Later at the Home Ranch, I quickly strip down and got in my private outdoor hot tub.
I accidentally dip a large corner of my towel in the tub as I get in. “Goddamnit,” I say with a snarl that melts into a smile when I realize how ludicrous it is to be angry at the situation. I feel utterly calm in that tub, especially after locating the switch for the Moto Massage. I close my eyes.
Should I buy a hot tub? I think I need one.
I open my eyes. Aspen trees. Mountain views. A deer ambles by, grazing. Zen.
As I get out of the hot tub, I realize the jets had been obscuring the meows of a cat that was onto the scents of mesquite turkey and brie emanating from my fridge. I shut the closet where the fridge is tucked away, but the cat—bony and animated with a big divot missing from its left ear—is stubborn. It meows and meows and rubs against everything. It seems incredibly hungry, but I’m not going to condition it to claw at my door all night. I begin to think it might be feral, so I shoo it away and shut my cabin door.
In the late afternoon, I ignore the signs of a pending thunderstorm and hike the trails behind the Home Ranch for an hour. I climb up a gently sloping mountainside dominated by a vast aspen grove. It is open range, too, so I come across some grazing cattle, and accidentally spook them away. As I steadily hike, gaining a few inches of elevation with every step, it dawns on me, it’s all one.
Each and every aspen in the grove is all one. Aspen trees share the same root system, meaning massive stands of aspen are actually just one organism. Along with the Great Barrier Reef and a massive underground fungus in Oregon, the largest stands of aspen in the Rockies are among the biggest single living things on the planet.
It’s all one.
A level of calm takes over. My feeling in place equaling calm makes sense, and my searching for external stimuli to dampen emotion produced by external stimuli seems illogical. Peace comes from within.
I look at the aspen as I hike the trail, mentally crafting a metaphor for humanity as the stand, each aspen an individual in society and ultimately connected to everyone else.
I am but one aspen. We are all connected. Some aspens support other aspens that would have otherwise fallen. I feel like an aspen.
It’s all one.
I have no ideas what the cows represent in this metaphor.
I go to get my fancy Rockmount Western shirt and boots from the car for the 6 p.m. margarita hour. When I return to Roo (my cabin), the cat emerges from under the porch and meows. He evidently is still hungry.
Dinner is terrific, a polenta-like bed of grits for a scallop and a shrimp, drizzled in bourbon sauce. Tiramisu means to lift up, the chef tells us and that it does. The guests and I later commiserate over our shared disdain for the petroleum economy.
I regain my inner peace the next morning in the aspen grove. This time I am on horseback for the first time since I was four, riding with a wrangler named Greg.
“Aspen are really interesting trees,” Greg says as he hops off his horse to clear some wood from the trail. “They don’t live very long, and they have an interesting root structure.”
“It’s all one,” I respond. I tell him about my metaphor, and ask the career English teacher what the cows might be. He’s stumped.
My horse is Hopi. Skittish at first, he warms up to me as the ride goes on. He seems much more interested in eating grass than transporting me, but we work it out in the end. “Relaxed alertness” is what Greg describes as the perfect equestrian mindset. Knowing when to be gentle and when to be firm also strikes me as critical.
Are my emotions like Hopi? Is controlling one’s anger akin to riding a horse? What are the cows in this metaphor?
After lunch, I leave for State Bridge, listening to Greg’s Cowboy Fandango and The Shaggs en route.
As I drive through Oak Creek Country, I think about connectedness and humanity in general. Everything I say, think, and experience is based on other people. Same goes for everybody else. It’s so easy to have tunnel vision and forget that we’re all one. I also take a picture of a big set of mechanical jaws that hauled coal out of these mountains until 1996, when the Edna coal mine closed.
State Bridge’s reputation precedes it. A favorite of bikers and hippies, it sits on the Colorado River and the tracks where Amtrak trains and coal trains and rafters and kayakers continually pass. It is right next to the bridge of the same name, and known for its concerts (mostly jam bands, but the Dixie Chicks played here in 1996) and saloon. (Note: The lodge burned in the time since.)
