24 - And the moral of the story is ....

The 1978 journey

            Boulder, Colorado is “exactly where the plains meet the Rocky Mountains.” Driving east from Nebraska or Kansas, eastern Colorado seems no different, until the Flatirons suddenly pop up just west of Boulder.

            In 1978, Boulder was teeming with vitality. The University of Colorado had more than thirty thousand students. The Pearl Street Mall was dedicated the year before as a pedestrian-only downtown, populated daily by musicians, street people, shoppers, tourists, and townies. The Rolling Stones played before 60,000 happy folks at Folsom Field.

            And best of all, Mork and Mindy debuted in Boulder, catapulting Robin Williams and Pam Dawber into stardom.[i]

            People came from all over to visit Boulder, such as the travelers at the Youth Hostel from Ireland and Australia. Boulder was also a mecca for the burgeoning counter-culture movement of the ‘70s. Here’s a poster I purloined for my scrapbook:

            Boulder was also the birthplace of one of the most distinctive universities in the U.S. In 1974, an exiled Tibetian Buddhist, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, founded Naropa Institute, and asked “beat poets” Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, John Cage, and Diane di Prima to establish a department for creativity, which they named the "Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics."

             I was intrigued enough by Naropa that I thought about attending, talking to Peter Hearst in the psychology department about their new graduate program - though I was hesitant because the school was not yet accredited. (Naropa attained that status in 1988.) Nor did it have a campus. In 1978, Naropa’s offices were located above a Chinese restaurant on the Pearl Street Mall, and classrooms were rented throughout downtown.

            In just a few short weeks, Bruce and I already had a great group of friends. We enjoyed everything Boulder had to offer, from the climate and mountains, to the bountiful and eclectic restaurant and live music scene. (Not to mention “The Spoke’s” generous moped test-riding policies.)

            Needless to say, Bruce and I talked a lot about staying. Yet I remained conflicted, overanalyzing everything, stimulated by daily visits to the Boulder Library. I read voraciously, studying chess, philosophy and Buddhism, scribbling quotes into my journal without really understanding them, like this one from Suzuki’s “Studies in Zen:”

            Rinzai the young monk goes to the master and askes, “What is the essence of Buddhism? The master gave him blows with his staff. … This happened three times. Rinzai concluded, “I deeply regret, that owing to my stupidity, I am unable to comprehend the hidden meaning of all this.”

             In one long passage, from November 7, 1978, I was stirred enough by reading Fyodor Dostoevsky to write about passion, intimacy and trust, as I struggled trying to understand myself and cope with relationships. I was especially critical of my self-perceived weaknesses, scorching the pages with the chaos I felt inside. No doubt this turmoil blinded my ability to see the beauty of the place, and I actually wrote in utter frustration, “How long are we going to stay in this hick town?”

            Thus I persuaded Bruce to leave Boulder, with lame justifications like:

            I am enjoying being alone. It has not happened often lately. That is one reason I want to leave, though W is guilt-tripping me about deserting my friends here. But I hate snow and want to spend my hastily-earned money on the road, not in Boulder.

            Let’s stop the tape here. “Hate snow?” Boulder has a great climate. Summers are warm and dry, the sun shines throughout the year, and winters are mild. Sure the snow falls, but it would be typical to get a blanket of a few inches overnight, which would burn off in the afternoon sun. People famously skied at Eldora in t-shirts or even shirtless. If I truly hated snow, I wouldn’t have spent the next forty years in freaking Michigan.

            But I always thought I’d return to Boulder. As Bruce and I drove South from Boulder, I prophesied:

            I have to work soon. It will be in Ann Arbor, probably waiting [tables] and driving [I drove a day-care van part time], playing chess with Mike, and hopefully crystallizing a screenplay idea. Maybe come summer I’ll return to Boulder and Naropa. If I ever return to school it may be here, for the classes are unique. Credit towards MA in Psych for dance and martial arts would be cool.

            But then I tempered my own dreams: But, what good would an MA in Psych do?

            So we went back to Ann Arbor in the late fall of 1978, and pretty much resumed our old lifestyle.

             I never did write that screenplay, lost interest in chess, and didn’t get back to Boulder - even to visit - until the 90’s. After returning to Ann Arbor, I waited tables, worked on a child psychology research project, helped to organize a national housing conference, was accepted to the University of Michigan Art School (but took no classes) then the School of Education (and again took no classes). I waited for a bolt from the blue to tell me what to do with my life. It essentially came when I was fired from my waiter job, after trying to organize my co-workers (though there was also that incident when I rode my bicycle through the hotel lobby).

            So I applied to law school, what I sometimes call “the last refuge of the liberal arts major,” where I met my wife who was also a Wayne State law student. We have three daughters, and here I am.

