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If you're ever down, or in need of a personal boost, move to a small town.  On your way into your new rural nest you'll meet and see people who will immediately invigorate you.  Amongst your new peers you'll feel like a genius. That is not to say that small town people are dumb.  We're just ignorant, and blissfully so, to the dire need of urbanites to always present themselves as fashionable and worldly and clean as possible.  Move there and it behooves you to quickly learn that in northwestern Colorado everyday is a "jeans" day at work.  Go to a potluck in Gould wearing sweats and a t-shirt and you'll feel like James Bond.  On your way to the hodown you might pass some dirty kids pulling a wagonload of contaminated dirt.  Although it's the strangest damn thing you've ever seen, it will instill in you a sense of pride.  You are home.

Now some of the newer folks in the Gould Community might disagree with me.  It's become trendy to build sprawling estates in the mountains.  The people who can afford those homes spend tons of cash on clothes that look like they're rugged, like they're "cowboyed up".  But those clothes don't smell like diesel so you know they are fakes.  

And that's something I can't figure out, is how everyone in Walden and Gould always smelled like diesel.  Try as they might they still seemed dangerously flammable.  Now I refer to them as "they" because I was different.  I smelled like cat pee.  But I just told you an excretory story so I'll hold on one of the more damaging instances of my pubescence.  

However, the person that my olfactory memory immediately conjures is a man who was a walking Molotov Cocktail.  I think he thought diesel was a cologne and he was always smoking.  He may have actually suffocated his lung cancer. His incessant smoking created kind of a cool effect.  Wherever he went he walked out of his own cloud.   Like his every entrance was an exaggerated Superbowl introduction.  The smoke, though, served an important purpose.  It was a the best way not to obsessively stare at his teeth.  

Some people have bad teeth and others have no teeth.  In between those two categories are those with teeth that won't let go but should.  For about a year Neil, the smoker, lived with us.  I most recall the dinners.  One night my mom had just spun some more magic on the wood stove and we were eating some of the best fried trout ever.  I was thrilled that for once it wasn't elk or deer.  I greatly appreciated the predictability of fish meat.  Rarely was there a surprise gristle or mystery vein as there is in elk or deer or even beef.  You might get a bone jabbed into your upper jaw but at least you had a firm grasp on what was in your mouth.  What in hell is gristle anyway?  And is there a worse experience than having your red-meat euphoria interrupted by a kind of rubberized fat repelling your bite?

Fish was good and not once did my mom feel compelled to cook its heart or liver as she did with the large mammals my dad hauled in.  I've only spent this space impressing upon you the greatness of trout because I want you to share my joy, and then you'll feel how far I fall. 

Relishing the clean, white meat, I looked across the table and saw Neil. 

His gums, he'd told us after coming inside from slaughtering another cigarette, had been giving him fits.  He couldn't quite close his mouth when he chewed.  From what I recall he had three teeth that soldiered up front.  I don't know what lurked in moist darkness of his molar areas, but I saw a big, top tooth; it might have been either a front or very nearly a front tooth, or maybe even a canine.   It was hard to tell.  Taking the brunt of his chewing, the tooth seemed to have moved off center, almost like a football defensive squad short eight players spreading the remaining guys across the line of scrimmage.  It clung to his gum skin like a desperate barnacle in a sea of saliva.  As tough as the old boy who bore it, it alternately chewed and herded the fish bite away from the open aperture of his painfully parted lips.  Add to that the tooth had been weathered.  A porous stalactite, it hung down and seared its image into the deepest recesses of my mind...

Yes, That is Still Shaved in My Back

Dance Competition Erupts during Lunch

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I could tell a lot of stories about growing up in the mountians.  When i say "mountains" I don't mean some candyass place like Winter Park or Vail where you're surrounded by coffee shops and organic groceries and North Face, I mean "mountains" as in lonely peaks freezing in the winter wind.  You didn't snuggle with the bunny from Houston you met on a chairlift, you spooned with family or, if you were lucky, a dog.  Those mountains can tell lots of tales.  You'd think Rocky Mountain Sheep battling for supremacy, deadly avalanches and harrowing accounts of man against nature would get a lot of traffic, but the one I'm most often asked about is peeing off the porch of the Gould house.

