Christmas Wishes From a West Virginia Tollbooth

photo: Kae Penner-Howell

The tollbooth lady wants to know if our dogs would like a holiday treat.
“Pardon?”
It’s late at night on a spooky stretch of interstate in the Appalachian Mountains. We’ve just driven eleven hours, with three more to go. We’re not particularly alert.
“Your dogs, would they like a treat?”
“Oh sure. Yeah.”
The tollbooth lady peels the lid off a blue plastic tub and quickly hands us two dog treats, along with our change from the toll.
Merry Christmases are exchanged.
The dog treats are clearly made by hand. Each one a flattened cylinder of grainy brown dough, bent at one end to resemble a candy cane. Halfway along their length the treats are perforated with fork marks, to make them easy to break in half. A practical touch.

We’re on our way to the east coast where my wife’s family live, and I’m preoccupied with preparing myself for the upcoming visit. Wondering how - or if - I can help keep things simple, or if I should just lie low. Over the next few days, millions of us who celebrate this holiday will engage in some manner of role-playing. Each must deliver a convincing individual performance in order to make it a success. You’d think we’d get better at it by the time we reach adulthood, but no other well-rehearsed day can come off the rails quite like Christmas. No day brings the “crazy” like Christmas. None other offers as many triggers for anxiety and depression, or sets the stage for family drama.

At my in-law’s home, the holidays are shaded with a heavy yearning - the echo of events eight decades old. Back in the Great Depression, my wife’s mom, Laura, was abandoned by her mother just before Christmas. This woman had disappeared with her eldest daughter and was never heard from again by the family. She had reached some sort of breaking point, the details of which are lost to another time. The little girl Laura, along with her father and several siblings, were left to ride out the depression by themselves. The dad tried to keep the family together for a while, but eventually had to surrender some of his children into foster care. He kept the older ones, since they could help run the family business. The three youngest ones, including Laura, were sent to live in a series of foster homes. Fractured households, abandonment and adoption were commonplace in the wake of the Depression, and the repercussions still ripple through many of those families. There’s much more to this story which isn’t mine to tell, but suffice to say that old wounds are real wounds nonetheless, and in this family Christmas remains forever complicated.

The traffic around us swells dramatically as we hit the Blue Ridge Parkway. The right lane is a blur of trucks hurrying the goods of the season to the brick-and-mortars of the mid-Atlantic. The left lane is crowded with impatient holiday travelers headed to their ancestral home towns. I imagine many of the cars around me are filled with families bucking up to the demands of the next few days, reviewing the ground rules for behavior, and coaching each other about forbidden topics. Many of these pilgrims have left their chosen tribes of friends and lovers, only to intentionally spend time among the people with whom they may have the least in common - their own extended families. They are vowing various things. To not act passive-aggressive this year. To let things go. To be patient. Some of these people even have it in mind to be deliberately kind. And they will try.

I picture the lady in the tollbooth rolling out her dog treats with the heels of her hands, twisting each into a cane, then toasting them on non-stick baking sheets in her West Virginia home. She’ll do this for days ahead of time, to make enough for the hundreds of dogs headed east in the way-backs of SUVs. I picture her peering into each car, looking for dogs who need treats. I wonder if her supervisors approve, or if the WVDOT has a policy provision for such idiosyncratic generosity among its employees. I imagine she does this because she loves dogs, and also to stave off the mind-numbing boredom of working at a tollbooth. On a day like today thousands of cars pass under her watch. She has only a few seconds contact with each driver. There is no time for chit chat, let alone a conversation. She uses these brief moments to reach out to travelers by way of home-made dog treats. For a gesture so tiny - trivial, in fact - it is remarkably effective at creating a sense of welcome. It strikes me as a kind of drive-thru Eucharist for dogs. She had asked if our dogs wanted a treat, but in a way, what I heard was, "Take this. It is real. The first real thing you’ve been offered in days. Share it now with your dog, and go in peace.”

For many of us, the holidays will always remain difficult, but they're rarely only difficult. They may also be a thousand other things. Some intrusion of ridiculousness and frivolity will break the tedium of ingrained patterns. Drunken board games and ugly sweater parties will do their best to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously. We may even get brief glimpses of joy, or some of the other things mentioned in carols. If someone drags us to a house of worship, or even if we are left to our own thoughts for a few moments, we may connect with deeper currents of meaning available for contemplation in this dark season. The emptying out of events on our calendars. The long pause as the natural world holds its breath until spring. The glimmers of hope and renewal as the days begin to lengthen. The persistent and seemingly preposterous theme of redemption.

Up ahead the traffic funnels down into one lane around a work zone. I’ve been staring almost exclusively at tail lights for two solid days. Drivers slow down to let each other into the one remaining lane. And so it begins: the small kindnesses and temporary civility that will crescendo over the next couple of days. Like children on their best behavior, these social niceties are awkward and theatrical. Doors will be held open longer, tipping will briefly increase in restaurants, greetings with strangers will be bravely exchanged. Small gestures will lead to bigger gestures until finally, exhausted from all the effort, we will collapse back into our individual comfort zones and life will return to normal. Old familiar fears and small-mindedness will slowly be restored. But we will have spent some small measure of time being the best version of our selves, and briefly abiding our own beliefs, which is its own kind of holiday miracle. Is it not?

