This time I am moving Cameron across country from Colorado to Georgia, to Alpharetta where she will re-open her store, Magnolia Moon. Perhaps, hopefully, a better fit for the Southern market. I flew from Corpus Christi to Denver, then took the shuttle to Fort Collins. At Cameron’s we spent the rest of the Friday of Labor Day weekend packing and then most of Saturday getting things in the U-Haul and her car. Luckily we had some hired hands to load the U-Haul, a thin fellow with a great arm span—he could lift and carry so many things just by himself. He was late arriving by an hour or so—his partner had to be taken to the hospital because he got some pesticide in his eye. So, the mover apparently recruited the help of his girlfriend who huffed and sweated profusely as she carried bins and other items down the stairs to him. He would then load and position the stuff into the truck. It always amuses me that the men let the women do a lot of the hauling while they put things in place. I must give this guy credit, because he crammed and stuffed Cameron’s things, at least most of it, into the 20-foot van. After he had left, we found the bed frame and the nightstand still upstairs. Cameron and I tried to find a place for the nightstand, but after all of the pet kennels and cat boxes, there just was not room. So, we left the nightstand and frame, plus a vintage turquoise chair and a pile of junk on the back deck, and finally got on the road. Quite a bit later and a lot more tired than we had planned. We contemplated disassembling the bed frame, but our mutual reaction was, “Fuck it. Let’s just go.”
At 5:30 we finally left the house. I am driving the U-Haul, a 20-foot truck. I am 68 years old, 5 feet, two inches. Most of the people I told about our adventure were dubious about my driving a big U-Haul, but I have done this before, moving Cameron and some of Brad’s belongs across country on two other occasions. It’s not so bad if you can figure out how to use the mirrors and avoid backing up. Cameron takes the lead in her car, a black Hyundai Santa Fe with an Auburn University sticker on the back window, loaded with two cats and Lucy, the dog. Cameron has the route on her GPS, and I just have to follow her. Out of Fort Collins and on to the freeway going south to Denver and then east on I-70. Our goal was Limon, pronounced “Lime un” in Colorado, a few hours from the condo and a start on the trek. It was sad leaving the mountains and I stole glances of them off to the left and then behind me, the layers of ranges highlighted by the rays of the sun as it progressively set behind them. Jagged lines of shadow, with streaks of sun, cloud banks of white, then golden and pink, suggesting the mysterious interior of the Rockies.
Once headed east, the country opened up, reminding me of the hymn to America, golden grains of wheat with purple mountains majesty in the rear. I don’t know if it was actually wheat, but the great, open land was colored golden yellow, the land gently rolling. Dotting the gold were the black forms of cattle grazing in the evening. The scene made me think of those great buffalo herds that must have changed the scene from yellow to black, their great hulks moving across the land. We passed a sign for a town named Kiowa, which put me in mind of Scott Momaday’s comment about the Kiowa who had so much space, so much sun in which to imagine themselves. I also thought of adventurers like Francis Parkman, who loved the buffalo chase, but could get separated from the rest of his group on the rolling plains without much in the way of landscape markers to orient himself. Melville’s Pip also comes to mind, the boy lost in the great sea and losing his mind in the vastness of the same “nothingness.”
Then as we would come up to a small town, Strasburg for one, I could see the white steeple of a church pointing heavenward from out of the mass of trees and houses that mark a town on the plains from the view of the freeway. Grain elevators, their stubby fingers of concrete the other edifice rising from the land, two symbols of the country, the church and agricultural commerce, the predominant structures and ideologies that shaped the West.
As we continued east, the color of the sky, the orange and pinks of the elapsing day and the purple, dark blue of clouds filled with rain. The view from the truck was immense, the land largely uninterrupted by human makings, I could watch the sky, the changing color, the blue-grey veils of rain falling from over laden clouds in the distance, the occasional flash of lightning emerging through the veil of rain or a flare of pink light illuminating, momentarily, the dark blue of the storm clouds ahead. And then as we drove into the night we drove into the rain, not too bad, just enough to wash the dust from the windshield. One of the momentary challenges in driving a new vehicle is finding its various functions, like the windshield wipers. I managed to turn on the left and right turn blinkers before I found the wipers, and then the lights for driving in the dark. Arrived at the motel, unloaded the pets and their supplies, our supplies for the night in a quick dash through the chilly rain, and then some wine to help unwind from a long day, our wine in a box. Dinner, two power salads from Taco Bell that we ate in the room.