All the propaganda I am falling for

 

Courtesy the Denver Public Library by way of a librarian/propagandist/writer
 from Wyoming. The downtown DPL was the first library my parents took me to
in the 1950s. Falling for propaganda even in kindergarten.

How the Great TB Sanatorium Craze came to the Rocky Mountain West

Part 2 of my review of John Green's "Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection." Read Part 1 here.

There was a rush in the early part of the 20^th century to isolate humans with TB, an incredibly virulent bacterium. Call it the TB Sanatorium Craze. Colorado jumped on the bandwagon early. So did New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

While I am a Colorado native, I spent 33 years living and working north of the border in Wyoming. The Wyoming State Legislature approved a TB hospital in Basin and it opened in 1927 . This probably was due to the Legislature’s tendency to parcel out important government functions: Cheyenne gets the capitol, Laramie gets the university, Basin gets the patients of a worldwide plague. It was only fair. As the years progressed, TB patients sought out famous hot springs in Saratoga and Thermopolis. The steam, heat, and sunlight were viewed as crucial TB treatments.

The Wyoming Legislature discussed a TB sanatorium as far back as 1909. During that same time, the National Tuberculosis Association sponsored a well-attended “Tuberculosis Exhibit” in Cheyenne and Laramie. The NTA traces its roots to 1904 when concerned citizens formed the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis. This was their advice during the Wyoming tour, as outlined in the 1910 edition of The Journal of the Outdoor Life from the University of Michigan:

“The cure consists of plenty of good, simple food, constant fresh air during the night as well as during the day, constant rest in the fresh air until there is no fever , and then carefully and gradually increased short walks, proper care and washing of your body, and proper clothing  and, finally, a determination to get well and to be cheerful in spite of everything, and only to look on the bright side of things, however hard your circumstances may be.”

Sanatoria offered all of these things with the predictable results: The Wyoming State Archives in Cheyenne shows that in 1910-1912, when most counties in Wyoming had between one and 20 cases of TB per year. Albany, Park, and Carbon counties were on the low end with one to three cases per year (Converse County had zero!) and Sheridan, Sweetwater, and Laramie counties were on the high side with Laramie County showing 18 cases in 1911.

At the beginning of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in September 1930, patient census at the Basin Sanatorium in September 1930 showed 15 women and 37 men. When effective TB treatments such as streptomycin emerged in the 1940s, the heady days of sanatoria came to a close. Old Archives photos show the building in Basin where patients struggled to breathe. Sad, isn’t it, that some settlers came West for breathing room but died for lack of breath?

Why is Green’s book important to us in the 21^st century? The U.S. has a 99-percent TB cure rate and about 10,000 patients yearly although that’s going up. Green takes pains to tell the story of Americans with TB and the tough time they had before modern meds. The Rocky Mountain West, especially, was home to a number of sanatoria for TB patients. The Wyoming State Archives has documents tracing the origins of the lone state TB sanitorium in Basin.

Construction began in Basin in 1926 and the Sanitarium was opened in May of 1927. By 1969 all references to tuberculosis were removed at the Wyoming Sanatorium due to the significant decrease in the incidence of tuberculosis in the state. It was replaced by the Wyoming Retirement Center which provides nursing care to residents with mental health, dementia and other medical needs.

Colorado boasted plenty of facilities. Green writes that some cities in the West were founded by TB. Colorado Springs is one of them. National Jewish Hospital in Denver had a treatment center for consumptives. It’s still known as one of the best pulmonary hospitals in the country. Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora opened in 1918 at the tail end of World War One and its specialty was treating men with TB and those whose lungs were damaged by gas attacks.

The U.S. Army sent my unhorsed cavalry officer grandfather to Fitzsimons as he struggled with a bad case of pneumonia aggravated by chemical weapons used in the war. My grandmother, an army nurse and veteran of a M.A.S.H-style unit in France, treated him there. They married in 1922. Their eldest was my U.S. Army Signals Corps veteran father who in 1950 married a U.S. Navy-trained nurse and here I am.

Lung ailments have figured heavily in my family. My brothers, sisters, and I struggled with asthma in our youth. I almost died after a bad reaction to horses at a Weld County ranch. This pretty much demolished my dreams of replacing The Lone Ranger.  

Movie westerns have featured tubercular characters. In “Tombstone,” Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday gambles, drinks, shoots people, coughs and sweats, not necessarily in that order. A gambler calls him a “dirty lunger” and pays the price. Gunfighter Johnny Ringo calls him a “lunger” and also pays the price. The message is clear. ”I’m your huckleberry,” Doc says, before or after shooting someone. Not bad for a lunger or consumptive patient. Doc succumbed to consumption in 1887 in Glenwood Springs, Colo. He went there in 1886 when told that the hot springs had curative powers. He apparently was misinformed. Visit his grave at the Doc Holliday Grave and Hiking Trail. Flatlanders beware: it’s located more than a mile high and it’s all uphill. Healthy lungs required.

One of our U.S. presidents, sought out the West’s fresh air and healthy lifestyle in North Dakota. Theodore Roosevelt thrived, returned to politics, declared Wyoming’s Yellowstone a national park and Devils Tower a national monument, and the rest is history and myth-making.

North Dakota’s San Haven Sanatorium in the Turtle Mountains treated TB patients from 1909 until the 1940s. As final plans were made for a 1911 opening, Superintendent of Public Health Dr. J.L. Grassick referred to TB as “The Great White Plague” because physicians marked TB-infected lungs with white arrows and healthy ones with black arrows. and assessed the illness as more a lifestyle choice than a microscopic rod-shaped bacillus with plans of its own.

“Wherever man builds his habitation, depresses his vitality by overwork or by debilitating excesses, lowers his powers of life by using insufficient or improper food, surrounds himself with the expectoration of his fellows and deprives himself of the blessings of God’s free air, there you will find it.”

Sanatoriums such as San Haven offered a higher altitude than the surrounding prairie, plenty of God’s free air, proper food, and all the available treatments. One of the more gruesome ones was puncturing and deflating one sick lung to nurture the other. During its time, more than 50 percent of the patients died.

And then came bacteria-battling antibiotics. San Haven closed. The abandoned building is billed on N.D. tourism sites as a good place for ghost-hunting. No mention of how the ghosts of The Great White Plague feel about this.

