Up Bear Creek / 24j13i3 / GJ Art Mag

WESTERN COLORADO JOURNEYS 

The amazing Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer at a reading in Grand Junction

Kat Rhein of Wild Kat Media has published a second edition of the Grand Valley’s premiere regional art, media and poetry guide. There are marketing sections on all the local hotspots surrounding Grand Junction, luscious photographs of impressive artwork, arts-related stories, and a selection of regional verse from place-based poets.

To get your own copy of what are quickly becoming collectors’ items in their own right, or to learn more, visit westerncoloradojourneys.com and enjoy the work of Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Malcolm Graeme Childers and Frank Coons.

Up Bear Creek / 24j13i3 / Sheridan Celebrates Anniversary

100 YEARS 

It’s wonderful celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the Sheridan Opera House, although it didn’t start out that way. Originally the Segerberg Theatre when it opened as a “picture show theatre,” according to the Telluride Daily Journal of July 2, 1913, the name was later changed from a theatre venue for silent films to an “opera house” and a mainstay on the state’s vaudeville circuit. There were several earlier opera houses in Telluride, both long gone. Opera houses not only hosted performances and lectures, but they served as community centers for dances and fancy dinner parties … The surviving Segerberg/Sheridan has become the town’s cinematic landmark, thanks to the annual Telluride Film Festival and its international following. And blossomed as well into an intimate performance showcase, “Telluride’s living room,” thanks to the Sheridan Arts Foundation.

Up Bear Creek / 24j13i2 / Tamiflu to the Rescue

INFLUENZA 

Sad Things by Diego Kricek Fontanive

It didn’t seem like a big deal. Gorio was home sick last Monday [Jan. 14th] with a headache, bit of a sore throat, cough (but no fever). And then Tuesday. But when it stretched into Wednesday, I took him to the clinic. And glad I did, because he tested positive for the flu … 

Both of us got Tamiflu pills (for which Don at the Apothecary Shoppe in Nucla saved us mucho dinero, as those little drug cures cost a pretty penny). And we stayed home all week. Him in bed, and me sorting through Mary’s things and being caretaker single dad. Lots of chores at Cloud Acre – wood heat means hauling logs from the shed to the stove and keeping the fire banked and burning, hauling water, preparing meals, washing dishes, shoveling snow -- the list of rural Wright’s Mesa what-to-do’s goes on a spell … 

I did get Saturday off to visit friends up from Shiprock for a dip in the pool at Ouray. But missed Sunday’s 49er game, which was tempting (especially as I love it when they win – Giants in the World Series and now the Niners in the Super Bowl – what a year for the Bay Area!) … Friday there was this dinner party in Telluride, but Gorio and I watched movies, played games, stayed up late and slept late … 

Sometimes being sick is the only way to slow the world down and sleep a lot.

Up Bear Creek / 24jan26013 / item one

On the trail of the Trogloraptor

SPIDERS … Like snakes, I was afraid of spiders as a young child. We lived among black widows and my mom even got bit by one, hiding in the sleeve of a jacket she put on. She was sick for days … But meeting an herpetologist at Pinnacles National Monument in California, I learned to love snakes – recognizing the danger but respecting their power and beauty. And after 30 years living in Norwood on a property with many old outbuildings and in a house with many resident spiders, I’ve come to an arrangement of sorts. I like to say, they don’t bite me and I don’t kill them. Both of these statements are true, although there may be no direct correlation between them. However, in my own magical worldview, there is. And I take great care to escort spiders out of my home (where a good number provide fly-catching webs, eliminating one of the area’s summer pests).

My success in doing so relates in no small way to making use of that wonderful humane spider trapping tool, the BugZooka – an air gun that sucks up spiders and lets you relocate them outside, unharmed … Having become a fan of spiders now (one of the great Diné feminine deities), I was delighted to learn in a recent issue of Science News of the discovery of a whole new family of spiders, Trogloraptoridae. Tens of thousands of new species are discovered every year, but finding a new family of critters is very rare. These new specimens sport big, three-part claws and spikes on curved feet and measure about three inches with feet extended. So far, this spider family has only one genus and only one species. It was discovered by cavers in southern Oregon, and was dubbed Trogloraptor (“cave robber”) marchingtoni (for amateur spelunker and deputy sheriff Neil Marchington). However, specimens have also turned up in the redwoods of Jedediah Smith State Park in California, and may be a second species of the genus Trogloraptor.

