Ursula and the Carnival Journey

Delta, Colorado

Note: I have recently published an essay in Under the Sun, an on-line literary journal, entitled “The Carnival Journey.” This essay explores several key transformational moments in my life, and how these moments intertwined with carnivals. What follows is an excerpt from that essay describing the last time my daughter Ursula rode the Ferris wheel in the annual Delta, Colorado carnival.

Three decades later, I was no longer the child who looked forward to the annual arrival of miniature rides and colorful tents. Instead, it was Ursula, my eight year old daughter, who waited in anxious anticipation for the carnival, the one that magically appeared in Delta every year on May 18^th, her birthday.

From our front yard we could watch it setting up on the banks of the Gunnison River, past the Southern Pacific rail siding and the grain elevators’ twin white towers. It was an especially delightful sight at night, when I would lean against the rough bark of the yard’s massive catalpa tree and watch the Ferris wheel make its grand rotation, its spokes outlined by flashing lines of blazing light. I could also see the great disk of a ride called the Flying Saucer, which would heave itself from the ground like a failed rocket launch, spin for a time with red and orange electric fires, and then plunge back to earth. When the cooling breeze blew from the Gunnison, I could just hear the shouts of the riders and the bass thump of the canned rock music.

Usually the day after the carnival had set up, I would take Ursula and her sister Isadora, two years younger, to play in the carnival’s magic spaces – with its popcorn vendors, cotton candy weavers, and ring-toss hucksters. And, of course, there were the rides – the merry-go-round’s plastic horses galloping in a perfect circle to recorded calliope music, the dragon-shaped miniature roller coaster, the fifty-foot high multi-track slide, and the giant metal strawberries that moved in a stately dance. But year after year, their favorite was the Ferris wheel. Ursula especially loved the Ferris wheel, and she would ride it – sometimes with me or her sister, sometimes alone – six or seven times before our night at the carnival came to a close, for she was mesmerized by the wheel’s cyclic journey, which landed you back where you started, transformed by delight and a quarter of an hour older.

Nevertheless, the day arrived when Ursula made her final Ferris wheel journey.

She had just turned ten, and was experiencing many significant life changes. Her mother and I were living apart and heading for a divorce. Also, we had moved out of our Delta house with its big glassed-in front porch, its maze of old rooms, its mysterious attic filled with forgotten furniture, and the big catalpa tree from which we could watch the carnival rides blossom across the river flats. Now my daughters and I lived on the ground floor of a small duplex in Grand Junction, a mid-sized city forty miles north of Delta. Still, on the day when Ursula turned ten, we decided to follow tradition and took the trek to the lost world of her birthday carnival.

We drove there on a bright Saturday afternoon, heading south through the shale hills that roll like ocean waves between Grand Junction and Delta. To the east, the basaltic ramparts of the Grand Mesa rose into a blazing white sky. To the west, the sun was a sliced-lemon smear of light behind high, thin clouds. Scattered clusters of antelope stood in the dry, curving spaces, and ravens played in a stiff west wind. This wind worried me as its gusts rocked the car and stirred up dust devils, miniature tornados that tore at the salt brush and sage.

Sure enough, when we reached Delta and turned into the park between the river and the town, the wind was cutting through the carnival, blowing in sand from the arid stretches leading to the Uncompahgre Plateau. Straining to escape, the red and blue and yellow banners snapped in the gale. Many of the concession booths were boarded up, and half the rides were shut down and motionless, machines defeated by the elements. Here and there, groups of sullen teens and blank-eyed families drifted around the nearly empty grounds, seeking something to do.

And yet, to my surprise, the Ferris wheel was running, so we fought our way against the wind to the great steel ring leisurely rotating against the white sky. Scared off by the wind, Isadora didn’t care to get on, so Ursula rode alone. Tall and slender, she carefully placed herself down on the aerial bench, and the operator – a tough, heavyset man in machinist’s overalls and grease-stained denim shirt – clicked the safety bar into place across her lap. Back at the controls, he threw a great steel lever and set the wheel ponderously turning.

