12- THE ROAD HOME
Terry and I had done considerable planning for the out-bound passage across the Rockies, nailing down campsite dates; biking and climbing destinations; sights and people to see. Not so for the return trip. We had left the road back to California intentionally nebulous to give us some wiggle-room for spontaneity. We wanted flexibility. So keeping it as “flexible” as possible, we gave ourselves three days to reach Bryce Canyon National Park by way of Rocky Mountain NP, a distance of 620 miles. We’d camp the first night in Estes Park, the second night somewhere along the highway, and on the third night, we’d be in Bryce Canyon, Utah. From there, we would continue south, to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and then it would be home sweet home.
We bade farewell to Ellen and Paul on the morning after climbing the Third Flatiron, thanking them for their wonderful hospitality and for making our stay extra special. We then drove into Boulder to do some quick sightseeing. Since it’s such a bicycle-friendly town, we ditched the van and took to the bikes, riding through part of the University of Colorado campus, down to Pearl Street, where we browsed through the shops and galleries. We ate lunch on the rooftop patio of the Lazy Dog Bar & Grill, savoring a Boulder-brewed hefeweizen, the Flatirons beckoning in the distance (I’m telling you, this town is hard to beat).
By mid afternoon, we were back on the highway, driving north on Highway 36. The town of Estes Park was our destination: the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park. The majestic granite domes of Lumpy Ridge loomed high north of town. I’ve been told there’s amazing climbing at Lumpy (and it certainly looked that way), but alas, that would have to wait for another trip. We followed a country road out to a clearing that had a striking panorama of stone towers along a high ridge. We parked there and enjoyed the good vibes, and the late-day sunshine and intermittent thundershowers—until a couple of cowboys in a pickup truck came along to inform us that we were trespassing and that we’d better skedaddle. And since they had more guns than we did, we skedaddled.
It is slim pickings for campgrounds in Estes Park, the KOA being the only game in town. We rented a site there for one night, on a gravel lot, wedged in between two tent trailers, with a view of the caretaker’s mobile home. Though there was zero chance for communing with nature, our neighbors on one side were especially friendly. They were a couple, about our age, from the Bay Area. The lady was a teacher, so she and Terry talked shop for awhile. In the morning, we were greeted with a scrim of haze in the sky, and we wondered if another forest fire had flared up somewhere—horrendous blazes had raged all across Colorado in July. But we never sighted or heard news of any new ones. We ate breakfast, packed up, and then motored into Rocky Mountain NP, beginning the long ascent into the high country.
The road through the Park is called the Trail Ridge Highway, and it climbs 4,500 feet to a tundra plateau. In all, it is 48 miles long, eleven miles of it above timberline, with a highpoint elevation of 12,183 feet. And once again, right around timberline, the “Check Engine” light came on. It hadn’t lit up since that day on Independence Pass, so we were certain that the problem was altitude related. We stopped at various turnouts along the way to take in the views—though one of the stops was more like a traffic snarl, caused by a small herd of elk that was grazing next to the road. At another stop, around the 12,000-foot level, we hiked up to a ridge and ate lunch on a limestone ledge that looked out over alpine splendor. There, a traffic jam was the last thing on our mind.
As the late-afternoon shadows grew longer, we began to discuss our options for the night. The first goal, decided that morning, had been to make Grand Junction by sundown. But it was clear that we wouldn’t come close to that now. Maybe Glenwood Springs? It was much closer. After many miles of dust and gravel, we crossed the Colorado on a suspension bridge and turned south onto Route 131, back onto pavement. A dozen miles later, we hit Interstate 70. From there, it was an autobahn, sweeping past the old mining burgs of Eagle and Dotsero, and then into magnificent Glenwood Canyon, where the Colorado River, the railroad and freeway all somehow share the same deep chasm.
