Family Visits in Colorado

I am now gearing up for a visit to my sister Mary. When her husband Ellis retired from his law firm last year, they startled their friends-and-relations by moving from Toledo, Ohio after forty years and settling in Durango, Colorado. They built a charming home in a wooded development and are ecstatic about their new life.

I will stop first in Colorado Springs to see my “niece” Katy Jenkins (actually first cousin, once removed—my namesake and the daughter of my adored cousin Helen Anne, who died of cancer a few years ago). Katy’s father is coming out from Michigan at the same time so that we can have a sort of family reunion. I will spend two or three days with Katy, then go on to Durango for about eight days. Carli and Tom are coming in the middle of my visit, and so is Mary’s oldest daughter Peggy, the cousin closest to Carli in age. Another house party and family reunion. I really am looking forward to it.

From there, I will fly to Phoenix with Carli and Tom, and we’ll drive to Mesa where Tom’s mother lives. She is older than I and fighting a recurrence of cancer. I have not met her, though I have been writing fairly regularly since Carli and Tom married. This could be my last good chance, and I want to make the effort. I will stay there only overnight, then I fly to Atlanta on doctor’s orders.

Colorado Springs

The first stop on my September trip was Colorado Springs to visit Katy and her husband Larry. Katy’s father, Hank de Geus, was there at the same time. In the short stay, we ran into such a succession of out-of-the-ordinary sights that by the end of the sequence Katy, Larry, and I all were convulsed.

I happened to arrive at the time when there was a gathering of balloonists from all over the country, a hundred or more of them. One night Katy and Larry took us to the “Glow In” at the park where all the balloons were tethered. It was eerie. There was a countdown, with the thousands of visitors chiming in, and at “…three, two, one, go!” all the burners were lighted with a great roar, illuminating the towering, multi-colored balloons in an awe-inspiring spectacle.

While most of the balloons were the usual striped design, there were many in special shapes—Snoopy, a tennis shoe, a roll of film, a moving van, a Champagne bottle, a polar bear, and an entrancing green dinosaur.

 

On the last day of our visit, we drove south of Colorado Springs to visit a monastery. I don’t know what Katy expected, or why she was so anxious to go there, but it was a lovely drive. As we approached the huge and handsome building, we saw, quite improbably, several large motorcycles, attended by ominous-appearing, black-leather-clad people. As we came closer and turned around the side of the building, we realized that:

1. There must have been at least fifty motorcycles.

2. Their riders may have been wearing black leather, but they all were Mom-and-Pop types whom you would have expected to meet at church on Sunday morning.

It was a wildly inappropriate gathering for a monastery, we thought.

We toured the public area on the ground floor of the Monastery. It was noteworthy only for an endless series of oil portraits of former abbots. Most of the faces from long ago showed the most kindly of smiles, rather than the sternness I might have expected. One portrait almost leaped off the wall at us. It was a young abbot in a World War II army officer’s uniform, cap at a jaunty angle. He looked exactly like Father Mulcahy in the TV series M*A*S*H. All of us were taken aback at the uncanny similitude. I studied the portrait a second time as we walked back through the corridor and found the resemblance even more striking.

As we left, the motorcycles were drawn up in parade fashion, and we were waved off to another exit. Behind us, we could hear them roaring to life.

 

At the end of my visit, Hank took an early flight home to Michigan, and Katy and Larry collected me to drive me to Durango. As I waited for them in my hotel room, I watched the balloons take off from the nearby park, floating serenely across the face of the distant Pike’s Peak. Once on the highway, it was an unexpected delight to find that our route took us past the area where they were landing.

The sky was full of balloons. Some skimmed so low over the car that we expected them to alight on the roof. Nearby fields were studded with balloons, landing or landed. It was a fascinating, colorful display.

I had barely stopped exclaiming about the delightful and unusual scenes of balloons and motorcycles, when a magnificently restored car, at least half a century old, approached us on the opposite side of the highway, gleaming with wine-colored enamel and chrome. We still were marveling about it when a second old car approached, then another and another. It was a caravan of antique cars—all makes, all ages, all colors—apparently headed for some sort of rally. They were beautiful, with enamel so polished that it looked inches deep. Some were crazy colors of bright yellow or aqua or lime green. Larry estimated that there must have been forty to fifty of the lovingly restored cars.

