Whistling along the Colorado River, Part 2
Including a less-than-monumental experience at the border
Reference material:
I wound up spending three nights in Grand Junction, Super Bowl Sunday being the last. (I was rooting for Cincinnati on principle, that principle being that any city too small to deserve a pro football team anymore should win as many championships as possible, Green Bay and Buffalo excluded.)
I often judge a city or town I visit by the quality of the running there—even more so than most runners do, I suspect, perhaps because I could far more easily relocate to almost any part of the country within a few weeks of deciding to do so, and invariably find myself imagining being a resident of any city hosting a motel or hotel in which I am staying. Grand Junction would, in my judgment, be a suitable city for a runner with modest or even unusual outdoor needs to operate in. What I saw of residential grid has wide and accommodating sidewalks alongside long, neatly groomed streets almost impossible to speed on. It seems quiet, and people don’t mind your business.
Maybe I’m just not picky, at least now that my primary criterion for assessing the quality of a running route or environment is how many dynamic distractions it has for an ears-up, snout-forward dog, visualized or fancied.
But on Monday morning, we left Gee Jay and headed west on I-70 into Utah, diverging from the course of the Colorado River in the process. I was en route to Cortez, Colorado via Moab, a place in Utah I had long wanted to see. The quickest route runs west and then southeast to skirt Arches National Park, while the Colorado flows southwest to and through Moab more directly.
Moab, I believe, represents the lowest elevation point I have experienced so far on this trip, which began at 5,286’ above sea level: Around 4,096’.
From Moab, the Colorado River continues its southwestern course toward Arizona, whereas US-191 heads south and closely tracks the Utah-Colorado border.
The Colorado River, thanks in large part to its having carved out some impressive channels though deep rock formations, plays a significant role in U.S. culture. Almost every American adult has heard of the Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam, even if only a small percentage could name the 1,450-mile-long river responsible for these and other features and constructs.
It is only an hour’s drive from Moab to the town of Monticello, where we headed east on US-491 toward Colorado. Somehow, we gained around 3,000’ of elevation in this leg of the trip, which still has an unplanned final leg. I would have guessed it was, on balance, close to flat, maybe because the entire time I could see large mountains rising to the west. Or because of the grandeur of the scenery the drive—plus a stop— provided overall.
I had decided the night before for no special reason to spend Monday night in Cortez, population ~8,000, elevation 6,200’. We wound up spending two nights there, largely on the strength of a single large park north of the modest east-west downtown strip, Parque de Vida. This one has a paved path around the perimeter, occupied by enough rambunctious geese to keep Rosie interested between glances at other perambulating dog-human pairs. There is a wonderful view of the La Plata Mountains to the east. From where I am now, I’ll be able to see that range from the eastern side if the skies are clear Thursday morning.
Overall, though, it struck me as kind of a grim place compared to Grand Junction.
My total amount of running has been less than usual on this trip, for the simple reason that I usually run more than Rosie does, and that’s not much of an option when it’s just the two of us on the road. I can leave her in the house without her panicking, but if I were to leave her alone in a motel room, which I would never do anyway, she’d be crying and barking within fifteen seconds of the room door closing. I could leave her in the car for an hour and she’d just sleep, but I’m not presently that desperate for mileage. Rosie will be eight in less than a month, and while she has plenty of spring left in her get-along, she seems to flag or lose interest after twenty or so minutes if we’re just cruising city streets or animal-free scrub trails.
On the other hand, my Garmin data tells me I’m getting in over a hundred minutes a day of walking plus running on this trip, which means we both are.
On Wednesday morning, I booked a room in Durango, 38 miles from Cortez. But I decided to take a circuitous route so that I could visit the Four Corners Monument at the mutual point border of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Since learning of this spot when I was no more than five or six years old, I have periodically conceived of it as a secondary bucket-list item—a place I’d visit if it became convenient enough. My impromptu road trip had now offered that level of convenience.
This decision meant driving southwest on US-160 into New Mexico, then turning right (northwest) a half-mile later and continuing along a bumpy road for three-quarters of a mile to a parking lot. And a toll booth. I hadn’t realized before getting here that there was a $5 charge, and that the monument is operated by Navajo people.
That strikes me as weird. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the U.S. Government decided to add this land to its burgeoning, westward-bleeding empire, and thanks to the way it divided up that land into states, a quirk of geography unique to the nation called the four corners was created. Then, it seems, the U.S. Government decided at some point to let the Navajo earn chump change by giving them control over the immediate four corners property. That the Navajo have no use for these boundary lines and cannot be expected to revere or even respect their crossing is not so much ironic as a kick in the face, a judgment easily rendered without any trendy bellowing about white-colonialist fucknuts and their fucknut-supremacist land thievery.