Lord, Bless These Hands

Gordon walks toward me with a bottle of wine protruding from the pocket of his cargo shorts. I ask, “Is that a bottle of booze in your pants, or are you happy to see me?” He doesn’t get the joke. Gordon’s an older guy and should know that tired groaner, but somehow it’s elluded him. That, or he's just distracted. I know Gordon from an advanced winemaking class we took together at a local winery. He’s here at the Denver County Fair to enter a bottle of his pride-and-joy in the amateur winemaking contest. It’s a show-off-y blend of french grapes from a certain region known for its sophisticated soil and nuanced weather (or maybe it’s the other way around). It’s a wine anyone would be proud to have made, yet as I walk with him over to the competition entry table, Gordon hesitates, suddenly shy. It’s a big deal to submit a hand-made thing for judgement, even if it’s just at a county fair.

Gordon tells me the most discouraging thought is that his wine might not even get drunk. “I don’t care if I don’t win a ribbon. I just can’t stand the thought of my wine being poured down a drain. I hope someone at least enjoys it.” Those words stick in my mind when I finally bring my own fermented experiments over to the judges. The county fair staff are encouraged to enter competitions as long as we’re not directly involved in judging, and since I am managing the art gallery, there is no conflict of interest entering my homemade hard cider and rose petal wine. I too dread the moment I retrieve my bottles only to discover them half full of the libations I’ve been babying for almost a year. So at the last possible moment, I resolve that the risk of rejection is worth the potential affirmation, and I surrender my creations for evaluation.


At church potlucks, and other places religious folks gather for meals, it’s common to hear a prayer of thanks that blesses the hands of the people who prepared the meal. The Christian version goes something like this: “Lord, we give you thanks for this meal, (etc, etc), And we ask that you bless the hands that made this food. May it strengthen us so that we may better serve you. In Jesus name, amen.”  As a kid who spent a lot of time at church picnics, the blessing of hands seemed curious to me. I always pictured ladies hands because cooking was pretty much women’s work back then. I imagined their hands had an invisible, sacred aura that got re-charged every time someone prayed for them, and that this somehow enabled them to be amazing cooks. It is no wonder the hands that create food are set apart for special recognition. Food is among the most fundamental sources of sensual joy we can experience, since it is basic to our survival. I can’t recall any prayers of blessing specific to other types of work, except maybe surgeons. Their hands were routinely busy patching up the old people in our church. But there were no blessings for the hands that prepared tax documents or did data entry or took away our garbage.


My favorite moment at the Denver County Fair happens on the last day, at the very end, after everyone goes home. This is when the call goes out over our walkie talkies to come divvy up the leftovers from the food and drink competitions. Don’t for a second imagine that stuff gets tossed in a dumpster. Some of us have been eyeing those cupcakes and lattice-topped pies all weekend. Generally, the creators of these dilectables don’t bother to circle back at closing time to claim the remains of their labor. This is good news for the staff. Most of us are dead on our feet by this point, so we summon what civility we have left to bargain over half eaten pies that have been sitting in display cases all weekend, and random bottles of home-brew (beer contestants are required to submit 2 bottles, one is for the judges, the second is a “backup.” These are rarely opened). My own haul after this year’s fair included various ambitiously-hopped beers with the word “imperial” in their titles. I also loaded up with several perfect slices of strawberry-rhubarb pie that were seemingly beamed down from heaven by someone’s righteous great grandmother, and an apple pie labeled “3 Sheets to the Wind Bourbon Apple Pie,” whose sugary spell I am under as I write.

I have no idea who made any of the things I’m nibbling on now. For the purpose of blind judging, each entry has an item number and a title, but nothing to indicate the identity of its creator. I suppose if I were especially determined I could track these people down, but it would take some serious poking around in an Excel spreadsheet I don’t have access to anymore. I’m not even sure what the point would be. I’m not a food critic or some sort of culinary talent scout. I’m just a random dude that ended up with county fair leftovers. The thing is, I’m really thankful for these things, despite their idiosyncrasies and technical flaws, or maybe because of them. What often gets labeled a flaw is just a departure from the expectations of the judges anyway. Most of what I’ve brought home is pretty delightful, and none of it is bad. So in the late summer night quiet of my back porch, I savor each edible creation, wishing I could thank each baker or brewer for the gift they didn’t know they gave me.