Before arriving in Glenwood Springs, Terry had used her iPad to find and reserve a campsite. It was a modest-looking RV park on the outskirts of town. We snagged a good-looking site that backed right up to the river, where we could be lulled to sleep by the rushing water. It was definitely nicer than the KOA in Estes Park. We set our camp chairs on the river bank. Ter worked her magic on a delicious pasta dish. I opened a bottle of wine (see, I contribute to the effort). By the time we finished cleaning up from dinner, it was pitch dark.
It was a balmy, peaceful night, and the steady tumble of the rapids unquestionably lulled us to sleep. But at some point, an hour or so after falling into deep slumber, there came a loud, squealing clamor, a sound so piercing and sustained that it could’ve raised the dead. It certainly woke us up. As we soon discovered, the tracks of the Burlington & Santa Fe Railroad were on the opposite bank from us, just 150 feet away. We were on a tight bend in the river, and therefore it was a tight bend for the tracks as well. The train’s wheels were chafing against the outside rail, steel against steel, plus the engineers were riding the brakes. The sound of fingernails on a chalkboard would’ve been more relaxing. Around 1:00, another train screeched past. And another one at 3:30. And yet again at 6:00. That’s when Ter crawled out of her sleeping bag, fed up. As for me, I woke up singing that Johnny Cash song...
I hear the train a comin',
It's rolling round the bend.
And I ain't seen the sunshine,
Since I don't know when,
I'm stuck in Folsom Prison,
And time keeps draggin' on.
But that train keeps a rollin’,
On down to San Antone.
That’s what sleep deprivation does to you.
13- ROOTS
My great-grandparents, Barney and Daisy Wright, came to Colorado in 1905, leaving Oklahoma with no intentions of returning. Barney was 26 years old, Daisy was 21. When they married, Barney had promised his bride that he would build her a home where they could raise a family. And thus he staked a homestead claim on land in Garfield County on the Colorado River, six miles upstream from Rifle. It was bottomlands, prime for farming, though the lower fields were prone to flooding when the river sometimes jumped its banks in the spring. With help from two of his brothers, Barney got right to work and did as promised, erecting a sturdy, split-log main house with a gallery porch that ran along three sides.
Barney and Daisy had only one child at the time: an infant boy named Ernest—my grandfather. Three more sons and a daughter would follow in the ensuing years, and the farm improved with time and hard work. A large barn and other outbuildings were added, and also a peach orchard. Elm trees were planted up the drive and around the main house, providing ample shade when they matured. Barney grew sweet potatoes, corn and alfalfa. He also raised hogs, chickens and a few head of cattle like most farms of the day. They were self sufficient.
Electricity came to the Wright Farm in the 1920s, around the time my grandfather completed high school. It was a thriving operation by then, though things started to go downhill after Daisy passed away in 1948. Barney followed her ten years later. Their youngest son, Barney Jr., stayed on and ran the farm for several more years, but eventually he took a job with the County and moved to the nearby community of Silt. As for the farm, he would lease it out, though at some point in the ‘60s, the main house and outbuildings fell into disrepair and were abandoned.
In 1997, I paid a visit to Mary Wright, wife of the late Barney Jr. She was 80 years old and living in the same house they had bought when they moved to Silt. I was interested in the old farm and she had stories to tell. When I told her that I wanted to go see it, she scoffed.
“You can’t get near it,” she warned. “The land’s owned by the Hang brothers. They’ll shoot you for trespassing.”
Really? Later that day in Rifle, while having dinner with a cousin of mine, I again broached the subject of visiting the farm.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he advised. “Those Hang brothers are crazy sons of a bitch. They’ll shoot you.”
I tried to get him to come with me to the Hang residence to get permission, but he vehemently declined. “No way,” he said.
