So this is paradise. Or so I have been told. Paradise smells about like I remember. Like feedlot and chemical mist. And it looks about like I remember, too. Miles upon miles of winter wheat covering the flat ground as far as the eye can see, interspersed with patches of corn stubble, milo stubble, CRP(ground that the government pays landowners to let sit fallow) summer fallow (about what it sounds like, ground that is allowed to fallow for one growing season to get its growjo back). It looks like a two hundred square mile crazy quilt. The only major thing different from when I left almost a decade ago are the things that now break the monotony. Long center pivot sprinklers have popped up at the rate of prairie dog hills. A wind farm was finally approved after years of teasing, and now rows of giant white blades slice the air over a field I used to work the old fashioned way, making arrow straight rows by focusing on a distant spot on the horizon and lining the hood of the tractor I was driving up with it, fourteen hour days of staring at that one spot, a telephone pole or a distant farmstead, over a little silver arrow.
Now, I hear, the farmer who paid me to work the weeds out of his summer fallow has auto steer. A satellite does my job. Another farmhand, one who's worth and wage will not be determined by his unwavering rows sits behind the wheel, only steering to turn around at the end of the field. And the most recent change is also the biggest, in terms of the lives of locals. New technology has revealed pockets of oil under the black dirt, gypsum and buffalo grass, and the one paved road in the area, the Pence road, is now lined with big black tanks and nodding iron beasts, giving out the the stink of oil and the teasing promise that nobody knows who's ship will be the next to come in. The wife of a farmer who spent his life digging dollars out of the black dirt, then died, now owns multiple oil wells. But she doesn't need the money. It is for her kids and grand kids. I used to think her grandsons were cute, when we were teenagers together. Out of my league even back then, and I knew it, but cute.
Oh, well. The man I married is cuter. He has these big blue eyes and a thick shock of hair that bleaches in the summer, full lips that he always purses, hiding disastrously crooked teeth that he only shows when he is surprised into a grin, a bristly reddish goatee and thick brow that belies his baby face and provides a perch for his Oakley sunglasses when they are not resting on his wide, sunburned nose -sunglasses I am pretty sure he was born with. He wears clothes that are even more disastrous than his teeth, long shapeless tee shirts that he picks up for a few bucks at department store sales that look even worse after I forget to take them out of the dryer for a few days, and jeans that sag and show the square from his wallet in the back pocket. And ever since we moved here, these awful roper boots. Or his hiking shoes. And he may not have oil in his family, or really anything but a long line of perpetually unlucky optimists always believing they are about to invest in the thing that will make them rich and their kids proud of them, but he has poop.
Cow poop, to be exact. To quote a friend I worked with in the bike shop just before we moved here, I am now the proud wife of a fecal farmer. A turd wrangler. An excrement entrepreneur. We left our home in the mountains for a sh...I mean, poopy reason. We fell into sh..tuff. Insert potty humor here. During a slow morning at the bike shop, my boss, through giggles, helped me come up with the best possible description for what my husband does. He is an eco soil augmentation specialist catering to an organic clientele.
