Category Archive for ‘Small town life’ at Beside the Stream

Archive for the 'Small town life' Category

A kayak slalom race

Published on June 24, 2008 in Celebration, Small town life and water. 0 Comments

Animas River Days slalom races were held on Saturday. This is a paddling town, and these kids are fast. World class fast.

This path goes beside the rapids and the race course is set right on this stretch of river. People leave their boats and gear on the grass until it’s time for their class to race.

A kayak slalom course has 18 - 22 gates and takes a few minutes to run. You go through the red gates against the flow of the river, and the green gates with the flow. Each gate is hanging from a cable stretched across the river, so the race course can be changed from race to race. When there isn’t a race, the gates are pulled over to the side of the river.

In an eddy near the head of the course, the paddlers wait their turn to run the gates.

Here’s a kid approaching the first gate. He makes the drop before the gate, and then starts turning his boat upstream

rotating around that firmly set paddle blade.

He clears the gate, quickly turns his boat for Gate 2

and squeaks through.

And then he’s gone around the bend.

Old Mines

Published on June 16, 2008 in Small town life and water. 0 Comments

This part of Colorado is mineral-rich. Silver, gold, lead, copper, coal, and uranium have all been mined near here, and the higher metal prices make it profitable to put old mines back into production. Some people object.

Mining has big impacts on water quality because abandoned mines leak acid into the river. Private citizens have worked for years cleaning up the old mines that drain into the Animas River, and the handful of new mining ventures in the region was a topic of discussion at a recent water meeting.

One question was: Are these big ventures? Are they national, well funded companies? (Do they have the money for proper environmental mitigation, and a reputation to protect?)

Oh, no, was the response. These aren’t modern mining operations. This is traditional mining, where small operators fleece big city investors and leave behind an environmental mess.

Which would be funnier if it wasn’t true.

A Californian consortium is trying to reopen a gold mine in Mayday. Here’s one local’s response:

There’s a nifty Burma Shave type series of signs that reads

TAKE YOUR

GOLD RUSH

BACK TO

CALIFORNIA please

and the last sign is

Whatever your opinion of mining in Mayday (or political theatre, for that matter) you gotta love someone who takes you from Uranus to heinous* in less than a half mile.

*love that word.

heinous

c.1374, from O.Fr. haineus (Fr. haineux), from haine “hatred,” from hair “to hate,” from Frank. *hatjan (cf. O.S. haton, O.E. hatian “to hate”).

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper

The Iron Horse Criterium

Published on May 26, 2008 in Small town life. 5 Comments

Every year on Memorial Day weekend a big pack of cyclists race the train from Durango to Silverton, 50 miles and three mountain passes away. The Iron Horse Bicycle Classic has become a famous race over the years, and top cyclists come to compete in it. This year the women’s field included a few Olympic hopefuls, and a cyclist who has competed in every summer Olympics since 1980. The main event was cancelled because of snow–first time ever–so people competed in a Criterium on Sunday and a time trial on Monday.

My beautiful niece Katie, who skied in two Olympics, took up cycling a few years ago and is very good at it. Whenever there is a big cycling event in town, she stays with us while she races. I love to see her, but I never understood why she wanted to spend her time off work travelling to compete–she’s not trying to beat someone else, or to become a world champion. But these pictures showed me something I hadn’t understood before.

The pro women raced for forty-five minutes around a course set through Durango’s downtown; I took photos each time they rode by. The cyclists are going so fast that I couldn’t really see what was going on until I looked at the pictures later… and then I saw why she was out there.

I think she’s racing because of the way that it makes her feel inside. She’s totally focused on this moment, this curve,

calm, and fully engaged.

For those 45 minutes, she was a pure being.

It was like a Pow Wow with less stylish costumes.

High water

Published on May 22, 2008 in Small town life and water. 2 Comments

The Animas flooded its banks today,

and with the high water I went to Smelter Rapids, the town’s best white water.

It was big water today, one of the highest flow days of the year. There was one kayaker out there, and maybe twenty people watching.

Can you see the joy?

The balancing of immense forces? This guy is likely Olympic caliber–there are a lot of world champion and Olympic kayakers living here

and I assumed everyone was there to watch his perfect form. Instead,

the main attraction was a group of four commercial rafts due at 2:15. Two rafts made it through intact, one raft lost and recovered a passenger, one raft flipped…

and it was really entertaining.

