Back in February, my partner Doug and I both traveled to Colorado expecting to return to Amherst in mid-April. Soon it became apparent that was not going to happen and we settled in at Doug’s lovely house.
One month rolled into another and when it looked like we would be there through the summer, we resurrected a garden spot behind our house and planted an optimistic amount of seeds. Like all gardens, it was way more work than we anticipated, but spending time in it each day created a rhythm in our stay-at-home lives.
In June, July and August, there were more than 70 days when the temperature was over 90 degrees — many days, way over 90! The plants seemed to love it and with a thick blanket of mulch and water, they thrived every day. We were well rewarded for our time and energy with eggplants, peppers, beans, tomatoes and hundreds of sunflowers.
Occasionally we talked about how we would get back to Amherst. We ruled out flying, or driving and staying in motels. We looked into renting a camper van, but at $2,500 for four days (they were in high demand), we ruled that out too. On Aug. 1, we went for our usual visit to our local flea market, and there it was — a bright white Ford 250 van in perfect condition with windows on the side and back doors and a “For Sale” sign taped to its windshield.
Gene, the owner, appeared and we learned that the van was 14 years old and had gone only 19,000 miles taking Gene and his wife Alice back and forth from the nearby community of Greeley to the flea market a few times a month to sell second-hand blue jeans. Doug took it for a ride around the parking lot and bought it on the spot for $9,300. We soon added a platform bed and set it up for camping.
This would be our way to get back East. The Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles had a three-month waiting period for license plates, but we got a “temporary plate,” a piece of paper that we slipped into a plastic bag and slid into the license plate holder on the back door of the van.
Heading east from Henderson, just north of Denver, we crossed the South Platte and Platte rivers (several times as they meander), the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Illinois, Wabash, Cayahoga, Susquehanna, Alleghany, Delaware, Hudson and finally the Connecticut — each river brought back a fact or two remembered from our geography and American history classes. We were reminded again what a big country this is and how the rivers were a major organizing principle for all the flora and fauna, including humans, that lived along their banks and crossed their wide waters.
We decided not to hurry, to take small roads when possible, limit our driving each day and stop early enough to enjoy each new campground and its environment. Our first day was a short three-hour drive. We stayed in Julesburg, Colorado with Chuck Wills, an old friend of Doug’s who moved to the northeast corner of Colorado to escape the population explosion and industrial expansion happening in all directions from Denver. He and his wife, Debbie, bought a lovely late 19th-century home built of pressed cement bricks made by a local man who bought the brick press from Sears & Roebuck.
Their house was filled with beautifully restored period furniture and was graced by an enormous American elm tree in their front yard. We slept in their quiet driveway (except for the nearby trains) for our first night in our van.
The next day, after a quick tour of downtown Julesburg, we drove five-plus hours to Minden, Nebraska and found a meager campsite under a tree just next to Harold Warp’s Pioneer Village, a place I had visited around 1972. Harold Warp, born and raised in Minden, invented a product called “Flexi-Glass,” thin plastic sheeting with lots of possible uses. His business was wildly successful (competitors called their copy-cat products “Plexi-Glass” and “Saran Wrap”) and he accumulated a fortune.
With his money he decided to build a showplace of American industrial creativity in his hometown. We spent a day and a half in his wonderland of “things” arranged in historical order: cars, trucks, fire engines, trolley cars, circus wagons, bicycles, airplanes, internal combustion engines, boats, typewriters, sewing machines, washing machines (including a dog-powered one), lamps, furniture, and on and on.
“Over 50,000 items and 6 Million satisfied Visitors.” Perhaps because of the virus we literally had the enormous room in the main part of the museum to ourselves! The next day we went through the buildings that Harold had assembled in a small-town circle. These included the one-room school house that he had attended, land title office (the exact one where Harold’s newly-wed grandparents registered their first homestead in Minden), a church (the one he went to), livery, general store, sod house, train station (complete with an enormous steam powered train) and assorted other structures. It is an amazing collection.
Harold died in 1994 and the development of the village stopped when he did. Now, the place itself is a monument to a tourist attraction of the 1950s. It’s run down at the edges, but the collection is well maintained, “All mechanical items in Operating Condition.”
In the early afternoon we unglued ourselves from history and drove to Indian Cave State Park on the western bank of the Missouri River. Anthropologists report that the cave, with its petroglyphs, was used as a meeting place for many tribes as long as 1,500 years ago — maybe more. We decided to stay two nights and spent hours sitting at the edge of the fast-moving Missouri. I had just set up my easel to do a painting when along came a river tugboat pushing five flat barges, each one with an enormous pile of rocks, upstream! They were like small islands moving against the substantial current. I sketched quickly and Doug took a few photos for reference as I completed the painting. It was the only boat we saw all day.
On Saturday morning, we spent a few hours at the nearby Annual Brownville Fall Flea Market: pumpkins, face painting, old farm equipment, kitchen tools, doughnuts, jewelry, and a big display of Trump banners, hats, and buttons. We knew we weren’t in Amherst yet.
That day we drove across Missouri and Illinois and stopped for the night at Kickapoo State Recreation Area. Not far from the Mississippi River, it is set among rolling hills and trees with a few lakes. Here, as in most campgrounds, our white van was dwarfed by behemoth mobile campers with their pop-out sides. They always make me think of the “transformer” toys my son loved that could change their shape with a twist and a turn.
The roads across Indiana were bumpy and bad (maybe not enough taxes for road maintenance?) and we appreciated some smooth stretches of highway going northeast in Ohio. On Sunday night we met old friends from Amherst for an outdoor dinner at Taza, a Lebanese restaurant in Cleveland.
After dinner, Doug and I drove about an hour in complete darkness trusting Google Maps to bring us to our campsite at Geneva State Park on the southern edge of Lake Erie. In the morning light, the vast lake looked like the ocean without waves.
Back on the road, we finished up with Ohio, drove through the western “tab” of Pennsylvania, and reached New York! It was a glorious drive across this big east-west state. There were many pockets of road where the temperatures in the valleys had done their magic to turn the leaves the most amazing variety of autumn colors.
Every year, despite having lived in New England for 37 years, I am still amazed and thrilled by nature’s display. Awestruck all over again. My son Tim calls this, “the bonus for living here.” Late in the afternoon we arrived in Treadwell, a small town in the west Catskills that my daughter Su and her husband, Gordon, and Tim and his fiancée, Georgia call home.
Together, a few years ago, the four of them bought the Treadwell Public School. It was built in 1928 and has 18,000 square feet of classrooms, offices, cafeteria, locker rooms, boiler rooms, and a full-size gymnasium. Together they are renovating it all. They are all artists and it shows in their sense of design, attention to materials and details, and appreciation of light and space.
They were all busy with projects and work so the next day we drove our final three hours and arrived back in Amherst! We were very happy to see Shahrooz, our friend and graduate student tenant who had been living in our house while we were away taking care of himself and our cat, Bijou. They were both glad to see us.
Our eight-day journey from Henderson to Amherst was a small adventure that we very much enjoyed. After mostly staying in our Colorado house for the past seven months, it felt good to spread our wings a bit and explore, in a safe way, a thin ribbon of the American landscape.
