I drove a few blocks over to Union Station and walked around the magnificent waiting room, completely void of any patrons. I scanned a display of photos depicting the glory days of the depot. In the early 1900s, the station was the largest building in total square feet in Denver. One photo showed two diesels warming up in front of the station, both pulling passenger cars and headed in the same direction. One was the Burlington Route and the other the Union Pacific. According to the text, the two lines were in daily competition with each other for the passenger traffic to and from Chicago in the early 1950s. It was hard to imagine that kind of frenzy, especially after walking outside to a deserted platform and seeing four empty tracks where once there were a dozen or more tracks teeming with train traffic. Sometimes I thought of myself as being somewhat masochistic with my self-induced depression while wandering around quasi-abandoned railroad stations. Maybe so.
I drove up the main 17th Street through the middle of downtown in a light downpour, thinking, “If it wasn’t raining, I would be out biking around downtown,” I couldn’t complain. I was loving the wintry weather. I made my way back to King Soupers where I used the outside pay phone to call a bunch of old Denver friends, all of whom I had befriended at RNL Architects. I still cherished their friendships, especially Tom Reilly’s. Every time I came to Denver, I felt like a grapevine, talking to everyone telling them how everyone else was doing since most of them very rarely saw each other. I checked with security to see if we were still on the same page. A light snow was beginning to fall which reinforced my fabricated excuse for having to stay one more night: “I’m trying to get back to Gunnison (thank goodness for my Gunnison County plates), but I saw on the evening weather report that Monarch Pass was expected to get about a foot of snow tonight.” He bought it. I didn’t feel much like writing in my journal by flashlight, so I took the cover off the A/C D/C Batt. 9 inch B & W and watched some TV, in particular, the local news and weather and The Late Show with David Letterman. As I slipped under the comforters, a blanket of snow was covering the skylight. It was winter!
I awoke to about six inches of snow on top of Ol’ Blue, and flakes were still lightly falling. This “Last Blast of Winter” arrived totally unexpected. I was thinking, “How ironic! All those early spring forays to Colorado in hope of getting showered by some snow, some even predicated on long-range forecasts (on the Weather Channel), and more often than not, the only snow I would see was on top of the mountain ranges.” I remembered thinking before I left: “After the festivities in Albuquerque, I’m headed to Colorado to see my friends and I couldn’t care less if it didn’t snow. So there!” Yep, the best things on trips happen unexpectedly.
After getting some comestibles at King Soupers, including some more of those delicious deli meatballs, I headed south on I-25. It was one of those dream drives with a light snow falling and a tail wind. And because the snow was so moisture-laden, the pavement was clear of any slippery accumulation. As a testimony to how non-hazardous the driving was, I didn’t see one car mired in a snow bank off the side of the roadway. I was tuned in to KOA out of Denver which kept reporting that Raton Pass was closed. That didn’t surprise me because the snowfall was getting a wee bit heavier. It didn’t bother me one bit since I had planned to spend the night in Trinidad anyway.
I consulted my trusty Best Western directory to see at what exit number they were located. I checked in at the Village Inn around 5 P.M. and felt very fortunate to get a ground floor room since the parking lot was all but saturated with motor vehicles. This was the third motel I had stayed at in Colorado on this trip alone. I had set a record. In all my 23 years of traversing the state, I could recall only three other times I had moteled it, two of those being at the old Broadway Plaza in Denver, and the other in Colorado Springs on my first day out of Denver on my first western odyssey in a brand new Chevy van in September of 1981. I was getting soft. I kept stepping outside to revel in the beautiful snowfall. At one point, I initiated a conversation with my neighbor who was driving back to Minnesota with his fiancé from Juarez. Wow, you talk about a culture change (and shock)! I had a chance to up-date my journal, noting, even with the 200-mile stint on I-25, I had only driven about 400 miles on the inane interstates out of a total of 1600 miles so far. I was happy with that.
I called Louis Thomas in Texas to see if we were still on schedule to meet at his friend’s ranch in New Mexico. To my dismay, he said he couldn’t make it due to an overlooked previous engagement, something having to do with a crawdad fishing tournament in North Texas. I couldn’t believe it. We had been planning on this get-together for months. I even had a framed watercolor of New Mexico Mesas to give to a person I didn’t even know, but from what Louis had told me of his love of western art, he would have greatly appreciated my artwork. I asked him if it would be alright to call Larry “Buddy” Wright and go ahead with a solo rendezvous at his ranch. He said, “I have no problem with that. Go for it.” I made several calls, but got no answers. Well, maybe it was not meant to be.
I arose on the morning of April 24th and said to myself, “Happy 66th Birthday, Billy Bob.” I called Mr. Wright several more times, but to no avail. I figured he was out on the range somewhere. As I was packing up the van, I looked up and saw these huge snow masses cantilevering from the edge of the roof. When I was checking out, I mentioned to the proprietor of the danger of having that “Colorado cement” cascading down on somebody’s head. She assured me that they were taking care of the problem. Yeah, right. I decided to treat myself to a real breakfast in the motel’s Jesse Jane restaurant. I ordered two eggs over easy with toast and jelly. Sitting at an adjacent booth was Minnesota and Juarez. I said hello and glanced over at them from time to time, noticing they had nary a word to say to each other. I thought, “A wedding made in heaven. He couldn’t speak Spanish and she couldn’t speak English.” She was one fine-looking woman.
I had plenty of time to go nowhere, meaning I had no idea where I was going to spend the next night. So I took off east on U.S. 160 across the vast Colorado plains. The sky was a cerulean blue with a white blanket extending to the horizon. Sadly, the Rockies were fading away in my outside mirror, so I picked up on something else to pique my interest — the silhouetted fence posts paralleling both sides of the highway, marching along interminably into infinity. It was sort of mesmerizing. Ah, the beauty of simplest pleasures. At the junction of CO 389, I drove south into New Mexico through Folsom and Capulin, tiny burgs that were on the edge of extinction. They had the ambience of being in Old Mexico. I met up with U.S. 87/64, and then west to Raton. I guesstimated it was about 100 miles farther than going over Raton Pass, but it didn’t matter. I started noticing a ever so slight thumping noise. I thought, “Was it my imagination, or what?” When you own a vehicle for 23 years and over 200,000 miles, your senses become acutely aware of the least aberration.