We travelers — a group of four — enjoy the warmth and hospitality of random travelers as well as those who host us when we’re eating or preparing to sleep.
Our accommodations are modest, neither luxurious nor bare.
In our travels, we suffer no inconvenience that prevents us from our pedestrian pleasures of food, shelter, clothing, shopping and sightseeing.
Our views are close as well as wide, a covered outdoor gas grille juxtaposing the Stanley Hotel, high mountains surrounding us in all directions, for example.
So it was I found myself yesterday preparing to pack our rental SUV and heard the honk of a loud truck horn across the street.
A Manitou Springs sanitation crew was waiting for homeowners up the hill from us to haul down two flights of red-and-brown stone stairs their garbage in white plastic bags.
The sanitation truck driver saw me and held out his forefinger, indicating he’d be over to my place in a moment.
I looked in the driveway of our rental cottage and found three rubbish bins, one a bit older and away from the other two newer bins.
As the sanitation truck stopped at the cabin, I quickly rolled the bins to the two guys dumping the trash at the back of the truck.
When the sanitation crew leader grabbed the older bin from me, he peered inside and gave me a questioning look.
He tipped the bin in my location. Inside the bin were a few small plastic shopping bags; old, tattered clothes; and ripped, weathered shoes.
I shrugged my shoulders to indicate they weren’t mine so the crew leader went ahead and dumped the contents of the bin into the truck.
Later, I noticed a very thin homeless guy walk by our cabin, then slow down to look in the direction of where the older bin had been. He was wearing a T-shirt covered in mud stains, a pair of barely held together, excessively-shredded blue jeans and a pair of flattened flip-flops, his long hair tangled in knots and pointing in all directions. Either he just returned from an outdoor music festival or lived along the creek like the fellows I’d seen whilst fishing earlier in the week.
I wonder: was the homeless guy and perhaps others using the older bin as a relatively dry, animal-free storage locker for their clothes and belongings, maybe even food?
Some say home is where the heart is.
Home can also be where you have a place to store your belongings, no matter how insecure, no matter how temporarily, just like the wanderers and fortune seekers who’ve hiked these hills for millennia.
Fading into the background of life, as I decided to do upon retirement in 2007 at age 45, has taught me to appreciate the silence that lack of conversation with other humans has given me.
With silence, then appreciation, comes reflection.
As either Buzz Aldrin or Neil Armstrong (who described himself as a “white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer”) said after they’d traveled to the Moon and back, going on a world tour, fielding questions about what they thought when they were on the Moon, paraphrasing, “The reporters wanted us to answer them like poets or philosophers but if we were either one of those we wouldn’t have been the ones who’d gone to the Moon.”
“I wanted to say something profound, something meaningful,” Buzz Aldrin wrote in his 2009 autobiography, Magnificent Desolation, named for the words he uttered after stepping onto the moon’s surface 40 years earlier. “But I was an engineer, not a poet; as much as I grappled with the quintessential questions of life, questions of origin, purpose, and meaning… I found no adequate words to express what I had experienced. Yet I recognized that people wanted me to provide them with some cosmic interpretation gleaned from the lunar landing.”
In Magnificent Desolation, Aldrin describes telling two different psychiatrists about “always being known as the second man to walk on the moon, and continually being reminded of that fact.” To some extent, it clearly grates on him still. He recently told the National Geographic that being forever introduced as the second man on the moon gets “a little frustrating.”
Portrait of American astronauts, from left, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, and Neil Armstrong, the crew of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission to the moon, as they pose on a model of the moon, 1969.Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images
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I have been a poet-philosopher my whole life, more apt to write than act.
In the past few weeks I’ve asked myself why I ride a motorcycle. I’ve watched a lot of motorcycle-related films such as “Silver Dream Racer” and “Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man.”
What do I get out of increasing the tinnitus noise in my head? What do I get from increasing my chances of dying on the road? Why do I put up with stop-and-go city traffic on steep inclines trying to keep my motorcycle from rolling backward whilst changing gears? How can I compare myself to the tattooed/smoking Harley riders or kids on Ninja bikes?
I even drove to the local motorcycle dealerships looking for the next perfect ride, including a barely-used 2015 Honda NC700X:
It’s not about the “what,” “why,” or “how.”
Riding is like climbing a mountain, because it’s there.
Yesterday, I watched a film called “Marjorie Prime” about a mid-21st century future where we have a digital assistant who/which is a projection of someone familiar in our lives, a projection that learns about us as well as about itself so that it can interact with us in an approximation of the loved one it represents.