To John Green’s credit, the book includes blasts at the healthcare industry (especially – surprise! -- major drugmakers) and global policymakers. He does this surprisingly quickly in 208 pages (hardcover) and 256 in paperback. I read it on my Kindle. He requires more pages to describe faulty stars and why those turtles go all the way down, but fiction is one thing and non-fiction is another.

The story that holds “Everything is Tuberculosis” together is one 13-year-old’s journey. Green is a fine storyteller and the one he tells about Henry keeps the reader hanging on to the end.

Postscript: A big thank you to my son Kevin, a writer and tech guy in Cheyenne, for hands-on research at the Wyoming State Archives. As always, the Archives staff went out of their way to help a researcher.

Breaking: Daytona Evening News 08/16/1972: All heck breaks out in Miami

Reading the Daytona Beach Evening News: City Final. Price 10 cents.

Some interesting headlines:

Youthful and Elderly Protesters Join in ‘Gripes’ on Nixon Policies

After Haggling Aplenty, Campsite Finally Slated to Open Thursday

Askew Orders 15 Pct. Increase in Welfare

Argentine Leftists Stage Wild Jailbreak-Hijacking

Speaking of Hijacks…Airlines Find Subject Less Than Amusing

Display ad placed by a consortium of local banks in bottom left corner has an illustration of a man reclining in an easy chair in front of a TV set. He is smoking a cigar and holding a highball. The text: 

Pro and college football, the World Series, coming up. This little guy has it made. How about you? We’ll finance your color TV. Fact is, we’ll finance the adjustable lounge chair. You finance the cool drink. Have a nice day – have a colorful fall.

Dateline: August 16, 1972

It’s going to be hot and sticky with a high temp of 88 and humidity at 82. Ocean temp: 78.

Welcome to Daytona Beach 53 years ago.

The newspaper is yellowed but you can still see the track marks on the margins from the printing press. It’s a big broadsheet, a size you no longer see. Newspapers have downsized and disappeared.

I was 21 and hitching across America with my girlfriend. We were in Utah or Colorado – I didn’t keep a journal then so I can’t be sure. Wherever I was, I probably wasn’t reading the morning or evening papers. I was reading “Travels with Charley” by John Steinbeck who wrote it to reconnect with America. “I did not know my own country,” he wrote.  I was aware that Republicans were conventioneering in Miami and there were protests going on. I didn’t know that Vietnam Veterans Against the War members were there and we would be hearing more from them later. I didn’t know that a gonzo reporter named Hunter S. Thompson was covering the fracas and would be famous for his “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.”

As were so many others, I was out there looking for America. I found it too. It was wonderful and exciting. My favorite summer. I had no clue who Ron Kovic was and what he was experiencing in his heart and on the streets of Miami. I didn’t yet know the name of Scott Camil and the Gainesville Eight were not yet named the Gainesville Eight. I thought I knew a lot but I knew nothing but how much fun it was to be 21 and traveling with a beautiful woman and free of the Selective Service Draft. We met and partied with other young people on the road. It was glorious.

I did read part of this morning’s Daytona Beach News-Journal. I skipped the headlines because I didn’t want to see them. Yes, it’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, a day which I used to spend marching for Martin. It also is another day that I am ignoring. I would rather read above the cute Welsh Corgi named Taco that Palm Coast police take along as a therapy dog. Nice photo – one lovable dog. I did look at the weather. It’s going to be cold, folks, surprisingly cold for Florida. I looked up at my big TV. It’s a nice one, Roku HD4. I am not turning it on today. Not protesting in any park but I’ve done that many times. We put on some fine Inauguration Day protests in 2017 and 2018. More than 1,000 people came to our Jan. 21, 2017, Wyoming Women’s March protest in tiny Cheyenne, Wyoming. People I knew from Laramie and Casper and Fort Collins were there. I made my famous almost-salt-free chili for the post-protest feed. We plugged in so many crockpots at the Cheyenne Historic Depot that the power went out. Despite the downer reason for the protest, a fine time was had by all. Local TV and newspaper covered the event. Lots of photos on our cellphone cameras. I will share one with you if I can find it in my photo cache.

I’m returning to my newspaper. In 1972, Volusia County had six A&P stores and now there are none. In 1972, I could buy a loaf of white bread for 22 cents and a pound of coffee for 69 cents. A pack of frozen waffles was 10 cents and a big box of Sugar Frosted Flakes sold for 55 cents (Everyday Low Price!). No prices are listed for eggs but they were cheap, I know that, maybe as cheap as they’re going to be starting today. I can’t wait.

P.S.: You might wonder why I was reading a 1972 newspaper. It was included in a packet of stuff sent to me by my sister who is downsizing and cleaning decades of storage from her house. She knows I’m a history buff who writes about arcane stuff.

On the ghost trail to Lulu City

I am caught between two worlds.

In one, I am at the beach or in a park or lunching with friends at Inlet Harbor.

In the other, I tense up, stare at the wall, and wonder where I am and who I am.  I drift off, imagine I fly over the Laramie Range. Below are the convoluted rock shapes of Vedauwoo. On one of the heights is my son, waving up at me as he used to wave down at me on the flatlands as I wondered how in the hell a 12-year-old scrambled to the top without falling. I soar above the beach and see the waves I no longer ride or no longer even stand calf-length in since I can’t walk unaided to the water.

I almost died twice during a four-day hospital span that I can’t remember. I awoke a mess, unable to walk or shit or even talk. “What month is it?” I haven’t a clue. The medicos gave me fentanyl to let me float through the trauma and it worked as a mind-eraser. I float through those four days that I don’t remember.

Yesterday I sat for three hours in the nicely-appointed customer waiting room at KIA HQ. The people there seemed human enough as did I. I read a non-fiction book about Japanese fliers who flew airplanes into American ships in a last-ditch effort to halt dreaded defeat. Kamikaze, Divine Wind. In Korea, where my SUV was made, Japanese troops rounded up young females to serve as “comfort women” and worked to death Allied soldiers my father’s age of 20 in 1943.

I live on a thin thread. We all do. I didn’t want to die from septicemia but almost did and it was nothing that I did or didn’t do. An occupying army of bacteria invaded my bloodstream and began to switch off my organs, one by one, like you walk through the house turning off lights, eager to get to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving. Antibiotics stopped the massacre. And medical staff on a mission. And time. And something undefined. Something blessed.