The Gould House was built in 1888. It did not have running water.  We’d get that from our more modern neighbors.  It did have electricity, although it had been wired back when electricity was more deadly than useful.   The phone service was decent except for when Earl, who owned the Trading Post with his wife, Belle, wasn’t listening in on the party line.  Other than that things were pretty good.   With some extra effort we kept the entire two-story homestead heated with two wood stoves.  One of which was for cooking and heating the weekly bathwater.   As a kid none of this made much of a difference.  I didn’t bathe much in the early 80’s; that is until my middle school teachers starting calling to tell my mom it just wasn’t safe for me to be mingling with others; and any other plumbing issues were quickly expedited by the trajectory of the front porch. 

We did have an outhouse but it was at least fifty yards from the house.  I think it was so far away for sanitation reasons, which of course were defeated by our newfound convenience.  With one step out the door we’d avoid the long, dark journey and take care of business.  At first we didn’t tell our mom.  She was from the suburbs of Chicago.  Granted, her upper-middle class expectations had already been stunted (before we moved up to the house Eddie Gould built, she was raising three kids in a one-bedroom trailer), but we were pretty sure that her children relieving themselves right outside the kitchen door would not instill in her great pride. 

My sister, however, had a little kid potty in our room.  I’d already tried to use that without mom noticing.  For the first few days she thought her three-year-old girl could appear on That’s Incredible.  But after it became clear that her precious daughter was not a monsoon tinkler, I was advised to be a big boy and use the outhouse.

For a while it was good.  Gotta go at three in the morning?  No problem.  The porch is ten feet away.  My brother, myself and I even think our father, enjoyed the luxury.  And the rumors our true (I’m so thankful my sister doesn’t have Internet), even little Laura jumped on the bladderwagon.  Ignorance, it turns out, can be rather useful.  Especially when your brothers teach you how to stand and go. 

It didn’t take long, though, for a kind of rancidness to permeate the house.  My mom caught on and took action.  One day after my brother and I walked home from the bus, she met us at the precipice of the aging, gray steps of the kitchen door.  She had a wagon and two shovels.  We were to dig up the bad dirt and move it far, far away and bring back something that smelled less like Grand Central Station.  And so we did.

Later that night, at about three-ish, as I was sneaking out the kitchen door, I encountered my brother.  He was in his tighty whities and shivering in the cool night air.  The porch’s sweet relief eclipsed any chill one might feel standing outside in their underwear at 9000 feet.  As he wrapped things up and I prepared to take his place, it was understood that the wagon would be playing a major role in the next few years of our lives. 
 

Local Vegetarian Caves, Eats Baby

Twenty years without meat was just too long for an Englewood woman who, according to her husband, has eaten a baby--whole. 

Local man, Jared Ewy, spent the good part of last Sunday illustrating his theory to the throngs of newspaper, television and radio reporters that had gathered at a press conference at Denver's Bagel Deli.

With his wife only occasionally glancing at him, Ewy explained. "It might seem totally farfetched, but there is a new glow about her.  Take a look for yourself.  It's got to be the protein."

When Mr. Ewy produced the evidence that his wife had eaten a baby--whole--the room was stunned to silence.   It was clear to all who gathered that there is indeed a baby in her belly.

"The remarkable part, "continued Ewy, "is that this has spurned a new wave of hunger."  Ewy went on to explain that eating the baby--whole--has created in his wife other unusual urges.  Oranges at three in the morning, a remarkable number of bagels and, in Ewy's words, "does anyone know of a place where we can get discount pizza?"  

Despite the ultrasound photography providing a clear image of a baby in Mrs. Ewy's belly, several questions still persist.  Whose baby is this?  Will she now want more babies in her belly?  Mr. Ewy requested the press put out a call for a scientist practiced in this area of expertise.   

Ewy explained that he's not alone in his curiosity.  "Our  friends and family have also expressed surprise at how a baby got in there."  He ended the press conference on a hopeful note.  "Some bacon or filet mignon might have been more practical,  but if we get anything from this unusual occurrence, it's that eating baby--whole--stimulates healthy growth," Ewy declared while  pumping his fist in the air and excitedly gesturing towards the vicinity of the "Colorado" written across the chest of his wife's  sweatshirt.                              
 

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