I ended up taking third place for both of my booze entries. The judges were unallied. Their remarks were contradictory and blunt, but somehow seemed fair. One said my cider had a sophisticated flavor profile, but lacked correct aroma. Another said it lacked complexity but was still drinkable. A third judge said it was nicely done and very drinkable, with hints of gardenia and honey. I’m still trying to parse all their comments. Coming from the art world - and before that a long career in advertising - I am prepared to triangulate this sort of messy feedback. Still, after nearly forty years of exposing myself to such critiques, I have yet to develop much immunity to their souring effects on my emotions. Anyone entering a contest like this must first battle their own self-doubt before they can offer up their talents to the world. After that we learn to take our lumps in a give-and-take process that hopefully leads to some sort of validation of our efforts. This is the bumpy path of the “third place” creative endeavor, and there is no shame in it. The trick is to buck-up, process the criticism, and move forward. This may be the single hardest thing any creative person has to do on a regular basis.

As we clear the last few items from the cooler it is evident that Gordon’s bottle is not among the sad, unconvincing wines left on the back of the shelf. Instead, I find it in a box of empties headed for recycling. I recognize it by it’s distinctive tapered shape, the kind normally used for light-bodied wines. As I pull it from the box I am relieved to see about a half inch of sediment sloshing around the bottom of the bottle - evidence the wine was drunk, and possibly enjoyed, but not poured out. Though his wine didn’t win a ribbon, I assume Gordon is tenacious enough to give it a try again next year, as will I. In the meantime I say a quick prayer of blessing for his hands, and then for my own. I don’t know if that’s how it’s supposed to work, but it’s worth a shot.

Work In Progress

When you don’t hear from me for a long time, it’s because I’m working. Or rather, stumbling around in some new rabbit hole, and trying to make something of the things I find. This I call work. Clearly it’s not the kind that pays bills, or the kind you avoid like cleaning the oven or going to the DMV, but the kind that is so engaging that you forget to go on social media to talk about yourself for weeks on end. I’ve been working on some new paintings for a show I have coming up, so there is some degree of external pressure, but no one is standing over me, checking on my progress or providing direction, so it remains pretty soulful work. I’m thankful for that freedom.

The only reason I bother to write this now is that Facebook algorithms have goaded me into it. Every week I get a little reminder about my Facebook page - the one for my artwork - that tells me how many visits I’ve had and that sort of thing. It usually tries to guilt me into posting something new by saying “You haven't visited Mark Penner Howell in a while and there's some activity you might have missed. To keep people interested in your Page, please post something new or respond to some of your new activity.” Given the language, it’s easy to suppose Facebook is just looking out for me, but when I consider that any post I make must also be “boosted” by paying real money to reach my audience, then Facebook’s actual motivation is laid bare. Their feigned concern is just a programmed message triggered by my prolonged inactivity. And still, I have to admit the Facebook bots are correct, it’s been a while.

For an artist trying to create a new body of work, it’s necessary to carve out a distraction-free work environment (both the physical space, and somehow also your state of mind), and to stay in that space as long as possible, returning to it often, until your new “work” becomes clear to you. This is basic stuff for any practicing creative person, but the thing I often need to remind myself is to go as deep as I can and stay there as long as possible, especially in the initial stages of creative exploration, before coming up for air. The temptation is to commit to halfway decent ideas, familiar ideas, before you’ve discovered something truly new. The tricky part is to slow down and linger with your inspiration and really stretch out the time you spend in that concentrated state of creative flux. For me it’s an act of discipline that usually precludes the use of social media in the studio. Apologies, Facebook.

The guy across the table from me in the coffee shop this morning asked where I get my inspiration. We were meeting to discuss a commissioned piece. I was flummoxed by the question, as I usually am, since there is no one answer. I wish there was a kind of psychic Costco where I could just stock up on ideas. Then I could simply give him directions. Instead I told him most artists have a catalog of themes or image fragments or half finished stories that just sort of bob around in the back of the mind until a catalyst begins to pull some of those pieces together. I have found this mostly to be a function of the subconscious. Something at work in that protean mental engine causes the good ideas (or at least the shiny, attractive ones) to bubble up to the threshold of consciousness. The conscious mind need only be on duty, or at least nearby, to receive the thought. This experience of suddenly wakening to a fresh idea is what people have taken to calling the “aha” moment. The mumbo-jumbo part is that practically anything can trigger it.

 To any severely left-brained person, this is all going to sound like utter horse shit. Sure there are things that can make creative inspiration more likely, but they aren’t remotely quantifiable or repeatable in a laboratory setting. Recently I spent a whole weekend trying to have some exciting new ideas for paintings. Right away the half-decent ones began to present themselves, but nothing seemed worth diving into. The weekend was a wash. The following Monday morning I went about doing some of the chores I’d avoided all weekend. At the grocery store, while scanning my rewards card, the friendly voice inside the machine said “Welcome, valued customer.” That message was all I needed to pull together a whole host of ideas I’d been having about materialism, fate, and the power of the individual. I already had most of the images I needed in my head but they needed some sort of context. And though the phrase wasn’t remotely visual, it suddenly provided the framework for me to organize my thoughts so I could begin pushing the images around in a meaningful way. This, I’m afraid, is as close as I can come to describing my inspiration. I regret it isn’t more stirring or provocative.

