Contemporaries of mine who are products of a Catholic education were more than likely taught by Nuns; at the least, all of you have very strong Nun recollections, and most have more than a few good Nun stories. Some of the stories would involve acts of faith, kindness and charity; most would be stories of brutality, physical and mental abuse and in some cases, incidences of sadistic torture.
In spite of the irreverence and blasphemy that will follow, know that my recollections are borne from admiration and respect, for at the core of these Nun’s daily reign of terror was their heartfelt desire to transform us from slovenly, unappreciative little pagan babies into educated, unquestionably committed Roman Catholics – with the ultimate goal being our individual quest for Sainthood; nothing less was acceptable. In 1962, in Johnson County, KS, at Cure of Ars’ Parish School, we were taught to believe that Sainthood was attainable – it was all up to us.
I blew my chance at Sainthood early on, in the spring of my 2nd Grade year. I’d recently been blessed with God’s Grace, having confessed my sins to that point of my life, and then having taken my First Holy Communion. To those of you who aren’t Catholic and haven’t experienced this physical and spiritual transformation, as 7-year olds, we took this Sacrament, this Holy ritual, deadly serious, and for most Catholics, the seriousness of the ritual doesn’t diminish with age. Though as a newly Catholicized 7-year old, there was a bit more at stake with keeping up my end of the bargain with regards to being good, being Christian – I still at that time had Sainthood in my sights.
My 2nd grade fall from grace started with a lie – a big, spur-of-the-moment whopper; a lie that I still to this day am uncertain as to source of its summonance. It ended with the heretofore kind, reasoning, patient and all-knowing Sister Mary Joseph, Principal of Cure of Ars Parish School, kicking me square in the ass soccer-style, (way ahead of her time!) with the force of an NFL kicker going for a 65-yard field goal; jettisoning me out of her office and into the hall, tumbling once, twice…probably three times, head over heels. I knew at the end of the second tumble that my chance at Sainthood was shot, and it’s been downhill for me ever since.
It was a sunny spring day, lunchtime recess; the mid-day break consisting of twenty minutes to eat your lunch (which you ate in six minutes and fidgeted for the next fourteen minutes), and forty minutes out on the playground. On this particular day, I was treated in my lunch to a box of Cracker Jacks – which of course, in addition to caramel coated popcorn and peanuts, came with a ‘prize in every box’. My prize was a small, plastic magnifying glass. The lens was maybe ½” in diameter and the whole thing might have been 1 ½” long; with my current old man vision, I would need a big magnifying glass to even see this magnifying glass. Anyway, it was a prize, and I found myself absent-mindedly standing in the warm spring sun, farting around with it on the playground.
Were this a film, you would see me in a long shot; a sweet, innocent blond-haired little guy standing on the playground, minding his own business, and then, the soundtrack would begin playing something not unlike the theme from Jaws, as unaware to me, the class fat kid/bully was waddling his way towards me from behind. Totally unannounced, the ogre whammed me in the back, his two fat paws simultaneously colliding with my two shoulder blades, sending me face first towards the pavement; in short, the fat bastard walked up behind me and without provocation pushed me to the ground. With cat-quick reflexes I shot my arms forward in time to prevent myself from falling face-first, but the downside result of this nanosecond reflexive act of facial self-preservation was the loss of the little magnifying glass, as it flew from my hands and was never to be seen again.
I didn’t cry, but was on the verge of crying; I was for a fact pissed and quickly decided that this fat jackass had to have some payback. Unfortunately none of the Nuns or teachers who had playground duty witnessed this wanton act of aggression, and I didn’t feel that much would happen to him if I ratted him out for simply pushing me to the ground, so I decided, as I walked towards one of the teachers, angry and wounded, to sweeten the pot a little. This pot-sweetening would require that I lie.
“Mrs. Daly, Claude Oafbutt pushed me and when I hit the ground, I....I...I lost my contact lenses!”
I had no idea what contact lenses were, I just knew that they were small, expensive and hard to find when lost. Seems I saw something about this on TV the evening before.
Mrs. Daly instantly sprang into action, blowing her whistle and herding all of the other kids away from the scene of the crime. She cleared out an area that was about 200 square feet, and instructed everyone to stand back.
“Where did you fall?” she asked, panicked, all but breathless.
“Uh… right over there.” I pointed in a direction but to no spot in particular.
In short order, there were six Nuns on the spot, getting the lowdown from Mrs. Daly. Before my very eyes, and the eyes of the entire grades 1-8 recess crowd, the Nuns got down on their hands and knees and slowly began crawling in the cordoned-off area, their noses inches from the pavement as they scanned the ground; like a huddle of arctic penguins searching the desert sands for ice cubes, they diligently poured over every inch of the playground, looking in vain for something that, like ice in the desert, never existed.
I didn’t cuss at that tender age, especially having just made my First Holy Communion, but I knew the sight that lay before me caused me to mutter under my breath something very close to “Holy Shit, what have I got going on here, and how am I gonna get my ass out of it?” Even at that tender age, I knew that if you caused a Nun to crawl around on the playground,in her habit on her hands and knees because you lied, there would be unimaginably huge repercussions. HUGE!
Enter Sister Mary Joseph, Principal of Cure of Ars.
After getting the skinny from Mrs. Daly, she turned and headed slowly over to me.
“Richard, I’m very sorry this has happened, but we don’t seem to be able to find your lenses. Could there be a chance that you left them at your desk, or in the bathroom?”
“Uh, nope, I’m pretty sure I had ‘em on when I came out here.” Another lie.
“Well….maybe we should go inside and have a look, just to make sure. Don’t you think?”
So I followed Sister Mary Joseph into the empty school, down the hall and towards my classroom, knowing with every step that I was a dead kid walkin’.
Standing me before my desk, Sister asked “How about your pencil box, can you look in there for me?”
I pulled out my cigar-box, which held pencils, crayons, erasers – stuff that we used to write with before we had computers. I opened the lid and slowly fished around among the contents, thinking, hoping and praying that maybe I actually had contact lenses; ‘By Golly Sister! Here they are right here! How lucky was that?’
Instead, of course, I said “No Sister, I can’t find them in here…”
“Let’s go look in the bathroom. Maybe you left them in there.”
“Yeah… maybe I left them in there…..” I said, barely audible as we headed down the hall to look one more place for my fictional lenses. I think I remember starting to pray a bit harder at this point.