For those of us who remember, the “Marjorie Prime” digital assistant is like a 3D version of the ELIZA software program from the 1960s.
But for me, the film reminded how much I missed my father. Dad has been dead for over seven years now which has given me time to forgive myself for holding negative thoughts about my father which were over-exaggerated in my thoughts compared to the real person Dad was.
Dad was the only person I cared enough about to share my enjoyment of mechanical things like cars, motorcycles, airplanes, lawnmowers and heat pumps.
After Dad died, sharing the things I’ve learned, like changing the water pump on a 1962 Dodge Lancer, or changing the oil on my 2007 Honda Shadow Spirit…well, there’s just no one like Dad to share them with.
I’ve tried. I really have.
But the people I talk to have lives or body piercings/tattoos/haircuts I don’t understand that get in the way of the mechanical stuff.
As my social life dwindles down to just my wife and me, containing a little social interaction with my boss and a few coworkers (but where I mostly work by myself all day, sometimes taking short phone calls for medical supply orders in between filling orders alone in a stockroom/loading dock area), I realize what I’m missing by not willing to understand others who are different than/from me.
But I am old beyond my years.
When 80- or 90-year old men think I’m close to their age while the calendar says I just recently turned 57, then I know the wisdom of my years shows itself in the thoughts of others.
I wish I had more to give.
Today, I watched a film called “The Flying Dutchmen” about a young man who took his older mentor on 3000-mile motorcycle trip to the Pacific Ocean.
The film reinforced feeling lost without my father’s guidance.
Dad and I didn’t share enough road trips together although we enjoyed several, including an Indycar race weekend in Long Beach, California, a vintage racecar weekend at the Mid-Ohio racecourse, NASCAR races in Bristol, TN, and Charlotte, NC.
He and I also traced the paths of our ancestors on a trip to Norfolk, VA and down the Atlantic Coast to Cape Hatteras, NC.
So, you see, my father was the person with whom I shared road trips about mechanical objects that move fast.
I love my wife dearly and miss her much (thank goodness she’ll be back tomorrow). She and I share everything with each other.
Well, almost everything.
I don’t fully share her love of handmade cards although I appreciate it when she makes one for me.
She doesn’t share my love of tinkering around in the garage on my motorcycle or building structures like treehouses or wooden bridges in the backyard.
Yet we love each other for our differences.
I would like to take a cross-country motorcycle trip with someone I love but my wife won’t ride on a motorbike and my father is dead.
Also, I can’t see taking a Dad version of the “Marjorie Prime” digital assistant on the road with me would have quite the same effect.
I still dream of traveling somewhere, around the world or to the Moon, on a motorcycle or flying machine.
However, already I drove my parents’ station wagon from Knoxville, TN, to Seattle, WA, to Los Angeles, CA and back by myself in Sept/Oct 1984.
I wonder if reliving that 1984 trip on a motorcycle in the next year or two would make that dream of mine a reality? With whom/what would I ride to give me closure?
Would this blog be enough? After all, I’ve written to myself for just about as long as I could write, always with an eye toward readership by more than one person, always freely, never for money.
If I wanted more readership I would stick to posting photos of the sights around me, whether here in our yard or on the road, leaving out personal philosophical commentary, adding notes to enhance the image rather than give insight into the writer. I understand that only a small number of readers are interested in what I have to say about my personal life unless there is something to increase the reader’s personal understanding of self. I used to struggle with the imaginary connection between writer and reader but then realised I needed/wanted to be myself, not a well-crafted writer, so I’ve let go of the image of the Perfect Reader in my thoughts, the Other, the Not-I/Not-Me, the Yin to my Yang, that sort of thing.
No compromise.
I also used to think I had to keep growing, keep improving myself, feed the work ethic, perfect my craft.
But I get bored in pursuit of perfection. I just want to have fun which takes me in many directions, rarely any one direction for very long.
I have read/heard that perseverance in pursuit of perfection pays off proportionally to our sense of purpose. The ol’ 99% sweat, 1% talent saying.
My wife and I are already self-invested millionaires who’ve lived beneath our means whilst working at jobs with modest incomes. Do I really need any more financial/social reward for having fun?
In other words, I’m telling myself it’s okay to say, “Dad, I sure miss you. I always felt like I could have done more to make you proud of me but that was in my own thoughts. Except for your comment that you’d wished I’d gotten a PhD or some other professional degree, you often told me you were proud of me just the way I was, a creative writer who was able to achieve success in many different (and at different levels of) industries without going completely mad by what we both saw, in our shared snobbishness, as the general idiocy of the average self-important human manager.”
