Once upon a time, I learned that writing and living don’t go easily together. And so it has been the since the first week of July. I have answered no comments – which grieves me – and hardly been able to read the journaling of people I genuinely love. Instead, I have dedicated myself to soaking in the increasingly rare proximity of my youngest child. That, and to running the million errands that preparing even for a small, intimate wedding demands.Oh, and spreading manure and putting up fly strips and driving tractors and (cue soundtrack of grinding teeth) irrigating. And losing some weight.
Wait – and managing the loss of several major appliances and car parts. And rebuilding my blog array, including trying to make my visual editor work after the Big Update – which means messing big time with code (a pleasure in the presence of the code king and problem solver, M).
And being with my Other Beloved Children, including the effort it takes to recognize Chaz every time her hair color changes. And making luncheon favors. And planning Events. There are stories in some of that. I intend to tell them, hoping that after the first of September, the parade of stories will sort of dry up for a while. Then I can write instead of live. Which – at least for the time being – will be refreshing.
I am now going to try to pick up where I left off. At least I have pictures of some of this stuff – like breadcrumbs backward through the months. Which is good, because I just realized I’d almost totally forgotten about the Disneyland trip.
And so: coming home from Santa Fe, land of burning skies.
Why were there more trees on the way home?
These odd knobs, emerging from the forest. This one looked like a sphinx. Actually, a whole lot of them ended up liking like sphinxes. sphinxi?
Another one.
More trees and big skies. Headed up now, into the mountains.
Then comes my favorite part: The Three Horses. In Santa Fe, you see a lot of Native American art. A traditional staple in the design is the Resting Horse. I have horses, and I’ve seen them rest, but never quite in the iconic manner. However, here we were, tulin’ on down the highway, when THREE traditional resting horses were suddenly right there in front of me. Or to the left of me. Here they are from far away:
I actually had to back up to recreate my first sight of them. I did it quickly. I cut a U-turn, went back up the road about half a mile, did another u-turn and started over. I did this very quickly. And with gusto. Then everybody started yelling at me. I don’t understand why. An urgent situation like this is exactly why I make them wear seatbelts in the first place.
There are a couple of reasons why I had start over.
This is the main reason. On the first pass, by the time I was close enough to pull over and take a real shot of that line of three, they woke up and looked at me with interest. Evidently, they don’t get a lot of gawking tourist traffic, and by pulling over to observe, I completely skewed the natural setting.
I thought maybe, if I retreated, they’d go back to sleep and forget about me. Which they did. Then I crept up on them on the very, very slender shoulder of the road, using my long lens judiciously. Not really judiciously, but – you know, the word gives you a sort of gravitas.
see – I got closer, that first pass.
Oh – whoops! This is where it all began to fall apart. One head my way. Then all three.
This is all three. But you can’t really see it because I was NOT using my lens (and auto exposure) judiciously. I mean, the fact that I can actually USE this word should still give me – oh, never mind.
So we’re all nicely backed up, here. Dang motorcycle.
And finally, my own collection of Resting Horses.
And that’s it. The whole coming home story. We were going to stop at Chaco canyon, but it was inside the burn area and we didn’t even try. And then we were going to go to Mesa Verde.
There is a story to this. I’d almost forgotten. We were planning to go there, even though it was getting kind of late. And why was it getting late? We really didn’t stop anywhere else. Except Rainbow gifts. And we had lunch at that great place in Pagosa – so maybe we did stop.
Anyway, as we’re driving through Durango on our way to Cortez – or was it out of Cortez? I see this horse trailer pull out onto the highway ahead of us, and it has two really pretty horses in it. We end up pretty much trapped behind it on the two lane highway, which is fine. Trapped behind horses is actually not a bad thing. Then suddenly, there are these little brown lumps bouncing all over the highway ahead (behind the trailer) and hitting us.
I’m thinkin’ – whoa. I guess we can’t get away from manure wherever we go. But in the time it took me to frame that idea, I realized that it was rubber hitting us, and in the nano-second it took to think that, I knew that the right tire of that trailer was disintegrating, right in front of us.
My stomach clenched. Two horses. Sixty five miles an hour. I couldn’t tell how many tires that trailer had, and I was terrified that I was going to see one of my worst nightmares played out in front of me. I yelled at Murphy, and he yelled, and the tire up there simply blew up. But the rig kept right on moving.
No dead horses. Yet.
We sped up, following as closely as we dared, honking like mad and flashing our lights and yelling. But the rig just kept rolling. We followed like that for miles before we hit a passing lane. I floored it, trying to get up there so we could stop them, and we finally caught up (that truck was moving FAST). Murphy was leaning out of the passenger side window and I was honking like a crazy person – the woman driving the truck looked at us like we were out of our minds. Which we were.
But she pulled over. I had to back up about five hundred feet to get back to her.
That tire – when Murphy finally got it off her trailer for her, it looked like some nightmare, really terrible Christmas craft idea – a metal wreath with tufts of shredded rubber hanging from it like ragged ribbons. It took us maybe forty minutes to get her on the road again – Murphy was the hero. He figured out how to jack up the trailer and did the lug nuts – while the lady was on the phone with her husband. Up close, the horses were even more beautiful: two young Morgans. She’d just taken them swimming at the lake. The fact that they were still alive made the whole thing a celebration.
By the time we got to Mesa Verde, we were close on evening and still far from home. But we pulled in to the ranger station, thinking maybe we could see something not too far in before we drove on. But it turned out we had to pay about thirty five bucks just to drive past the station, and the visitor’s center was fifteen miles up a winding mountain road. So we had to give it up.
We were still in pretty great spirits when we got home. Tired. But pretty happy. And that’s the end of Road Trip Number One.
Thanks for comin’ with –
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