I sometimes see the world’s forests on fire. Other days, I peer down into Rocky Mountain National Park and see me hiking with my wife and kids. That is just one part of one summer day. It’s frozen in my memory. I am always on the trail to abandoned Lulu City, walking past falling-down cabins with a ghost in each doorway. One of them looks just like me.

A snowless Christmas season ain't all bad

The most beautiful song about missing snow at Christmas is one written by Steve Goodman and performed by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The song’s narrator looks out the window of his Hollywood Hotel on Christmas Eve and sees billboards, neon, traffic, and palm trees, and notes it’s 84 degrees.

He yearns for Colorado. The song’s refrain goes like this: “The  closest thing to heaven on this planet anywhere/is a quiet Christmas morning in the Colorado snow.”

Nothing gets me as nostalgic for Colorado. John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High,” maybe, a 1972 song that planted the seeds for Colorado’s marijuana boom.

The state is not always snowbound at Christmas. I do remember a time when it was, Christmas of 1982, the year of the Great Christmas Eve Blizzard. Two feet of snow fell in one day. I watched it outside my walkup apartment window in City Park South, where we could hear the zoo’s peacocks almost every day.

Chris, alas, was trying to figure out a way to get home from her downtown job. Buses weren’t running as businesses and government shut down. A coworker herded Chris and four others into his 10-year-old compact car and raced up Colfax (“The Fax”) to drop everyone off. He hoped for the best, as did they. After maneuvering through a maze of stuck cars and two-foot drifts, Chris was released on Cook Street. As she said later, “He just slowed down and I jumped out.” A bit later, I saw her maneuvering the drifts, her diminutive figure whipped by the winds and flurries. She was shrouded in snow and ice by the time she reached the apartment. We unwrapped her carefully, fed her coffee and soup, and soon she was able to tell her tale.

We went to sleep secure that the snow would wrap up in the night, Santa would arrive, and we would wake up to a winter wonderland.

Chris woke up with a cold, and went back to bed. I ate, grabbed the snow shovel, and wandered out looking for people to help. Our neighborhood was a mix of old brick houses, apartmentized houses such as ours, and small apartment complexes. Most of the neighbors were young but there were some elders in the mix. I sought them out. But they knew better than to venture out. I was able to help a driver dig out his stuck car but that was it. I headed home.

We had other big snows but rarely ones like this. In 1982, we were recently married and were only four years into our Denver adventure. We still remembered snowless Florida Christmases. It snowed once in Daytona and twice one year in Gainesville. Never a blizzard but a sprinkling could shut down the city. And did

Git along little dogies -- and watch out for that six-foot gator behind the palm tree

When I moved from Florida to Denver in 1978, I wandered down to the local bookstore and bought “Centennial” by James Michener. It was published in ’74, two years before the Centennial State’s centennial. That tie-in helped boost the book into the bestseller lists. Michener had a history at UNC. He taught there from 1936-40 when it was called the Colorado State College of Education. He donated all of his papers and research material to UNC and it became the Michener Special Collection. The library was named for Michener in 1972.

When I moved to Wyoming in 1991, I picked up John McPhee’s “Rising from the Plains.” In it, McPhee, with the help of legendary Wyoming geologist David Love, Tracked the amazing millennia of land masses rising from and falling into the plains. On one of my first work trips around the state, I listened to the audiobook and found myself on site at the Red Desert and the Snowy Range and the big caldera that is Jackson Hole. Never looked at them the same again.

I’m writing this because I now have returned to Florida from Wyoming which, as I remind people who seem a bit confused by its whereabouts, I say it’s the big (almost) square state just north of another square state, Colorado, where both pot and membership in the Democratic Party are legal.

But I digress. When I arrived in Florida in August just before back-to-back hurricanes, I vowed to read a book by a Florida writer about an era of the state I knew nothing about. So, naturally, I chose a book about Florida cowboys and their cattle drives. Head ‘em up and move ‘em out – and watch out for the snakes and the gators and malaria-carrying skeeters.

“A Land Remembered” from Pineapple Press of Palm Beach is an excellent novel by Patrick D. Smith. It tells the story of three generations of the MacIvey clan from 1858-1968. In the early years, they face starvation, gator attacks, ambushes by Confederate deserters, and all kinds of wild weather. They round up stray cattle with bullwhips and the crack of the whips give them the name “Crackers.” They assembled herds, drove them to the west Florida port of Punta Rassa near Punta Gorda, and faced all sorts of adventures along the way. They eventually moved from cattle to citrus to land developers, each with their successes and pitfalls. They lost friends and family to raging bulls and rustlers. But all of that land that the family bought in what’s now Dade County became very valuable once air conditioning entered the picture.

It's a fantastic tale, the book worthy of the kudos heaped on it. I couldn’t avoid making comparisons to books and movies of cattle drives in the West, especially Wyoming and Colorado. I worked for 30 years in Cheyenne and learned a lot about the history of the cattle biz in the West. Cheyenne Frontier Days is in its second century and that history is featured in the CFD Old West Museum, the Wyoming State Museum, and many works of art around the city.

“A Land Remembered” is a great novel and opened my eyes to Florida history I knew little about. The MacIveys make their home on the Kissimmee River near the town that’s mostly known as the neighbor to DisneyWorld, SeaWorld, and all those other amusements of Central Florida. Kissimmee hosts an annual rodeo and an excellent museum, the Osceola County Welcome Center and History Museum at 4155 W. Vine St. There you can view dioramas of some of the scrawny cattle rounded up from swamps and scrubland, the outfits worn by Florida cowboys (no Ray-Bans but they could have used them), and info on the various predators that threatened cow and cowboy. The Seminoles also played a part in the trade and Smith does a great job describing their culture in his novel.

I think my next move will be to the Ormond Beach Public Library and see if I can find a Florida-based book targeted by Moms for Liberty. There should be scores to choose from. I’ve been here for two months and don’t yet have a library card or whatever they use for library access these days. I do have access to Libby on my Kindle but Libby is not the same thing as spending hours scanning the new books section. I have found so many treasures there.

Welcome to Ormond-by-the-Sea which, surprisingly, is next to the sea

My new home is in Ormond-by-the-Sea, Florida. It is separated by the Inland Waterway from Ormond-not-by-the -Sea where most of the rest of my family lives. They just call it Ormond. As I drive A1A up the coast, I look out at the billions upon billions gallons of water in the omnipresent sea or Atlantic Ocean as some call it. It is so vast that I stand by-the-sea and gape.