I have an artist friend who routinely talks about her muse. I’ve always thought the idea of a muse is sort of romantic and fey. For the longest time I assumed she was just being metaphorical, but she’s so consistent in her personalization of this inspirational force, and so reverent toward “her,” that I’ve begun to realize my friend’s muse is more literal than I had allowed for. It works for her. Every artist has some personal version of this, we just talk about it differently. My own religious background makes me wonder to what extent the creative impulse isn’t the distant echo or fingerprint of the divine somehow still at work in the world - another seemingly antiquated idea, for sure, but also workable. So whether you think creativity is a function of a trans-personal “collective” unconscious that forever seeks expression in order to ensure the adaptability of our species, or whether it’s the work of the Holy Spirit, we’re kind of all talking about the same thing. In the end all these distinctions may be false dichotomies. A subject as big as the mechanism of creative impulse is at the limits of our language to describe. Multiple points of view are to be encouraged.

Back in my basement studio sit four new paintings in various states of completion. None of them are actually ready for you to look at. One has recently emerged from an extended ugly-duckling phase and just today I realized it’s the one all the others are going to have to live up to. You artists know what I mean. If I’m lucky and stay focused, I might eke out one or two others that do what they are supposed to do as well as this one. We’ll see. I’ve only got a few more weeks to finish everything up for my next show. Until then you’ll have to use your imagination, and this will have to serve as an update. It’s a paltry offering, but hopefully enough to appease the almighty Facebook data gods.

Waving at the sky

Buffalo Creek burn scar – Photo: Kae Penner-Howell

 Wondering and Wandering 

 I can’t say exactly why we chose to hike for half a day on this little-used and not particularly scenic section of the Colorado Trail. Maybe because we were bored with the familiar beauty of the nearby Buffalo Creek trails and needed something new. By contrast, this windswept footpath meanders through a decades-old burn scar. The mostly flat route offers little in the way of navigational challenges, and even as a specimen of devastation it isn’t much to look at. The fire that raged here was so hot even the topsoil caught fire. Subsequent flooding and erosion ensured no forest would soon return. What remains is an undulating boulder field with a ribbon of single-track snaking through it, a few skeletal spires that once were pine trees, and the kind of grasses that can eke out a life on cracks in rocks. Still we opt to give it a go. To see what we may see.


A trail that winds through a forest naturally accommodates the landscape. It twists and turns according to the placement of trees and creeks, drop-offs, and bodies of water. But when the trees burn up and the creeks run dry, the shape of the remaining path ceases to make the same kind of sense. In the years since the fire, this trail has straightened itself out a little, but there are still the occasional zigs and zags that suggest phantom obstacles. The ghosts of trees long incinerated. It is mildly disorienting to hike such a path, its layout strangely at odds with the land it tries to make accessible. Like the solemn, circuitous route one follows to the center of a labyrinth laid in stone on a cathedral floor, I begin to wonder if the point of all this winding has something to do with observance of a ritual, its purpose long ago lost in flames.

Chartres Cathedral maze. Image: Wiki-Commons

We begin to look for some sort of destination, a place to call our journey complete. Maybe somewhere with a view where we can eat our sandwiches. A hill in the distance is crowned by a small stand of Ponderosa pines, unlikely survivors of the Buffalo Creek Fire. Surely there would be decent views of the Continental Divide from up there, and the trees could provide some shade for our lunch. We agree to make it our turn-around point, but as we get closer the trail angles away disappointingly into a rocky ravine. Having already fixed our expectations on that summit, we decide we are done with the trail, and begin to climb.


There is something thrilling about going off-trail (where allowed by law, and common sense), even in a place like this where being on or off the trail are nearly identical. The first step off a path always initiates a heightened awareness in me. I’m careful about how and where I walk, both to lessen my impact in a place unaccustomed to human footfalls, and also for reasons of safety and efficiency of effort. To exit the well-worn trail is to commit to your own wits. Each step is a tiny symbolic rejection of the known. Admittedly this isn’t much of an undertaking in a denuded landscape where the way home is more-or-less apparent. Still, there are places not far from here where to walk just a few feet from the trail renders it, and all it represents, indistinguishable from the natural world that surrounds it – the way back home can suddenly be obliterated by nothing more than a field of tall grass and wildflowers, humbling in their complete indifference to us. Like astronauts on a space walk, we are tethered to all that is safe and familiar by contrivances of human effort. Good trails allow us to pretend we are better connected with the natural world than we may actually be.

Photo: Kae Penner-Howell

Up on the hill we find an old dirt road running along through the trees. It leads out into a meadow and across a grassy ridge where it doubles back abruptly in a tight loop, as if changing its mind. The fire has opened up unnatural vistas here - the kind you would ordinarily have 4000 feet higher, where trees simply won’t grow. To the north, the icy Mount Evans massif glows blue-white on the horizon. Ahead of us, a few yards past where the road ends, we see what looks like a small brick chimney. Heading over to check it out, we find it’s only about 4’ tall and completely solid - not a chimney at all, but some sort of marker set on a round flagstone base. About a foot above the base are three concentric iron rings circling the structure like the rings of Saturn, but also like some sort of footrest, or step. On top of the structure is a brass survey marker set in concrete. This is what surveyors call a benchmark, and it is where we get that word. But why the metal rings, and the large flagstone base? The structure is only mildly perplexing at first, like any sort of old weathered object you might stumble across while hiking.  But when we step around to the other side and see a plaque which reads: HISTORIC UFO MOORING POST, things start to get interesting.