            In a nice twist, my youngest daughter is one of Naropa’s 400 or so undergraduates, where she majors in music and recently recorded her first album. She has fully embraced Boulder, hiking and cycling in the mountains, and learning to rock-climb. She works in a coffee shop/book store while attending classes, and shows no signs of wanting to live anywhere else - though she does enjoy driving her 1999 Subaru Forester “Joni” on back roads to places like the South Dakota Badlands. So yeah, maybe I returned to Boulder after all, just not in the exact form I envisioned!

            As for my pal and fellow traveler Bruce Weil … he did return to Boulder for an extended visit in the spring of 1979, but eventually returned to his home town of Cincinnati where he still resides. He never did rewrite and resubmit his screenplay, despite encouragement from the agent in Hollywood (though he swears to this day that the movie "Sideways" is a direct ripoff). Instead, Bruce embarked on a circuitous professional life that always led back to working with kids in some form.

            His particular specialty was shaped in part by a near-disastrous nap under a sunlamp. Bruce burned his retina, but it could’ve been much worse had a roommate not walked in on his tanning session. Bruce healed, but decided to go to graduate school and teach the visually impaired. This was after flirting with medical school, law school, and a stint as a program director in a psychiatric hospital.

            Bruce also had a long career as a teacher in inner city Cincinnati, where he started two successful steel drum bands, after learning the “pan” from steel drum legend Hugh Borde of the Trinidad Tripoli Steel Band. Here’s the Clark Montessori High School Steel Band (That’s Bruce juggling around the 2 minute mark):

            Bruce also had his own music career, leading a band called “King Penguin” that opened for acts like Leon Redbone, Arlo Guthrie, and Billy Crystal. (Crystal asked Bruce before the show, “You don’t do funny stuff, do you?” and did not look happy when Bruce admitted some of their songs were satirical. Bruce recalls King Penguin getting a nice reception, but when Crystal walked out and said, “Cincinnati, you look MAHVELOUS!” the crowd went absolutely crazy.)

            

             After retiring from teaching a few years back, Bruce returned to working with the visually impaired, paying visits and teaching them one on one. He’s married with two daughters; his youngest daughter is also a musician, and she may be attending school this fall at Eastern Michigan University just up the road. It all circles around somehow.

            I can’t tell you what the moral of all this is. You get one life in this world, and there’s a lot to see. Helen Keller said, “Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing at all.” Travel can be fraught with insecurity and the unknown, but as another daring adventurer, Anthony Bourdain, put it,

            Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.

            He added,

            If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.

He’s wrong about the twenty-two part: learning never stops. But you have to get on the road to do it. Reading about new places is no substitute for travel; it should only inspire it. As a certain disembodied poet once said:

            Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain. – Jack Kerouac

I now understand that I didn’t leave Boulder because it was a “hick town,” I was just itching to get on to the next place.

At the outset of this blog, I promised to deliver what I learned about America. Visiting the same places, and a few of the same people, I can tell you this. It’s as beautiful as it was in 1978, and in many ways timeless. Main streets in small towns look pretty much the same now as they did back then. They may seem indistinguishable from one another, but when you look closer, there is a often a unique “sense of place” that you won’t find anywhere else. It may reflect pride in the natural features, or local culture sustained by native tribes. In the western states, there is a palpable sense of the “rugged individualism” that runs through their politics. (Example: billboard with a candidate posing with a cowboy hat and Winchester rifle hugging a steer.)

Discerning these differences helped me to understand the people I met. I still feel I can connect with almost anyone in some way. I might ask about their family, describe how their town has changed, what they like doing for fun, or the local food specialties. Almost all the people I met seemed good at heart. It’s humanity that’s a mess - then and now. We muddle through, most of us trying to make ourselves and the world better, the best way we can.

My 8788 miles across America did nothing to sate my wanderlust. I’m already planning my next trip - along the Alcan highway to Alaska - the only state I have yet to visit. So while my own journey will continue as long as I can, I can’t predict what the next forty years will bring for America. Perhaps that’s a journey for our children to take up, and their own book to write.

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[i]  My friend Norm told me he had one of Pam Dawber’s tennis shoes, and promised to deliver it to me. He sent teasers like the following:

I’m still waiting for that shoe.

Credits:

Opening Boulder quote and Flatirons photo - Boulder Convention and Visitors Bureau website.

Rolling Stones photos – Michael Goldman, CU ’78 (https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/2012/12/01/waiting-friend)

Mork and Mindy, Billy Crystal gif  – web archives

Rinpoche and Ginsberg photo – www.naropa.edu

Deshan with staff - https://ericgerlach.com/buddhistphilosophy9

Map, Rocky Mountain Truth Force, comic, Dawber clues – my own collection