Needless to say, neither did I score the non-existent lenses in the bathroom.
Back up in the school office, Sister had me sit while she called home to give my Mom the bad news.
“Mrs. Paradise, this is Sister Mary Joseph at Cure….no, no…your children are all fine. But we do have a small problem. It seems that Richard lost his contact lenses on the playground during recess and….(my Mother became very audible on the other end of the phone, and although not intelligible, I knew exactly what she was saying)….Oh really. Is that so? I see….Yes, I’d be happy to let you talk to Richard.”
“Hullo?”
“What in the world are you doing?? What in God’s Name are you thinking?? Contact lenses?? What on earth are you talking about??” She was yelling these questions at me pretty loudly. She had probably been leisurely ironing my Dad’s handkerchiefs, thinking about what she was going to cook for dinner that evening, and then this call comes in!
“You know Mom….those contact lenses I had. I lost them when Claude Oafbutt pushed me for no reason...sniff…and I scraped my hands and knees…sniff…and it hurts really bad…..sniff….” I started to whimper a little, hoping the tears might allow me to buy some sympathy, but Mom didn’t have any sympathy for sale.
I handed the phone to Sister, my head down, waiting for God knows what to come. I’d seen Nuns draw and quarter kids for snickering in the bathroom line; I couldn’t imagine the hell that awaited me from the Head Knucklebuster for this infraction. I assumed she got the top position because she could out-sadist all of the other sadists, and I’d done some really bad stuff; stuff that would test her mettle as an administrator of punishment.
To my immediate surprise, all I got was a stern look and an outstretched arm, finger pointing down the hall as she hissed “Back to your classroom… young man!…”
Just as I was walking out the door, starting to think “Wow, that wasn’t so bad”, Sister Mary Joseph made her attempt at putting her name in the NFL record books.
As I lay dazed on the other end of the hall, I recall hearing one of the other Nuns in the office say something like “Excellent form Sister, and what solid follow-thru! And did I count three tumbles???"”
Sister Mary Joseph coolly nodded her head, wordlessly acknowledging the compliment, then said “Sister Ann.... go get the tape measure.”
At the end of the ordeal, Sister Mary Joseph was immortalized in the Official Record Book of Nun Brutality for ‘Longest Distance Kicked with Accompanied Somersaults, male, less than 60 lbs – 13 feet, 8 inches, 3 tumbles.’; all I got out of the deal was an early exit from the Sainthood sweepstakes.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Mr. Abner Renta.....Dinner is Served
After a brief attempt at trout fishing in the Colorado River, a clean up and a few quick cocktails, we found ourselves in The River Room Restaurant, the early 1970’s addendum to the western edge of the original 1903 structure which overlooked the stretch of river upon which I’d just unsuccessfully attempted to angle.
Our group of nine – four adults and five children - was seated at a large table, hungry, anxious and eager to order; more accurately, the kids were ready to order, as the adults with the cocktails were less eager to do anything substantive beyond enjoying the moment. The adult mood was sublime, brought on more by the place than the booze, as this warm room and its immediate proximity to the mountain and the river had a wonderful affect on the best part of your psyche.
WHAM!!!
Abner’s easel/chalkboard, which contained the evening’s food offerings, slammed down next to our table for the threefold purpose of 1) abruptly/rudely getting our attention, 2) temporarily shutting up the kids and 3) letting the adults know that their brief stay in La-La Land was now over….Welcome to Abnerville!
“I’m pretty busy so I don’t have a lot of time.” (The restaurant was nearly empty.) “Our soup tonight is Ham & Veg…A...Ta…Ble.” (He said the word ‘vegetable’ not only as if it had four syllables, but as if it was four separate words.) “We have fried pork chops, fried trout or New York Strip Steak, all served with Spanish rice. We had some wonderful Cornish Game hens, but unfortunately we’re out of the game hens.” As Abner delivered the Cornish Game Hen news, his eyes rolled skyward as if an old friend had just passed. Oh….the drama.
(Again, we were at our table early, and the restaurant was empty. So I’m guessing that Jamie – Abner’s cook, plumber, landscaper and….I’ll leave it at that, prepared but one Cornish Game Hen, and Jamie and Abner had eaten it before the dinner service began.)
“Is the trout fresh from the river?” I asked.
“It’s from a river.... What do you know about fresh trout, or rivers….and why would you care where it’s from?”
“Could we ask about…?”
“MAKE YOUR CHOICES!! I’m VERY BUSY! I’ll leave you the board but be back in a minute…. FOR YOUR ORDER!!”
‘Wow, did I miss something? We’re in this guy’s place of business, ready to spend money, and he seems pissed that we’re here? How could this be?’
From grades 1 through 8, I had the honor of being educated by Nuns – real Nuns, from the 50’s and 60’s - not these new age Nuns that were all about peace, love and wearing civilian clothes. My Nuns were first and foremost about knuckle-busting, skull-rapping discipline whilst they were adorned in restrictive costumes that obviously brought them to the point of wanting to torture the rest of the world as a way of getting things on an even keel.
Abner Renta’s customer service style made me feel as if one of those All-Pro 1950 Nuns was standing at the edge of the table, not-so-gently tugging at the tender part of my upper ear, asking, no, demanding, “You don’t want the trout,…whap!... you want the fried pork chop, and if you think you don’t want the fried pork chop, …whap…put your knuckles on the table and I’ll make you wish….whap…whap…whap… you’d have ordered and enjoyed the fried pork chop.”
Seven minutes later, Mr. Renta reappears with an order pad in hand, noticeably very testy. (Had Abner been dressed like a Nun, I wouldn’t have been surprised, nor would I have found it out of character.)
“Alright, who’s ready to order???”
I decide to jump right in to the fray…
“I’ll have the New York strip steak, medium rare.”
Abner’s response…” I’ll bring it cooked, but there’s no guess as to how it will be cooked. You won’t get sick if you eat it… that’s about all I’ll guarantee. Bwa HA HA HA … (an over-the-top, hysterically theatrical laugh, unlike any you've ever heard).
“Ok, who’s next?” I say.
My fictional wife Julie steps up to the plate, and orders..”How about the trout? How’s the trout?”