I’ve heard of Hippies and New-Agers appointing themselves ambassadors to extraterrestrials. There’s even a UFO landing pad in the desert down near New Mexico, but it’s sort of a tourist thing. Is this a cultural remnant of such an effort? We busy our brains with all the possibilities. Did a UFO-believer commandeer an old government survey post, or was it the other way around? Or maybe they collaborated on this dual-purpose marker in the middle of nowhere. This is Colorado after all. We have a town with a house cat for mayor (Divide), another town with a festival to raise money for a home-made cryogenics experiment (Frozen Dead Guy Days in Nederland), and a town where all adult head-of-housholds are required to own guns (Nucla) - and I’m only getting started with the civic weirdness in Colorado. It’s conceivable this marker was some such partnership. Or it could simply be somebody’s obscure joke. The word ‘historic” could be a giveaway. Do the plaque-makers mean to say that UFOs used to moor here at some point long ago? Have the UFOs moved on to more updated mooring posts? And how did they moor, exactly? I picture flying saucers bobbing gently a few feet off the ground, a pair of long leather reigns looped around the mooring post. It starts to seem like it has to be a joke, but why? Nerd humor? It’s impossible to know, and there’s not a soul for miles to ask, so we snap a photo and begin to look for a suitable way down the hill.

Photo: Kae Penner-Howell

Below, we see another forest service road and pick our way carefully down through loose talus to meet it. As we guessed, around a bend or two the road delivers us back to our trail, which we dutifully retrace for several dull miles back to our car. In defense of boring trails, let me point out they are a reliable way to get lost in your own thoughts while obtaining the health benefits of a low intensity work-out, if you’re into that sort of thing. For me, this kind of mobile meditation tends to deliver me to my daydreams. Before long I’m crunching along in a half trance, staring down at the left-right-left-right blur of my feet, when all at once a door opens onto a memory I had long ago boxed away. Our visit up that hill had guaranteed this door would fly open, but I hadn’t seen it coming. The memory that overtakes me is less the recollection of an event, and more the story of the memory of the event. A story I long ago stopped telling, even to myself.


A Thing in the Sky

There was a puzzling thing in the sky over our car. My mom was driving, my little brother was in the front seat next to her. I was in the back. We were headed west on a country road in upstate New York on a late summer afternoon. The thing in the sky appeared to move along beside us, a few dozen yards off to the side. Was it following us or simply headed the same direction? My little brother shrieked and dove into the footwell of the passenger seat where he huddled in a fetal position. Was he terrified or just being dramatic? This was in the days when seat belts were a mere suggestion and children were pretty much free to move about the car as they wished. I moved over against the window. Mom gripped the steering wheel tighter and sped up. Was she trying to outrun the thing or simply hurrying home to change the situation? I wished my brother would sit up. I could not take my eyes off the thing in the sky. I stared and stared but couldn’t get a fix on it. It was so completely outside my frame of reference that I wasn’t able to decide what it was. It was big as a house, but smooth and elongated. Like a blimp but smaller and sleeker. There did not appear to be windows, and there were no insignia or graphics of any kind on its surface. It had a row of small lights in a horizontal band which ran its length, and though it shames me deeply to say this, the lights were indeed green. After several minutes beside us, the thing in the sky rocketed off to the south, disappearing beyond the big hill on the Rosecrance farm.



Soon we were safe at home in our driveway, un-traumatized. There had been no alien abduction. No anal probes. I didn’t have nightmares or 'act out' after this. Instead, the feeling I remember having afterward was disappointment. I wasn’t done looking at the thing. I hadn’t figured out what I thought it was, or even which end I was looking at. I felt cheated. It was yet another cool thing that had ended too quickly. In days that followed I kept looking to the skies, hoping the thing would swing back over my neighborhood, and a little frightened it actually might.

Ezikel's Chariot vision, by Matthaeus Merian

When our dad got home he did not laugh at our story, probably because my mom was pretty freaked out. We talked about it a lot at first, but only as a family. Why had it happened to us? We didn’t even believe in such things. We were good Christian people. Our superstitions were entrenched in orthodoxy. We weren’t given to fringy group hallucinations. Then someone pointed out the bible describes something like UFOs in the book of Ezekiel. This helped. Not because it explained anything, but knowing it was in the bible meant God was probably wise to it. Even so, before long we stopped talking about the thing in the sky because we simply didn’t know what to make of it. I knew instinctively it wasn’t a good idea to speak of it outside the family. I’ve only slipped up once or twice since then - until now - and the effect was never good. Try to imagine how alienating and disgraceful it is to have a first-hand UFO story. It actually makes dreadful party talk – guaranteed to make you seem paranoid, conspiratorial, or very bi-polar. You learn to keep the memory stashed away in a box in the back of your mind. And every time you get it out and re-remember it, it proves to be an almost useless thing.

