Oh, The Hits Keep On Coming

I snagged this shot of a sunset on the state highway that connects Penrose and Colorado Springs a few weeks ago. I thought it was beautiful, and I was thankful for my surroundings, as I was a PASSENGER (yay!) on a road trip back to Salida from my brother's high school football game. It was nice to be idly chatting with my parents and him, crusing through the semi-arid desert that is the Arkansas River Valley and, later, Bighorn Sheep Canyon. (I still refer to it as "The Canyon" and everyone seems to know which one I'm talking about.)

It seems that it's nearly impossible to see a bad sunset. Have you ever heard anyone say, "Oh, that sunset was absolutely dreadful!"? My friend Dan and I have had this conversation a few times where we came to the conclusion that people seem to take things like this for granted. Every once in a while, we need to take time to look, to really see a sunset... or a flower, or the clouds slowly changing shape. Like in the movie "Fearless", we need to stop working when the wind blows and just face it, take it all in.  There are so many sunsets and wooden fences and children playing that we take them for granted, forgetting to acknowledge the ancient mysteries that lay within these moments. These are the moments worth living for. These are the moments that convince us that death isn't really death, it's just a transcendence.

The Band-Aid

I drove the van back to Denver yesterday, and when I got here, I did a patch job, moreso than the wiper a few months back. This is the ultimate. I taped a headlight and a turn signal on the BattleWagon. Excellent!

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.