It is a big change from Cheyenne-by-the-Prairie which is also a vast land that, coincidentally, was once an inland sea where plesiosaurs pursued prey under my patch of dry ground. A better name might be Cheyenne-pretty-close-to-the-mountains which is the Laramie Range and then the Snowy Range and if you travel south the Mummy Range and Rocky Mountain National Park. Beautiful, beautiful places where our family spent a lot of time and those memories will be forever lodged in my heart.

Vedauwoo was our favorite. Son Kevin learned to free-climb there and our daughter Annie loved to hike and camp. We watched UW’s Vertical Dance on a rock face of 1.5-billion-year-old granite. I’m pretty sure Florida will be underwater by then. I recently saw a map that showed Florida twice the size 18,000 years ago due to a 30 percent drop in sea level. Ormond-by-the-sea would have to move east to maintain its name and dignity.

Yesterday Chris and I drove to Flagler Beach. You can see the waves break from A1A. The day before, a stretch of this road was swamped by a monsoon rain and traffic had to be rerouted. Once we reached Flagler, we had to slow down for construction. The Army Corps of Engineers brought their massive equipment here to refurbish the beach and roadway washed away during the last two hurricanes. They are piping in beige sand from a huge barge. The current sand is red which has its origins in coquina rock and is a rougher sand that washes away easily. The beige sand is more stalwart.

After six or seven miles of construction, we get to the Flagler Pier and summer crowds. Surfers have arrived in droves to ride the waves which break better near the pier. My brothers and I surfed here in the 1960s and ‘70s. The crowds were smaller and the locals pretty welcoming unless you took off in front of them on a wave and then they would kick their board at you trying for some decapitation or maybe just a few bruises. We did the same thing at our beach in Daytona. All in fun.

Chris and I were on a mission to get our Florida driver’s licenses and tags and also register to vote. We didn’t want to miss out on the most important vote of our lifetime. We volunteered for election day duty. Some say it’s going to be a free-for-all but ruffians will think twice when they see this gray-haired man in a walker sent to keep the peace or die trying. It’s easy to come unglued at times like this. MAGA people and Christian Nationalists have followed Trump’s lead and issued threats. The other side (my side) tries to keep cool heads and say only positive things online. We often fail.

Chris and I accomplished two of our goals. The tags had to wait due to additional paperwork. We celebrated by taking naps and ordering take-out from Stavro’s, a fine Italian place just up the street and in sight of the sea. I should say by-the-sea.

Purple Mountains Majesty, 1919

In my novel manuscript, “Zeppelins over Denver,” three sisters from Ohio travel west in the summer of 1919. Their first goal is to negotiate the rough roads to the Rocky Mountains and drive to the summit of Pikes Peak to see what inspired Professor Katherine Lee Bates to write the poem that became the famous song “America the Beautiful.” This excerpt is from Chapter 10. 

Colleen looked to the west. She was grateful for the hat brim that shaded her face from the afternoon sun. Wispy white clouds had gathered to the west but they didn’t look like the dark storm clouds of her home. Colorado’s July sun was relentless. A different sun than the one she was accustomed to. It came up lazy in Ohio, sometimes shrouded in river mists, and the trees were always a barrier. Here, it erupted from the east, announced itself as a glowing orb that shot out fingers of light to illuminate every living and non-living thing. The air seemed to crackle with the light.

Colleen noted that there was something funny about the clouds. They didn’t move. She sat in her flivver and watched for the landscape to change but it did not. And then she noticed the clouds’ irregular shapes that seemed to be propped up by a horizon which was darker than the sky above.

“The Rocky Mountains,” Colleen said.

“Where?” asked Pegeen.

Colleen pointed.

Ireen got out of the car. She looked west and shaded her eyes with both of her hands. “Those clouds…”

“Are not clouds.”

Pegeen hit the ground. Colleen switched off the motor and got out. “See,” she said as she joined her sisters. She pointed. “Those things that aren’t clouds are patches of snow and ice – glaciers. All the tall mountains have them.”

“In July?”

Colleen laughed. “All year,” she said. “Those mountains will be all-white in January. This whole place will be one big snow field.”

“Blessed be,” said Pegeen. “How do you drive in that? You’d need a sleigh.”

Colleen hadn’t thought of that. “Maybe they plow the roads.”

“Or people just stay home,” Ireen said. She looked over at Colleen. “Can we go up there? Do they have roads?”

“Of course they have roads,” Colleen said. “There are gold and silver mines all over those mountains.”

“Still? Even in these modern times?” Ireen asked.

“Yes. But we want to go up there to see what it’s like. I bet it’s grand.”

“Beautiful.”

“Just like Mrs. Bates' song.”

They stood and watched. Cotton ball clouds drifted overhead. A gentle wind rattled the cottonwood leaves. A hawk screeched.

Look for "Zeppelins over Denver" this fall from Hummingbird Minds Press.

Hey old guy, you might want to think twice about returning to 6,200 feet

WELCOME TO 7,220 FEET.

That's a huge sign on UW's War Memorial Stadium. It's meant to psyche-out teams visiting from lower altitudes, which is any NCAA Division 1 school.

My Ireland-born grandfather was about my age now when, in the 1980s, he traveled to the Mile-High City of Denver, the place he spent most of his adult life. The day after his arrival, he was hauled off to the hospital with breathing problems and heart pains.

A few days later, a physician told him to go home. He said Colorado was his home. He also had to admit he’d spent the last six years living in Bradenton, Florida, with his second wife.

The doctor explained that most of Florida was sea level and Denver was a mile high. Grandpas knew all this. He arrived from Chicago as a 19-year-old hoping that the dry climate would help him breathe with his one lung. It did. He worked for the railroad and was a bank guard. He spent a lot of time mowing lawns and shoveling snow for his neighbors. He loved mountain treks, often exploring unpaved roads that he and his ’57 Chevy had no business on. My brothers, sisters, and cousins loved those trips, jouncing unbuckled in the back seat.

So, at 75, Colorado had become the enemy.

Go home, old man!

My Uncle John had the same problem when he (at 62) journeyed to Denver from his Naples, Fla., home. Heart issues drove him to the hospital. The doctor there said basically the same thing: go home. He was a Denver native, who lived all over the Front Range and even up in Buffalo Creek and commuted to The Flatlands every morning.