I thank those who’ve taken the time to post comments on my blog entries, or clicked that they liked what I’ve posted. In my deepest depressive moments, I’ve found comfort in believing that some future blog post will make someone feel generous enough to like what I’ve written/posted.
I’m an old man now, bordering on becoming a curmudgeon, in part because I see I don’t have as many days ahead of me as I do behind me, shortening my patience, decreasing my tolerance/kindness and increasing my insensitivity.
Today’s tourist stop: Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum, “Home of the World’s Largest Motorcycle Collection” [certified by the Guinness folks].
Although these machines exhibit fine engineering design and detailed craftsmanship, evoking strong memories in many visitors, my history with motorbikes is limited to a few examples.
The display here amazes most, no doubt, overwhelming one’s senses.
Yet, one can find specific marques, models and configurations to keep one from getting lost in arcana and modernisation…
I don’t want to overwhelm this blog entry with all the motorbikes, cars and whatnot I photographed.
But I did accomplish my goal of finding a motorcycle fairing I want to duplicate in a cruiser rendition…
With nods to this:
Any of the two-wheeled motorbike vehicle configurations I would gladly own…
…or the four-wheeled varieties!
Overall, the two-hour drive to visit here is worth what has ended up being about a two-hour tour.
As a bonus, I got to watch Porsche driving school students speed around the road course racetrack next to the museum…
Two hundred years after my ancestor explored the hills, rivers and valleys of East Tennessee, including a spot where Big Creek meets the Holston River not far from where my wife grew up, and on Long Island in Kingsport not far from where I grew up, I worked at my first job, a cashier/short order cook for McLendy’s, a fast food restaurant in downtown Kingsport in a building now home to a CPA and travel agency…
My childhood was rather sheltered culturally.
The vast majority of people I knew and met on a daily basis were WASPs. One exception — my first and second grade school years where my best friend, Kevin, was African-American and fell in love with my sister.
From 3rd grade (age 8) until 10th grade (age 16), I only knew a few Jewish friends and two Hispanic friends who were not WASPs.
In 10th grade, I turned 16 and, with my father’s help, purchased my first car, a gold Dodge Dart. To help pay for the car, I started working at a “real” job because my lawn mowing business didn’t bring in enough income for car expenses — monthly car payment, gas/oil and insurance (the last of which my father paid).
I question whether a fast food entry-level position is real work but for a suburbanite living in the Tennessee foothills it counted because I had official training, wore a uniform and had to punch a time clock to record my work hours.
McLendy’s exposed me to the “big city” life, or so I thought, basically because I was surrounded with people who were not my high school mates.
One workmate was an older guy (probably 30 years old) who had spent 10 years in the U.S. Army as a bazooka specialist who could not find a civilian job that took advantage of his unique skills handling a shoulder-fired weapon. He constantly complained about the lack of civilian support for a person like him which the U.S. Government had invested thousands of dollars training for war. He advised me to be careful if I decided on a military career and get an assignment (MOS) which had useful civilian skills like office clerk or driver.
Another workmate was about my age — Greg Watterson.
Have I told you about him? He was the first African-American person I got to know as an adult.
Yeah, my life was pretty sheltered culturally.
Greg was surprised I held no bias against him and I didn’t know why.
I didn’t know about ethnic cliques or subcultural biases except remotely through the evening news.
Greg was shocked I knew nothing about him because he knew a little bit about me.
By the time I started at McLendy’s I had shown an interest in acting, having participated in my high school’s performance of the musical “Bye Bye Birdie.”
Other of my fellow actors/high school mates had made friends with actors in our rival high school in Kingsport, Dobyns-Bennett.
One such actor was Justin Faire whose nickname was Justin Fairy.
At age 16 I understood there were boys/men who showed effeminate traits but I didn’t understand that effeminate boys/men are usually homosexuals.
Justin was (and from I’ve seen on Facebook still is) very effeminate.
So was Greg.
Greg was shocked that not only did I show no animosity toward him as an African-American but also no animosity toward him as an effeminate man.
At first he thought it was probably because I knew his father was important, a local business owner on the city council.
Surely, Greg asked, I had seen his father’s business, a famous liquor store in town?
Nope, my parents weren’t big drinkers.
Sure, Greg asked, I had heard about his father’s comments in city council meetings?
Nope, my father was opposed to us watching TV news and because I didn’t live in the city of Kingsport I didn’t pay attention to Kingsport-related news articles in the Kingsport newspaper.
So, Greg concluded, I didn’t show respect for Greg because of his father.
Nope, Greg had my respect for him because he was a person, not because of someone or something else.