There couldn’t be anything else special to see—but there was: a group of three covered wagons accompanied by a group of a dozen riders. Signs indicated that it was part of a special camping project.

 

The drive to Durango was a perfectly glorious trip through the Rockies and over the Continental Divide. It was my first visit to that part of the country, and I was awestruck.

Durango

My visit with Mary and Ellis in Durango was the loveliest I ever have had with them. It was only later that I realized how relaxed they both were, not at all wound-up as they had been my last few visits to Toledo. This move apparently is what they both needed.

Their new house is gracious and livable. Huge windows look out through Ponderosa Pine forests to nearby mountains where the green is highlighted by great gashes of jagged crimson rock. Deer wander into the yard to eat Mary’s carefully tended flowers, and elk pass by, spring and fall, on their migration route.

 

Mary and I went to town on the Monday and decided to stay for lunch. I found a beautiful, simple pendent and earring set of polished bronze-over-silver, set with malachite, for Maria’s birthday. Indian styling, but restrained. That evening the three of us went out for dinner, then attended the last performance of an old-fashioned melodrama and vaudeville by a talented young repertory company. Utterly delightful.

On Tuesday, Mary and Ellis had a cocktail party for about twenty-five of their neighbors. I was most impressed by the variety of the people living in their “ranch,” and by their warmth and lack of affectation.

Carli and Tom arrived mid-afternoon on Wednesday and Peggy flew in that evening. The house expanded easily to hold us all. It was a glorious mini-reunion.

I was impressed by Peggy, whom I hadn’t seen in decades. She is at ease with herself, interested in others, bright and knowledgeable. A charming, thoughtful, gracious young woman. Of course, she also is a vegetarian, which to me is like saying a Martian. Mary managed a mixed menu that suited everyone. I swear, Mary does not know how to put a meal on the table that doesn’t look like an illustration from House Beautiful and taste like Julia Child’s.

 

Peggy arrived with some last-minute urgent work to do on her first morning, so Mary sent Carli, Tom, and me off with a picnic lunch to see Mesa Verde. They all had done it more than once and did not want to go again. I was thrilled that I had seen the ruins in/near Colorado Springs with Katy and Larry so that I had a background for the tour.

Mesa Verde is a fascinating area of deserted cliff dwellings. The mesa is about 7,000 feet high, which means labored breathing for a sea-level type like me. The caves are accessible by arduous climbing over difficult paths. For the most part, we walked down to the overlooks and used Carli’s binoculars to bring them close.

We walked down to one ruin—probably because I was determined to do it and this looked like an easy route. It began with two steep downward flights of comfortable iron stairs.

I did not know that at the bottom of those I would be forced to wedge myself into a slit between two towering rock walls and continue down steep, narrow stone steps. All the way down I kept thinking: “What goes down must come up.”

When we finally reached the enormous cave with its extensive cubist buildings, we could not explore inside, but could climb a ladder and stand on the walls overlooking the kivas. With that, and by peering through windows at inner walls covered with pictographs, we made a fair examination of the ruins.

And then it was time to return to the car, which, as far as I was concerned, was on another continent. We started with an innocent, winding walk. Then came another slit in the rock with steep stone steps going upupupupupup. My progress was accompanied by Carli’s worried refrain begging me to stop and catch my breath. Catch it! I was racing to keep up with it. My only thought was to go up as fast as I could and get the climb over.

At the end of the crevice came ladders—lovely, sturdy ladders, almost vertical, going up, one after the other, for the equivalent of three stories (that’s three stories with 14-foot ceilings, I suspect). Up I went, with Carli cautioning me to stop and rest. Once I did because I had virtually stopped breathing. At the top, which, believe it or not, actually arrived eventually, I had that wonderful, (to me) unfamiliar feeling of having exceeded one’s capacity to exercise and having survived.

Ellis had told us to be sure to stop at the museum. We all were delighted that we did. It had charming dioramas of various stages of development and living situations of the early Indians.