I check into the cabin next to the cabin where Teddy Roosevelt slept when he was briefly vice president in 1901, right before he took over following the untimely demise of William Henry Harrison, whose main claim to fame today is dying. Then I hike to the top of a red volcanic finger for some rest and relaxation at 4:25 p.m., reasoning that 4:20 is horrible due to its Hitler/Columbine connotations, and that stoners should not be punctual. Once down, I shower and head off to Friday happy hour at the Wolcott Yacht Club, a hobnobbing time and place of note for Vail Valley locals. I’d driven right by on U.S. 6 a week before, and should have stopped then. But Friday happy hour is the place’s prime time and the silicone was out in full force.
The see-and-be-seen crowd at the riverside bar and grill is a marked contrast to the sparse, odd mix of tourists and hippies at the State Bridge bar later. But the hippies on the river seem to have something down right, as do the ski bums, fly-fishing guides, whitewater freaks, et cetera: They knew how to take it easy. Too fucking easy sometimes. The bartender in Wolcott tells me he’d been in the area for 16 years and had a condo in Vail. I thought he was a ski bum who bought a goldmine—condos in Vail have skyrocketed from $200,000 to $1.6 million in the last decade—but he was actually psyched that he was renting one for only $600 a month. And he didn’t even sleep there outside of ski season.
Maybe a little bit of stress and self-flagellation isn’t such a bad thing after all. The flip side, of course, is that I only get mad about the most trivial of things, typically fired by pointlessly volatile dipshit testosterone. Everything is pointless, and nothing is meaningless.
Is sexual frustration the source of my anger? Why did my dog have to die? WHY is it so hard to shake the sadness? Why the why-me? Why the anger?
Why do I feel the need to self-medicate with booze and weed? The train is passing. I go out to watch and mostly listen to it chug and screech by in the dark. Its industrial cacophony soothes me more than any other available external stimuli.
We’re all one.
I accidentally dip a large corner of my towel in the tub as I get in. “Goddamnit,” I say with a snarl that melts into a smile when I realize how ludicrous it is to be angry at the situation. I feel utterly calm in that tub, especially after locating the switch for the Moto Massage. I close my eyes.
Should I buy a hot tub? I think I need one.
I open my eyes. Aspen trees. Mountain views. A deer ambles by, grazing. Zen.
As I get out of the hot tub, I realize the jets had been obscuring the meows of a cat that was onto the scents of mesquite turkey and brie emanating from my fridge. I shut the closet where the fridge is tucked away, but the cat—bony and animated with a big divot missing from its left ear—is stubborn. It meows and meows and rubs against everything. It seems incredibly hungry, but I’m not going to condition it to claw at my door all night. I begin to think it might be feral, so I shoo it away and shut my cabin door.
In the late afternoon, I ignore the signs of a pending thunderstorm and hike the trails behind the Home Ranch for an hour. I climb up a gently sloping mountainside dominated by a vast aspen grove. It is open range, too, so I come across some grazing cattle, and accidentally spook them away. As I steadily hike, gaining a few inches of elevation with every step, it dawns on me, it’s all one.
Each and every aspen in the grove is all one. Aspen trees share the same root system, meaning massive stands of aspen are actually just one organism. Along with the Great Barrier Reef and a massive underground fungus in Oregon, the largest stands of aspen in the Rockies are among the biggest single living things on the planet.
It’s all one.
A level of calm takes over. My feeling in place equaling calm makes sense, and my searching for external stimuli to dampen emotion produced by external stimuli seems illogical. Peace comes from within.
I look at the aspen as I hike the trail, mentally crafting a metaphor for humanity as the stand, each aspen an individual in society and ultimately connected to everyone else.
I am but one aspen. We are all connected. Some aspens support other aspens that would have otherwise fallen. I feel like an aspen.
It’s all one.