Go home, old man!

Not a good thing to hear, that you are too old and decrepit to live in a place that meant so much to you.

I bring this up because in September my wife Chris and I will move to our new home in Ormond Beach, Fla., some 10 feet above sea level (for now). What is this Florida obsession of our family? The space program took my father and uncle and their families to the Sunshine State in the mid-1960s. Work and the military took some of my sisters and brothers and cousins away, but most of them returned. I did not.  

What was I looking for? Work, mainly. Why am I returning to Florida? Retirement, mainly. My remaining brothers and sisters live in Central Florida. Chris has friends from high school and community college in the area. We met in Daytona Beach and got married just north in Ormond Beach. Many more health care choices in the area. I am a heart patient and partially disabled. Chris is a diabetic and breast cancer survivor. Our new home on the aptly named Ocean Shore Drive is close to the beach and recreational activities.

I close by saying that as a 73-year-old heart patient, I probably will not return to 6,200 feet. I might push it a bit to come for a few days to visit my two grown children and any grandchildren that eventually arrive. But who’s to say where my 30-something offspring will be in one, two, even five years? And who knows where I will be.

Go home, old man!

There is much to be thankful for. But there are no guarantees, are there?

Finn Murphy’s “Rocky Mountain High” may give you a “Hemp Space” buzz

“Rocky Mountain High” reminds us of how we sat around a campfire everybody getting high on Colorado in the summer of ’72. John Denver’s melodic version of Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley. Longhairs from all over stoned on this beautiful slice of paradise. I was there, a traveler from flat, muggy Florida. The air was sweet. So were the sights. The Rainbow Family gathered a few mountain ranges over. Longhairs clogged interstate on-ramps. Meanwhile, our parents’ generation was all in a dither, nervous about drugs and sex and rock’n’roll, nervous about the fate of their offspring.

We got jobs, married, and had kids that don’t listen to us. The marijuana that was such forbidden fruit then is now available at your corner dispensary in Colorado and many other states that aren’t Wyoming. The other cannabis sativa, hemp, grew into a commodity akin to oil, gas, and coal, subject to the same boom-and-bust cycles. Guys who looked like hedge-fund managers (they were) began showing up at farms along the Front Range asking where all the hemp was and did the farmers have any for sale?

If the present situation seems ripe for dark comedy, Finn Murphy spells it out in “Rocky Mountain High: A Tale of Boom and Bust in the New Wild West.” Murphy’s a Boomer, an enterprising capitalist and Ivy League grad from Connecticut. He sees hemp as they new big thing and moves to Boulder County, buys a 36-acre spread, and strolls out in his Wall Street suit to greet his rural neighbors.

It didn’t go well. There are some high times to celebrate but, as the reader knows from the subtitle, both boom and bust await Mr. Murphy and his colleagues in “The Hemp Space,” the countercultural term for this new business.

First, the boom. Hemp is a cannabis product that cannot register more than 0.3% of THC, so says the Colorado Department of Agriculture (and the one in Wyoming). The CDA inspects your crops, makes sure that you are not growing smokeable marijuana because that’s a whole other thing. That’s being grown a few fields over. Hemp is made into CBD among other products. CBD was a thing in the 2010s, the cure for every Boomer’s aching joints. CBD stores popped up on every corner. Many of us bought the overpriced oils, put drops under our tongues, rubbed it on aging body parts, and eagerly awaited the cure.

Murphy saw the promise of legal hemp. Over the decades, he had birthed and sold many businesses, some in areas he knew little about. In the book, he leads us through his decision-making process and into the growing, harvesting, and selling of the product. He thought the harvesting end would be the most lucrative. He told his neighbors (he calls them the “Weedwhackers” – and they shall remain nameless) he would harvest their crop and since nobody knew the costs of such a venture, agreed to settle up when the work was done.

Murphy spends way too much time telling us about the costs of this enterprise. But it is instructional. Farmers need farm implements to harvest fields of five-foot hemp trees. Murphy buys three big hoophouses in which to dry the hemp. They are $10,000 each. He later has to buy thousands of dollars of tools and equipment to erect the hoophouses. He spends more than the $150,000 he budgeted for equipment on bucking and trimming machines, fans, generators, and humidifiers. He hired a band of trimmigrants to do the tough and sticky work.

But it’s the author’s self-effacing humor and eye for life’s strange contradictions that kept me reading. He also knows how to keep the reader turning the page. He concludes the “Start Me Up” chapter this way:

We’d all be rich and happy. We agreed then and there on handshakes to go forward, and the room was awash with good fellowship and excitement.

My thought: This is really going to be bad, isn’t it?

And it was. Nobody died but the “fellowship” didn’t last.

Murphy’s first book is “The Long Haul,” also by Norton. It’s about his foray into the long-haul trucking business.

For information on the Wyoming “Hemp Space,” go to the Wyoming Hemp Association.

After watching Oppenheimer in Missile City, WYO

After watching Oppenheimer with my daughter Annie

Storm clouds on the Wyoming horizon looked like giant mushrooms. No surprise as movie scenes roll through our minds. We recall Oppenheimer’s quote from the Bhagavad Gita “now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Backdrop for the morality play spread before us, a prairie of missiles perched below ground each with a hundred times the killing power of Fat Man and Little Boy sculpted not far from here on a tableland at the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. The statistics don’t really matter but I have lived my whole life in the Nuclear Age and so has Annie. The Strontium-90 in my bones will always reveal my origins, child of The Bomb, fallout drifted east to Colorado from desert tests, accidents at Rocky Flats and Hanford, a thousand tiny mistakes. Dr. Oppenheimer, I don’t cheer you as did the delirious nuke workers after Trinity. I don’t curse you. I can’t, father, I simply cannot.

Personal reflections on the student loan forgiveness policy

I got some very good news last week. An email was tagged: “Your student loans have been forgiven.” First I thought it was fake and then I checked it out and yessiree, no more student loan payments. I have been paying off $20,000 in grad school loans since 1993. Successfully, at first, and then as our financial situation experienced some serious ups and downs, I worked with my student loan provider, one of the businesses that the government contracts to provide this service. I would get them down to a payment I could afford and then they would suddenly, as if some invisible switch was pulled, jack it up to a higher level I couldn’t pay. I then would request a forbearance for six months or a year and that would expire, the company added in all of the unpaid interest, and my payments would be higher than ever. Or I would sign on to a payment plan and suddenly my company shuffled me over to another and I had to start all over again. When my wife's coffee shop/art gallery business failed (she was ahead of her time) 20 years ago, we declared bankruptcy which I thought would include my student loans. I neglected to read the fine print.

