Photojournal of the end of September

The main street in our new town. We were there one Friday afternoon...

a few feet behind Edith and her classmates...

who had decorated headbands...

...for the high school homecoming parade.

Yes, believe it or not, in this little mountain town all the elementary and middle school kids get out of class to go cheer on the high schoolers in advance of Homecoming. If it seems a bit strange (as it did to us), the parade felt in the spirit of town-wide community building more than it seemed to be about rah rah sports. The elementary, middle, and high school all share a mascot (the mustang) and colors (green and gold), and all the schools are named for the town itself. So when the kids cheered for Manitou, it was as if they were cheering for themselves as much as for seventeen-year-old football players.

Today I was reading Bill McKibben's new book, Eaarth, in advance of assigning some of it, and it occurs to me the Manitou homecoming parade may be in the spirit of the small-scale, highly-local community building McKibben insists we all need to cultivate to sufficiently lessen our carbon footprint on the planet. On the other hand, while Manitou has a cute downtown and loyal residents who join together for plenty of parades and festivals, it has about zero commercial enterprises of a practical nature (unless you find medical marijuana practical). So everyone has to hop in their car and head off to the strip malls east of here to get groceries, clothes, haircuts, hardware, office supplies, books, or cosmetic goods or to go to the movies, theaters, bars, or concerts. I've been musing a great deal about what I want in a town, and I think that if Manitou could replace 80% of the hundreds of gifts shops, fudge and ice cream parlors, craft boutiques, and New Age psychic stores along Main Street with a variety of practical enterprises selling things residents need on a daily basis, it would be an ideal little enclave.

While we're on the subjects of community building, living green, and elementary school, Tom and I found ourselves scratching our heads yesterday at the annual Walk-to-School event. A well-meant tradition, the idea is to get all kids to walk to school one day to promote healthy, eco-friendly living, as well as neighborliness and traffic safety awareness. But if you live too far from school for your children to walk, noted the permission slip, you could drive them to the park three blocks from school, from which a big group of children, parents, and teachers would walk together.

So instead of Edith and the neighbor kids getting on the schoolbus together yesterday morning, each family separately drove their car 90% of the way to school, jockeyed for parking, then joined a pedestrian crowd so large that it required a police escort and blocked intersections (meaning everyone was fairly blase about the traffic awareness element). Sure, it was nice to see other parents and kids, but I'm not sure it taught Edith much about efficiency, green-living, or looking both ways before crossing the street.

A beautiful place to play football, no?

Edith and Alice, about to be trampled by the Manitou Mustang

II. Baseball Fantasies

When our friend Dave in Princeton heard that we were moving to Colorado Springs, he immediately invited Tom to sign up for a charity baseball event put on by his boss, Jared Polis, who is a Colorado Congressman. Jared runs a baseball tournament each year to benefit a foundation that helps get technology into schools. Participants--mostly men in their 30s through 50s who fondly remember their Little League careers--get to play a full day of games at the Minor League Sky Sox stadium in full uniforms with professional umpires, enjoying an announcer on the P.A., all the musical sound effects, the official scoreboard in operation, etc. Playing for the victorious Dwarves with Dave, Jared, and a bunch of other nice guys (a couple with Princeton connections), Tom had a blast. Who cares if he could barely walk the next day?

Alice practices her catcher's stance. With full run of the stadium, the girls had a great time, too.

III. Hiking

Speaking of being unable to walk...

To celebrate the end of my first class, Tom and I decided to take a little hike. From all over Manitou one can see a scar up the side of one of the mountains (it appears above in the picture of the girls with the mustang statue) that we knew was an old railway bed now used by hundreds of people as a hiking trail. With no twists or turns, it's just a straight haul up the mountain. Looking at it every day as one drives around, one starts to feel that if one lives here, one should climb it. I told Tom that it seemed to be calling my name, and he agreed that on the last day of my class, we would hike it. We figured it would be brutal but short. We got one part of that right.

Turns out that in looking at it every day, our sense of scale was way off. I thought I rarely saw people on it; in fact, they're specks too small to be seen from the city streets. There were at least one hundred people on the trail the morning we went up, including runners timing themselves, dogwalkers chatting on their cellphones, and other awe-inspiring natives. There were also plenty like us, stopping every minute or so, chugging water, gasping, willing themselves to put one foot in front of another at the end.

It didn't help that there were at least two false summits. See that place that looks like the top in this picture? That's maybe 1/3 of the way. It also didn't help that Alice was unwilling to be transferred from my back to Tom's when the going got tough. We spent about ten minutes with her screaming hysterical, meltdown, bloody murder on Tom's back before deciding that it wasn't a particularly inspiring sort of noise, for us or anyone else on the trail, and switched her back.

It was only after I got home and looked up the stats that I learned we'd climbed 2,000 feet over 1.2 miles. With the old railroad ties still embedded in the mountainside, the whole thing was akin to climbing the stairs of a 200-story building.

So why do it, other than to train for the Olympics or a tour in Afghanistan? For this...

Our town down below, the buildings along Main Street visible down the center of the photo, the highway into the mountains at the upper left. Edith's elementary school is the building with the large roof on the right-hand side, about 2/3 of the way up. The high school is above that, with the athletic field next to it.

Fortunately, the old railbed trail meets up at the top with the Barr Trail, the footpath to the summit of Pike's Peak. So we could hike down a more reasonable path and save our knees.

Incidentally, you readers will have to study these pictures and help us with another puzzle. According to the weather.com foliage maps, the Colorado Front Range is near peak leaf color right now. In church last Sunday there were prayers of thanksgiving for the vibrant autumn color in the trees all around us. Edith's class is going to be studying autumn leaves next week, and each child is asked to bring in a small bag of brightly colored leaves.

As far as we can see, she's going to have to order them from Vermont. We're feeling a little like the boy in the "Emperor's New Clothes": Does this really count as fall color? 

I don't mean to be a snob from the coast, but wouldn't it be better simply to acknowledge that in the absence of sugar maples, this isn't a part of the country that does the leaf-peeping thing? Maybe each region should play to its strengths. Colorado has the 14-ers, for Pete's sake...why not cede autumnal glory to the Northeast?

We'll miss those leaves this year. Send us your photos.