Grand Junction, Colorado
There’s
a certain place in my backyard, in between the glass-topped table and my tool
shed, where, at night, in the silence of a small city at midnight, under a near
full moon painting the sunflowers with the white light of transcendence, I can stand and see, far off to the west, the double radio towers that stand on a
distant arm of the Uncompahgre Plateau. They each hold three red lights. The
bottom ones are steady; the top ones flash a warning to the dazed pilots of
nighttime aircraft.
These
towers remind me of when I was a child and my father would drive us from the
rural outback of upstate New York across the Alleghany Plateau to Binghamton –
a city, like Grand Junction, that rests in a long valley where two rivers meet.
And there, high on the far hills beyond the city, stood similar radio towers,
three of them, with the same arrangement of red lights. When I was young, those
towers held the same magic for me as the science-fiction novels I devoured,
evoking a world of wondrous technology, so different from the farmlands and
forests where I lived.
Today,
from my Grand Junction backyard, the paired radio towers of the Uncompahgre are
a far off, mysterious sight, a fine accompaniment to the shadows of mulberry leaves
on the white shed, cast by the twin lights of the moon and a nearby streetlamp.
If my wife is still awake, the five-sided window high up on the bedroom wall
blazes forth with a light that rivals even Luna’s glow.