The museum had displays of artifacts—early stone tools, arrowheads, baskets, the medicine man’s herbs and charms. Seeing them in that setting was like walking back into the Jean Auil books I had read (Clan of the Cave Bear, The Valley of Horses, The Mammoth Hunters, The Plains of Passage). Each tool was as familiar as a whisk from your kitchen or a drill from your toolbox. I have seen artifacts like these dozens of times in the past, of course, but never in connection with the actual dwellings of the people and never after having read detailed (though fictionalized) accounts of their lives. It was an out-of-time experience.

 

The next day, the plan was for Ellis and me to drive The Young People to Silverton to catch the train back to Durango. There was a boggle in Silverton with a surly station master refusing to sell tickets despite assurances to Mary earlier that he would.

I was outside the station, happily crunching back and forth in the cinders surrounding the old fashioned building and remembering the feel and sound from my childhood, while Ellis was having his blood pressure elevated to dangerous heights by the man he was sure was waiting for a kick-back.

It resulted in our driving on to Ouray for lunch over a spectacularly gorgeous route and everyone’s deciding that they didn’t want to take the train anyway. Ellis drove us back another way, stopping to see Telluride.

We went directly to an informal restaurant when we reached Durango, and Mary met us there at about the time Ellis, Tom, and I were mid-way through our second beer. That was when Tom asked if I realized that each glass held a full pint and mentioned that I would have polished off a quart of beer if I finished. I assured him that I had no idea of the amount but that I was dehydrated from altitude and thought that it should be considered medicinal—at which point I continued to finish it off with the greatest of pleasure and without ill effect.

 

Throughout the visit, Ellis was determined that I would see deer. Day after day and night after night we went where they ought to be, lucklessly. Finally, returning near dusk from our visit to Mesa Verde, Carli spotted three deer in a meadow. I was looking elsewhere. As we entered Falls Creek Ranch, where Mary and Ellis live, Carli exclaimed, “Deer!” I looked up in time to see the bottom, tail, and hind legs of a disappearing doe. Half a deer is better than none, and I was quite satisfied. My brother-in-law was not.

Mary’s post-visit letter told me, with some dismay, that when she returned from the airport after delivering Carli, Tom, and me, she found a huge buck happily lunching on the yellow flowers beside her front door.

Mesa

The flight to Phoenix and drive to Mesa were uneventful. I regret to say that the temperature was 104 when we landed and I greeted the heat like a long-lost friend. I was completely comfortable in both Colorado Springs and Durango, and loved the unlikely combination of 80’s days and 40’s nights. I admit that, while I embraced Arizona’s heat, nothing else about the place attracted me, especially after the glories of Colorado.

Tom’s mother, Vera Rindfleisch, has a pleasant house in a retirement community (not a retirement home, as I had expected). I shuddered to hear her say that there now are 5,000 people in Leisure World. She is a dear—outspoken, sassy, gallant. She is fighting breast cancer, glaucoma, diabetes, and skin cancer, but waves it aside impatiently and gets on with her very limited life. I was touched by how grateful both she and Tom were at my making the effort to meet her.

Atlanta

Atlanta was a worthwhile medical detour. Nothing serious, but a particular long-term condition was not responding properly. My glamorous and gifted doctor sorted things out quickly. I first met her after leaving Austin last spring. I can’t tell you what a shock it was to have my new doctor prove to be a stunning blond with a china-doll complexion wearing a candy pink suit and spike heels. The soft, Southern voice and graciousness were in contrast to her focused intellect when she went to work on me.

Although I was not particularly pleased to spend the time and the money for the extra trip to Atlanta in September, it gave me a chance to visit family. I was in Atlanta for three nights with Bucher’s eldest sister Bibba, and in Jefferson with his adored youngest sister Becky for two.

The trip home was remarkably easy. I had a bulkhead seat between Atlanta and Houston and could brace my foot comfortably against it to elevate my leg. By great good luck I was the only person in a three-seat row between Houston and Belize, so I sat sideways with both legs on the seat.

Alex and Maria met me at the airport. No problem with customs. The officer insisted that I open everything, which was something of a nuisance because of the straps. He poked around a little, but nodded and sent me on my way.