I watched as Ursula rode up into the glaring sky and descended back to earth, a faint smile on her face, her long blond hair whipping in the gale. I pictured what she was seeing as the wheel moved, the town she had called home for seven years dropping beneath her feet and spreading out before her – the riverbank where she had skipped stones, the drug store with its ice cream counter, the century-old brick library where Tin-Tin waited patiently on his shelf, and even, perhaps, a glimpse of the old house and its beloved catalpa tree, its two-story white clapboard structure now occupied by strangers. The wind whistled through the wheel’s struts, the gusts rocked the seat back and forth, and the wheel revolved, bringing Ursula visions of her lost world.

Fairly soon, the operator started manipulating various levers, and the great wheel slowed. The journey had seemed shorter than usual. There were only a handful of riders, and Ursula was the last one to get off. After the operator helped her down, he hooked a chain across the gate. Despite this, she held out the right number of tickets to ride again. The operator glanced at her and shook his head.

“I’m shutting down,” he said in a gruff voice. “Too much wind.”

As if she hadn’t heard him, Ursula stood for a time holding out the tickets. Finally, she turned away and stepped down the stairs from the short wooden platform with its closed gateway to the Ferris wheel. Upon joining her sister and me, she still possessed her tight smile, but as we began to cross the half-abandoned carnival, she began to silently cry.

To read the entire essay, please go on-line to Under the Sun at the following address: http://underthesunonline.com/wordpress/2017/the-carnival-journey/

The Journey East

Grand Junction to Denver, Colorado

During my boyhood summers in upstate New York, I always looked forward to our annual voyage from Newark Valley to New York City.

Each year, on a hazy, sunny August morning, my family and I would pile into the blue Chrysler station wagon and begin the incredibly long drive (or so it seemed to me at the age of ten) down the impossibly stretched and twisted asphalt snake called Route 17. From my backward facing seat at the rear of the Chrysler, I would watch the retreating highway as we passed between mounded hills covered in dense forests of deciduous trees – maples, oaks, hickories, and ash – sometimes pacing the Delaware River, wide but shallow in the summer heat, flowing over grey shale rocks formed in an ancient muddy ocean. Occasionally, we would cross broad, mysterious valleys with farms and fields and intersecting roads. And, of course, there was the parade of towns – Windsor, Deposit, Hancock, Fishs Eddy, Roscoe, and so on – all of them sleepy clusters of clapboard houses, grocery stores, and gas stations, the old kind with wood siding, big plate glass windows, bubble pumps out front, and a shadowy, mysterious garage on the side. My favorite town was Liberty, where we would stop for lunch at the Liberty Diner, a classic art-deco glass and steel eatery straight out of American Graffiti.

An hour or after Liberty we would hit the outer edges of the urban world, announced by far more buildings, businesses, and streetlights. Near Goshen we would join US 6, which would take us to Harriman and the New York State Thruway. As we neared the city, four lanes would become six, even in 1966, while the buildings would rise higher and higher, and brick and wood would give way to steel and glass. Finally, we would enter what to me was the incredibly exotic world of the biggest city in America.

For a quarter century now, my trips from Grand Junction to Denver with my wife and daughters have replicated my childhood journeys to New York City. 

There are remarkable similarities – the general movement eastward, the sinuous path of the highway as it follows major rivers, the passage through forests, the succession of small towns, stopping midway for lunch, even how the route to Denver joins with US 6. All of this creates a powerful and nostalgic echo of those magical journeys of my youth. So while the landscape and the towns I pass through to reach Denver are quite different from my childhood world of upstate New York, I am still sharply reminded of those boyhood car trips to “The City” whenever I drive to Denver. 

These days, our Denver voyages begin by negotiating the sinuous canyon east of Grand Junction, the one formed by the Colorado River out of surreal, wind-carved sandstone. After breaking out of the canyon, we cross the long, broad Plateau Valley between high chalk-colored ramparts and bluffs. At night, the gas wells blaze like sinister futuristic towers with their rows of electric lights topped by an orange flame. In this valley, Interstate 70 arrows past De Beque, Parachute, Rifle, Silt, and New Castle – but unfortunately the traveler doesn’t see much of these towns since they repose outside the highway’s unstoppable surge.