And so I drove to their house myself—along with my sister, and my niece (age 15) and my youngest daughter (age 7), figuring that bringing them along would help my cause. The Hangs lived in a weathered ranch house, the dirt yard enclosed by a wire mesh fence with a sign that read: BEWARE OF DOGS. I stood there at the locked gate, waiting for somebody to come out, which didn’t take long because their dogs were barking and snarling at me through the fence. A man emerged from the house onto the front porch, stopping to look me over thoroughly before striding out to the gate. He looked to be in his sixties, unshaven, with a sun-battered face and a disheveled mop of gray hair, a character right out of the movie Deliverance.
“Good morning, Mr. Hang,” I chimed, and went on to introduce myself and my family sitting in the parked car behind me, and why we were there, and how my great grandfather had homesteaded the Wright Farm property, to which Mr. Hang now owned, and we would be much obliged if we could visit it, etc, etc. It was a very compelling homily, to which he quietly absorbed with a dubious eye. But when I had run out of words, he shook his head intolerantly.
“Go on, git!” he grumbled, motioning with his hand for me to leave. Then he turned around and walked back into the house—to fetch his shotgun for all I knew—and thus was the end of it.
That was fifteen years ago. And as Ter and I ate breakfast on the banks of the Colorado, only twenty miles upstream from the old farm, I began to ponder the merits of trying again. We still had 400 miles of driving ahead of us to make Bryce Canyon NP by nightfall. But still… If we seized an early start, I reckoned we’d have time to swing by, check it out. And my sweet wife, bless her, was very accommodating.
We got off I-70 in Silt and crossed the river on the Sixth Street bridge. At River Road, we turned right and passed by alfalfa farms and modest ranches. I slowed down after a few miles, sensing that we were getting close—and then, there it was! From what I remembered from my last visit, the Hang residence would never have been a candidate for the cover of Ranch Home Magazine. But now it was even in worse shape. More intriguing, the place had an abandoned feel to it. Old curtains in the windows were all drawn tight, even though it was a bright, sunny day. The barn and stable yard looked empty. But most notable was the lack of a single vehicle on the property, not even a tractor—and no snarling dogs.
Our next stop was a ranch house a half mile further down the road. Fifteen years ago, a nice couple—SoCal transplants—had lived there, and they had graciously allowed me onto their property so that I could get within a thousand yards of the Wright Farm to snap a photo. As I walked up to the front porch, a woman came out to greet me. I wasn’t sure if she was the same person from years ago, but after I had relayed my story, her face lit up. Yes indeed, she remembered! She then told me that the Hang brothers had both passed away, their house was vacant, and the property had been sold. If I wanted to go see my great grandfather’s homestead, she said, then go for it, because it was only a matter of time before the place would be torn down by the new property owners.
What was left of the T-shaped main house stood gnarled and solemn in an open field, the interior a jumble of discarded mattresses, worn tires and assorted flotsam. Long gone were the outbuildings and the orchard and giant elm trees. There was one small, rundown structure remaining behind the main house. In the ground nearby, a circular concrete plug—probably the old well. My grandparents had lived here for a while during the Great Depression, when my mom and Aunt Norma were very young, and my aunt had nearly drowned in that well. She was two years old at the time. As the story was told to me long ago, my grandmother had scooped Norma out of the well, and seeing that she wasn’t breathing, screamed so loud that field hands heard her mile away and came running.
It was an exceptionally warm morning. The air was heavy and there wasn’t a breath of wind. Ter had walked to the back of the house to look around, and I stood alone in what would’ve been the front yard long ago. I tried to envision my great-grandparents, Barney and Daisy, surveying this land for the first time 107 years ago, a young couple with an infant son and grandiose plans of building a house; raise a family; lay down roots on the Western Slope. Surely it had been a thrilling moment for them. And there I was, standing where they had started.
A sense of closure prevailed as we pedaled back to the van. It had taken fifteen years, but I had accomplished what I’d set out to do. Someday, a D9 Caterpillar would rumble out and raze the old house to the ground, erase it from the land. Or maybe not. Inevitably, though, rust and decay never sleep. Whether by the hand of man or acts of nature, the Wright Farm will one day cease to exist in the material world.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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