“We’re out of trout. But we’ve got a few pork chops left, and a few steaks, cooked to the chefs liking…Bwa..Ha..Ha ..Ha!.”
“But your chalkboard had trout, and…”
“WE’RE OUT OF TROUT!!! DID YOU NOT HEAR ME? WE’VE GOT STEAKS AND A FEW PORK CHOPS!!!”
Sheepishly, my fictional wife orders the pork chop, and we order pork chops for the kids, as the $30, 8-ounce frozen steaks are but a bit beyond our budget.
The food was decent (being both famished as well as a little inebriated might have helped to soften the requirements of a particular palate), but the previously sublime atmosphere was darkened by the SS-like discipline that was practiced by the owner. Possibly at this point, the first seeds to growing the ultimate flowers of our eventual demise were planted….
“Wow. This place is awesome. If we owned this place, we wouldn’t be mean and shitty to our customers. We’d try to accommodate their desires, rather than verbally beating them up for expressing their desires. Gotta think that attitude would ultimately be better for business……If only we owned this place….”
To be continued......
Our group of nine – four adults and five children - was seated at a large table, hungry, anxious and eager to order; more accurately, the kids were ready to order, as the adults with the cocktails were less eager to do anything substantive beyond enjoying the moment. The adult mood was sublime, brought on more by the place than the booze, as this warm room and its immediate proximity to the mountain and the river had a wonderful affect on the best part of your psyche.
WHAM!!!
Abner’s easel/chalkboard, which contained the evening’s food offerings, slammed down next to our table for the threefold purpose of 1) abruptly/rudely getting our attention, 2) temporarily shutting up the kids and 3) letting the adults know that their brief stay in La-La Land was now over….Welcome to Abnerville!
“I’m pretty busy so I don’t have a lot of time.” (The restaurant was nearly empty.) “Our soup tonight is Ham & Veg…A...Ta…Ble.” (He said the word ‘vegetable’ not only as if it had four syllables, but as if it was four separate words.) “We have fried pork chops, fried trout or New York Strip Steak, all served with Spanish rice. We had some wonderful Cornish Game hens, but unfortunately we’re out of the game hens.” As Abner delivered the Cornish Game Hen news, his eyes rolled skyward as if an old friend had just passed. Oh….the drama.
(Again, we were at our table early, and the restaurant was empty. So I’m guessing that Jamie – Abner’s cook, plumber, landscaper and….I’ll leave it at that, prepared but one Cornish Game Hen, and Jamie and Abner had eaten it before the dinner service began.)
“Is the trout fresh from the river?” I asked.
“It’s from a river.... What do you know about fresh trout, or rivers….and why would you care where it’s from?”
“Could we ask about…?”
“MAKE YOUR CHOICES!! I’m VERY BUSY! I’ll leave you the board but be back in a minute…. FOR YOUR ORDER!!”
‘Wow, did I miss something? We’re in this guy’s place of business, ready to spend money, and he seems pissed that we’re here? How could this be?’
From grades 1 through 8, I had the honor of being educated by Nuns – real Nuns, from the 50’s and 60’s - not these new age Nuns that were all about peace, love and wearing civilian clothes. My Nuns were first and foremost about knuckle-busting, skull-rapping discipline whilst they were adorned in restrictive costumes that obviously brought them to the point of wanting to torture the rest of the world as a way of getting things on an even keel.
Abner Renta’s customer service style made me feel as if one of those All-Pro 1950 Nuns was standing at the edge of the table, not-so-gently tugging at the tender part of my upper ear, asking, no, demanding, “You don’t want the trout,…whap!... you want the fried pork chop, and if you think you don’t want the fried pork chop, …whap…put your knuckles on the table and I’ll make you wish….whap…whap…whap… you’d have ordered and enjoyed the fried pork chop.”
Seven minutes later, Mr. Renta reappears with an order pad in hand, noticeably very testy. (Had Abner been dressed like a Nun, I wouldn’t have been surprised, nor would I have found it out of character.)
“Alright, who’s ready to order???”
I decide to jump right in to the fray…
“I’ll have the New York strip steak, medium rare.”
Abner’s response…” I’ll bring it cooked, but there’s no guess as to how it will be cooked. You won’t get sick if you eat it… that’s about all I’ll guarantee. Bwa HA HA HA … (an over-the-top, hysterically theatrical laugh, unlike any you've ever heard).
“Ok, who’s next?” I say.
My fictional wife Julie steps up to the plate, and orders..”How about the trout? How’s the trout?”
“We’re out of trout. But we’ve got a few pork chops left, and a few steaks, cooked to the chefs liking…Bwa..Ha..Ha ..Ha!.”
“But your chalkboard had trout, and…”
“WE’RE OUT OF TROUT!!! DID YOU NOT HEAR ME? WE’VE GOT STEAKS AND A FEW PORK CHOPS!!!”
Sheepishly, my fictional wife orders the pork chop, and we order pork chops for the kids, as the $30, 8-ounce frozen steaks are but a bit beyond our budget.
The food was decent (being both famished as well as a little inebriated might have helped to soften the requirements of a particular palate), but the previously sublime atmosphere was darkened by the SS-like discipline that was practiced by the owner. Possibly at this point, the first seeds to growing the ultimate flowers of our eventual demise were planted….
“Wow. This place is awesome. If we owned this place, we wouldn’t be mean and shitty to our customers. We’d try to accommodate their desires, rather than verbally beating them up for expressing their desires. Gotta think that attitude would ultimately be better for business……If only we owned this place….”
To be continued......
Friday, September 16, 2011
Mr. Abner Renta....Introduction
After a slow rise, and a dramatic flourish of the arm, Mr. Renta all but exploded….
“Welcome to The Riverside! Go upstairs and pick any room you like!”
“Abner! Good to see you! It’s Roscoe Cowerd. Remember me??”
“Of course I do. Is the rest of your family with you? Have you brought your dogs? I don’t want the dogs down here.”
“No Abner, no dogs; just our friends from Kansas City and their kids.”
“Wonderful! How nice. Nice to meet you. Will you be having dinner with us tonight?”
“We wouldn’t miss it” interjected Roscoe, before I had the chance to say “Hell No!”
“What’s for dinner tonight, Abner? We’re all starved!”
“We’ve got Ham & Veg…a…ta…ble soup, Pork Chops, Trout and Strip Steak…all served with Spanish Rice.”
