Talking to the Owl

I just returned from vacation and I can’t believe I’m still up writing in my blog.  I must still be on Colorado time. 

I wish I could regret not taking more pictures, but given a choice of either being in the moment or taking pictures of the moment, I usually choose being in the moment.

We went to the 4th of July rodeo in Steamboat Spings and poor Sylvia cried and cried when she learned that even though she had a cowboy hat, she was not going to be riding a horse that day.  She did, however, cheer up when she learned that she could join a horde of other kids to chase a lamb around the arena and pull a ribbon off its back.  Nothing like watching 3-5 year olds going head-to-head with livestock.  By age 12, they put them on a steer and send ‘em out of the chute.  The clown asked, “What kind of parent let’s their 12 year old in the bull riding event?  The same that says, ‘Did you see the size of that belt buckle?  That’s a college education - you git on that bull and git ‘er done.’”  I just can’t argue with logic like that.

I came home with a gorgeous Wrangler shirt that is an American flag.  The stars are embroidered and it really is sharp.  Not totally my style, but if you can’t get patriotic at a 4th of July Rodeo, you just can’t get patriotic.  I can’t wait to get my boots on and show up to work with all these yankees wondering where hell did this guy come from. 

Mugs Coffee shop was the only coffee I could find in Ft. Collins at 6:30 (8:30 my time) this morning.  I like to come here because it is my old neighborhood.  It was a TV repair shop when I was growing up.  We would raid the dumpster for transformer wire for our neighborhood communications projects.  I had a friend with similiar interests who lived a few houses away.  We’d take out the speakers from the TVs and unroll the wire - miles of wire - and run the wire through the ditches between our houses and make walkie talkies.  We ran it to our tree house.  We ran it up and down stairs to link up the ping-pong table with the bedroom.  He went on to be an executive in a subdiary of Quest Communications. 

The photo is of an old logging truck in the Colorado State Forest in Gould.

I’m always out of sorts the day before I travel.  I enjoy my destination when I get there, but I hate packing, catching airplanes, renting cars, and leaving Teton in the kennel.  Car travel is much easier than planes, but Colorado is just too far to go by car and I think my next car-ride there will be a one-way trip.

The place I’m going is Gould, which is west of Fort Collins about 60 miles just beyond Cameron Pass.  Near Gould is “Owl Mountain,” this blog’s namesake.  As mountains go, it isn’t that spectacular: Tree covered, rounded by glaciers, more like a New Hampshire foothill than a Colorado postcard.  My attraction is more the quiet solitude of the lodgepole forest that surrounds the cabin and extends uninterrupted by roads all the way to Rocky Mountain National Park.  I love the feeling of getting on a trail and knowing I could walk it for days and not see a road.

At one point in my life I had the dream to hook high-speed internet to the cabin and spend a good part of my year writing technical books and articles and the other part consulting.  Someday, I could make that a reality, and perhaps that will be my next career after Verisign.  Then again, I’m a social guy and I really like going to the office every day and working on projects. 

I’m the kind of person that always longs to start over.  I love the feeling of throwing away belongings except for a few essentials, loading a truck and going to a new life.  I wish I was doing that right now it were this summer, but we are much too entangled in our lives here in Rhode Island to leave this year.  Someday we will.

The photo on the left is of my mother in Acadia National Park a couple of years ago in June.