Almost Useless

I’m startled back into the here-and-now by the partly decomposed carcass of a small animal just ahead of me on the trail, its rib bones jutting out at broken angles. Probably it’s a rabbit, given the grayish fur with tufts of white. I holler at my dogs to LEAVE IT, using my most serious voice. They nose it quickly – because I told them not to – but seem uninterested. As I pass the carcass I watch it literally transform from a decaying animal to a trampled prickly pear cactus. Shreds of dried gray grass are tangled in it’s spines. A white fuzzy mold covers its blackened fruit. It’s a simple mistake of perception with quite different implications. I puzzle for a moment as my brain abandons one certainty for another.



It’s a wonder that our species not only survives, but flourishes, when we are so unscrupulous about the particulars of the real world. We see a thing and are certain of it. A moment later the thing changes completely and so does its meaning. A dead rabbit becomes a cactus.  We may be momentarily flummoxed, but the neural pathways in our brains accommodate the updated information. We adapt, despite the mental dissonance we feel in the wake of our initial perception. Clearly our brains are only partly hard-wired to think a certain way, otherwise we would stick to our conclusions, no matter what. Luckily there’s a whole lot of gray matter where our neurons keep their affiliations loose. This flexibility seems to be a good thing, and may be the advantage that keeps day-dreamers in the gene pool. Evolution would suggest that being half-aware of our surroundings wouldn’t work to our favor as a species, yet somehow our partial engagement with reality frees us up to be creative problem-solvers. We seem to be the only species where beliefs, ideologies, visions and outright delusions are foundational to some of our greatest discoveries and accomplishments. Think pyramids, nuclear bombs. Las Vegas.



I decide to ask my mom and brother what they remember about that UFO event. 



As we near our car the surroundings resolve into something more familiar and ordinary. Gone are the fire-haunted boulder fields and disorienting views. Later at home, I use Google Earth to fly over our route to see if the satellite photos yield any additional insight into this odd corner of the mountains. It’s easy enough to locate the UFO mooring post, if you know where to look, but I’m surprised to see the road that accesses it seems to be off limits. Zooming down to Street View, I can make out a locked gate and a No Trespassing sign where the road meets the highway. Evidently, extraterrestrials are welcome, but you and I, not so much.



A week later at Thanksgiving dinner with my family, I mention the thing in the sky. It’s been 45 years since the afternoon it shadowed us down that country road, so I’m not hopeful my mom and brother have any better access to primary memories than I do. We haven’t spoken of it in decades. Still I want to know what they do recall, and if their stories intersect with mine – or if we’ve all drifted hopelessly away into private embellishments. Somehow, even mentioning the thing in the sky sends my mom and brother into animated re-tellings of their own versions. They begin comparing notes and suddenly all hope for objectivity is lost. My brother remembers far too many details for a kid who spent almost the whole time on the floor of the car. But he did recall that the object seemed to be glowing, as if illuminated from within. I picture the blurry glow from inside one of those inflatable Frosty the Snowman-type lawn ornaments. This triggers a strong recollection and I feel that his memory of this detail may be correct. Maybe it did glow. Or maybe I’ve heard my brother’s story so many times that what I’m feeling is a nostalgia for his version of it. It’s impossible to know. My mom only remembers that there was something large following along side us, low in the sky, and that she was concerned about getting us all home safely. No other details mattered to her.



After dinner my brother redeems himself by pulling up several websites on his i-pad with information that could corroborate our experience. He’s not a UFO enthusiast. More of a research junkie. One website is a searchable database of thousands of UFO sightings compiled from reports stretching far back into the last century. It seems there were many, many descriptions of odd things in the sky in our neck of the woods around the time in question. Spinning disks, glowing orbs, hovering boomerangs and silent cigar-shaped projectiles. They appeared day or night, to many or few. What is it with UFO sightings in rural areas? I wonder. Are extraterrestrials obsessed with our agricultural practices? Or do city people just not bother with objects in the sky?



Another website indicates we lived near a small air force base - a possible point of origin for test flights of experimental military aircraft. Aha! I decide this is the answer I like best. I have no idea whether it is true. I just like it because it seems reasonable and doesn’t demand a thing of me. No major shift in beliefs. This was during the Cold War, after all, the Baroque era at the Pentagon, when our military leader’s most creative thinking was poured into the absurd proliferation of experimental gadgetry, much of it useless and unfeasible. 



And so the family arrives at the place we always do with the thing in the sky, a place of familiar unknowing, where a shrug or a “who can say?” signals we are done with the topic, and the conversation is again free to drift where it will. Later in my room, my thoughts return to experimental flying things. I am drawn in by several images that Google serves up under the search term “experimental military blimps.” It could have been this one. Or that one. I picture them each taking a turn flying beside our car, low and silent. Each is equally feasible.