“That sounds great Abner. Sounds like what was on the menu the last 30 times we were here.”
“Well, yeah, I guess that’s true; we got it down pretty good. Dinner is at 6:00 O’Clock. Don’t be late! And make sure you put the bath mat on the back of the chair after you shower!”
And so went my brief introduction to Abner Renta. Not in a billion, trillion, ka-zillion years at that time would I have ever imagined that 14-years later, two days after our final Christmas feast in the family homestead that we built and in which we raised our children, my wife and I would have just driven 700 miles across an icy I-70, over a snowy Berthoud Pass, having pulled a U-Haul trailer loaded with lots of our precious stuff, to ultimately be standing in this very room giving this grimy little man a check comprised of the better part of our lives savings, in return for the honor of sitting in this lobby, greeting strangers and telling them where they would be sleeping, what they would be eating for dinner and at what time they would be eating it.
Who amongst us can at any time imagine and say what will ultimately be?
Not one of us; if we could, we would be King eternally.
Yet we can all accurately make pronouncements as to what absolutely will not be.
It’s funny how the unknown can so soundly trump the absolute.
To be continued....
“Welcome to The Riverside! Go upstairs and pick any room you like!”
“Abner! Good to see you! It’s Roscoe Cowerd. Remember me??”
“Of course I do. Is the rest of your family with you? Have you brought your dogs? I don’t want the dogs down here.”
“No Abner, no dogs; just our friends from Kansas City and their kids.”
“Wonderful! How nice. Nice to meet you. Will you be having dinner with us tonight?”
“We wouldn’t miss it” interjected Roscoe, before I had the chance to say “Hell No!”
“What’s for dinner tonight, Abner? We’re all starved!”
“We’ve got Ham & Veg…a…ta…ble soup, Pork Chops, Trout and Strip Steak…all served with Spanish Rice.”
“That sounds great Abner. Sounds like what was on the menu the last 30 times we were here.”
“Well, yeah, I guess that’s true; we got it down pretty good. Dinner is at 6:00 O’Clock. Don’t be late! And make sure you put the bath mat on the back of the chair after you shower!”
And so went my brief introduction to Abner Renta. Not in a billion, trillion, ka-zillion years at that time would I have ever imagined that 14-years later, two days after our final Christmas feast in the family homestead that we built and in which we raised our children, my wife and I would have just driven 700 miles across an icy I-70, over a snowy Berthoud Pass, having pulled a U-Haul trailer loaded with lots of our precious stuff, to ultimately be standing in this very room giving this grimy little man a check comprised of the better part of our lives savings, in return for the honor of sitting in this lobby, greeting strangers and telling them where they would be sleeping, what they would be eating for dinner and at what time they would be eating it.
Who amongst us can at any time imagine and say what will ultimately be?
Not one of us; if we could, we would be King eternally.
Yet we can all accurately make pronouncements as to what absolutely will not be.
It’s funny how the unknown can so soundly trump the absolute.
To be continued....
Monday, September 12, 2011
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…..
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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…..
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Justin Time for Dinner.........The Main Course
At our Meet & Greet, Justin was quick to offer me his wood for The Riverside. He was a young newlywed with another mouth to feed on the way, and free appetizers and decently prized booze not withstanding, he was at the HSS Chamber Meet & Greet to rustle up some new business.
It pained me to ask, but I had to. “If it’s a boy, will he be Justin Jr.?”
“We already know it’s going to be a girl. We’re thinking of naming her Precious. Get it? Precious Tiem?”
Obviously the nut had not fallen very far from the Tiem family tree.
“So what do you charge for a cord of wood, delivered and stacked?”
“Normally I get $175 a cord, but that doesn’t include stacking – I can get $200 a cord if it’s stacked. Now if you bought maybe at least 10 cords, I could deliver it and stack it for $2000. How’s that sound?” The concept of the volume discount had not yet made its way to the thin mountain air between Justin’s ears.
“Wow! That seems kinda steep. I paid maybe $150 bucks in Kansas City, delivered and stacked. Lemme think about that, Justin. That kind of cash is pretty hard for me to come up with in one chunk. What would you charge to dump some 10’-20’ logs in the backyard, and I’ll cut them down and split them myself?”
“Hmmm….I’d have to think about that for a minute. Everybody wants it cut already.”
I could see this new wrinkle to his wood business had thrown him for a bit of a loop. Justin may have been many things, but a savvy marketer wasn’t one of them. I came up with a better idea.
“How about this, Justin? You bring me a load of logs, and I’ll treat you and a guest to dinner in our restaurant, not including drinks. You gotta pay for your drinks.” (An extremely important caveat in Grand County when bartering goods and services– not on any deal would you break even if unlimited free drinks were offered in exchange for anything.)
“And every time you bring me a load of logs, you get a dinner for two.” A worst case cost for a dinner for two without alcohol, with both ordering rib-eyes and dessert, was a $60 tab, with an actual out of pocket cost to me of $20. If they ordered alcohol with dinner, that profit would help offset the $20 expense. I’d be getting loads of uncut wood for $15-$20 bucks a pop; you couldn’t beat that deal!
Justin was quick to accept, as his wife’s birthday was fast upon him, and he’d promised her a birthday feast at The Dairy Dine – The Riverside would be quite a step up on that promise. It really worked out well for both of us, as I needed wood, had limited funds to buy wood but had the nicest restaurant in town. Justin wanted a nice meal, had limited funds to buy a nice meal but had plenty of wood to deliver; kind of a Hot Sulphur Springs version of the Gift of the Magi.
The following Monday morning, I’m up early taking Lucy outside to do her morning business. There were no guests to check out and nobody checking in, and the restaurant was closed on Mondays – so it was as much of a day off as we got at The Riverside. Its 7:30 AM, cool, crisp, and I’m in my Riverside Signature flannel robe, leaning on the wood shed, watching and waiting as Lucy sniffed her way to where she ultimately wanted to be. The morning stillness is broken by the loud rattle of a rickety truck coming down the alley between our neighbor’s apartment building and Joe’s Auto Repair, which bordered the north (back) end of our property.