Greg told me he was close friends with several of my classmate, including Justin Faire and Jeff Fleischer, if I knew what Greg meant.
Greg laughed when it was obvious I didn’t get what he was talking about.
At that point in my life, I had not yet kissed a girl, I mean really kiss a girl (not counting the boy/girl party in 5th grade when, at age 10, I had to go in a basement closet with a girl, Renee Wells (who later was pregnant at age 14) to kiss her after a “spin the bottle” game put us two together); or the time I pressed my lips to a friend, Patricia, when we were nine years old to see what kissing was all about.
Therefore, I certainly didn’t know or understand why two guys would want to kiss each other or anything else that has to do with homosexual activity — it just wasn’t a part of my upbringing — something that Greg had shared with his friends Justin and Jeff.
Greg said that he knew about me already even though I didn’t know about him.
I couldn’t see how.
Greg said that I had been a really nice friend to his friends Justin and Jeff and they had mentioned my name to Greg.
Ummm…what?
Greg laughed. He was playing with me in a way that I had seen Justin and Jeff play games with me verbally. I didn’t understand it was how homosexual men flirted.
Greg said that I was as clueless about his verbal wordplay with him as I had been with Justin and Jeff.
Times like those reminded me that my set of thoughts are often fogged and closed in by a type of social disconnection similar to but not the same as Asberger’s syndrome, a type of mild autism, a mental condition I have dealt with my whole life whereby I see myself in conversation with others, completely comprehend what they are saying but another part of me keeps me separate from them as a natural protection against their ability to make fun of my disconnection.
Girls/women in high school also joked that I was clueless about their flirtatious advances toward me when, in fact, I was fully aware of their intentions and kept my distance.
Today, I drove my mother around downtown Kingsport on the way to see some pre-owned/used motorcycles…
As I drove her around, I remembered my youth and my adulthood all the way up to the present day.
I don’t understand what is supposed to be my species.
I don’t understand why I, a set of states of energy in motion here in this particular place and time for no other reason than happenchance interconnectedness, has a recorded history that makes no sense. We live in this vast universe of which Earth’s history, and the history of only one species’ previous progenitors, is of little meaning, is it not?
Why are our ancestors and what they did of any importance to us when we haven’t yet begun to explore the cosmos, living and dying over and over again on this habitable rock?
Whilst rehashing my father’s side of the family in my thoughts and on this blog, I found a history of my mother’s side of the family I’d recorded in another blog entry years ago. Despite rereading the entry, I still don’t understand why it has any significance — aren’t all of just the same despite outer appearances to the contrary?:
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From “The history of Blount County, Tennessee and its people, 1795-1995,” pg. 352, article 1023 “Pioneer family from DEFFITAHL to TEFFETELLER” In 1748, a young man named Johannes DEFFITHAL left southern Germany. He traveled to Rotterdam, Holland where he boarded a ship to America. The ship was the “Hampshire” and it docked in Philadelphia, PA. Due to “Americanization”, the immigrant’s name was translated into ”John DEVENDALL”. John later moved to MD and his name was changed again, this time to TIEFENTELLER. He died in 1775. That same year, his son Michael was married.
I recently ran across a Rotterdam, Netherlands record, unfortunately I was unable to copy it, that mentioned a Johann Tiefenthaler leaving for the U.S. at the same time and same ship and arriving in the same location as Johannes Divendall (other different spellings have been used for this last name.)
I believe these two to be the same person. I then checked for a Tiefenthaler in the southern part of Germany, particularly close to or on the Rhein River. Sure enough, I found one Johann Tieffenthaler, christened 25 Aug. 1718 in Bickensohl, Freiburg, Baden, Germany, father: Christoph Tiefenthaler who married Susanna Rieffler/Riessler on 9 Aug. 1707 in Bickensohl. This Johann has an older sister named Anna Barbara Tieffenthaler, christened 9 Dec. 1711 in Bickensohl. There are more Tieffenthaler’s in this region. Next, I checked for a Barbara Weise in Freiburg, Baden, Germany region. I found Barbara Wiss, christened 19 Feb. 1725 in Katholisch, Elzach, Baden, Germany. Her father is Joseph Wiss and mother is Agatha Maier b. 5 Feb. 1706 in Elzach. This I believe to be a very strong lead to our common ancestor, while I have found nothing on Hans Jorg Dievedal except that he was deported back to the Netherlands from England as a reject for American colonization in 1709 due to belonging to the wrong religion.
If anyone can help with this it would be greatly appreciated, you too Eric.
Bog, Swamp, River and Garden 