South through Colorado, then across northwest New Mexico

Believe it or not, almost all of the driving on this road trip so far has been done by tireless spouse H, except for a 60-mile stretch in Iowa along US 6, during which H (and the kids) slept. This is because H doesn't like being a passenger, and, when not sleeping, conveys this dislike through fairly regular criticism of the driver (usually silent criticism if the driver doesn't happen to be a spouse, whom one can freely criticize...)

But today H flew home on account of having a real job and having to get back to work (3 driving comments during the 30-minute trip to the airport), and we are leaving the kids with H's mom for the week, so I am off to New Mexico, for a little bit of solo travel and a little bit of organizational exchange with the South West Organizing Project in Albuquerque.

After leaving the airport, I drove south on I-25 through the seemingly endless exurbs of Denver, then the suburban-religio-military complex that is Colorado Springs, which was kind of a depressing way to start the day.

South of Colorado Springs on I-25 comes Pueblo, a small industrial city which still has some signs of industry, believe it or not. One of those signs is a bit south of the city, an oil refinery with one, prominent wind turbine displayed out front:


After Pueblo it is pretty empty out there on the plains, and I got pretty bored of driving on the interstate. In part because construction made it difficult to see and access the exit, I failed to stop in Trinidad, which is too bad, because, at least from the interstate, it looked like it had a nice downtown, and I was definitely needing to get out and stretch my legs. Instead, I drove across the Raton Pass into New Mexico, and stopped at the New Mexico Vistor Information Center in Raton, which was kind of out in a strip of Denny's and Sonics and such like, and not such a great place to stop.

On impulse, while looking at the map and thinking about another three hours on the interstate to get to Santa Fe, I decided to cut across on US 64 to Taos instead. The first thirty or so miles were easy driving, a nearly empty two-laner across nearly flat plains:


But then, past Cimarron, the highway started snaking up into the mountains, and I think between all the curves and everything I maybe averaged 30 miles per hour, taking two hours to get up and across and over to Taos. It was beautiful, though. I even stopped at the Palisades Sill, a layer of igneous rock that the Cimarron river has cut into:


* * *

I'm not sure what possessed me to go to Taos, other than perhaps the lyrics of an obscure Jules Shear song:

On his eighteenth birthday, Jimmy Taylor rode to Taos
With his girlfriend Lucy, to rob a bank and buy a house

The ubiquitous adobe architecture in the downtown area makes Taos look a bit like if Stowe had been built by the Barbapapas — or at least by Barbapapas who were primarily interested in selling art and a kind of art/nature lifestyle to rich people rather than creating an eco-anarchist paradise.


Instead of browsing the expensive art, I paid 25 cents for some parking time and wandered around downtown for awhile, then found a grocery store and had a lunch of yogurt, apricots, crackers and lemonade for $5.75. Taos on six dollars a day.

Clearly, rain is not a problem in Taos. Designing your roofs so that rainwater pours out onto your customers' cars would not fly in Vermont:


(incidentally, that Durango from Texas parked next to me was running its engine — someone was napping in the passenger seat — during the more than an hour that I was parked there)

It was interesting, but I wasn't sad to leave. On a final note, even the Walmart in Taos has an adobe look to it:

Western State College, or, the Novosibirsks of American academia could be worse

Gunnison, Colorado — where I've been staying for the past week — is also home to Western State College, a public 4-year liberal arts college. Wandering around the campus the other day (which runs up against a park the kids & their cousins were playing in), it occurred to me that had I pursued the Ph.D. I supposedly entered graduate school to achieve, I likely would have ended up in a place very much like this.

I think probably anyone who enters graduate school in an academic discipline, with the intention of becoming a professor, at some level at least secretly harbors fantasies of teaching at a prestigious institution — maybe not Harvard or Yale or Princeton, but at least a major research university like the Universities of Wisconsin or Texas or so forth — and doing important research. If you're interested in changing the world and not just studying it, you want to be Robin D.G. Kelley or Peter Rachleff — or at least in a large urban area where there are movement institutions you can be part of, or a celebrity supporter of, etc.

The reality, though, is that most folks are going to end up in out-of-the-way places like Gunnison, political action limited to an Obama bumper sticker and buying organic vegetables at the farmers' market, desperately trying to engage ill-prepared students in the excitement of, say, labor history, knowing full well that even those you reach are going to slip back into the miasma of American anti-intellectualism as soon as they are out of school.

* * *

That said, Western State appears, like Gunnison, quite charming — it could certainly be worse. What I presume are the original buildings have a kind of nice stucco and slightly Spanish architecture to them:



Like most college campuses, there are some unattractive blocks built during the 60s expansion of higher education:


No college is complete without a brand spanking new student center built in 90s bland-o-rific style:


And, most importantly, a billboard advertising new building projects:

Gunnison, Colorado

We've spent the past week family-reunion-izing with H's family in Gunnison, Colorado — not really H's hometown, so much, but one of the numerous places they lived (and arguably the real hometown for younger siblings), and where the family matriarch currently resides.

Gunnison is in a broad, fairly flat valley just west of the continental divide. The house we stayed at is in an area just outside of town of ranching land being slowly turned into suburban residences:


... and with some nice sunsets.