What that actually means is, he piles poop by the ton into the back of a Mack truck equipped with a box with beaters in the back and a conveyor belt on the floor, which he then drives to a nearby field and bounces over at high speed while flinging poop out of the back of his truck to coat the soil evenly, giving nitrogen to the corn to be planted there. He loads it with a big yellow CAT loader, scooping it from the bottom of a pen in Caprock, one of the largest cattle feedlots in North America. Hundreds of thousands of cows stand flicking their ears and tails, watching him dolefully through big, limpid eyes as he honks his horn and shakes his loader bucket at them, trying to get them to move out of his way for just long enough to allow him to scoop up a load of stinky, steaming poop and dump it over the fence into his truck box before they run in, eager to roll in and lick the freshly exposed layers of their predecessor's digested corn and ensilage. I rode along with him one day, and having had experience with cows, I jumped out of the truck while he was loading and stood on top of the pile. The cows backed into a corner of the pen, more afraid of me than of the massive tons of roaring yellow metal. Equipment has never hurt them. Roaring piles of metal come by every morning and evening to feed them their daily corn ration. But creatures on two legs have been known to inflict pain, and the memory tends to stick. Ropes around their hocks and necks. If they were a bull calf, a slice, a yank, and their tender bits severed when they became a steer. Long rides in stifling or freezing semi trailers. Electric prods up in their unmentionables. Long, and possibly dull needles shoved into their shoulders. Red hot iron brands held against their flanks. Boots to their jaws if they thrashed. Tags punched through the cartilage of their ears. The fear of the two legged creatures far outweighs the delight of rolling in freshly turned poop. But then he wouldn't let me stand on the pile anymore. He was worried the cowboys would laugh at him. No wife in her right mind volunteers to stand on a pile of poop in the middle of a dusty pen, so they might assume he was not man enough to deal with his own cow problems and had to bring the little missus to scare away the thousand pound beasts so he could work.
A year ago, we were never going to leave Colorado. We had a poor man's mansion, a double wide trailer house in Summit Cove, the residential area a few miles from Keystone ski resort. And for Summit County, we felt like we were doing quite well. Lot rent was only $850 a month, pretty darn decent for a house located within biking distance of a destination ski resort. Sure, the work kinda sucked, but what job doesn't? We managed a lodging company for a man who lived in Denver, a boss we only saw a half-dozen times in the eight years we worked for him. 50-100 houses and condos that the homeowners put on our program to be rented to skiers on a nightly basis. We could never decide if it was a sweet deal or a raw deal. Our boss gave us everything we asked for, and allowed us to run the in-county operation without too many questions. We struggled a little to make ends meet until we asked for a cost of living raise, then lowered our standard of living along with our rent with the double wide. But we were slaves to the phone. Even though we lived just a few miles from trail heads into the pine scented wilderness, B could probably count on both hands the times he was able to sign that wilderness registry and walk off the grid without having to be within rushing distance of overflowing toilets, clogged garbage disposals, malfunctioning carbon monoxide detectors and faulty wifi modems. And then one group, not necessarily our worse group, but the group that broke the camel's back, checked in around the end of June or first of July. And for the next 48 hours, the phone rang nonstop. They demanded everything from him they could think of. They berated him for not having thought of them himself. He stood there and took their abuse, and repeated over and over, "You are right. I apologize. What can I do to make it right?"
Even this group would not have broken him if he had not just been talking with a few friends back home who had been telling him about a manure spreading operation selling out. We stood in a condo one night and talked it over, among piles of dry cleaned bedding, and we wondered if the universe was telling us anything. I think I cemented it when I asked him what would happen if he turned down the opportunity to own his own business, a lifelong dream of his, and ended up back in Kansas anyway, driving tractor for low pay, and watched the manure haulers and spreaders making their thousands while he made his hundreds?
Synthetic nitrogen is a luxury right now, so manure is in demand as the price of corn skyrockets. That is the other change from when we left. Corn was around $3/bushel when we moved to the mountains. Now it is worth $6-$7/bushel. That extra $4/bushel translates to some pretty big money coming into the local farmer's pockets. Even dry land (unirrigated) corn can make 100 bushels an acre. A quarter of ground is 160 acres. My grandpa farmed five quarters. He was one of the smallest farmers in the area, competing with farmers who farmed upwards of thirty quarters. At least one neighbor of ours has broken every inch of his pristine grassland, ground that has not been cultivated, merely grazed, since the dawn of time, into farmland, and now grows continuous crop corn, meaning he does not rotate it with other crops in order to replenish the soil, instead he pays my husband to spread poop on it and plants another corn crop the next spring. Or lets it sit fallow for a season before planting corn in the stalks of the last crop. At any rate, corn growers need cattle and cattle growers need corn, at least they need corn to fatten their cattle at the rate they need to to make money.
