Adventures on Highway 92

Those of you who know me well understand that I am filled with derring-do, a sense of adventure that constantly needs to be slaked — wait, am I thinking of someone else? I have been talking, I’m sure it feels endlessly, about roadways these last few days, although in my defense this is bound to […]

Lonely Is

All roads lead to Rome, I’ve heard it said, but here in Gunnison there’s really only one good way in and out of town. Technically, it’s two ways, but both are on the same highway, U.S. 50. I am just now learning, along with you, that this is the “Loneliest Road” in the United States, […]

Stuck

A few years back, down in the Durango area (Colorado, not Mexico), a couple of men — from Texas, of course — took their Jeep where they shouldn’t have, and ended up becoming news fodder for a week. And while I say “of course” they were from Texas, I think everyone in Colorado was just […]

Governing From the Hip

Our governor, here in Colorado. I voted for him; I don’t know if I’ll be doing that again. I suppose I probably will, but this time around it will likely be a vote against his eventual opponent rather than a vote for him. So far I am going to rate his pandemic response as: tepid. […]

Reading the Paper

I know; I have vanished for an unconscionable amount of time. I didn’t mean to, and I have multiple topics to cover, but every morning for the last four I have decided all those could wait. I have to confess, I kind of got stuck on last week’s local paper, which came out Thursday. I […]

As He Lay Dying

My uncle, in faraway Nebraska, is in hospice. This is my mother’s brother, the person everyone has compared me to back as far as I can remember: You’re so much like your Uncle Jerry. You remind me of Jerry. You and your uncle are so alike. That connection has been more or less lost these […]

A Windmill Falls

It turns out, sometimes you can tilt at a windmill and win — or at least gain a temporary reprieve. I just heard yesterday that Western Not State’s board of trustees has decided to continue music as a major at the college, I mean university. This is a text from the friend of a friend, […]

Charging Ahead, Smartly

As most of you probably know, my car is electric. Not electric as in “exciting,” particularly — it’s a rather ordinary sedan, which is not anything I’ve ever sought out in a car — but electric as in that’s how it’s powered. I didn’t specifically set out to own an electric car, although as a […]

Separate, Not Even Equal

The first piece of writing I got published in actual print was a letter to the editor of the Denver Post, when I was 15. It was in response to a sports columnist whose name I remember but the jerk isn’t worth mentioning, who had written an idiotic column proudly bragging how he had taken […]

(Endless) Season of Mud

Once again, a forecast of snow ended in the tiniest whiff of white stuff, so I’m not buying it as the Denver forecaster shows a map with moisture clear across the Western Slope for today. But, given the pattern we’ve been living in this entire year (nearly a quarter done already), there will be enough […]