Up Bear Creek 17jan26013

Trying to get the state to use some OHV common sense in our high country

OHVs on a forest road

DENVER … It was a lot of effort for a two-minute speech. My fellow commissioner was unable to attend the meeting of the state Parks & Wildlife Commission at the Westminster Doubletree Hotel as planned, so I got roped into the three-day trip … The state P&W agency had been dinging us on our application grants for an Alpine Ranger to manage our Off-Highway Vehicle traffic on county roads in the high country. Although the state OHV fund has specifically been restructured to help pay for OHV law enforcement, San Miguel County and its neighbors (Ouray, Hinsdale and San Juan) had been preventing from getting these state OHV grants because our joint county regs for OHV usage on our treacherous mountain roads includes insurance and driver’s licenses – neither of which requirements are mandated by the state. As such, the P&W bureaucracy has concluded our regs are “inconsistent” with the state’s regs, and as such can’t be funded … Which puts the four counties in a terrible situation. The state is saying it won’t help us pay for our Alpine Ranger to manage OHV traffic because we don’t let 10-year-olds run motorized OHVs on narrow jeep roads where the exposure is often extreme and quite likely deadly. If that sounds like a crazy situation, you’re right. It is … Although I only got two minutes to make my plea as to the unfairness of the situation, my fellow commissioners Pete McKay of Silverton and Lynn Padgett of Ridgway also spoke, and the three of us had a good effect … Given the legal quagmire of conflicting regs and regulatory inconsistencies, the P&W Commission promised to review the situation with its staff and try to find a solution – good news for the county, as budgets shrink and the ability to do things, like the Alpine Ranger position, become more and more tenuous on taxpayer funding alone … We’ll see if the trip to the big city actually nets the county some real dollars to help manage OHV use on our alpine roads.

APOCALPYTIC PLANET … If you think climate change is the only threat to our future as a species, think again. Paonia-based author Craig Childs has researched the real history of our cataclysmic earth and come up with the many ways the earth has died and come back to life in its multi-million year history. Once again we see that the Darwinian concept of slow, gradual change is counter-balanced by some of the catastrophic insights that Immanuel Velikovsky championed … I can’t help thinking of that dazzling chant that the native people of my hometown, San Francisco, sang and that I named one of my poetry chapbooks after, “Dancing on the Brink of the World.” That certainly describes living on the coast of California, where earthquake, flood, tsunami and volcanic activity abound. But it also speaks to our entire species, trying to find a foothold on an ever-changing planet … Childs is a great writer. He makes the science come alive with personal stories of his adventures seeking extreme habitats that reflect how the entire earth might one day look … Highly recommended.

WATERSHED … The Telluride Institute is hosting a screening in the Nugget Theatre this Friday night at 8 p.m. of Watershed: Exploring a New Water Ethic for a New West, a documentary narrated by movie star and conservationist Robert Redford and produced by son Jamie … "The watershed issue is something that's happening all over the world, where the need for water is greater than the amount of water to provide for it," Robert Redford told Reuters news agency. "I think we're picking the Colorado River as an example of what's going on and trying to focus on that and draw attention to it." … 

Mentzelia marginata

Chimed in Telluride Institute board member Audrey Marnoy, “Watershed's creation, as an inspiring social action tool to engage people, synergizes with the Telluride Institute’s mission to collaborate with leading artists and scientists, businesses and the public to advance real solutions that support healthy environments, diverse cultures and progressive economies.” A short panel discussion bringing the film’s ideas to the local water situation will follow the screening.