Perhaps this is part of why my brief visit to the Four Corners was so unpleasant. After the gate attendant swiped my credit card, I parked the douchewagon next to one of the other four or five vehicles in the visitor lot. The actual boundary marker is in the center of a circular concourse maybe 40 meters in diameter. Dogs are banned from the concourse, as are skateboards and motorcycles. Bear in mind that no one, no one at all, at all lives within two thousand miles of the monument. But that signage probably wouldn’t be there if some dipshit hadn’t decided her needed to bag four states at once on a Harley-Davidson slewing around the money spot in a slow, noisy circle, probably leaving a skidmark on the concourse to mark its fetid passage. This idea struck me as funny.
I didn’t get fifty feet from my car before a woman, maybe the same one who had swiped my credit card, appeared in my field of view and demanded that I out a mask on.
“Out here?” I asked with a winsome smile, even though her scowl told me the answer and with my grin saying Oh not you too you ignorant fucking idiot and control freak. Anyone who still thinks she can catch covid outdoors, especially with a strong mountain breeze blowing her words almost beyond hearing range even at a distance of six feet, has none of my pity and all the scorn I can muster. I refuse to join the cable-news-and-Twitter-addicted U.S. information underclass in its obscene fever dream.
I had just noticed that the open space beside the parking area looked like a small dump site, with what looked like a couple of old hot-dog carts rusting away there. The place had the feel of a degraded camp site that was technically communal but really more of a “look but don’t touch” zone. So, I didn’t feel bad about cutting my visit short and heading back to the car. I had a mask in my pocket, but fuck this bitch and her imperious nonsense. Did I mention where we were?
I did get a few quick photos. And as far as I’m concerned, I Officially Reached The Corner.
When we regained US-160, it was only a half-mile or so southwest until we penetrated Arizona. Then, less than ten miles later, we swung east onto US-64 and were soon back in New Mexico. Not the prettiest or most prosperous part. When we drove through Shiprock, I was depressed by the number of loose dogs I saw running around, even across shopping-center parking lots. I could see a startling number of discarded liquor bottles in the trash-filled ditches on either side of the road. Poverty isn’t frightening; it’s depressing, whether it’s you, a friend, or merely in the air, kept on partly at bay by a rolling glass-and-metal cage.
After reaching Farmington, a city in which I spent a month in the late fall of 2001, we swung north and served as the pacesetter for another old-school MINI Cooper all the way into Colorado and practically to Durango. It was snowing when we arrived, but for once I enjoyed driving today.
I have read two and a half books during this trip, though I am not sure when. Mostly newer Stephen King stuff.
What now passes for the real, “outside” world seeps into my head as much as it ever does, mostly because for now I have a television on much of the time I am stationary. I just saw a drug commercial referring to “people assigned female at birth,” further evidence that society is allowing itself to be gaslit by a small minority of mentally troubled people whose otherwise quixotic quests have been mainstreamed by gobs and gobs of cash from Woke, chuckling billionaires to whom major societal squabbles are no more than a Netflix series. Bryan Cranston is the latest celeb to perform the funky “white privilege” chicken. And Nikki Hiltz has added another plaintive, falsehood-driven post to the Instagram pantheon, ignoring the fact that all kids are welcome to participate on sports teams in accordance with their sex, even if something in their psyche rejects the reality of that sex and the implications of that non-fungible quality to others with whom they interact. (Some of the anti-“critical theory” bills crafted by legislators and targeting American classrooms lately are in fact really bad, as they trespass freely into censorship. But it’s hard for even competent policymakers to respond nobly to the onslaught of Wokish madness, and competent people are in very short supply in U.S. state legislatures.)
More foreboding than any of this is PayPal’s recent decision to make it impossible to view your running account balance, a feature the company had already made more cumbersome to access last year. That such a longstanding given in online banking (including e-wallets) is being unpretentiously eliminated seems certain to herald a new era of even more hidden fees being implemented financial-industry-wide and their incremental individual impact being widely unnoticed by millions of consumers.
On the bright side, America’s collective trust in its elected officials and journalists has never been lower. But if that’s the case, why do so many people keep repeating what the media reliably passes on to them directly from the government, however self-contradictory and farcical on their face these stories become?
Sometime on Thursday, I am leaving Durango and heading east, but that’s all I know. I am starting to miss my Kurzweil PC-361, but being deprived of my music keyboard leads me to take fewer breaks from the one with letters and other symbols on the keys. Hence, these dispatches, plus whatever else I can get done in the hope of passing the time more cheerfully.
A final note: After publicly flogging myself—on Valentine’s Day, no less—for making easily avoided mistakes, especially when discussing historical running facts, I left you all an Easter Egg fuckup on purpose, just to see if anyone would notice it and respond. Toward the bottom of the piece, I referred to Eamonn Coghlan’s nickname as “Master of the Boards,” which almost doesn’t make sense. I don’t know how many people noticed it, but only one person pointed it out, and with all the pouncing, exulting glee I would expect of the typical rapscallion who signs up to receive these posts.
Well done, but only by one overcaffeinated bonehead. That “error” has been quietly corrected, but no others have.