I have no ideas what the cows represent in this metaphor.
I go to get my fancy Rockmount Western shirt and boots from the car for the 6 p.m. margarita hour. When I return to Roo (my cabin), the cat emerges from under the porch and meows. He evidently is still hungry.
Dinner is terrific, a polenta-like bed of grits for a scallop and a shrimp, drizzled in bourbon sauce. Tiramisu means to lift up, the chef tells us and that it does. The guests and I later commiserate over our shared disdain for the petroleum economy.
I regain my inner peace the next morning in the aspen grove. This time I am on horseback for the first time since I was four, riding with a wrangler named Greg.
“Aspen are really interesting trees,” Greg says as he hops off his horse to clear some wood from the trail. “They don’t live very long, and they have an interesting root structure.”
“It’s all one,” I respond. I tell him about my metaphor, and ask the career English teacher what the cows might be. He’s stumped.
My horse is Hopi. Skittish at first, he warms up to me as the ride goes on. He seems much more interested in eating grass than transporting me, but we work it out in the end. “Relaxed alertness” is what Greg describes as the perfect equestrian mindset. Knowing when to be gentle and when to be firm also strikes me as critical.
Are my emotions like Hopi? Is controlling one’s anger akin to riding a horse? What are the cows in this metaphor?
After lunch, I leave for State Bridge, listening to Greg’s Cowboy Fandango and The Shaggs en route.
As I drive through Oak Creek Country, I think about connectedness and humanity in general. Everything I say, think, and experience is based on other people. Same goes for everybody else. It’s so easy to have tunnel vision and forget that we’re all one. I also take a picture of a big set of mechanical jaws that hauled coal out of these mountains until 1996, when the Edna coal mine closed.
State Bridge’s reputation precedes it. A favorite of bikers and hippies, it sits on the Colorado River and the tracks where Amtrak trains and coal trains and rafters and kayakers continually pass. It is right next to the bridge of the same name, and known for its concerts (mostly jam bands, but the Dixie Chicks played here in 1996) and saloon. (Note: The lodge burned in the time since.)
I check into the cabin next to the cabin where Teddy Roosevelt slept when he was briefly vice president in 1901, right before he took over following the untimely demise of William Henry Harrison, whose main claim to fame today is dying. Then I hike to the top of a red volcanic finger for some rest and relaxation at 4:25 p.m., reasoning that 4:20 is horrible due to its Hitler/Columbine connotations, and that stoners should not be punctual. Once down, I shower and head off to Friday happy hour at the Wolcott Yacht Club, a hobnobbing time and place of note for Vail Valley locals. I’d driven right by on U.S. 6 a week before, and should have stopped then. But Friday happy hour is the place’s prime time and the silicone was out in full force.
The see-and-be-seen crowd at the riverside bar and grill is a marked contrast to the sparse, odd mix of tourists and hippies at the State Bridge bar later. But the hippies on the river seem to have something down right, as do the ski bums, fly-fishing guides, whitewater freaks, et cetera: They knew how to take it easy. Too fucking easy sometimes. The bartender in Wolcott tells me he’d been in the area for 16 years and had a condo in Vail. I thought he was a ski bum who bought a goldmine—condos in Vail have skyrocketed from $200,000 to $1.6 million in the last decade—but he was actually psyched that he was renting one for only $600 a month. And he didn’t even sleep there outside of ski season.
Maybe a little bit of stress and self-flagellation isn’t such a bad thing after all. The flip side, of course, is that I only get mad about the most trivial of things, typically fired by pointlessly volatile dipshit testosterone. Everything is pointless, and nothing is meaningless.
Is sexual frustration the source of my anger? Why did my dog have to die? WHY is it so hard to shake the sadness? Why the why-me? Why the anger?
Why do I feel the need to self-medicate with booze and weed? The train is passing. I go out to watch and mostly listen to it chug and screech by in the dark. Its industrial cacophony soothes me more than any other available external stimuli.
We’re all one.