NEW ENDEMIC … Ridgway-based Western Slope botanist for the Colorado Natural Heritage program Peggy Lyon reports that a new species of plant has been found in San Miguel and Montrose counties, Mentzelia paradoxensis. The new find was reported in Madroño, published by the California Botanical Society, in a paper by John J. Schenk and Larry Hufford of Washington State University at Pullman titled, “Taxonomic Novelties from Western North America in Menzelia section Bartonia (Loasaceae).” M. paradoxensis is closely related to M. marginata but was found to be its own distinct species.

THE TALKING GOURD

Cabin

He sets up the cribbage board

while she shuffles the deck;

his scotch mingles with ice

while her hot cocoa steams

on this January night.

-David Reynolds

Fountain Valley

10jan26013

Trying to get my calendric facts straight

Izapan stela from John Major Jenkins

TWEAKED … Mea culpa. Mea culpa … I’m so obsessed with calendars that I’ve leapt ahead of my research, scattergun as it’s been. Truth be told, the Izapan (Mayan) Long Count Calendar’s Great Cycle wasn’t 26,000 years … What researcher John MajorJenkins believes is that the Long Count calendar was invented in Izapa’s mix of Olmec/Mayan traditions and that, through astronomical observation of the shift in the sun’s equinox position in the stars as seen at the Izapa site, the shaman/astronomers there had hit upon the physical reality of the precession of the equinoxes, a 25,800 year cycle of changes in the night sky due to the rotational spin of the earth on its axis as it circles the Sun. Hipparchus is credited with “discovering” this “wobble” that creates a great cycle of shifting constellational alignments vis-à-vis our scan of the night sky. But Jenkins thinks it was “discovered” in Izapa hundreds of years before the Greeks caught on … So, for that reason, I’ve decided to base my new calendar on that precessional wobble, and honor the Izapans who found out about it, and the cultural phenomenon of the “Mayan Calendar’s” beginning of the 14^th baktun (as the archaeologists have named it), with a nod to physical anthropology’s best guess of human arrival on the continent (somewhere between 13,000 and 25,000 years ago), and still provide a bridge to our own historic Gregorian calendar in use today around the world… I’m marrying the Christian end-numbers to a rounded-off precessional cycle of 26,000 years in crafting a new Goodtimes Calendar (GC) … Voila! Thus, my new year, 26013 (GC)

Art reading at Grand Junction's The Art Center

FIRST FRIDAYS … Camille Silverman of the Western Colorado Center for the Arts Art Center and Luis Lopez of Farolito Press held a special show, Make It New: Poets Take the House, last Friday up in the Western Slope’s queen city, and it was a whopper … Over a hundred people crowded into The Art Center’s exhibits of Christopher Z.Y. Shang’s paintings, images from Tibet, clay vessels and local artists to hear something different – four dazzling poets assembled by emcee Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer … 

Wendy Videlock and daughter Shawnee

Grand Junction local Frank Coons kicked off the evening with humor and panache. Denver’s LadySpeech took the house by storm with her evocative performance and won a standing ovation. Rising national poetry star Wendy Videlock and her daughter Shawnee, both of the Grand Valley, combined word, song and music for a masterful synthesis of sound and sense. And New Mexico poet Stewart Warren took the audience on extended flights of deep image and earth-based metaphor … An amazing evening. Easily one of the best readings I’ve ever attended on the Western Slope.

LadySpeech captivates a rapt audience

AIRPORT BLUES … It’s interesting to hear questions raised, at this late date, about the effectiveness of having a Telluride Airport siphoning air guarantee dollars away from cheap direct flights to the Montrose Airport. As a bioregionalist (member of Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft’s Planet Drum Society in San Francisco), it never made sense to me to build a tiny airport on a fragile high alpine mesa in order to bring tourists to Telluride, albeit we all came to recognize that it was great for convincing wealthy investors to speculate in the area’s real estate boom of the last three decades … But to move people, on the cheap, partnering with the Montrose Airport would have seemed to have made more sense, even thirty years ago … If we’re truly going to try to transition to a more stable and resilient summer/winter industrial tourism economy without an unsustainable real estate/construction boom component, then we’re going to really have to re-examine how we most effectively move people here in an era of rising energy and transportation costs.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer emceeing at The Art Center

 

POET LAUREATE … San Miguel is one of a handful of counties around the country who appoint poet laureates in their communities. It’s been a local tradition for the past eight years. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer served two two-year terms, and Ellen Marie Metrick is finishing her first two-year term. It’s an honorary role, although promoting the literary arts “in this county and around the state” is the only real duty connected with the job – open-ended enough to allow anyone to do almost anything with the title … But I’m wondering if we shouldn’t open the appointment to any poet living in or owning land in San Miguel County. Perhaps we should ask for a request for proposal from county poets to see who might do what with the job?