So why was moving back home such a big deal for us? Because we pretty much shook the dust off our feet when we left western Kansas. It took us a few years to make the transition, but when I embraced the mountain lifestyle, I did it in a big way. It started slowly enough, just taking walks down the shady trails along streams and under leaning lodge pole pines, but every summer I added to it, and soon I had the reputation, even in Summit County, as that crazy one. Not that it was deserved, there were many people much more crazy than I. But the fact that I was willing to try almost anything once, and willing to tell on myself, and seemed to always be sporting spectacularly disgusting bruises, scrapes and scars gave me a shred of cred with the "real" outdoor crowd. I also bordered on maniacal when I raced. The world fell into muffled sound and the blood roared in my ears and I literally hated the guts of anyone ahead of me. Somehow, competitiveness became rage and grimacing, red faced and grunting, I pedaled harder, took risks, and with every person I passed, felt a little more vindicated. I wasn't the best or strongest rider, but I think I may have punished myself harder than my teammates, ridden at redline for longer, felt more urge to vomit at the finish line as my stomach churned, my breath tasted of blood, my legs turned to jelly and my heart slowed it's staccato pounding. In fact, I am sure of this, because as my teammates and competition, with whom I was suddenly friends with again after the race, took their number plates off their handlebars and into the designated bar or beer tent to get their two free beers to nurse during the awards ceremony, and ordered plates of fried food,I could barely manage sips of water lest my still-churning guts decided to rebel.
One day, I was in my local bike shop having a conversation with my favorite bike mechanic anywhere, Thomas, as he worked his magic on my mountain bike. Thomas, a Norwegian 20-something with a hundred-watt grin, wild sandy curls and a history of downhilling, can whisper to my bike and coax clicking gears to shift into perfect alignment. For him, my rattling chain settles back exactly where it should be, rubbing brakes relax, my shift levers respond promptly. After a session with Thomas, my bike no longer sounds like a dying wildebeest when I squeeze the brakes. It no longer sounds like someone stuck a screwdriver into a pencil sharpener when I downshift. It whispers back to him, and then, for the next 100-200 miles, it whispers to me. It makes no difference how well I lube the chain, how lovingly I wipe it down, how lightly I turn it's screws and adjust it's tension and tweak it's derailleur, it just needs some love from Thomas to make it truly purr.
So that particular day, as I was begging Thomas to teach me the secrets of the universe from my bike's point of view, a manager of the shop slipped an employment application on the greasy counter top in front of me. I already had a job. But I suddenly realized how much I really wanted to work there, too. I really wanted to learn how to speak bike. So I filled it out, and took time off from my $20/hour job to make $9/hour being a gear head, racing between my two jobs at the cost of my precious trail time. Only it didn't really work out that I learned much from Thomas, because it was late fall before I started, and then it was ski season. The bikes were hauled away to a warehouse, the mechanic's stands were taken away, and the bike shop became a ski shop for the next seven months. But it was okay. I learned to speak ski fluently enough to talk people into dropping a grand on a new pair of skis based on my recommendation. I learned the basics of mounting bindings, and more than I wanted to know about safety testing and DIN settings, and could never learn enough about working ski boot magic and making a hard plastic boot fit to a human foot in a way that keep the owner of said foot from coming back in a week, limping and demanding money back. And I did eventually get to work in the bike shop, Thomas watching my every move as I tried to mimic his deft adjustments, nodding as he explained to me little tricks and common mistakes, built my first $3,000 mountain bike under his careful supervision.
And I was a member of the bike shop's racing team. I had already ridden with their women's bike club for years, but this year, I got to enjoy the perks of being sponsored, not that the perks were so big, since this was not exactly a huge race series. But still nice. Free race entrances. A free pair of sunglasses, a free jersey and shorts, unlimited free tune ups, not that I didn't already have access to that. Energy bars. Team support at races.