I consolidated my loans in 2012 when they reached the $102,000 mark and worked out payments with Nelnet and the amount with accrued interest and fees reached $165,000. Interesting to note that the federal government paid off the student loan servicer and it, conceivably, was very happy to have the money and scratch me off their to-do list. Not such a great deal for the feds and my fellow taxpayers. But, as a taxpayer, I was also supporting the government to contract with this servicer which didn’t seem to give a damn about me and millions of others in debt for attending college. One of the worst servicers is FedLoan Servicing, an arm of the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, a company co-owned by Betsy DeVos, Trump’s “secretary of education.” The PHEAA was, for a short while, my loan servicer. DeVos made millions while arguing forcefully against student loan forgiveness. She now is back under the rock she came out from under. A very fancy rock to be sure.

But, in good faith, I was paying off my debt. All I asked is that the servicer find me a level I can afford and I will pay it until its paid off or Doomsday arrives, whichever comes first. We all got a reprieve when Covid hit and payments were suspended. According to Mohela, a new loan servicer that picked up my account under President Biden’s watch, when my future payments resumed, I would be billed $1,963 a month. My Social Security deposit (I am 72 and retired) each month is $1,940, slightly above the average Social Security check of $1,701. My wife, who volunteered to go on this journey with me, gets $1,240 a month, below the national average because her working years were spent with childbearing and childcaring and household management, none of which enhanced her Social Security benefits. I am disabled and my wife in a Type 1 diabetic and breast cancer survivor. It’s ludicrous to think that a retiree should remit his Social Security check to the government which deposits it into his credit union account every month. But there you have it. Then again, we have GOPers who believe that Americans should not be allowed to retire at 65 or should never retire and, if they do, don’t deserve the funds that came from their paychecks for 40 years.

The Supreme Court aided by GOPers such as Wyoming's entire Congressional delegation and Governor Gordon, stymied Biden’s forgiveness plan so he found new and interesting ways to relieve the burden of millions, many of whom are senior citizens. Because I made a certain number of payments and loans older than 20-25 years were considered time enough to pay, I was forgiven. My loans were 30 years old. I also worked in public service so I was credited with monthly payments I made which go toward forgiveness. All of Biden’s positive ideas to solve this crippling debt were fought by Republicans because CRUELTY is their middle name. Also, they despite higher education, education of any kind – witness the New College fiasco and GOP-mandated public education requirements in Florida. GOPers, even Harvard-educated ones such as DeSantis, have used the loan forgiveness issue as another cudgel for the MAGA crowd to use against the so-called elites.

I send thanks to Pres. Joe Biden and his allies. 

Remember that the Loan Forgiveness Program could be reversed if the wrong people take control of governance in 2024. 

The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 1

Over 400,000 people worked on the Apollo Program. – From the end credits of Richard Linklater’s Netflix film “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood”

My father was one of them. Unlike’s Linklater’s Houston-based father, mine worked closer to Cape Canaveral, in an office in Daytona Beach, Fla. Thousands joined the Moon Mission, most of them answering JFK’s call although he was no longer around to cajole and promise. Lyndon Johnson would be president when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969 after being launched from the Cape on July 16. Johnson was glad for a bit of good news after the battles of the 1960s which weren’t over yet. Camelot a distant memory. On this hot July day in Florida, hundreds of thousands of space-age lunarnauts and millions more around the world rooted for U-S-A!

July 20 always brings footage from the lunar event. It seems like yesterday that I watched it in black-and-white telecasts beamed from the lunar lander. I am 72 and retired. I look through veils of nostalgia. I sometimes share my memories with my two 30-something children. They are mildly amused. At least they believe that we landed on the moon. I think they do but it’s difficult to know for sure. All of us carry different memory-loops through life and they change as time passes.

What do I remember from this time? Some things I know for sure. Others are a bit foggy so I conjure what seems closest to the truth. I have not made up anything that follows but I may remember it imperfectly. That’s life.

I was 13.67 years old in August 1964 when our family of 10 moved to Florida. I was not pleased to be moving to the third state I would live in during the past eight months. In January, I’d been yanked out of St. Francis Grade School in suburban Wichita in the midst of basketball season and the wooing of classmate Patty Finn. In February, I was walking to the bus stop in snowy Denver to attend the split session at a junior high packed with Boomer kids and the site of at least two knife fights and a teacher mugging during my short time there. In June, my father came home from work to announce his new job with G.E. and our Florida move. He had finished the task of hiding nuclear missiles among the sagebrush of the West. The space program needed his accounting skills and our family was going along for the ride. Dad moved immediately. We sold our house, packed our goods, said goodbye (again), and off we went.

Next: Night Swimming in the Sunshine State

We say goodbye to our beautiful cat Lacey

Our cat Lacey died yesterday. She was old, 18 or 20, which is ancient for a cat. She was a Holstein variety, mottled black-and-white like the namesake cow. Chris, Annie, and I took her to the vet after she went a week without eating. She was still getting around but losing weight fast. She spent most of her time wrapped up in the cat bed in my  home office. We had watched her snuggle up to the heater vent for awhile and we put an electric blanket at the bottom of her bed. She seemed to like that.

Sometimes it's easy to tell when a pet has reached its end. We've had so many. Annie's Shelter dog Coco had a huge tumor on her head and blood tests revealed cancer. She was still pretty young but we knew she was in for months of pain so we took her for one last walk and opted to say goodbye at Avenues Pet Clinic. We spread her ashes in her favorite pond in the park. Not sure if that was legal but we were crying too hard to care.

Annie found Lacey five years ago at the Loveland, Colo., Animal Shelter. It's a really nice shelter, newer than most in the area. Annie, Chris and I had come to find a kitten to keep Annie company in her new Fort Collins apartment. So many cute kittens. Annie didn't show much interest so we passed by until we got to a large cage with one noisy occupant -- Lacey. A very pretty cat with a very loud voice. She came right up and pressed her face against the cage, begging for a touch. Annie obliged. I read the cat's description: "Dipstick, healthy older cat, declawed, female." As Annie played with the old lady cat with the dumb name, Chris and I found other cute kittens that Annie roundly ignored. We knew which cat Annie was going home with.