Human Benchmark

Stapelton control tower.
Image: Wiki-Commons

I was born in an airport. I live at an airport. Two preposterous yet ordinary truths. The first is explained by the fact that my hometown airport, originally a hub for Air Mail service in upstate New York, outlived its logistical purposes and was re-fitted as a community hospital. I was born there a few years later. It still looked like an airport when I was a kid. Every time I ended up there for stitches or a shot, I could pretend I was going on a fancy trip somewhere. But we never flew anywhere, except for one time when we came to Colorado on vacation. We flew into the old Stapleton Airport in Denver.
Today I live on the site of that airport. The Stapleton neighborhood in east Denver was redeveloped as a massive 'urban infill' project after the airport was relocated in the 1990’s. I’ve pored over vintage maps and determined that our house sits roughly at the far end of the old Concourse E.

Prior to moving here, that family vacation was my only experience of Colorado. It was two summers after the UFO event, and my parents used some inheritance money to bring us out to a Dude Ranch. It was our first and only vacation that wasn’t a car trip. We bought 'western' shirts at the one department store in our town before the trip. At the Stapleton airport, the dude ranch shuttle driver spotted us immediately. We drove down through the Rampart Range to the Lost Valley Ranch down near Deckers. I was twelve years old and completely smitten with Colorado. I knew I could probably never live here, but for the price of a black felt cowboy hat from the Lost Valley Ranch gift shop, I could pretend. Six states and thirty-five years later I moved to Colorado. I learned the dude ranch had been nearly destroyed by the Hayman forest fire a few years ago. The buildings were spared, but thousands of acres of trees in every direction were burned to the ground. It turns out this ranch is just a stones throw from the burn area where we recently found the UFO mooring station.

These fragments of happenstance are benchmarks in an oddball narrative I’m still somewhere in the middle of experiencing. We’ve all got some version of this. Like pins on a big map that I can’t get up high enough to read, my coincidences may be proof of some sort of pattern beyond my reckoning. It’s possible I’ll never know. It turns out I’m not that much of a stickler for certainty anyway. I’ve never found my own attempts to apprehend it to be that reliable. Each time I think I’ve solved some big life question, a constellation of unknowns circles in to fill the void. Maybe the acquisition of certainty would matter more to me if I were a religious fundamentalist or an atheist. Instead, the need to have all the answers seems like a very useless anxiety.


In Buddhism there is the notion that some things are flat-out unknowable. Buddha is said to have refused any discussion of them whatsoever. These are known as the 14 Unanswerable Questions, and each has to do with things like the nature of the self, whether time and space are infinite, whether there is an afterlife, and so on. Delineating each of these questions with a number and specific description seems to belie the fact that they are unanswerable, but Buddha said that to entertain them is a craving which leads to sickness and misery. 



The early Christian church had a similar approach to questions of ultimate knowledge, best exemplified by a philosophy called the “Via Negativa,” an apophatic theology now mostly lost to contemporary evangelical Christianity, but still widely practiced in the Eastern Orthodox Church. This perspective insists that God (or the Ultimate Good) can only be described in the negative, since what IT is, is wholly beyond our comprehension or ability to describe. Therefore, we can say that God is not evil, God is not ignorant, and so on. But here’s where it gets extra squirrely: God can neither be said to exist, nor to not exist, because all questions of existence are framed by limits of the human intellect which is a finite product of the temporal world (which by definition, God transcends). Got it? The modern mind may detect a circular logic at work here, but practitioners of this theology would argue that only by emptying the mind of all notions of God, other than pure goodness, can we hope to experience IT. This is because the Divine cannot be discovered, but must reveal itself to us. Prayer is said to be the mechanism to make this experience accessible, but the practice of humility, thankfulness and love are the virtues that make it possible.



Religion aside (whew!), it’s unlikely anyone would argue that the practice of humility, thankfulness and love isn’t the exact right path to be on at all times. Not that any of those three virtues are easy. The key idea is that they become a practice. I think about this stuff a lot when I’m out hiking in the mountains, particularly if I’m alone, though I’ve never actually set out to be contemplative. Usually I just want to explore some new trail. But then it just sort of happens, an effect of silence, the physical rhythm of hiking, and the awe I feel at my surroundings. It’s easy to be thankful at such times, and when thankfulness kicks in, humility and love are normally pretty close by. It may not be a traditional sort of spiritual path, but tromping around in the wilderness is my own Via Negativa.  
 