B moved to Kansas in July, which is the most beautiful month in the high Rockies. I stayed behind to race, help train in new managers at the lodging company, and work shifts at the bike shop through the summer. We saw each other every two weeks, when one of us would make the five hour drive to see the other. At some point in there, feeling the prospect of my life being upended, I decided that this was the sign I was waiting for- it was time to start trying for a kid. B got this goofy grin and said he had been thinking the same thing for a while now, he was just afraid of bringing it up, since I had announced I was ready and begged him to agree many times in the past and then, every spring, the urge faded as the weather warmed and the bike called, and he expected the same reaction from me now. He would never hear of trying to get pregnant in the winter, he always made me wait six months and report back to him, not trusting me to resent our child when biking season rolled around. I could never argue. Yes, I wanted a kid. But I was also happy to bike when the weather was as idyllic as it gets on a lazy summer afternoon at 9,000 feet.
But this was different. There wouldn't be a next season. So knowing our odds weren't great considering that we only saw each other twice a month, we ditched the condoms. I don't know why it didn't occur to me that I might be pregnant within a month, or that the pain that suddenly had me writhing on the floor whimpering might be a miscarriage-- me, the self-appointed goddess of tough, who once crashed her mountain bike and went skidding down a hillside covered with rocks, sand and wild rose bushes, then rode home with jersey pulled up, lower back slick with blood, hosting a mosquito smorgasbord in the deep cuts and scrapes, pedaling with one foot clipped in while the other leg hung stiff because a Garmin GPS tracker in the back jersey pocket had jammed so hard into left kidney and hip that she couldn't stand to put weight on that leg, and yet still worked and got around with the help of a ski pole crutch for the next two weeks...that hurt, but this pain had me whimpering and incapacitated, clutching the top half of a cheese tray to catch the vomit that was trying to come up as a result of the pain while my husband, miraculously in the County for the day, drove me to the ER. It took five days, given that it happened on a holiday weekend, then the lab machine broke, to confirm that my HCG levels had dropped and I had lost the pregnancy.
Then B left me again, and went back to the camper we had bought for mountain biking trips to the desert but was now parked in Leoti, Kansas, as a result of him having financed a hundred grand on a glorified Mack truck, leaving me sitting high and dry in Colorado. He wasn't there to see the highlight of my racing experience, a grueling race up Boreas pass, then down through rocky stream beds and tight trees that I finished long minutes ahead of second place, cinching my spot as the championship winner in my category by a hair and a technicality. And only a few days after the miscarriage. Looking back, I know I was an emotional wreck. But I somehow managed to blame the hormonal mess on the circumstances. It was the hormones talking when my boss at the lodging company was angry at me for something, not a new development, and I started sobbing uncontrollably in my impotent rage and then quit. And walked out of that office forever. Effective immediately. Not exactly my finest moment. Race season was over. The bike shop was back to being a ski shop. The weather was getting cold. I got in my car the next day and drove to Kansas, where B held me and made it all feel better. I never went back, except to pack and sell the house. Three months later I was pregnant again. Ecstatic, happy plans. And again, with no warning, blood and pain and loss. That was two months ago.
The end of an era. The start of a new one. Life cycles. I see them every where I look. A new phase calls for a new blog. My old one was written with the purpose of letting my family know I was fine, telling them about my life that I was so busy living I only had time to write one letter, one email, make one phone call, so I blogged so that everyone would hear about my life from me without me needing to invest much time in communicating. Now I live here. Now I have more time. My old blog was intensely personal as it repeated my inner thoughts, occasionally whiny, but mostly just a letter to the universe and whoever else cared, a commentary on whatever I happened to be thinking about at the moment. But I feel like I am embarking on a new journey now. I want to blog for a different reason, about a different journey. So I am strongly considering bidding the old blog adieu, and starting fresh. Because that is what my life is now. A fresh start. Only where do I go from here?
And that is prologue and prequel. From here on out, it is a live show.