As it turned out, Annie left Fort Collins shortly thereafter and moved home to Cheyenne. She brought the cat with her, now called Lacey because that seemed to fit her better and it reminded Annie of the Irish Lace she likes so much. Teddy, our big male cat, was not amused. He's an outdoor cat who prowls the neighborhood and everyone knows him. He's a hunter. Annie adopted him as a kitten along with another kitten she named Bubba. Teddy and Bubba grew up together until Bubba disappeared one night and we never saw him again. We thought it oddly coincidental that a big owl made his home at the top of the neighbor's blue spruce around the same time. Owls are hunters too.

Teddy and Lacey did not get along. Teddy ruled the roost and Lacey was old and cranky. Teddy would whack at her with his big paw and Lacey backed up and hissed like a cobra. With no claws and small stature, she had to be vocal and scary. We also found out quickly that she was deaf. To make up for the silence, she filled the house with vocals. You always knew where she was, and maybe that was her point.

When Annie first took her outside on a nice spring day, she seemed stunned. It was all new to her, this outdoors stuff. She wandered through the yard sniffing at everything. She discovered grasshoppers and it was one prey should could snatch without claws. All that summer, she captured hoppers in her mouth and they bounded around our house for months.

Lacey found a home in my office. I write every morning and she seemed mostly content with sleeping at my feet or in her bed. When I rubbed her head, she looked up at me with those big eyes and seemed a bit surprised that I existed. 

Annie and I looked into her eyes yesterday as the vet administered first the numbing shot and then the kill shot. It was sad to see the light go out of her eyes. Before her spirit flew, she uttered one more meow. 

She had such a beautiful presence in the world. I know I am going to wake up in the middle of the night and hear her. I may hear her over the coming years. I may hear her when the light goes out of my eyes, welcoming me to The Great Beyond, where cats have their voice, their hearing, and their claws, and where I can spend eternity with the pets and people who made this life living. 

Go West, young man -- historical fiction along the open roads of the West

My two most recent reads were “on the road” style of historical fiction novels: “West with Giraffes” by Lynda Rutledge and “Gone, the Redeemer” by Scott Gates. I enjoyed both and probably would not have found them if I wasn’t part of the Historical Fiction Book Lovers group on Facebook. These people like to read and recommend some fantastic books that interest me now as I finish writing my second historical fiction novel.

“Gone, the Redeemer” by Scott Gates is a rollicking good journey across the U.S. of 1900 and its pivotal scene takes place in my home state of Colorado. It’s in the first-person voice of army deserter Thomas Sparkman and the reader gets to decide if he is a reliable narrator or unreliable narrator or falls somewhere in-between. Thomas runs into some amazing characters along the way including a manikin (from the Dutch manneken meaning "small man") named James who is escaping a circus, a giant who is handy with his pistols, and an Apache woman seeking her errant husband.

The bad guys are memorable too, notably the uber-capitalist Junior John. Thomas robs Junior John twice and that is almost two times too many.

Denver readers will recognize the streets of downtown Denver, mentions of infamous conman Soapy Smith, the interiors of the Brown Palace Hotel, and the old stockyards.

The author leaves us hanging in a couples places meaning there are a couple story lines that don't get wrapped up. Also, there are some abrupt endings to chapters where the author doesn't make the most of the tension of the scene he's set up. I got a bit frustrated reading the novel in Kindle format because it's so annoying to go back to previous chapters. But that's my mistake in not going to the library or buying a hard copy, you lazy cheapskate.

The novel's ending, well, it may be a happy culmination of our protagonist's journey from wartime Cuba to his lover in California. Or it may not --- that's the risk the reader takes when he embarks on a journey with a first-person narrator. But it is a journey worth taking.

"Gone, the Redeemer" is published by Blue Ink Press, a small publisher in North Carolina. Lot of good books come out of these presses and they don’t get the attention they deserve.

Next time: I travel "West with Giraffes."

Saying goodbye to a friend, Dick Lechman

A eulogy for a friend from a friend: 

Books, books, books.

Dick Lechman had thousands of books at one time at his Old Grandfather Books in downtown Arvada. He had books in the store, books in a garage, and a few in his apartment and his car. I loved going into the Arvada store because I could always find something I didn’t know I was looking for. A history of World War I, a coffee table book of Colorado maps, an unread early novel by one of my favorite writers. If I couldn’t find anything, Dick would always suggest something. His interests centered on spirituality and religion as befits a one-time practicing priest. But his imagination wandered far and wide. My daughter Annie, Dick’s goddaughter, liked the bookstore too. She was little and liked to get lost in the stacks to discover intriguing books about dinosaurs and unicorns, sometimes in the same book. I never met with Dick that he didn’t have a book for me. I might be interested in it or maybe not. But someone who will gift you a book is someone to spend time with.

After Dick and his wife Mary bought a house in Arvada, I sometimes journeyed down from Cheyenne to play ping pong in his garage/office. Books lined the shelves there too. Dick usually won the games and then we retired to the garage’s book section. Dick also built and installed a Little Free Library in his front yard. I like those and usually stop to peruse the library when I see one. It’s like hidden treasure – there could be anything in there. And often was.

Dick was a writer too, a poet with philosophy in mind. He always emailed or mailed me his poetry. I usually commented on it because I know, as a writer and writing teacher, that every written thing deserves attention. In his poetry, Jesus played baseball and so did his disciples. Amazing flights of imagination. I liked the way he always worked friends and family into his poems – that made it very personal. I didn’t understand all of it but appreciated that he spent time and energy writing it down.

Dick was a conscientious godfather. He always brought Annie books and wrote her poems. He went out of his way to help her when she was in a variety of mental health treatment centers, in Colorado, Wyoming and a few neighboring states. It’s sometimes hard to know what to say to a loved one with mental health challenges. Just being there in a big deal. Yourself, listening. Chris and I always appreciated Dick’s attention to our little bird trying to fly.