Enter an old, beat up, coughing, wheezing, barely running Ford Pickup truck – Google research tells me it might have been a 1965 model – rusted out with bald tires and a short bed to boot, a goofily grinning Justin Tiem at the wheel. In the back of that short bed were eight 6’ pine logs, each with a diameter of less than 8” - Tony’s free logs the summer before were 20’ long and 12” – 18” in diameter. Justin didn’t go up into the woods and lop these babies down – I think possibly he found them laying in the streets of Hot Sulphur, or in the woods of Pioneer Park….maybe even on the river bank next to our property. They were like big twigs – the stuff that you’d gather up at a city park if you were going to roast weenies.
“Here’s the first load” Justin said, proudly beaming, “Were do you want me to put the wood?”
“Uh, let’s just toss ‘em right here on the ground. They shouldn’t get in the way of anything.” I don’t think Justin picked up on the sarcasm.
“What time does the restaurant open?” Justin asked.
“We’re closed on Monday, so it’ll have to be tomorrow night if that works for you.”
“No problem, we’ll see you tomorrow. I’m coming hungry!!” Off chugged the oldest, still functioning piece of commercial wood hauling equipment in the lower 48. Possibly there were older ones in some Third World countries…..possibly.
Justin and his pregnant bride showed up promptly at opening time Tuesday night– actually early, waiting in front of the hotel for us to open up. I sat them at the corner table, the best one with the best view of the river. I treated them like royalty – Barack and Michelle would have had no less flourish from me. Of course, as expected, they both ordered appetizers, salads and the Dirty Rib-eye, plus desserts; but Justin decided to be a teetotaler that evening – no revenue-producing booze for which I could charge him, only the endless glass of free iced tea. (Perhaps he was being thoughtful of his wife, with child and probably not drinking, as he wasn’t the least bit shy about pounding down the hooch at the Meet & Greet.)
Justin and his wife had a lovely dinner – they ended up being our only customers that night. I fired up the kitchen, paid a cook and gave out two free meals for 8 logs that I could have cut, split and burned before I’d served Justin’s rib-eye. So far that ‘how could you go wrong with a deal like that?’ deal was tilted in the favor of Mr. Tiem. Within a few short days, that favorable tilt would turn to a 90o landslide of inequity; and true to form, certainly not in my favor.
Two days later I awake to find a load of ten logs, some but 3’ or 4’, and all skinny as fence rails, deposited in the back yard. 12 short hours after I’m thinking he must have deposited them in the yard, who shows up at The Riverside, this time with his mother, but Hot Sulphur’s version of Jack Haley, sans the suit of tin; two more rib-eyes with all the trappings and an endless river of iced tea refills. My good humor was starting to wear a little thin.
The following Tuesday, the third “pile” of logs is delivered by Mr. Tiem – while there were a few more logs, they were still of the same quality with regards to their length and diameter The good humor has now disappeared completely, to be replaced by a state of pure pissed-offedness; more at myself than Justin, for once again, I’d let myself fall prey to the Grand County hustle.
Justin shows up by himself that evening, and I take the opportunity to have a frank, man-to-man discussion with him about our previously agreed-to business arrangement.
“Hey Richard! How’re you doing this evening? Did you see the load I left this morning?”
“I saw a few small logs in the backyard that I hadn’t noticed being there yesterday.” I answered, somewhat icily. “Was that the ‘load’ you’re talking about?”
“Sure was – that’s why I’m here for dinner. I sure could use one of those rib-eyes. I love the way you cook those steaks.”
The attempt at flattery flew right by me, finding no purchase.
“Justin, I gotta be honest with you. Those aren’t exactly what I’d call Dirty Rib-eye logs. I’d even be stretching it to call them Chicken Spedini logs. If we served Hot Dogs here at The Riverside, those logs you brought me today would be Hot Dog logs. Get it?”
He cowered a little. “My equipment isn’t set up to bring big wood….you’ve seen my truck!”
Yes, I’ve seen your truck and I’m surprised that it would haul a case of toilet paper, I thought but didn’t say.
“But Justin, your business card says.…well…I assumed you had a real wood business…hell, you’ve even got a slogan! Are you telling me you can’t actually put the wood where I want it? ”
“I can…I have to split it to 18” lengths, deliver and stack it, one cord at a time. And for $50 a cord and a few more of those Dirty Rib-eyes, I can deliver all the wood you want….. Justin Time!”
“Still want that rib-eye, buddy… extra-well done?”
Eleven extra-well done rib-eye dinners later, and an extra few hundred bucks to boot, I had my wood for the final winter of Living Life Riverside……just in time.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Justin Time for Dinner....Second Course
The batch of wood that first Riverside summer was courtesy of our good friend, Tony the Sober Plumber. Tony and his Dad were the kind of guys that if they weren’t doing something highly physical and potentially dangerous, they may as well have been getting a pedicure. Tony had a friend who gave him access to all of the dead Lodgepole pines he wanted – all he had to do was cut them down and haul them off. That might sound easy to you flatlanders, but it involved driving a truck and trailer up a 15o incline, whacking down 100’ tall dead pine trees – TIMBERRRRR!!! – cutting off the branches, sawing the trunks into 20’ lengths weighing 1000 pounds apiece, and then the two of you man-handling them onto your trailer. After this blistering display of high elevation derring-do and Mountain Man machismo, Tony drove to the back yard of The Riverside and left us 20 of these babies, gratis. He was that kind of a guy.
Whilst we were winding down our stay in Hot Sulphur as it coincided with the demise of the Grand County economy, Tony’s ‘new construction’ plumbing business – along with all other construction related businesses – had gone straight down the toilet. Not one to sit around and feel sorry for himself, Tony bought an old diesel semi- truck and a log-hauling trailer and employed himself hauling dead pine logs out of the mountains. His summertime hobby of felling and gathering those logs for friends and neighbors was mere child’s play compared to his new winter profession. Imagine driving a semi-truck with tire chains, pulling a 40’ log trailer, up the side of a newly hewn, snowy mountain path in the middle of the freezing Colorado night. Logs loaded, he would carefully traverse his way back down the hill – foot all but always jammed on the brake, as the slightest bit of unchecked downward motion could cause the trailer to jackknife, upending both the cab and the trailer and sending it down the steep mountain side in a grisly, cacophonous pas-de-deux. Once safely down the mountain – the target time was always 4:00 AM – the real trek began, as the final destination for the load was a saw mill in Rifle, CO, 170 miles WSW of Grand County.
