glenwood springs

The Chool Bus (ch8)

Chapter 8: The Forks prepare for a long swing through the western states. Professor T. ponders a vivid dream and Abigail Weiser takes advantage of his unsuspecting nature.

Mork T.’s eyes popped open around midnight. He hadn’t felt this giddy since The Forks’ early days. That is, before the charms of his grunge-metal song & dance routine began to wear thin. After an obligatory visit to the toilet, he would try to get right back to sleep as tomorrow would be a long day of travel along familiar highways. Sometimes however, the call of nature sings subtilly, not loud enough to force an immediate nocturnal trip to the commode, but just enough to invoke that foggy state of consciousness where textures, moving objects, interactions, and colors are vivid as ever, with the waking mind also present enough to recognize the dream state and, depending on the desirability of the images, works to keep the dream state going. In this straddled state, Mork T. witnessed a stunning tapestry of swirling figures, all moving in color-streaked spirals around his awareness. A hurricane of sensation where the locus of observation was like an aircraft in the eye of a category 5 storm. He saw artifacts of human progress and scientific inquiry. He saw the icons of religious tradition, spires of great cathedrals, microscopes, holy books, high-tech weapons, bottles of communion wine, communication satellites, pipe organs, advanced medical imaging machines, and gilded pulpits swirling around him in an ever expanding spiral. And just as Professor T.’s awareness worked for a finer focus at these swirling shapes, the dream state evaporated like so much morning fog. As he reached for the flush handle, he tried to focus his bearing toward slipping back into a cozy position in bed in order to get right back to sleep. Before pulling the covers and placing a pillow between his knees, he made a mental note to take up the dream impressions for later ponderings.

And now, in the department office, taking care of final details, Abigail Wiser, long-time office administrative manager, approached Professor T. with Buck Wellstone’s application paperwork. Just a couple more signatures, and the process would be complete. She approached him with a Mona Lisa smile. Had Mork T. been a bit more aware of his surroundings he would have noticed Abigail was dressed somewhat more provocatively than is her normal workday routine. She knew the rest of The Forks and Buck Wellstone were to meet in the office at noon. They would grab a lunch in the university cafeteria one last time before boarding the Chool Bus and striking west for Salt Lake City by way of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Abigail was hovering a bit closer to Professor T. than he was comfortable with, but he thought nothing of this since he believed their relationship had settled into a strictly professional mode years ago. Little did he know, but Ms Wiser was setting him up to be caught by his traveling companions in the act of misconduct clearly prohibited by the policies of Title IX.

As Billie, Jack, and Buck entered the closed door of Professor T.’s office, what they witnessed would be very hard to interpret as purely innocent.

She tripped, fell against him, he caught her, hands around her waist and just as the Forks were entering the room, Abigaile struggled against Professor T.’s hold as if to escape an unwanted groping. As the Forks stood there, jaws agape, Professor T. tried to maintain a dignified countenance, but Abigaile played her part with great panache. “This isn’t what it looks like,” said Professor T. looking wide-eyed at his companions.

“Have a great trip,” said Abigaile with a cold sneer as she elbowed her way out of the office.

After an awkward, silent beat, “well… who’s hungry,” Jack enthusiastically inquired, eager to get past the chilly silence?

“Right… shall we,” Professor T. gestured toward the open door, leading the gang toward the cafeteria?

It was a perfect day for a road trip, and as Billie steered the Chool Bus into Silverthorn Colorado. Evening was approaching, it was time to pull over for some rest before pushing on to Salt Lake City where their next focus group interviews would be conducted on the campus of the University of Utah.

In a quiet reverie, with the hypnotizing sound of rubber to the road, Professor T. recalled images experienced in the early morning hours of this day. It seemed as if his unconscious was sending him messages related to the research The Forks were conducting. For most of his adult life, Professor T. would be dismayed at the behavior of his fellow Kanoradians. Staunchly conservative in rural areas, and moderately progressive in the population centers. Even so, there was much in the way of rancorous discontent between neighbors, even family. Some folks driven to the point of insisting the only solution to this stubborn culture clash would be a rematch of the Civil War. And with the rise of Social Media’s dominance of the Internet, these divides grew worse with each passing year. Professor T. dubbed this the “fibrillating heart of our divided nation” and he hoped this research project would help people see a way out of this corrosive state of affairs. Professor T. wished citizens would find a way to promote a willing detente between neighbors who have different ways of seeing the world. And so, the image of a swirling vortex of science and religion icons spinning around as if both attracted and repelled simultaneously held some hinting charm in his mind.

