Mr. Abner Renta.......Proprietor

Note: As with all of the previous chapters of this blog, it is important to reiterate with the next few chapters that all of the characters featured in these stories are purely fictional. This next series of stories are about a fictional man who owned a fictional hotel in a fictional town in Colorado, which was ultimately purchased by a fictional family. Any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental; just good old fashioned, honest-to-God, blind-ass happenstance.

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In the summer of 1993, we made our first visit to The Riverside Hotel. It was the first stop in an extended trip where the ultimate destination was a five day visit to Julie’s family reunion (my fictional wife) in Anaconda, MT. A lot of driving in a 1992 Chevy Astro Van with my 8-year old daughter and my 5-year old son; this before they’d started installing DVD players in cars – having lived through the trip I can now say that was a good thing, as the kids were forced to drink in the scenery, as were we and any other of my generation fortunate enough to take a driving vacation. Remember, this form of recreation was pretty much new to the Post-WWII civilized world after the relatively recent advent of the car, the paved road and the job where you got time off. How quickly we’ve degenerated to the point where our offspring are entertained not by nature’s beauty and familial interaction, but only by Hi-Def 3D Pixar stuff.

The summer of 1993 was also famous for the Flood of 1993 – the heartland of our Country from the mouth of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, through Iowa to the heart of the Mississippi Delta, and the mighty Missouri River back through the upper reaches of the Dakota’s – was devastated by a 500-year flood, not seen again until 18 years later. The flood threatened my business, which was a few short miles from the point where the Kansas River (aka The Kaw) hooked up with the Missouri River; 3 miles downstream from our plant, trailer parks and a few businesses that had been there since the 1940’s were literally wiped from the map by the overflow of the Kaw – the land remains barren today.

We headed west from Kansas City towards Denver and the Rocky Mountains on I-70 – to many this stretch of road is the punch line to “What is the shittiest section of interstate highway in the US?” Having now made this trek I can’t remember how many times – 30, probably closer to 40 – I can tell you that stretches of this ride are singularly spectacular; 10-fold more scenic than the I-70 that stretches through the equally Kansas-flat cornfields of Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. Driving west out of Topeka to Salina, you will experience a nice stretch of the Flint Hills; hit them early in the morning or during a purple fall dusk, and you will experience a vision like no other. Mountains are quietly envious of this spectacle. The latter part of Kansas into the eastern stretches of Colorado gives you the gentle rumblings of the Chalk Hills, truncated by the jagged cuts and arroyos that exist with a vibrant purpose in the rainy spring, only to turn to wasted, unimportant ditches in the summer and fall. It is a barren land, hard and spent, but its starkness whets your appetite for the beautiful, yet brutal peaks and spires that lay ahead.

The summer of 1993 was the third time I’d made this trip, and the first time in my adult life. The first trip was in 1959 as a three-year old in the back of a brand new 1959 Chevy Station Wagon, (my memories of this trip are vague), the second in 1973 as a 17-year old protesting the fact that he had to go on a family vacation (my memories of this trip are also vague), and now, as the head of the family, I was essentially heading into lands unknown.

Our lunch stop off of I-70 was Wilson Lake Reservoir, about 200 miles west of KC, halfway between Salina and Hays, KS. I’d picked the place out on a map because it was right off the interstate and it had some decent looking picnic areas where our kids could run off some steam. Unbeknownst to me, two weeks before our visit an F-4 tornado had torched through the area. Shortly off the interstate, driving towards the picnic areas, the devastation from the storm was otherworldly – a shell of an old gas station, the pumps and its spidery twisted canopy turned on its side, a large stand of cottonwood trees turned into a spot for a massive fall bonfire, picnic tables and fire grills a jumble of iron and wood nested 10’ off the shore of the lake, forty yards from their original point of purpose. Add to the aura the fact that there was no evidence at this ‘park’ of any other human – we had the place so to ourselves that it felt as if we’d stepped into the Twilight Zone. Who would have expected such a surreal setting for the two month-prior planned consumption of our Underwood Deviled-Ham sandwiches, crunchified with straight-up Lay’s Potato Chips and washed down with Sunkist Orange Soda?

A deeper portent of things to come on this trip and our ultimate western journey..…. Perhaps.

Two nights were spent in Denver, me doing some business while Julie and the offspring hit the zoo and the Children’s Museum. My doing business was central to our being in Denver, and totally central to our ultimate involvement with The Riverside Hotel. My boss lived and operated several other businesses in Denver; in one of those businesses I found a kindred spirit, Roscoe, who became one of my closest friends. We were both at similar points in our lives with working wives and young children while toiling away for the same boss in related industries; tied into the package was our mutual love of sports, fishing, literature and fine food and booze.

When I’d mentioned to Roscoe that we were driving west on vacation for a family reunion, a stop in Denver followed by a night at The Historic Riverside Hotel – a getaway staple for my Colorado buddy since his youth – was etched into the trip. One of the things I love most about Roscoe is his tendency to embrace his knowledge of prose and literature and infuse it into every fragment of conversation. He can make a trip down the driveway to pick up the morning paper into an event….”the morning sun sparked the glistening snow into a field of blinding diamonds as I made my way towards the bundled journal, treading carefully…cautious not to disturb the surrounding glitter as I bent to gather the previous days’ news.” Roscoe’s propensity to elucidate on the most ordinary of tasks and events (certainly not a fault, as it is borne from the most genuine joie de vivre that I’ve ever encountered) made a trip to the Colorado mountains and an eventual visit to The Riverside seem as if we were in fact heading to Shangri-La.

The drive seemed endless, up and over Berthoud Pass, through one small town after another, before we took a right turn onto the main street of Hot Sulphur Springs, CO, heading slowly west towards Mt. Bross, the Colorado River and The Riverside Hotel. The white clapboard façade bared itself to the south and the rest of the town as if it were one of the worlds’ last outposts. It was truly as if all roads in Grand County led to this end, the juncture of farm, burg and field, river and mountain. I stood before the place awestruck; I knew that I was in the presence of time, history and past generations. Good Lord, but the place had a feel!

As I walked into The Riverside for the first time, bags in tow and eager for the experience, and more importantly eager for a cocktail after the long drive, I was greeted by the visage of this fantastically musty, cluttered old place – half-dead climbing vines clinging to the walls, window ledges and door jambs, a homey living area dominated by a massive limestone fireplace and a mounted trophy 7-point Elk-rack lording over the room. It was certainly as if the old-timey feel of the outside had pulsed its veins straight through the interior. I’m certain that if you’d have walked into the place in 1930, not much would be different, save for the raging 19” television in the corner, and the old man who sat in the chair, his eyes glued to that television; he wanly greeting us as we entered.

Meet Mr. Abner Renta, the proprietor of The Riverside Hotel.

At that time (before Peter Jackson’s rendering, and to the truth, Mr. Jackson and I were eerily on the same page) Mr. Renta would have been my vision for the Gollum character in Tolkien’s works; bloodshot bulging bug-eyes, sallow skin and rotting teeth under a wild unmanageable tangle of wispy, wiry hair. His lilting high-pitched welcome and his hysterical falsetto of a following laugh would have most certainly further chilled Gollum’s icy blood. I clutched onto my bags, forgot about having cocktails, and looked nervously for the exit.

On the spot I began to question the accuracy of my friend Roscoe’s tendency to creatively describe his past and present, thinking possibly that some serious drugs had played into his utopian world view way more than I’d imagined.

To be continued…..