The quickest route that a normal person would take to Rifle from Hot Sulphur Springs during the winter was to take Highway 40 west to Kremmling, a flat, easy 17 mile track, and then head south on Highway 9 along the floor of the Blue River valley. During the fall, this 40 mile drive is as beautiful as any on Earth, with golden aspens ablaze against the jagged peaks of the Gore Range. In the winter, while still beautiful, you had better not notice the view; you’d best keep your eyes squarely on the often windy, sometimes treacherous two-lane stretch of highway. At the end of the road you will find yourself on I-70 in Dillon, CO, at which point you head west another 115 miles until you hit Rifle, CO.
That is the route I would travel, (it is the route MapQuest would suggest as well), and I would be cautious and generally white knuckled as I gently maneuvered my 2003 4-Wheel drive Chevy Suburban along the curvaceous, snow-packed lanes of Highway 9 during the winter. If you wanted to cut 30-45 minutes off of the drive, and if you had no regard for your life or limb, you would jump on the ‘trough road’ just south of Kremmling, and be deposited about 50 miles further west on I-70 in Eagle. The trough road was a mostly gravel, barely two-lane narrow road that snaked its way along the Colorado River – sometimes adjacent, sometimes 500’ above the river as it hugged the side of some of the Rockies finest granite. This was also the route that the Amtrak’s California Zephyr takes midway on its trek from Chicago to Los Angeles. (If you ever get the chance to jump the Zephyr in Denver and take the 4.5 hour trip to Glenwood Springs, CO, take it, as you’ll believe you’ve died and gone to heaven.) The drive was scary enough to be an attention-getter for tough guys in summer in a small car – to me it was an unimaginable feat in the winter while pulling a trailer loaded with 40,000 pounds of logs in the wee hours of the morning. The only possible upside to this pre-dawn journey, and I’m stretching hard here to find one, would be the lack of traffic.
The only time I took the trough road was in late spring for a brief trip to Glenwood Springs. There was still some slickness and the occasional snow and ice patch; a few points in the journey – narrow curves overlooking deadly drop-offs into the majestic Colorado River - I had to fight hard not to wet my pants from fear. On that return trip, I didn’t even for a second consider taking the road, rather, simply opting for the additional time and mileage of Highway 9.
Tony made this nail-biter twice a day, six days a week – at night, often in blinding blizzards with gale force winds.
He had some close calls and more than a few scares – once when his brakes were smoking-hot and non functional as he flew uncontrollably down a, thankfully, relatively straight stretch of road – and he was fully aware of and not enthralled with the danger he faced every night. More often than not upon his return home around 1-2 PM, dog tired from both the physical labor of maneuvering his belching diesel mammoth and the stress associated with keeping his load intact and himself alive, he would have to do one repair or another to either the truck or the trailer. You’d assume correctly that a guy that would buy a truck and do this sort of thing for a living would have the wherewithal to repair his own rig.
After trying to live a fragment of a normal family life and 4-5 hours of sleep, Tony was back up and in the truck, heading for another load of logs at 12:00 AM. He did this for $800 bucks a load. While that may sound like a lot - $4800 a week – the reality is that he spent $300 per trip on fuel and untold more on repairs; plus he had the truck payment and insurance. At the end of the deal he might clear $200 bucks a day – before taxes. Basically, Tony was risking his life, working his tail off and barely surviving. Sound familiar?
As I’ve stated previously, times are hard and living and surviving even harder in Grand County, CO.
Again, I digress…………back to Mr. Tiem, the provider of both wood and unintended mirth to the fine folks of Hot Sulphur Springs.
Whilst we were winding down our stay in Hot Sulphur as it coincided with the demise of the Grand County economy, Tony’s ‘new construction’ plumbing business – along with all other construction related businesses – had gone straight down the toilet. Not one to sit around and feel sorry for himself, Tony bought an old diesel semi- truck and a log-hauling trailer and employed himself hauling dead pine logs out of the mountains. His summertime hobby of felling and gathering those logs for friends and neighbors was mere child’s play compared to his new winter profession. Imagine driving a semi-truck with tire chains, pulling a 40’ log trailer, up the side of a newly hewn, snowy mountain path in the middle of the freezing Colorado night. Logs loaded, he would carefully traverse his way back down the hill – foot all but always jammed on the brake, as the slightest bit of unchecked downward motion could cause the trailer to jackknife, upending both the cab and the trailer and sending it down the steep mountain side in a grisly, cacophonous pas-de-deux. Once safely down the mountain – the target time was always 4:00 AM – the real trek began, as the final destination for the load was a saw mill in Rifle, CO, 170 miles WSW of Grand County.
The quickest route that a normal person would take to Rifle from Hot Sulphur Springs during the winter was to take Highway 40 west to Kremmling, a flat, easy 17 mile track, and then head south on Highway 9 along the floor of the Blue River valley. During the fall, this 40 mile drive is as beautiful as any on Earth, with golden aspens ablaze against the jagged peaks of the Gore Range. In the winter, while still beautiful, you had better not notice the view; you’d best keep your eyes squarely on the often windy, sometimes treacherous two-lane stretch of highway. At the end of the road you will find yourself on I-70 in Dillon, CO, at which point you head west another 115 miles until you hit Rifle, CO.
That is the route I would travel, (it is the route MapQuest would suggest as well), and I would be cautious and generally white knuckled as I gently maneuvered my 2003 4-Wheel drive Chevy Suburban along the curvaceous, snow-packed lanes of Highway 9 during the winter. If you wanted to cut 30-45 minutes off of the drive, and if you had no regard for your life or limb, you would jump on the ‘trough road’ just south of Kremmling, and be deposited about 50 miles further west on I-70 in Eagle. The trough road was a mostly gravel, barely two-lane narrow road that snaked its way along the Colorado River – sometimes adjacent, sometimes 500’ above the river as it hugged the side of some of the Rockies finest granite. This was also the route that the Amtrak’s California Zephyr takes midway on its trek from Chicago to Los Angeles. (If you ever get the chance to jump the Zephyr in Denver and take the 4.5 hour trip to Glenwood Springs, CO, take it, as you’ll believe you’ve died and gone to heaven.) The drive was scary enough to be an attention-getter for tough guys in summer in a small car – to me it was an unimaginable feat in the winter while pulling a trailer loaded with 40,000 pounds of logs in the wee hours of the morning. The only possible upside to this pre-dawn journey, and I’m stretching hard here to find one, would be the lack of traffic.