Then the memory of Abigail Weiser, someone with whom he had years of shared professional experience, inexplicably forcing a close unwelcome physical encounter within eyeshot of witnesses had him puzzled. He knew she had crushed on him many years ago, but believed she had grown to accept the fact that he was not open to that kind of relationship, especially with co-workers. The encounter caused no great consternation and so his thoughts drifted back to the research project.

The sound of Sam Jackson berating Billie for missing a turn in Silverthorn broke Professor T.’s reverie. Jack and Buck were finishing a chess match when Billie pulled the Chool Bus into the RV park where the gang would rest for the night.

“Check,” cried Jack with an almost surprised tone? Buck took a moment to confirm, but sure enough, “I think it’s mate,” he mumbled. “Well played,” Buck congratulated his new colleague for an interesting match.

Next Week:
Professor T. ponders mental residue of the previous evening’s dream and the newly expanded Forks make sightseeing plans before resuming research interviews.

GO BACK => (Preface & Chapter links)

HSoB: Notes From the Road (pt1)

(A single spotlight hits an avatar, RONNIE HAYS, mid-60s, holding a worn acoustic guitar. He doesn’t play it. He just holds it like a shield or a piece of driftwood. He stares out, not at the audience, but through them.)

My pinkie toes. That’s what i remember about New Mexico. Not the Flagstaff sky, which was a shade of blue so deep i could’ve drifted upward into it forever. Not the train… a glorious old steam-belching dragon chuffing its way toward the biggest ditch on planet Earth. Nope… i remember my pinkie toes, both of them, singing soprano arias of pure, unadulterated pain inside a pair of waffle stompers that were just a whisper too narrow in the front. A purchasing error. A metaphor. I was trying to rise above the heat and the soul-choking smog of Albuquerque, to summit the Embudito Canyon Loop, but i was grounded by a millimeter of poor planning. C’est la. I turned back halfway up, defeated by footwear, then pointed Rocinante toward Georgia O’Keeffe’s ghost in Taos.

And like all of those “best laid plans”… a perfect day, ruined, setting me off on another journey altogether. You get those, sometimes. A gift. A trick. I was at Lake Wilson, back in Kansas. A limestone bowl of water so almost clear, like a dusty mirror on a rocky prairie. Not a breath of wind. The kind of day that makes you think the whole grand, chaotic carnival might just work out. And then the phone rang… a branch of the family tree just… fell to the grass… just like that… gone. The universe had provided a perfect day, and then, the bill. The HSoB tour was born right there, in the silence between the ringing and the news… an extended Bardo in motion.

And then, as if waking to a disjointed lucid dream, Cannery Row. Walking through the ghosts of Steinbeck’s worlds, smelling the salt and the history… beautiful. Then from the hand-held dream portal, i saw some new AI-generated video… something someone made with a sentence prompt. And soulless cartoon pop-stars with autotune larynxes, hitting all the right pitches on demand. Was this a dream, or were we building a world without flaws, without the shaky notes, without the happy accidents? A world of deus ex machina? A perfect, yet unrealized machine partnership? A place where my screaming pinkie toes would seem out of place.

What can we do? Here in the real(?) world… after the 2024 election, when the tectonic plates groaned and shifted rightward… a slow-motion drift that picked up steam with Bubba’s saxophone… and then poor Uncle Joe took to the debate stage like he was trying to remember where he’d left his tennis ball tipped walker… what do we do? I decided. I would be an anonymous troubadour… like Kwai-Chang Kane with a song list instead of Kung Fu. At worst, i’d languish in utter obscurity, singing to light posts and fire hydrants. At best, i’d become a gadfly on the rear end of a naked emperor’s pony. A tiny, buzzing annoyance for the forces of indecency.

Then came winter. The bomb cyclones and blizzards hammering the interior, but where was the Anonymous Troubadour? South Florida. All of January, February, half of March. I became a connoisseur of the Everglades, that “River of Grass.” Alligators sunning themselves like lazy, armored gods. The quiet hum of a billion insects. It was a primordial peace. Meanwhile, the forces of chaos were perfecting the art of “flooding the media zone.” A new outrage every hour, a new tweet to send half the country into a fit of cheering and the other half into a spiral of despair. The gasping death of democracy, playing out on a 6-inch screen with real life, ancient and unbothered, oozing by in a Florida swamp.

