Monday, March 26, 2007

Roadnotes: Mile-High Edition

I’ve really had almost no time for keeping up with email, much less blogging, since my return from the conference.  I didn’t bring my camera with me on the trip - it’s too bulky, and I didn’t have enough reliable shooting time.  Instead, I wrote this, the first bit while waiting for my supper at Rock Bottom Brewery, and then more on the 737 home, with appropriate pauses for turbulence.  Consider it what you get instead of a lousy t-shirt, and consider yourself lucky.

Welcome to Denver, dude – population: me.  I’m in a raucous sports brewpub with cool deco-style lights, old school but new manufacture, and that seems to be a lot of what I’m seeing around here - a town where everything seems like it should be older than it is.  The hotel is brand new and very beautiful - 35 stories of big rooms and down comforters, wide-screen tvs and lots of art, paintings and photos and sculpture and a mysterious adage of some sort scrolled around the port-cochere.... in each elevator, another extra-big tv, this one turned permanently to video loop of scenes of place: long clips of an immobile shot of the highway, a mountain lakelet, a diner’s parking lot in the rain - chosen and filmed by artists to make the closed moving chamber of the elevator more of a still outdoor space.... I look out the window of my 10th floor room to see many big new glass towers surrounded by old brick warehouses, and then flatlands to mountains that are much taller than they look.  I walk out and the town smells weird, a smell I keep thinking I’ll outwalk but I don’t.  The sky is big - not quite Montana big but big nonetheless, and close, and cornflower blue; the air is warm and dry, so dry my nose bleeds…

It was strange meeting people in Denver.  Of course there was Jill, my first on-line friend and finally a friend in person too, with whom I had a delightful supper and conversation, but then after supper I went for a Chimay in the lobby bar of the hotel and struck up a convo with a grizzled fellow next to me who: was there for the same conference as was I; was from California; was a partner at a major firm with important ties to public interest law and my own office; himself had helped to found three of the programs I now fund; WAS A STUDENT OF MY FATHER’S AT THE SEMINARY.  We had a good talk about ethics, administration, theology, spirituality, my dad… there were all the other California advocates, too, with whom I speak all the time but whom I never see in person unless I travel to another state.... and then, out of nowhere, Lilli, who took the open stool at the brewpub and wound up stuck in a conversation with me - a schnecken-baking spin-teaching hash runner from Eugene, who’s moving back to - of course - Santa Cruz in a month or so....

Denver itself: There were the many blocks of beautiful masonry and stone buildings, with rough western alleys full of bricked-up windows and old overpainted ads - set into the sidewalk at one moribund intersection was a bronze plaque identifying that location as once the commercial center of Denver, describing each building’s purpose and materials - and three of the four of these elegant edifices seemed empty and closed, a tragic waste of beautiful architecture…

There were - oh yes there were - the two brewpubs, one in an old building but dating back business-wise only to the 1980s, and one in a new flashy spot that looked and felt very much like the other from the inside - both decorated in a self-consciously western-heritage style, pouring beer that was generally servicable and sometimes quite good, like the Big Easy Belgian at Wynkoop or the Golden Eagle IPA at Rock Bottom.... yet with all the beer I drank, and my very comfortable bed in my softly silent room, I consistently fell asleep late and woke up not just early but before my alarm even went off, watching out my never-closed blinds for the first hint of blue in the sky so I could justify rolling out of my very comfortable bed to work out in the gym - a big, nicely appointed facility where I lifted, pedaled, saunaed and yogaed at various times, working up a really good schvitz and - at first - getting myself a little queasy-dizzy from the altitude…

There was the strangely abundant seafood, not just trout but salmon, shrimp, swordfish - real seafood, and what it was dong way up in Denver I have no idea but it was pretty damn tasty…

There were the abundant Ethiopians, many among the hotel’s staff and all over downtown and at the airport, beautiful people with beautiful names, so many of them and all so far from what was once their home, and I should have been wondering what kind of cosmic disruption brought them all to this arid high plains city but all I can really think is dang I could really go for some doro wat and tibs about now…

There was the set of silos we passed on the way back to the airport in our big Chevy suburban shuttle - a late afternoon with a heavy sky and light rain, easy jazz on the radio and those huge silos erupting next to the freeway out of a neighborhood of shabby small old wood-frame houses, a thousand shades of grey and brown, and the silos a dirty off-white with a huge dog-food aid painted on the side; the air all around reeked of kibble and I could only imagine how sick of smelling it the locals must have been…

And of course there was the conference itself, where the civil Gideon session overflowed the room and the official schedule booklet had a photo of the rocky mountains on the cover - superimposed clumsily for some reason over a blurry photo of downtown L.A.... and the session on rural delivery featured a Norwegian exchange student to whom I made a suggestion that left him genuinely intrigued, saying he’d never considered it but he’d take the idea back to Norway…

And now I’m on the 737 back home, delayed an hour or so, packed in tight, my “Philly” cheesesteak supper nestled uncomfortably in my gut, and we’re almost out of the turbulence, I think.  I’ll be home, probably, before midnight.  It was a decent stay in a decent town, and I would like to go back and explore it a bit more thoroughly sometime… but for now I’m ready for a little shuteye. 

UPDATE: Sodium-free club soda on the airplane: a refreshing cup of just plain club?

Epilogue: It’s been tough getting time to post, but I’ve got some fun essays saved up.  I should have something more worth your time to read it soon.  Till then, don’t forget to floss!