The only time I took the trough road was in late spring for a brief trip to Glenwood Springs. There was still some slickness and the occasional snow and ice patch; a few points in the journey – narrow curves overlooking deadly drop-offs into the majestic Colorado River - I had to fight hard not to wet my pants from fear. On that return trip, I didn’t even for a second consider taking the road, rather, simply opting for the additional time and mileage of Highway 9.
Tony made this nail-biter twice a day, six days a week – at night, often in blinding blizzards with gale force winds.
He had some close calls and more than a few scares – once when his brakes were smoking-hot and non functional as he flew uncontrollably down a, thankfully, relatively straight stretch of road – and he was fully aware of and not enthralled with the danger he faced every night. More often than not upon his return home around 1-2 PM, dog tired from both the physical labor of maneuvering his belching diesel mammoth and the stress associated with keeping his load intact and himself alive, he would have to do one repair or another to either the truck or the trailer. You’d assume correctly that a guy that would buy a truck and do this sort of thing for a living would have the wherewithal to repair his own rig.
After trying to live a fragment of a normal family life and 4-5 hours of sleep, Tony was back up and in the truck, heading for another load of logs at 12:00 AM. He did this for $800 bucks a load. While that may sound like a lot - $4800 a week – the reality is that he spent $300 per trip on fuel and untold more on repairs; plus he had the truck payment and insurance. At the end of the deal he might clear $200 bucks a day – before taxes. Basically, Tony was risking his life, working his tail off and barely surviving. Sound familiar?
As I’ve stated previously, times are hard and living and surviving even harder in Grand County, CO.
Again, I digress…………back to Mr. Tiem, the provider of both wood and unintended mirth to the fine folks of Hot Sulphur Springs.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Justin Time for Dinner
Early in the summer of 2009, The Riverside hosted the inaugural Hot Sulphur Springs Chamber of Commerce Meet & Greet. In a town of 400 people, obviously there were very few businesses, and perhaps the need even questionable for a Chamber of Commerce – two motels on Highway 40, the hot springs resort, two small diners (The Glory Hole and The Depot), the seasonally-open Dairy Dine, The Barking Dog Pub, a gas station/convenience store, a liquor store/video rental/fishing tackle/Laundromat, a mortuary and The Historic Riverside Hotel, Restaurant & Bar. Hot Sulphur Springs is also the county seat for the county of Grand, ergo; you had the courthouse, drivers’ license bureau, County Treasurer, Appraisers office, Building Department and the crown jewel of the public trust– the Grand County Jail, otherwise known as the DUI Hilton.
None of the aforementioned businesses were represented at the HSS Chamber Meet & Greet, with the obvious exception of yours’ truly. In place of the real brick and mortar town businesses were friends and neighbors who had small businesses on the side – Amway, Avon, Pampered Chef and Aveda sellers, four certified ‘life coaches’ and an income tax service, to name but a few. Mostly, it was a good excuse to get together and eat appetizers that we had prepared and belly up to the usually ‘not open to the locals’ bar at The Riverside; the appetizers were free, but the booze wasn’t.
One interesting thing about the get together that I noticed immediately – I’d never before seen any of these people frequent The Riverside as paying customers. A few I’d recognized from seeing them at the post office – located across the street from the hotel – but otherwise none of them had dined with us in our restaurant; you know, that room overlooking the river where we were trying to earn our living. This speaks to one of my major miscalculations when I was projecting revenue for our business venture; I’d made the incorrect assumption that locals would dine in our restaurant – nada, it didn’t happen.
One of the strangers that I met that evening was a tall, pleasant young man named Justin Tiem (pronounced ‘Time’). That’s right. Twenty-five years ago Mr. & Mrs. Tiem had a baby boy, and decided to make him the poster child for peer abuse, sending him out into the cruel world to be the eternal butt of one bad joke after the next. Really, what were they thinking? Justin was pretty good natured about it, even using the misspelling in the title of his business: his business card read:
JUST-IN TIME WOOD SERVICE, Justin Tiem, Owner. His mission statement, or motto, was “I’ll Put the Wood Wherever You Like!”
There was also a man who lived in our town with parents that named him Dick Johnson. Those long Grand County winters can have a crooked effect on the minds of its citizens.
In the land of eternal winter, the need for a steady source of firewood was profound. This profound need was ratcheted way up at The Riverside, as the two main rooms in the hotel had no source of heat – gas, electric, forced air or otherwise – other than two small fireplaces with non-functional heat-o-laters (blowers to disperse the heat). It wasn’t unusual to get up first thing of a frigid morning and find the inside temperature of the lobby to be hovering in the high 30’s. On killer cold nights I might leave an electric heater blowing, always weighing the notion of frozen pipes vs. the potential fire hazard; but then, I had insurance.
More often than not, the late nighters at the hotel would have expended all of the wood that was brought in throughout the day and night – that would generally be the reason people actually went to bed; no firewood, getting damn cold in here and way too damn cold to go outside and get anymore wood. Oh, and we’re out of beer. Most all of my days started with a trip through the bar, and out the backdoor to the woodshed – in a biting, dry cold that stung any exposed skin or appendage with the fury of a hundred angry wasps. It was the norm for early morning first light temperatures, December through February, on clear mornings to average -20oF.
The wood shed was roughly 10’wide and 14’ long with 7’ of clear headspace – that’s roughly 1000 cubic feet, which will house about 9 cords of wood. We filled that space to the brim both winters we owned The Riverside, with an additional cord or two stacked outside under a tarp. We used the outside wood first as the eventual snowfalls would make anything outside positively unattainable without the aid of a backhoe – I didn’t have one of those. All the wood stacked to the gills of that shed in late October was a little like a big paycheck – sitting full in the bank on day one, it seemed like a lot and looked like it was more than you could spend; come mid February, that wood, like the paycheck, dwindled down to pennies in your account, and you wondered how you were going to get to the next payday (spring and warm weather, in our case) intact.