Then, Springtime in Foley, Alabama. A land of asphalt and every consumer convenience this roving malcontent could desire. Wide parking spaces. Good Wi-Fi. I almost stayed. But Mother Nature was cooking up her own brand of chaos. Springtime tornadoes, spinning up like God’s own potter’s wheel. I grew up believing this was a Kansas/Oklahoma thing. Now they were chasing me through the coastal South, as if to say, “You can’t escape the whirlwind, son. Not even here.”

On the way, i met a guy in a Louisiana dive bar who told me about Amos Moses, a local swamp-dweller who could allegedly dance with gators and heal the sick. A regular Cajun Jesus Christ. The New Apostolic Reformation had nothing on this guy. And while we were swapping local myths, the big, global myths were playing out in blood. The Holy Land, a place that’s anything but. Civilian casualties, famine, talk of ethnic cleansing and genocide. No easy answers, just the hard, cold reality of bellicose leaders discarding compassion like a soiled napkin. Even Israeli Jews were in the streets, screaming against their own government’s handling of the tragedy.

We find our bliss where we can. A perfect song, a mineral bath. Oh, Sweet Golly Miss Molly, the mineral baths. Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Hot Springs, South Dakota. Sinking into that sulfur-scented heat, you understand that this isn’t indulgence; it’s healthcare. It’s sanity. Ancient Romans knew it. I was just catching up. And while i was soaking, trying to dissolve the knots in my soul, the ticker tape of modern U.S.A. life scrolled on. In the year of our lord, 2025, there would be over 300 mass shootings. Over 300 little holes punched in the fabric of the country, one for every day, it was getting harder to feel whole. A perfect day… then the bill. Maybe i should avoid consuming news for a while.

Turn the page, and the Appalachians… the rolling hills of the Virginias and Carolinas were beautiful and suffocating. But towns like Boone and Morgantown were so peak-and-holler infested, driving through them was like being on a roller coaster you can’t disembark. It gave me a strange kind of claustrophobia. And then perspective… the morning news from Ukraine. Atrocities that make the U.S.A.’s 300+ mass shootings look like kindergarten playground scuffles. It’s all a matter of scale.

Then Pennsylvania… Amish country. A different kind of rolling beauty, pastoral and profound. The horse-drawn buggies, the men’s beards, the ladies’ bonnets. It was like driving through a photograph from a hundred years ago. Strange and wonderful. And then, as if Stephen King had personally designed our itinerary, we landed in Horseheads, New York. A town named for the mountain of bleached horse skulls discovered by early settlers. They put the weird right there on the welcome mat. From Horseheads’ digital nomad-friendly library we planned several day trips. From the macabre to the hallowed… Woodstock and the Big Pink. We meandered through the forest and landed outside the house where The Band forged their sound. I just listened to the whispering pines. After that, to Hartford, to see Sam Clemens and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s next-door visitor’s centers, wrestling with the soul of America a century and a half ago. Some fights never end.

Which leads us, of course, straight into the belly of the ailing beast: Washington D.C. The 250th birthday of the U.S. armed forces. The President wanted a parade, a big, gaudy show of military hardware down the Mall for his own birthday. In response, a “No Kings” protest was called. I went, expecting a worst case scenario, like Kent State, like Tiananmen Square. What did i find? Maybe a hundred people. Mostly old hippies, the very same tie-dyed specters Stephen Miller claims to be a clear and present danger to the republic. Lots of smoke. No fire. An insurrection of gray ponytails and Birkenstocks.

And the road goes on forever… stay tuned… much more to come.

(Ronnie Hays looks down at the guitar in his hands, as if noticing it for the first time. He strums a single, unresolved chord that hangs in the air, then begins to sing…)

I got a black bomb…
It’s tickin’ away…
I’m gonna take it out…
On the Blue Highway.

(The spotlight fades to black.)

Bad Day in the Rocky Mountains

The plan was simple. Lisa, our mutual friend Tim, his brother Tom, and I would go for a nice quiet road trip through the Rockies — something we often did for grins and giggles. This time we planned to visit Tom’s college buddy in Grand Junction. We would stay Friday and Saturday, then drive home Sunday in time to watch the Broncos game on TV.