About an hour from Grand Junction, I-70 enters Glenwood Springs, and we pass the grand red brick Colorado Hotel with its century old memories of Teddy Roosevelt and the steaming Olympic size hot springs pool. With the railroad on the other side of the Colorado River, we traverse the serpentine Glenwood Canyon – carved from cliffs and pagodas of ancient limestone and granite hundreds of feet high. Occasionally, a Union Pacific coal train will snake through the canyon, appearing and disappearing in the route’s many tunnels.

Next is the long climb into the Rockies through Gypsum, Eagle, Edwards, Avon, Vail, and Silverthorne – the mountains growing higher and higher, the grey pyramids past timberline often tipped with snow even in the summer. Then, at 11,000 feet, we plunge into the nearly three kilometer long passage of Eisenhower Tunnel, with its overhead lights pulsing past like something out of a Kubrick movie. Past the tunnel, there’s the long winding descent through granite mountain cliffs and chasms and gorges through Georgetown and Idaho Springs, and soon after the houses and buildings begin to increase – just like when entering the New York City area from Route 17. Finally there is a vision of the vast prairie stretching all the way to the Kansas border and beyond – and on that prairie, clustered like a formation of quartz crystals stand the steel and glass towers of Denver, hazy and golden in the daylight, a galaxy of lights at night.

Thus, my adult sojourns from Grand Junction to Denver create a powerful echo to my childhood journeys from Newark Valley to New York City. Both of them are magic voyages I’ve made time and again through mountains and valleys, rivers and forests, to metropolises filled with art, music, wonderful cuisine, and the shining towers and stadiums of a great American city.

Myla: Petroglyph Hunter

Uncompahgre Plateau, Colorado

My Journeys with Myla, pt. 4

Note: This is the fourth in a sequence of blog entries concerning my travels with Myla, a superb dog of uncertain breed (we think she’s half rat terrier and half dachshund) who was found barely surviving on the streets of Grand Junction and rescued by a group called Grand Rivers Humane. We adopted her in the autumn of 2013, and she has been a beloved part of our family ever since.

We’ve had Myla for nearly three years now, and we’ve done a lot of exploring together. During the first year of our journeys, I discovered that Myla is not only a lizard-hunter, but she is a petroglyph-hunter as well.

It was late spring of 2014, and Myla and I were taking a hike in one of my favorite canyons on the Uncompahgre Plateau. (I’m not going to name the canyon for reasons that will become clear.) At the time of this hike, I knew there were petroglyphs in this canyon, but I had never found them, despite hiking there a good ten to twelve times a year. Well, this one spring day, we were heading down canyon, following the main trail as usual, when Myla started up a dusty side path that climbed towards the western cliff face. I almost called her back, but decided to follow instead. We passed through dense patches of sagebrush and juniper, and soon arrived at a tumble of sandstone boulders and debris at the base of the cliff. To my surprise, I could just make out that past these boulders the cliff face held a set of petroglyphs. Myla had discovered the mysterious petroglyphs that I had failed to find for nearly twenty years!

We scrambled atop the boulders closest to the cliff, and there they were, pecked out of the smooth sandstone surface centuries ago – several horned shaman around two foot high, and two abstract shapes built on a set of arcs. From their style and age, I would guess they were either late Fremont or early Ute Indian figures. It was a fairly modest display, but I was nonetheless excited about finding them at long last. And I had Myla to thank for their discovery.

What saddened me, however, were several pieces of graffiti next to the petroglyphs, some drawn with charcoal-coated sticks from an old nearby campfire, but some, the far more destructive kind, scratched into the sandstone. These names, obscenities, and images of skulls were a violation of the sacred, a sacrilege equal to the defacement of a cathedral or synagogue.

Unfortunately, just a few days ago I went to the same petroglyph site, and the amount of graffiti at the site has tripled from when Myla first took me to them. I have watched this increase take place steadily over the past couple of years. It seems every time I visit the site, there’s another defacement, and the graffiti is starting to cover the petroglyphs themselves.

