We had been together for ten years. Ten really good years. We met in Oregon, and she stuck with me through a move to near-Portland, a move to New York, moves all around the Northeast, to Nashville, and then near her girlhood home in Colorado.
From My Elusive Dreams ©1967 Billy Sherrill and Curly Putman. Used under Fair Use.
IBM laid me off from my job in Longmont, Colorado. A day or two later, her boss called and said, “We need you in Portland.”
I said, “I’m not going to Portland.” And just like that, we were exes.
Within a six month period, I had lost my health, my beloved Jeep, my job and my woman. It added up to 250 points on the Holmes Stress Scale. I was going to need to take very good care of myself over the next two or three years.
I would be eligible for early Social Security in a month. We had already untangled our financial matters when the Jeep got totaled. There were no possessions to fight over: we had given away most of the household items when we moved into the motorhome, and the rest was in storage.
I had no immediate prospects for work on the east side of Colorado. I decided I would retire, and go pan for gold in South Park for a while.
I’d been driving a Ford Expedition since losing the Jeep. You cannot tow that vehicle; you must trailer it — and the weight of an Expedition on a trailer exceeds the towing weight limit of my motorhome. So I picked my hide-out, the Middle Fork RV Park in Fairplay, and drove the Expedition up there and parked it with the intention of driving the motorhome up there in a couple of days. I have written of this RV park before:
Panning for gold
In many previous posts, I have spoken of passing through South Park on my way to somewhere else. To me, that’s all it was. Remember that in Colorado, a “park” is a large flat high-elevation area that is surrounded by mountains. Colorado has many; for example, Estes Park, Woodland Park, Taylor Park, etc. South Park is Colorado’s largest park. It is fa…
From there, we drove back to Loveland in her car. Like Supertramp, we took the long way home.
She wanted to see Rocky Mountain National Park one last time. So from Fairplay we drove north on SR 9 to Granby, then over Trail Ridge Road through RMNP. We stopped at the 12,000-foot level where I took this shot of Trail Ridge Road and Longs Peak:
It was the only shot I took that day. Neither one of us has ever seen this place since. This is a special, special shot for me.
She packed all of her things in her new car, and headed north two days later. Pookie and I headed south in the motorhome the same day that she left.
And thus began my five years of roaming the American West in my motorhome with a cat and a camera. Everything in this Substack up to this point has been a prelude. From the next post on, is what this Substack is really all about.
Epilogue
Here is the original processing I did of the above photo:
Here is what I was thinking at the time: The strength of the photo is the road’s S-curve, which leads the eye right to Longs Peak, which is the one that looks like the top of a pilgrim’s hat. Those elements were what I wanted to emphasize, and when you want to emphasize lines, one way to do it is to take the color out of the image. So I played around with different digital darkroom effects and chose this one, which resembles a charcoal drawing.
I think I might still like it better.
WOW! Like the picture, I love where this is going. Powerful stuff, Ken.