Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsModern day riders in an Arkansas Valley Fair sunset.
I just love a road trip. And I came across a new guide. It’s not filled with hotels or restaurants. It’s a literary road guide to Colorado– featuring excerpts organized by highways. So, for example, writing from along Highway 93 from Golden to Boulder, or on the Western Slope Highway 50 from Gunnison to Delta. Peter Anderson put together this collection, called “Reading Colorado.”
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsFrom “Whispers from the Past,” by Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk, of the Ute Mountain Ute: “Our movement and the landscape are bound together. Prayers are walked, lived and answered. Our elders have told us where to collect the herbs and places we can go to draw strength, where we can go to feel the Earth beneath our feet.” Ute Mountain looms over Towaoc on Ute Mountain Ute tribal land.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR News“He stood at the corner, peacefully aloof from the throng of passers-by, inflamed in the nimbus of a dying sun. He loved this moment of the day. People ceased to be workers and miraculously were transformed into free creatures once again.” - Dalton Trumbo writing in his first novel, “Eclipse,” of life in Grand Junction, where Michael Wilson’s sculpture of Trumbo, naked and working in a bathtub, sits on Main Street.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsThe view from Sunset Point at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. Author Ursula K. Le Guin was inspired by the dramatic gorge on the Western Slope, writing in her “City of Illusions” novel: “The City of Lords of Earth was built on the two rims of a canyon, a tremendous cleft through the mountains, narrow, fantastic, its black walls striped with green plunging terrifically down half a mile to the silver tinsel strip of a river in the shadowy depths.”
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsWorking on the Servicios de la Raza float ahead of Denver’s Pride parade in 2022, an emblem that’s part of a long and continuous struggle. “I have endured in the rugged mountains of our country. / I have survived the toils and slavery of the fields. / I have existed in the barrios of the city, / in the suburbs of bigotry, / in the mines of social snobbery, / in the prisons of dejection, / in the muck of exploitation, / and in the fierce heat of racial hatred.” - from “Yo Soy Joaquin,” by Corky Gonzales.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsA restored barracks at the Camp Amache site near Granada, where during World War II, more than 7,000 Japanese-Americans and non-citizen Japanese from the West Coast were forcibly incarcerated. In “Casa Casa Girl Goes to Camp,” Lily Nakai recalls revisiting the place of her imprionment as a girl: “The glimpse of Kansas heaven had to wait almost 60 years before it became real. In 1998 there was an Amache camp reunion. My son and I went two days before the official celebration to visit the camp. In our rental car we stopped at the entrance … “I used to stand by the barbed wire fence and wish I could squeeze through like the rabbits and make my way to Kansas.”
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsAn old empty building with an easy chair in Otis, east of Fort Morgan. "I'm no good at the restaurant business, I don't like farming, I can't stand heat, I'm allergic to dust, and the only other choice I have is to just sit here and take it. That or play pinball the rest of my life." - The character Tom Go, speaking in Laura Hendrie's "Stygo," a novel set on Colorado's Eastern Plains.