I have written about this problem before in this blog, when I described a petroglyph site near Moab, Utah (see “Watchers of the Skies” – February 18^th, 2016). As I did in that entry, I would like to quote National Book Award winning author Barry Lopez, who brilliantly expresses the depth of this tragedy in his essay “The Stone Horse,” from Crossing Open Ground (Vintage Books, 1989): “The vandals, the few who crowbar rock art off the desert’s walls, who dig up graves, who punish the ground that holds intaglios, are people who devour history. Their self-centered scorn, their disrespect for ideas and images beyond their ken, create the awful atmosphere of loose ends in which totalitarianism thrives, in which the past is merely curious or wrong.”

East of Kayenta

Grand Junction, Colorado

Announcing the release of my new book – East of Kayenta – a collection of poetry from the heart of the American Southwest published by Turkey Buzzard Press.

John Macker, author of Disassembled Badlands, writes – “This is his best book of poetry so far: serene, immediate and full of passion.”

Arthur Stringer, author of Late Breaking, adds – “John Nizalowski’s new collection ranges wide, just like the American West, the center of this poet’s world. His highly allusive poems cross cultures and eras to blend the sacred and the profane into an abiding spiritual presence. . . . The music and the immediacy of the words can be haunting. Yet we are not lost, for the voice knows its way.”

Read the Stay Thirsty Magazine review by Gerald Hausman at http://www.staythirstymagazine.com/p/hausman-book-note.html[J1] 

Watch the Lithic Bookstore book release reading on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0tHP_gU-LI

Copies can be ordered from Lithic Books in Fruita, Colorado. To request a copy, please email Danny Rosen at danny@lithicpress.com

East of Kayenta by John Nizalowski  / $12.00 & shipping and handling / ISBN 0-945884-45-1

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 [J1]

The Sandstorm

Gray Mountain, Arizona

I was recently reading Coronado’s Children (The Southwest Press, 1930), J. Frank Dobie’s wonderful account of the lost mines and legendary treasures of the American Southwest, when I came across his classic description of a Mojave Desert sandstorm:

Nothing in nature is more maddening than a summer sandstorm. The thermometer mounts to 110, 120, even more degrees in the blazing sun. Then the wind rises and begins shifting the dunes. It moves them fifty feet, five hundred feet. Above the swirling, cutting sand the sun becomes a dim copper disc; then there is no sun. The peaks of arid mountains, generally so clearly defined in the distance, blur out. A man caught in the storm cannot see his own hand. At one place the wind scoops out sand until “bottom” is reached; at another it piles up sand into overwhelming crests. On the grazeable fringes of the desert the sand sometimes plays humorous tricks. It has [been known to] cover up a windmill.

This passage brought to mind the sandstorms I have encountered. While the sandstorms of the Colorado Plateau are nowhere near as devouring as those of the Mojave, they are still awesome phenomena. I once drove through a sandstorm near Thompson Springs, Utah that totally blotted out the road, creating a very dangerous situation. When the headlights of approaching cars become very dim orbs and the highway looks like a contiguous piece of the sand-blasted desert, then you are in deep trouble. It is tempting to pull over and stop, but this action places you in danger of being rammed from behind. The best strategy is to slow down, watch for snatches of revealed pavement, and keep plowing forward.

The most impressive sandstorm I’ve ever witnessed, I observed from a distance. I was hiking one very windy March day on the northern rim of the Uncompahgre Plateau, and I had a clear, unobstructed view of nearly the entire length of the Grand Valley about a thousand feet below. A massive cloud of rust-colored dust came pouring in from the west – billowing and twisting and crawling its way across the valley. It must have been going a good 40 mph as it followed the river and ultimately swallowed the city of Grand Junction in a turbulent, ground-hugging nutmeg-colored cloud.

My most recent encounter with a sandstorm was a few months past. I was driving through Arizona’s Painted Desert between Cameron and Gray Mountain, and the wind really picked up, sending horizontal layers of sand across the highway. Most of the time, those sand streams stayed down around the wheels, but for a good twenty minute stretch, they crept up around the windshield. And while they weren’t heavy enough to cause the road to vanish, they did plunge the world into a vague, gritty indefiniteness, like being in an abrasive fog.

As always, the sandstorm was an experience most strange – almost mystical, but certainly unnerving.