View toward Pettingell Peak from Continental Divide Trail. Photo: Mark Penner-Howell

One of my favorite places to explore is up on the Continental Divide, just west of Denver. Little by little I’m trying to hike as much of it as I can. Though I have logged many dozens of miles along its spine, it’s certain I’ll never complete it, given the shortness of the hiking season and the frequency of electrical storms that force me down. Recently I’ve spent a lot of time on the trails around Rollins Pass, a low spot on the Divide long considered the safest place for planes to cross over the Rocky mountains. In the days before large commercial jets - which gain altitude quickly and don’t need to look for low spots - this was the standard route for passenger flights headed west out of Denver. At 11,676’ elevation, the relative lowness of Rollins pass is debatable. Still it is the best approach for small aircraft going up and over the mountains. Nearby is a mountain I like to climb called James Peak, which rises another 1600’ above the pass. From its top you are practically at eye level with many of the planes crossing over. Because James Peak is in a remote wilderness area, by the time you reach its windy summit there may be more people nearby in the sky than on the ground. In such a setting it is impossible for me to not wave at the planes, as ridiculous as that may be. I keep my wave nice and simple - more like a salute - so pilots don’t think I’m in distress. It’s something of a privilege to serve as a human benchmark in such remote and lovely places. Whether anyone looking down takes the gesture as my way of giving testament to the impossibly strange miracle of being alive, or whether they simply have a laugh at my expense, I’ll never know. I’m just happy to be up there poking around, doing my best to live in the present, and once in a while getting a peek at the indescribable. I keep suspecting that this sort of immersion in the moment creates an intimacy with the world that is more about “being” than knowing - a more useful thing in the long run. So that is why I wave at the sky. I don’t always do it, just when someone is close enough that I know they can see me. Whether or not anyone ever waves back is unknowable, and I’m okay with that.


- m.p.h.

Continental Divide Trail, looking south near Berthoud Pass, Colorado. Photo: Mark Penner-Howell

Ice Capade

I thrust out my hand to break the fall. It’s the only thing that keeps me from fracturing a hip, or so I imagine. Even so, I land so hard on my ass it forces all the breath out of me. My dogs hover in close, helpless care-takers sniffing at me tentatively, as if their noses can decipher why their human is suddenly on the ground moaning. They cock their heads in unison, awaiting instruction. I lay there a moment gasping, and as my breath returns I use it first for cursing. I curse the neighbor for not clearing the sidewalk. Curse my poor choice in footwear. I curse the black ice hiding beneath a blanket of fresh powder.

I even have a few choice words for my mom. Not because I think this is somehow her fault, but because she is in her mid-seventies, has osteoporosis (“thin bones,” as she puts it), lives in mortal fear of ice, and yet refuses to move to a warm climate. Understand, she is of north eastern, middle-class heritage, and thus culturally (and possibly even genetically) predisposed to move to Florida at this point in her life. The fact that she won’t allow my dad to even think of moving them south has to do with her fear of running out of money, or “living too long,” as she puts it. The whole topic makes me a little crazy. And for this reason I have recorded hours and hours of HGTV’s “Beachfront Bargain” episodes, that I plan to make her watch on her next visit, as proof that she can indeed afford to not kill herself on Michigan ice.

Regaining my feet, I take a few stiff test steps. A jagged pang shoots through my hip each time my left foot comes down. I resolve to finish the dog walk as best I can. Maybe I can walk off the pain. Maybe I’ll call an ambulance. I consider the dearth of medications in my house. Possibly there would be Tylenol. Maybe a shot of tequila, but definitely there are no serious pain meds. Then I remember my dog’s leftover Tramadol scrip from an earlier injury. And thus it seems the dogs will be of some help after all. I’m certain I can Google the correct human dosage when I get home. Sure, an internet search on human consumption of veterinary meds is bound to get red-flagged and logged on some server somewhere, along with every other naughty search I’ve ever done, but I accept those terms. My server full of shameful, funny and pathetic internet searches is probably sitting right there next to yours in some impossibly large room filled with blinking LEDs. All of our online activity - if it can be called that - tracked, compiled and ready for mining, for all of eternity. Then so be it. At least I’ll get my dosage right. 

Before long the stabbing subsides to a dull ache, and I decide my misfortune is the stuff of bruises and not breaks. I limp home buoyed by the sheer thrift of appropriating my dog’s unused opioids. And that, my friends, is what hope looks like on this icy midwinter night.

“Promise me we can move to Florida before I shatter my pelvis on black ice” are my first words as I come in the house. “Or Southern California or Hawaii. Not now, but in like 10 years.” I love Colorado, but I am not willing to die on her ice.

In the lottery-winning fantasy version of my life, I buy my mom and dad a home somewhere warm. It could still happen, but generous feelings don’t constitute a plan, so instead I badger them to spend their own money to move south. I suppose if I were serious about helping them I shouldn’t have bailed out of the corporate world at the peak of my prime earning years. No one ever said becoming an artist makes business sense, but I had to make a go of it. Time will tell if that was ultimately smart or totally selfish. I haven’t a clue yet.

In the meantime, I try to find a comfortable position on my sofa, but as it turns out, there is no comfort in sitting, standing, lying down, or any combination thereof. A bruised ass is just going to hurt. A lot. So consider this another learn-from-my-mistakes installment. A topic I seem to return to often. And just so you know, 25 mg of Tramadol - or half one of those little doggie pills - taken 4 times a day should mask a fair amount of pain (thank you internet). You’ll still feel sore, but you won’t care so much. That’s the best I’ve got for a takeaway.

Be careful. It’s brutal out there.