Stewart Warren in GJ

COMET ISON … Drywall Paul suggests you all prepare for Comet Ison’s incoming. Might be spectacular show later this year. Keep watch on the sky.

POLITICAL CAFÉ? … While I was going door-to-door in Lawson Hill, one citizen harangued me for a bit over tea, and suggested that we have a monthly opportunity in Telluride to meet with me as a commissioner outside of regularly scheduled meetings. I thought it was a good idea. And I’d like to see if there’s interest in the community. Coming up to Telluride from Norwood is a bit of a task, but if people would seriously like a more informal opportunity to talk with me, I’m happy to do it … Call me at 327-4767 or email commish3@sanmiguelcounty.org

THE TALKING GOURD

Home’s Magneto

-for Sara

So anchored am I

to the star-nicked drywall

of Cloudacre’s ceiling sky

who could believe

your insistent truth

that Orion’s belt

was buckling up

over winter’s dark steamed

fumarole at Orvis

at what seemed a horizon

too far north of

Little Cone

Up Bear Creek 3jan26013

Tweaking a North American calendar

BEYOND THE JULIAN … I know, I know. I have this obsession with calendars. Certainly the Christian calendar that we use, dated from the (unverified) date of the birth of Jesus of Bethlehem, has served us well. And it’s become an international standard. But, to my way of thinking, it’s far too religiously bound for the modern era, and far too culturally bound to our Graeco-Roman roots as North American immigrants of mostly European stock … Of course, there are other calendars … Muslims use the Hajri lunar calendar, starting with the flight of Muhammed from Medina to Mecca. Thus the current year is 1434 AH (standing for Anno Hejirae, in the year of Hijra) … The lunisolar Hebrew calendar has changed over time, but in the current Anno Mundi (in the year of the world) epoch, the current date is 5773 … The old traditional Chinese Yin lunisolar calendar can be calculated in a number of ways. We are currently in the Year of the Dragon, and the date is either 4709, 4649, or 4710, depending on the epoch used … There are many Hindi calendars, as might be expected from that hotbed of that ancient culture, each specific to different local cultural groups … So I think we as North Americans, with our New World perspective ought to craft our own calendar. For years I’ve tried to tie a calendar to the earliest humans to touch foot on this continent, but the science is unsettled. While the oldest physical anthropology evidence is 12,500 years ago, there are a number of unverified sites that are claimed to be far older – perhaps as old as 25,000 years ago … But the recent hoopla around the end of the first Great Cycle of the Izapan Mayan calendar has led to increased scrutiny on this indigenous calendric system. And to me, the start date of that calendar, some 26,000 years ago, seems to be perhaps a fitting starting point for a new Calendar specific to our place. Based on astronomical observations at the Mayan culture center of Izapa and focused on the passage of the solstice sun through the center of the Milky Way (the galactic womb for our solar system), their Long Count calendar started 26,000 years ago and was composed of 13 baktuns of 2000 years each. Since we are now in the first baktun of the new Great Cycle, I think measuring things from that start date makes more sense than something that happened in the Middle East just a couple of millennia ago … But in order to transition from the Gregorian dating system to this new dating system, I’m proposing we change our calendars from 2013 to 26013. The conversion factor is simple. We merely add 24 millennia to our current new year … In my mind, it puts our world into better perspective. It’s based on a date arrived at by the most sophisticated calendar ever created in the New World. Plus, it’s probably close to the date when the first humans reached Turtle Island.