The town itself is quite charming. The clear absence (or perhaps just weakness or poor taste) of any kind of Design Review Board has led to a kind of anarchic approach to architecture which would never have arisen in the more conservative building approach of New England:



(the second house apparently being designed so that small performances could be given on the stage in front of the house — a disturbing thought, given the loud and apparently drunken debates about the artistic merits of various Lynyrd Skynyrd songs coming from the back of the house at 11am)

The freewheeling architectural style has also apparently given rise to a creative approach to greenbelts, such as this embanked and stone-walled one:


However, the most curious aspect of downtown Gunnison is the fact that, on either side of the north-south streets (though not the east-west ones), run foot-wide irrigation ditches — the maintenance of which is presumably a municipal responsibility. Most of them are simple dirt ditches, but I did find one concrete-lined stretch:


Residents do in fact install pumps to pull water out of these ditches to irrigate their lawns, sometimes covered with little huts:


And, naturally, no 9-year-old boy could resist the temptation of travelling by jumping from one side of the ditch to the other (although I had my camera ready to catch it, he did not in fact fall in):

Denver: architecture and art

Most of H's family live in the exurban sprawl that joins Denver to other cities along the "front range" of the Rocky Mountains. As a result, I've been to Colorado numerous times over the past decade and a half, but never really gotten a chance to visit Denver as a city. My impression is that Denver is old, and urban, enough to still have some cool neighborhoods, but I've never seen them.

The one small bit of urban culture I've been able to fit in, both two years ago and also on this trip, is a trip to the Denver Art Museum. It is one of the cooler pieces of architecture I've seen in recent years. This time, I didn't take any pictures of the outside because I took a lot during our last visit in 2008 — imagine an angular spaceship with a long prow designed for breaking through space-ice or some such (the Wikipedia link above has a nice picture).

The angular addition is fairly new; I actually happened to read a review in the New Yorker a few months before our 2008 trip, which helped propel me there in the first place. The reviewer really liked the external features of the building, but complained that the odd shapes of the interior did not really lend themselves well to displaying much of the art.

The interior stairway is quite striking:



And many of the rooms actually provide a lot of wall space for hanging paintings — this one was awaiting installation, and gives you a sense of the space:


When I visited in 2008, I had to agree with the New Yorker reviewer. However, since then, I think they've gotten much better about finding art — especially installations — that work exceptionally well with the space. For example, these oversized kitchen knives, descending upon a doorway:


There was also an awesome installation that took up one odd-shaped room on the fourth floor:


The vein-like lines are, upon closer inspection, highways of various widths. They crawl all over the walls and ceiling:


And, my favorite part of the piece, tucked away in a corner that is not at all visible from the entrance to the room, a heart-like metropolis:


Another favorite installation was this red and gray installation of foxes and dinner tables:


Which was below a stairway and which you could walk through:


Finally, here's a couple of other cool buildings right around the museum. This one is, I think, the central Denver public library. It totally looks like it's made out of kids' building blocks:


And this one is, I think, high-end condos, built by the same architect as kind of a companion piece to the museum addition:

Gentrification: the second tier, as farce

Hipsters frequently play a vanguard role in gentrification. Sure, they seem harmless at first: the spiky-haired performance artist who just wants to deconstruct patriarchal settler colonialism, the quiet, intense bearded fellow who is obsessed with producing the finest artisanal small-batch sugared breakfast cereal, etc. But before you know it, the slightly run-down, funky neighborhood with cheap rents where they can follow their dream is filled up with trendy nightclubs, destination food spots and luxury condominiums.

This is what makes the "Old Market" neighborhood of Omaha, Nebraska seem so odd. In the big stretch of land between where we know people we can stay with (roughly, the part of the country east of the Mississippi, with an outposts just west of the river in eastern Iowa) and where H's family lives (the front range in Colorado), we needed to stop for the night in a hotel. We splurged on a semi-fancy hotel near downtown Omaha because, between long rides in the car, we wanted to stay someplace where we could get out and take a nice walk and find some good food, without having to get back in the car. I'm generally against gentrification of urban cores, but if you're travelling through a city where you don't know anyone, it does make for a more pleasant evening than staying in a hotel just off the interstate and driving across the mega-parking-lot to TGI Friday's for dinner.

We did find a decent place to eat — the Upstream Brewing Company, where I had a delicious saison seasoned with black and pink peppercorns, with a hit of ginger. And the food wasn't bad either: H and I split a 10-oz. steak with a perfectly tiny amount of a tasty crème fraîche sauce, and the kids' meals were very reasonably priced — something like five bucks for a burger, fries, juice and root-beer float for dessert.

But the walking-around-the-Old-Market part was just a little bizarre. It was like the city fathers of Omaha had decided to just import New-York- or San-Francisco-style gentrification and plunk it down on a place that was, well, empty. It was a Disneyland theme park version of urban gentrification. I mean, there was still the "Old Mattress Factory Bar and Grill," which was in a building which I have no reason to doubt used to be a mattress factory at one point, but it pretty much looked like it had transitioned directly from one to the other. There was an artists' cooperative gallery, but all the art was mediocre-to-mildly-interesting stuff clearly designed for people looking to decorate their "luxury downtown condominiums" which were, in fact, being advertised as "Downtown Living." There was no trace of hipsterdom, just a strange attempt to seem vaguely like the new face of the Mission district (in fact, I overheard a conversation in which a woman was describing how she had moved to Omaha from San Francisco, though she still "split her time" between the two cities).

There was even less trace of there having ever been any poor or working-class people living in the area. In fact, the powers that be seemed so completely sure of their domination of the place that they had clearly not even invested in the massive police state required for true urban gentrification. When I walked from the hotel to some "Downtown Food Market" in the morning to find something for breakfast, there was a homeless man sleeping in plain view on the side of one of the (otherwise empty) plazas.