t ask.)
When I gently explained to the nurse who conducted my pre-op interview that she was playing with the destruction of a small to medium-sized suburb, I was permitted clear liquids until 5 AM. This began a new conundrum: Define “clear.” Is Sprite clear? Do the bubbles count as obstructions? What about this here lemon ice? It starts out yellow, but after it melts… clear.
I don’t want to push it, as the last time I had surgery–a tonsillectomy– I threw up a grape Popsicle in my father’s car and passed the next ten days with my head in my hands, rocking back and forth and begging the ear pain to go ‘way. And I was twelve years younger. So yeah, not looking forward to this.
On the up side, however, I may be reaquainted with my dear, dear, friend codeine.
There has been some fairly major media coverage of the anniversary of D-Day, but most have focused on the landing itself. Here’s a bit about the aftermath. It first ran in November of 2006 on the original Blonde Champagne, as part of a series on a recent trip to France.
After Omaha, we stopped at the American cemetery in Normandy. The French have ceded this land to the United States, and so, half a planet away from where I was born, I stood on American soil.
The plots are on a hill near the sea where the landings took place.
It’s very quiet.We didn’t have time to examine each grave, although each grave deserved it. Here are a few.
There are over nine thousand just like them.
I passed one of a private from Ohio. A bird had left its mark; I pulled tissue from my pocket and wiped it clean. The sleeve of my jacket was good enough for my own needs.
This is the ceiling of the cemetery chapel. A mosaic shows America blessing her young men, sending them off to war
…and France placing a laurel wreath on the brow of her gift.
We passed several school groups, and a few veterans– fewer each year. Here is a gift from some who left just before we reached the Memorial. The card reads: “This wreath is placed in recognition of your bravery in the Normandy campaign. From the English veterans of the Sword Beach.”It was laid at the foot of this statue, called “The Spirit of American Youth Rising From the Waves.”Every hour, a bell tolls “Faith of Our Fathers”.
And it’s still quiet.
These are the gates to the Garden of The Missing, which is ringed with walls bearing the names of soldiers whose remains were never recovered.