[Ed. Note: Actually, this isn’t exactly correct. I clarified in next week’s column, but the Long Count calendar measures a 20 baktun cycle (7,886 years) that reached back to 3114 (BCE, Before the Christian Era) and was likely calculated a couple thousand years after the start date (early in but not at the beginning of the cycle of 20 baktuns). The recent Dec. 21, 2012 date marked the end of the 12^th baktun and the start of the 13^th baktun in this system. The Long Count calendar provided a way to measure distant times forward and backward for use on monument inscriptions. Its most brilliant insight was to recognize the precession of the equinoxes, the 25,800-year cycle of wobble that makes the constellations that we see shift in the sky. And it’s that celestial event that the calendar I’m starting to use commemorates, using the Izapan Mayan calendar hoopla as a reference point]

GETTING BACK TO NORMAL … But there’s never really a normal to get back to. Life is a constant mystery. And we seem to live a life of punctuated equilibrium – things going along smooth, in a groove, until something good or bad comes along, and smacks one’s small world around like a loose puck. What Paonia-born psychedelic guru Terence McKenna called Time Wave Zero … Getting re-elected was kind of more of the same, although doing the people’s work in campaigning or governance is always full of surprises – like San Juan and La Plata counties both turning blue, with Dem commissioner majorities on both boards … But losing my friend and co-parent Mary Friedberg was a shock that will keep reverberating throughout my life, and the lives of our children and extended family. I can’t imagine how it could be otherwise … Still I’ve got my heated buildings winterized, the potato and apple crops in, Mary’s life enshrined in her yurt, and my voluntary simplicity systems in place so that Gorio and I are snug in our routines at Cloud Acre. And Sara is in good hands with friends up in Telluride … If I’ve missed a call or failed to return an email, forgive me and try again. I hope I can keep up to speed with communications in the new year.

Victor Jara

VICTOR JARA … It’s hard to believe it’s taken 40 years for justice to be served in Chile, but finally eight retired military officers have been charged with the murder of charismatic Chilean folksinger Victor Jara back in 1973. Sad to remember the murder of this brilliant cultural leader, but glad to see his murderers held accountable, finally.

POETRY CLUB … Talking Gourds has morphed many times, from a festival in Telluride to an event at Faraway Ranch to a gathering on the Uncompahgre Plateau. For the last couple years it’s been a collaboration with a number of cultural groups for an interview-reading-gourds circle series at the Wilkinson Library … Now those of us local lovers of poetry have decided to change our venue and change our format. On Jan. 8^th we’ll be holding the first meeting of the Talking Gourds Poetry Club at 8 p.m. at Arroyo Telluride, a fine art gallery and wine bar at 220 E. Colorado Avenue. This will be a chance to hear and enjoy poetry for anyone interested, not just writers. We’ll be seeking memberships in the club, although the club meeting on the first Tuesday of every month will be open to all. New members will receive a discount coupon for Between the Covers Bookstore, one of our sponsors. Wilkinson Library will be holding an event earlier that evening, and encouraging folks to stop by the poetry club afterwards … To begin this new series, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and I will be doing a dual reading. I’m going to be sharing the erotic poetry of San Francisco poet Lenore Kandel, and Rosemerry has a surprise poet in mind to read from. After the reading, we’ll have a gourds circle and give folks a chance to read their own work or read erotic poetry from people they love … January 8^th at 8 p.m. at Arroyo Telluride.

THE TALKING GOURD

Boletus edulis (Photo by David Spahr)

Boletus Coitus

now that the rains are here

I look for you every morning

your shiny head

hard, ready, poking out

from earthy covers

shrouded in moist greening hair

how I want you

virile king

mycelial talons unbuckling my dreams

sliding off each night

slippery, wet feet

diving into hunt

I carry my box

open, ready, a crevasse

for your long white flesh

the many faces of you

invite, coax with scent

thread me through naked blue and fallen golds

past deer bones, deserted beer cans

teasing with jacks and agarics

every sexy spotted red nub

making me want you more

there, right there

here

jutting like a bull pine

ripe, thick, ready

you dance me to you

I squeal, you wait

a fixed flower

microscopic pulses

patient as I coo

pull you into my world

lips moist

fire hot

ready

-Blake More

Point Arena (CA)