Garden Club has a luncheon

Published on April 24, 2008 in Colorado women, Old-timers, Small town life and gardening. 1 Comment

Once every three years, the Animas Valley Garden Club hosts the spring meeting for the area’s three garden clubs. This was our year. The day before, we gathered at the grange and set up the tables and chairs. The tables, homemade with folding legs, had been made by Ruth’s grandfather.

The menu was soup, salad, and desserts, and we all cooked the night before. (I made cheesecake and 3 salad dressings.)

That morning we decorated the tables.

Each person got a little coleus plant grown in Jennifer’s greenhouse. Ruth and I wrapped each coleus in waxed paper, and tied raffia around it. There’s a poem about gardening in pink paper, and a lavender agenda. The baskets of flowers are borrowed from Kelly’s store; the tablecloths are borrowed from a grange member who has a full set of tablecloths for all the grange tables.

Miss Roberta particularly enjoyed the desserts. She said that she wasn’t used to not doing it herself, but she certainly thought we did a fine job. She said, I thought the club acquitted itself very well.

Fixing the light, and three lessons

Published on March 30, 2008 in Small town life. 1 Comment

When our first big January snowstorm knocked out the barn light, I didn’t think it was a very big deal.

I was wrong. Since then, we have had little triangles of metal screwed onto the roof so the sheet of snow can’t slide onto the light:

That was $80.00

Next Bob took the lamp to be welded at Animas Radiator

where Tim put some careful flanges on it. Two of them. The flanges were so careful they cost $70. The nails’ll rip out of the wood before these flanges let go, said Tim.

And it’s still not done. Andy, who wired the house, came by as a favor on Friday afternoon to put the light back up.

He has a new van/ before he used his truck and had to empty it into a storage locker every Friday. A van makes his life much easier.

Andy is an elite rock climber who often jams his fingers. I didn’t ask him what happened this time because I didn’t want to visualize it. Andy has spent dozens of nights sleeping in hammocks suspended from rock faces, and his cliff stories give me the willies. He put up our weathervane by tying himself to a rope looped over the roof and attached to the truck. And since his Mom was a librarian, he always returns books. This visit I’m returning one of his books; we both thought the author was annoying. Plus I’m sending along a jar of jam for his fiance’s opinion: she had a restaurant and I thought she’d like the jalapenos.

Andy is putting up the rewelded, rewired light, and you can see me in the window taking his picture.

In the end, it took both Bob and Andy to get the light back in place. Finally.

This story has three lessons. The fixture came from a gas station in Georgia–it’s a piece of 1940s Americana, and it was a big bargain: it cost about $100 including shipping. It’s an Ebay item. I liked it a lot but hadn’t anticipated a multi-step, multi-person, multi-lesson task. The first lesson is, inexpensive Americana may not be a bargain by the time it’s installed. The second lesson is useful for me but probably not for you: old exterior fixtures from the South are not designed for snow load. And the third lesson was my Grandfather’s mantra: Education is expensive.

Things you don’t want to do on Sunday

Published on March 17, 2008 in Small town life. 5 Comments

Gelande jumping is one of those things that you really don’t want to do. Never heard of it? Good, because it makes as much sense as going over a waterfall in a barrel.

Gelande jumping is going off a huge ski jump with normal ski equipment. I dated a Norwegian ski jumper briefly in college, so I’ve never minded other people going off big jumps so long as they’re using the proper equipment: giant seven to eight foot skis with a free heel.

This is a normal ski jumper.

Gelande jumpers are out of their minds, because they can’t pose their jump.

The jump at the ski area is a natural jump, not a ramp. It’s 70 meters high, which is considered smallish.

The ski jump itself starts at the big rock and goes about 70 meters before the lip that propels those poor guys into the air. The chute is the landing zone.

The first line marks a 200 foot jump, the second line is 250 and the third line is 300 feet. The dark speckles on the slope are the scattering of pine needles that allows the jumpers to see the contours of the snow. Sprinkling the slope with pine needles is standard for many ski events, not just gelande.

You can’t really see how incredibly steep this is. I tried to climb up it, but had to give up half way because I had soft boots on. With ski boots, you can jam the toe into the snow and climb very steep terrain, but with soft boots it was hopeless.

Here the jumpers are climbing up to the top of the take-off,

and this is the person who had the longest jump on the first round.