Here’s one other little thing about that wood. It wasn’t the oak and hickory hardwoods of my Midwestern life experience; the kind that was a dense, heavy, slow-burning wood, generating hotter heat and prolific glowing coals. It was pine – dead pine, from the dead pine trees that dominated the Grand County landscape, courtesy of the dreaded pine beetle. Vast expanses of forests that were for centuries Christmas green from the curtain of a million Evergreens, Blue Spruces and Ponderosa, Pinion and Lodgepole Pines, were now dominated by the deathly ashen brown pallor of these heretofore regal Emerald titans.
There is good and bad associated with dead pine wood. The good is that it’s relatively easy to split, and Chef Danny, one of his buddies and I, chain-sawed into 18” lengths and split every stick of that firewood with a splitting maul – thousands of pieces of firewood, cut, split and stacked. That would have been an impossible feat for this fat old man were we dealing with hardwood and next to impossible for the youngsters. The bad news is that the easy to cut and split dead pine wood burned faster than a gasoline-soaked firecracker fuse. You would stoke a hot fire with three or four stout logs, and within 15 minutes, it would be as if you’d stoked the fire with heavy air – where in the hell did it go? On an average night, with guests in the hotel and hanging around the lobby, you could easily burn 40-50 logs in a 5 hour period. On a night when there weren’t guests in the hotel, in an attempt to conserve our wood resources, we kept the fire low, dressed in our warmest sweaters and froze our asses off. The others at the hotel cursed me on those nights, low and under their frigid, visible breath, as I was the keeper of the wood.
But I digress….back to our friend Justin.
To be continued......
None of the aforementioned businesses were represented at the HSS Chamber Meet & Greet, with the obvious exception of yours’ truly. In place of the real brick and mortar town businesses were friends and neighbors who had small businesses on the side – Amway, Avon, Pampered Chef and Aveda sellers, four certified ‘life coaches’ and an income tax service, to name but a few. Mostly, it was a good excuse to get together and eat appetizers that we had prepared and belly up to the usually ‘not open to the locals’ bar at The Riverside; the appetizers were free, but the booze wasn’t.
One interesting thing about the get together that I noticed immediately – I’d never before seen any of these people frequent The Riverside as paying customers. A few I’d recognized from seeing them at the post office – located across the street from the hotel – but otherwise none of them had dined with us in our restaurant; you know, that room overlooking the river where we were trying to earn our living. This speaks to one of my major miscalculations when I was projecting revenue for our business venture; I’d made the incorrect assumption that locals would dine in our restaurant – nada, it didn’t happen.
One of the strangers that I met that evening was a tall, pleasant young man named Justin Tiem (pronounced ‘Time’). That’s right. Twenty-five years ago Mr. & Mrs. Tiem had a baby boy, and decided to make him the poster child for peer abuse, sending him out into the cruel world to be the eternal butt of one bad joke after the next. Really, what were they thinking? Justin was pretty good natured about it, even using the misspelling in the title of his business: his business card read:
JUST-IN TIME WOOD SERVICE, Justin Tiem, Owner. His mission statement, or motto, was “I’ll Put the Wood Wherever You Like!”
There was also a man who lived in our town with parents that named him Dick Johnson. Those long Grand County winters can have a crooked effect on the minds of its citizens.
In the land of eternal winter, the need for a steady source of firewood was profound. This profound need was ratcheted way up at The Riverside, as the two main rooms in the hotel had no source of heat – gas, electric, forced air or otherwise – other than two small fireplaces with non-functional heat-o-laters (blowers to disperse the heat). It wasn’t unusual to get up first thing of a frigid morning and find the inside temperature of the lobby to be hovering in the high 30’s. On killer cold nights I might leave an electric heater blowing, always weighing the notion of frozen pipes vs. the potential fire hazard; but then, I had insurance.
More often than not, the late nighters at the hotel would have expended all of the wood that was brought in throughout the day and night – that would generally be the reason people actually went to bed; no firewood, getting damn cold in here and way too damn cold to go outside and get anymore wood. Oh, and we’re out of beer. Most all of my days started with a trip through the bar, and out the backdoor to the woodshed – in a biting, dry cold that stung any exposed skin or appendage with the fury of a hundred angry wasps. It was the norm for early morning first light temperatures, December through February, on clear mornings to average -20oF.
The wood shed was roughly 10’wide and 14’ long with 7’ of clear headspace – that’s roughly 1000 cubic feet, which will house about 9 cords of wood. We filled that space to the brim both winters we owned The Riverside, with an additional cord or two stacked outside under a tarp. We used the outside wood first as the eventual snowfalls would make anything outside positively unattainable without the aid of a backhoe – I didn’t have one of those. All the wood stacked to the gills of that shed in late October was a little like a big paycheck – sitting full in the bank on day one, it seemed like a lot and looked like it was more than you could spend; come mid February, that wood, like the paycheck, dwindled down to pennies in your account, and you wondered how you were going to get to the next payday (spring and warm weather, in our case) intact.
Here’s one other little thing about that wood. It wasn’t the oak and hickory hardwoods of my Midwestern life experience; the kind that was a dense, heavy, slow-burning wood, generating hotter heat and prolific glowing coals. It was pine – dead pine, from the dead pine trees that dominated the Grand County landscape, courtesy of the dreaded pine beetle. Vast expanses of forests that were for centuries Christmas green from the curtain of a million Evergreens, Blue Spruces and Ponderosa, Pinion and Lodgepole Pines, were now dominated by the deathly ashen brown pallor of these heretofore regal Emerald titans.
There is good and bad associated with dead pine wood. The good is that it’s relatively easy to split, and Chef Danny, one of his buddies and I, chain-sawed into 18” lengths and split every stick of that firewood with a splitting maul – thousands of pieces of firewood, cut, split and stacked. That would have been an impossible feat for this fat old man were we dealing with hardwood and next to impossible for the youngsters. The bad news is that the easy to cut and split dead pine wood burned faster than a gasoline-soaked firecracker fuse. You would stoke a hot fire with three or four stout logs, and within 15 minutes, it would be as if you’d stoked the fire with heavy air – where in the hell did it go? On an average night, with guests in the hotel and hanging around the lobby, you could easily burn 40-50 logs in a 5 hour period. On a night when there weren’t guests in the hotel, in an attempt to conserve our wood resources, we kept the fire low, dressed in our warmest sweaters and froze our asses off. The others at the hotel cursed me on those nights, low and under their frigid, visible breath, as I was the keeper of the wood.
But I digress….back to our friend Justin.
To be continued......
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