Old Mike Mulligan

A little while ago, I had to go on an install up in Nederland, where they have Frozen Dead Guy Days. Look it up!

Anyway, while there, I saw this beast and snagged a picture. It's an old steam shovel, built in the late 1930s. It went all the way to Panama to help build the canal and what not. It still runs! They start it up once a year if I heard my co-worker right! Could you imagine the labor it would take to keep anything steam-driven running all the time? Trains, steam-shovels, ships... man those were the days, before all of this internal combustion hooplah. I would love to go back and see what they had going on, to take a train from Salida to Gunnison via the Alpine Tunnel, to have Teddy Roosevelt as my president, to have a chat with Mark Twain!

I feel like I was born 130 years too late. Then again, who knows? Maybe I was born at exactly the right time. Maybe people will see our Information Revolution as one of the great turning points in human history. Maybe we, humanity as a whole, will realize our full potential, that the Kingdoms of God truly are within each of us!

Wow... I love history.

Resurrection!

After a long and depressing week, I went to Salida to try to pick up the peices of a shattered van. I was driving my dad's PianoWagon, and I was cringing at the prospect of trying to fix my Cherokee Chief. Dad and I towed the BattleWagon back to the homestead where he had the insight and genius to try to use a hi-lift jack to pro open the engine compartment so we could see what was really going on. We did, reached down, and discovered that it wasn't the radiator the fan was hitting. It was the plastic shroud! Dad removed the culprit, and I started it up. The BattleWagon roared to live, hungry as ever for the adventures that lay before it!

I stowed some coolant just in case, and I set off for Denver with a renewed sense of Justice and alarm!  The only details which I soon hope to remedy are the absense of any lighting on the driver's side. I'm hoping some duct tape and replacement bulbs will take care of most of this, but as I've learned the hard way, I will not hold my breath in believing this will cute all my ails. I am considering, however, that the green duct tape may make a cameo in this whole debacle. Wouldn't that be a treat! After all, it's still serving diligently at it's post on my passenger side windshield wiper... couldn't think of a more fitting tribute to the BattleWagon.

It's supposed to be rather chilly tonight. My prayers have been counted in having a cozy and familiar place to lay my head tonight. Thank the Architect that things may be as they are.

If Wishes Were Wagons...

I've been ever so graciously and humbly driving around in my dad's PianoWagon, a 1985 Totota Tercel, with almost 250,000 miles on it. Granted these miles have almost exclusively been on the previous engine, but it's still very impressive. It makes me wish, in futility, that the BattleWagon was a Toyota, simply based on the reliability and resale values of the stuff they produce.

On a more philosophic note, I ponder this:  As the end of this chronicle starts to sink in, so, too, does the reality that the adventures are ongoing. Yes I spent an incredible year in a van, yet I never once parked down by the river. I met lots of people and made tons of friends, but never near a school. I decorated the van with stickers, vehicle graphics, and prayer flags, but I never spraypainted "free candy" on the doors. But ultimately, I learned how simply we can choose to live our lives when we really apply ourselves. It's amazing to me that we really don't need television or movies or the full and relentless witchcraft we call the internet to surf our minds away. All we really require (all I really require, I should specify) is fellowship, love, friendship, books, and a journal. It's amazing how when we try to access the core of who we are, we start to visit a much higher force.

A passage in the book of Luke in the Bible tells us that "the Kingdom of God is found within us". It challenges the reader to look inside one's self, deeply and honestly, and that is where we find, or even become, God in God's image.

Simply. Honestly. That's what I got from the BattleWagon, and I hope to go on applying the fruits of this experience to my everyday life.

Here's one...

It's a little hard to see unless you zoom in, but it was a very pretty car.

Hugs,

Russ

The End of an Era/A New Beginning

The time has come. The BattleWagon, while fighting a true and noble fight, has fought and lost its final battle.

I had spent an excellent weekend at home with my parents in Salida. My sister and her husband were there, and my brother and I had a chance to catch up some things.  I left at about 8:00 on Sunday night, in the evening in high spirits that my week would be good.

An hour later, while driving over Trout Creek Pass, I was listening to some Massive Attack, enjoying the starry night, when a doe ran out in front of me.

Thump.

I walked three miles, making phone calls along the way as I stumbled into areas where I got service. The van was towed to a body shop, where the insurance company declared it dead on arrival.

In the interim, my dad was kind enough to lend me his car, a champion 1985 Toyota Tercel, but the BattleWagon is no longer in service.

These chronicles of mine will go on, as there is a world of things to write about, a world of experiences to be had, good and bad. I have no regrets. If anything, I'm inspired be the possibilities of the impossible. I just hope some of you took something with you from all of this. It would be a shame if I couldn't share this with anyone else.

ONE YEAR!!!

Today is a year in the van! It's excellent! I have more to say, more to do, but this is a new day for me. Hardship is only hard if you make it that way.

Thanks to everyone who has supported me along this journey!

Sunsets in Alpenglow

I don't know if it's always called Alpenglow, but what I refer to here is usually a mountaineering term. It's when you're in the mountains early in the morning, before dawn. When the sun first starts to rise, it lights the mountains up in the most vivid of colors, usually casting a gold or red paint on the still otherwise magnificent mountain peaks. This effect is so vibrant that the first Spanish explorers in Colorado met some mountains in the morning (or evening) and named them the Sangre de Christo Mountains, which translanted means Blood of Christ. I could only imagine the awe and spectacle of these mountains which would drive the Spanish to name them that.

I've found recently very beautiful places after numerous trips west and driving east into the next day's dawn. Coincidentally, I always drive east at sunset and have continually been caught by this phenomenon, sometimes inspiring me to pull over and simply gaze at the sunset without looking towards the sun. It's like an old analogy I use to describe religion: God is the sun, but it's what we find beauty in, what the sun shines upon, that's how we believe God to exist. No two people will have the same love for God as each of our beliefs are custom made by us and for us alone. I believe this is how God should be. I believe this is how God is, universally loving, yet intimately personal for each of us.