By the time we made it halfway through the six-hour trek, pangs of hunger could no longer be ignored. We pulled into the next town, Glenwood Springs, for a bite. Not able to find a fast-food restaurant, we chose the first eatery that looked casual. It turned out to be a barbecue shack, and the ribs hit the spot. As we savored the last few bites, Tom, with a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, assumed a sober tone and began telling stories about his college buddy. He recounted several tales of drugs, guns, and dubious visitors speaking mangled Spanglish. This inspired a panorama of expressions from Lisa’s face, and she repeatedly commented how little of that sort of thing happened in her hometown, Pilger, Nebraska.

“Don’t worry Lisa, Tom’s pulling your leg,” Tim said, not altogether convincingly. “He loves to embellish. Actually, his buddy did some time for possession of marijuana in the seventies, but I’m sure he’s done with that nonsense by now.”

Lisa looked relieved, but I was beginning to wonder just how well Tim knew his brother.

The final leg of the drive was relaxing. As we reached the mesas and orchards of the area, the sun looked to be in perfect position for a spectacular setting. I was cursing myself for not bringing the “good” camera when Tom, from the co-pilot seat, called for a left turn.

“Only ten miles,” he said as the sound of rubber on gravel began to mix with that of the radio.

“I thought he lived in town,” Lisa said with a distant note of worry.

Tom turned to face her in the back seat, “Fear not,” he said with a crooked smile. “Jasper is wealthy, and he’s actually down to earth. Besides, you like horses so much, I figured you’d enjoy the ranch.”

Lisa looked unconvinced, so Tom continued. “Lighten up my dear. Beautiful this time of year. The parties are fun.”

I think Tom fancied himself a Zen poet. Lisa, however, did not appear amused.

Upon arrival, to my surprise, we found Tom was right. Jasper’s house was beautiful; a sprawling ranch with an outdoor pool and hot tub in the backyard. The green apple and peach orchards stretched beyond the stables as far we could see. Also, a friendly bevy of merry-makers was by the pool, and topping it off, Jasper proved a congenial host.

“Welcome, welcome!” he sounded earnest. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you,” Jasper said after Tom’s introductions.

Just then the sun was beginning a grand exit and most everybody, for a brief moment, seemed spellbound. The moment was stunning, and after sighs and wows faded, the porch lights came on, and the party began with a vengeance.

This is where I should have pulled back and found a way to get us out. These people seemed to be of a different universe from what Tom had described, and it was apparent that they were deep into a collective cocaine binge. I could tell because their conversations were way too energized and the guys were accompanying each other to the bathroom (a practice that is reserved for girls where I come from). Something was nagging in the back of my head… it just didn’t feel right. After a while, I was able to loosen up and, a few beers later, found myself carried by the kinetic mirth of the moment and that’s when the trouble began.

Someone standing next to me saw them first. Three motorcycles idled in past the parked cars and into the backyard. When the metallic-blue gleam of the guns came into view, the entire crowd broke into panicked chaos. The rapid firing seemed to go on forever, and when the shooting stopped, the motorcyclists rode away.

Jasper’s backyard could have been a turkey shoot, but the gunmen caused no physical injuries, other than scrapes and bruises diving for cover. Mentally, however, I was changed for life. In the short time for the assailants to empty clips, I saw all; my failures, my family, and all the beautiful things that routinely get taken for granted. I imagined myself paralyzed and wheelchair bound. That was the scariest thought. Not that I might die, but without any health insurance, being shot and hospitalized, I would suddenly become a crushing burden to my family.

After the dust settled and everyone calmed down, I began to browbeat Tom for leading us into such a mess. He apologized abjectly; he didn’t think there’d be any hassles. He did admit to knowing of Jasper’s continued involvement in the illegal drug business but never dreamt of exposing us to anything dangerous. Jasper, he thought, was a prudent man in choosing friends and business associates.

To me, that seemed like the central lesson of the day. Yes, these are maddening times; choose your friends wisely.

We drove home that night; fled like spooked horses. We were glad to be no worse for the wear, but no one could sleep, and none of us would ever be the same. “I can see it now,” Tim said as we crested Lookout Mountain. It felt as though we’d never get far enough from that scene, and a heavy sigh of relief came over me as we did. At the time, I felt a great antipathy for the city, “Yuppie-town” as we not-so-affectionately called it, but on this night, as we gazed down at the twinkling lights of downtown Denver, no sight could have been more beautiful.

Loopcircus

Loopcircus

glenwood springs

HSoB: Notes From the Road (pt1)

Bad Day in the Rocky Mountains