He’s off

Looks OK right now

and he’s getting some altitude, but with a fixed heel his form can’t hold.

you can see from his shadow how vertical he is

and he lands it

barely.

That’s gelande jumping. My real question for these guys is: how do you fit those gigantic cojones into that skin-tight speed suit???

but I didn’t ask.

In the deep freeze

Published on March 14, 2008 in Appearances and Small town life. 7 Comments

When my twenty pounds of chocolate from the Bloomers Sale disappeared in a corner of my coffin freezer, it occurred to me that you might like to see what else is in there. Heck, I’d like to see what else is in there.

Some of it is recent. In addition to the chocolate, there is

2 gallons of cider left over from cider pressing last fall,
2 organic turkeys (80% off the day after Thanksgiving), and
25 pounds of buffalo that was just recently added. There’s
15 pounds of fish and
7 pounds of butter from 1/2 price sales. From last summer, we still have about
10 pounds of lamb and sadly, about
7 pounds of lamb ribs that are getting old. We get a few lambs for the freezer every spring, which includes many packets of lamb ribs. Do you know what to do with lamb ribs? I don’t. There’s not a shred of pork, which makes me wonder about getting piglets this spring.

The fruits and vegetables are less manageable. There are are at least

30 pounds of tomatoes (a few pounds dehydrated, 10 pounds peeled, and 20 pounds frozen whole like little baseballs). I was glad to find
a bag of raspberries, of blueberries and some applesauce. I was less excited by the
15 pounds of peeled and pitted peaches from 2 years ago. And the freezer item that absolutely has to go is
20 pounds of apricots.

There are a lot of roadside apricot trees around here, and apricots are easier to freeze than they are to use up. So in honor of the weekend, I’m processing apricots Sunday: one batch with raspberries, one with habaneros, and maybe another with ginger juice. If anyone has a good apricot recipe, please, pass it along.

I didn’t realize I had so much food downstairs (and I’m not the only one; most of my neighbors have coffin freezers too). I pretend that it’s rational, but I think that deep freeze satisfies some ancient imperative. I’m talking primal satisfaction. I mean, this Anasazi granary and my deep freeze would qualify as things that don’t look alike, but are.

The Bloomers Sale

Published on March 14, 2008 in Small town life. 3 Comments

One of the perks of living in a small town is access to factory seconds. In Vermont, we lived near the Ben and Jerry’s factory and a sock mill. The socks were handy, but ice cream seconds were often disappointing: chocolate almond ice cream where they forgot the almonds… what’s the point? Nearly a decade ago, we moved to the home of the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. I think every woman in La Plata County would agree that the Chocolate Factory’s semi-annual sale of chocolates with a bloom of cocoa butter on the surface–the so-called Bloomers Sale–is a great local event.

It’s sort of a public service, and takes place at the County Fairgrounds. Small children can afford to buy substantial amounts of chocolate.

As for the adults, well, these days chocolate is practically health food.

Local wisdom is that if you have a deep freeze in the cellar, there’s no such thing as buying too many truffles. I bought 20 lbs. I do love that big deep freeze.

Garden Club

Published on March 7, 2008 in Colorado women, Old-timers and Small town life. 4 Comments

A few years ago, my then 92-year-old neighbor asked if I would join her garden club. Since it met once a month and she was getting to an age where she needed help with transportation, I said I would. Two years later, I’m the club secretary and Miss Roberta, who has been attending Garden Club meetings for over 50 years, is still going strong.

Most of the meetings take place in the Grange, and there are three or four women in the garden club who have been Grange members their whole life.

The Grange is a place of rural pride, home to the 4-H Club and the Saint Patrick’s Day corned beef boiled dinner.

It is part of the National Grange system of 3,600 Granges in 37 states, with an American flag out front.

Roberta and her late husband Robert are both Past Masters of the Grange, with their picture on the wall.

This is the Garden Club. Many of the members have been attending meetings for decades. Ruth was the hostess today, and she brought cherry pie made with her own cherries from the deep freeze.

It was an exceptional pie. And Roberta looked like a flower

but was pretty annoyed because she couldn’t hear at the meeting. She was the principal of two schools in her prime. Just last year she ran a bear off her property by yelling at him. She is a small woman with a tiny jaw, but it was very firmly set at that garden club meeting.

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