Dick was one of the first people Chris and I met when we decided to abandon traditional Catholic churches for something different at 10:30 Catholic Community. Some of us gathered together in a men’s group and it turned out we had a lot to share with one another. We went on jaunts to the mountains. I moved away from Denver, first to Fort Collins and then to Cheyenne, and some of the guys went down to Arizona for Rockies’ spring training. Dick liked his Rockies and so did Mary. We all were committed fans and one of my great memories was attending a Rockies-Dodgers game with Dick and Mary and Dick’s brother and sister-in-law. Summer night at Coors Field. Sure, you might get heartburn from the hot dogs and the Rockies relief pitching. But always the best place to be in summer.

It's sad to say goodbye to Dick. The memories remain. He was a good guy with a big heart. And a fine friend.

Dick was always learning. This is some of his commentary on an Easter poem he sent me in April 2022: Remember that is just Dick's two cents/And each of you have your two cents/So it seems this Easter is better than last Easter./Cuz I didn't understand the resurrection of the spirit till/I was 83 years old.

He was 85 when he passed from this life last week. 

2022 was Dick’s final Easter on this planet. He also commented on the afterlife, saying that he hoped there was no paperwork there. By that, I'm guessing he meant PAPERWORK, you know, the kind we all hate to fill out. He didn't mean the paper of books because that meant so much to him. I do believe there is poetry and books, lots of books, in the afterlife. What would heaven be without them?

Dick loved sports and especially the Colorado Rockies. If there's room for books in heaven, there must be be a snowball's chance in Hades that the Rockies can find consistent pitching and go on to win a World Series. We can all keep praying for that. 

You will forget things, micro-essay

You will forget things. As you age, that’s the mantra you hear from people who think they know better. Nobody tells you this: you forget how to forget. The past rolls in like the Florida East Coast waves I once surfed. That’s me on my long board walking the nose on a wave spawned by a tropical storm. I am 16 and my shoulders already are scorched by the sun. I will be riding this wave as a 71-year-old living in Wyoming’s high prairie as my dermatologist burns off a rough patch birthed that day at the beach. I am 28 making love with my girlfriend in a Colorado mountain stream. The water so cold, our skin warms from the friction of our bodies. Do you remember… starts my wife, 66, the one from the stream, and I say I cannot forget and it seems like the right thing to say but what I really mean is there is no way that I can forget, that even if we had split up during the awful times that we want to forget I could not forget how, in the shade of quaking aspens, the sunlight vibrated across your skin, your blue eyes on me. My last thoughts will be of waves and water, you and me. I will not and cannot forget. That’s old age, the truth of it.

Grandma and Grandpa were in France on November 11, 1918, when the guns grew silent

World War 1’s Meuse-Argonne offensive began on Sept. 26, 1918, and halted with the announcement of the Armistice on Nov. 11. It was the largest in U.S. military operation in history with 1.2 million American soldiers. Deadliest, too, with more than 350,000 casualties on all sides and 26,277 U.S. deaths. Many of the troops were inexperienced which probably added to the casualties. The so-called Spanish Flu was raging at the time which swelled the ranks of the soldiers being treated at American Expeditionary Force hospitals.

My grandfather, Lt. Raymond Shay of Iowa City was there serving with the Headquarters Troop, 88^th Division, U.S. Army.

Late in the day on Nov. 11, 1918, my grandmother, Florence Green of Baltimore, was a U.S. Army nurse serving at Evacuation Hospital 8 in France. She and other medical staffers still were treating casualties of the Meuse-Argonne campaign and would be for some time. Armistice Day (later Veterans Day) didn't yet have a name but here’s the entry in her diary:

November 11: Am so happy tonight to think the war is really over. I cannot believe it. Haven’t heard a gun since 11am. Great celebrating everywhere. Can almost hear the city hall in Baltimore ringing, and what a wonderful time for Paris.

The next day was Nov. 12 and she was still in France. She finally arrived back in the States March 10, 1919. She met my grandfather at Army General Hospital 21 (later Fitzsimons Army Medical Center) in Aurora, Colo. Raymond and Florence were married in 1922 and their first grandson, me, arrived on the planet on Dec. 18, 1950. Their son, my father Thomas, served overseas in the follow-up war to end The War to End All Wars from 1942-46. My mother, Anna Hett, was trained as a U.S. Navy nurse at Denver’s Mercy Hospital but the war ended before she could be shipped overseas.

More wars followed.

Micro-essay: Denver

Denver

When you’re gone you’re gone. That first house you bought on South Grant Street, some kids you don’t know slide down the driveway on skateboards. A stranger sits at your desk in the Broadway brick building, never heard of you, the building is a different business now, has nothing to do with the fan-belts and radiator hoses they make in the spooky factory across the street that’s now a condo complex. That dive bar where you got shitfaced after college hockey games is a fashion boutique next to a pot shop. Those softball diamonds all over town, you can watch twilight games in July with players your kids’ ages or maybe your grandkids’ ages. On one of those diamonds, you played in January’s annual Sno-ball tourney and froze your ass off. Your favorite bookstore moved across town. You and your girlfriend walked down Fillmore to the old place, it smelled of books and not coffee and the two of you found books and a quiet place to read for hours. Fourth of July at your aunt’s and uncle’s house you and your cousins almost burnt down the wooden fence with Wyoming fireworks. A procession of strangers have lived there and they keep on moving out and moving in and you don’t recognize any of them when you drive by. Camping near Grand Lake, we skip rocks in the shallow creek that grows into the mighty Colorado as it tumbles down the Rockies. Concerts at Red Rocks, you can see where you sat in the middle seats, surrounded by those with their own memories, the Eagles and The Dead, full moon coming over the mountains, lights of Denver down below. You’re not there. Days and weeks, months and years. Memories orbit like planets, find you where you are now. At the old Stapleton airport named after the KKK mayor of the 1920s, you drove to down Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard to get there. You linger outside the boundary fence, stand on the car hood to almost touch the arriving planes, hear the blast and feel the whoosh of the engines. It was 1978 on that July afternoon you first flew into Stapleton for a new job. On that day, you didn’t know it yet, but you were already gone.

Poets give voice to the voiceless gunned down in their schools

 

Reposted from a friend's Facebook page. Introduced me to a U.S. poet with Front Range connections whose work I didn't know. It brilliantly says what I am finding so hard to put into words. Thanks to Matt Hohner who has an MFA from Naropa University in Boulder. A friendly nod to Sam Hamill who published so much wonderful work at Copper Canyon Press during his time on the planet. He also initiated Poets Against the War to protest the 2003 Iraq War.