It was in Colorado, in some former mining town straight up into the Rockies from Boulder where I was doing a four-month programming contract for a little corporation owned by a rich guy named Bob. He ran the place with arbitrary authority and had me digging holes and filling them up again in the software we produced. On weekends I'd rent a car and drive up into the mountains, and it was on one such adventure that I ran across this strange little nowhere-ville that had somehow become a legal gambling zone and was completely taken over by casinos with names like "Gold Rush Gulch." I remember nothing about the young couple apart from their words, though I think they both had blond hair.
I did not particularly love it there. Mountains are beautiful and majestic, but I prefer to visit them only occasionally, though the city of Boulder is geographically extraordinary, situated high on the eastern slope under cascading cliffs. I enjoyed riding up and down the mountainside on the bike paths that someone had had the intelligence and clout to build across the city many years before. They went across fields, behind houses, along rushing streams, even through tunnels under highways. Nowhere else in America can you find bike paths like the ones in Boulder.
For the duration of my stay there I lived in the finished basement of a house at the highest end of the town, right at the upper edge of habitation. At that elevation there was a lot of wind late at night. Right in the middle of almost every night I was awakened by a wild and roaring wind. Once I actually saw a tornado, like a huge ghostly-white hose in strong moonlight, hanging in the air not a mile away with it's open end slowly roaming around horizontally and not touching ground. Some day maybe I'll find another place that has such powerful winds at night. There is something utterly magnificent about night wind, but for other reasons I was glad when my contract finished and I got sent on to another one, this time in smelly old Cleveland.
My earliest memory is of being held up by someone to look at the ocean. I looked out and tried to focus my eyes on the distance, but the sky was overcast and the sea blended with the clouds so as to completely obscure the horizon. I remember the sickening feeling of disorientation, and I might even have puked. This was probably at Crane's beach in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
Years later I did a bunch of canoeing around there in an old Grumman. There are interesting estuaries in Ipswich and meandering through the tidal bogs between Newburyport and Plum Island. I paddled around the estuaries and pulled the canoe through the shallows on a rope, usually with someone but sometimes alone. I remember hauling the canoe over sand bars and dunking myself often in the shallow water. There is something about immersing myself in an estuary that makes me feel integral to the ocean, as if I were some sort of waterborn mammal.
I lived up there for a short while too, in Newburyport, working for a couple of rich guys who felt entitled to order me around arbitrarily. Newburyport is an old city that was once larger than Boston due to its location at the mouth of the Merrimac River, which made it a perfect place to build ships. There are plenty of fine old federal-style houses up on the hill overlooking the broad river. One evening I was in a bar in the gold-leaf-embalmed historic town center, talking to a young couple who had recently moved there from somewhere else. They were both blond, and one of them, I forget which, said "We love it here."
I didn't love it there and moved away not long after. It was my fifth move in a single year of five moves, or at least that is my recollection and I think it might even be true. I went to New York, where I've now been living for about fifteen years. I wouldn't say that I love it here, but I don't hate it, though I'm preparing now for another move. I don't work in software anymore either, and I try to avoid working for rich guys.
No comments:
Post a Comment