Colorado Odyssey

Entering Colorado Springs, it's easy to see how important the military is to Colorado's economy. They've got air force bases butted up against other air force bases, NORAD, etc.

I had some vacation days to burn before the end of the year, Corinna had some gigs in Colorado Springs and Denver, so we made a road trip of it.

The honeymoon we never got to take when we got married over four years ago.

I didn't relish driving all the way in one shot. I can do those kind of drives but they always feel like a mistake, like when I drove straight through each way to Indianapolis to judge the Indiana Brewer's Cup. So Airbnb to the rescue. I'd never used it before, but now that's going to be my first look instead of Expedia. For $31, I scored a room in Salina, the guest bedroom in a person's home. It was cozy, well appointed with a space heater in case we wanted it warmer than the thermostat was set, mini-fridge (even with a couple of beers either left behind by a previous guest or provided by our host I wasn't sure). Basket of toiletries in case we forgot, flat screen TV if we were into that sort of thing, wifi, etc.

Way, way more hospitable than some generic motel room at three times the price. Anyway, that let us get escape velocity on Wednesday night after work, get a chunk of the drive out of the way, a good night's sleep and hit the road to Colorado quickly on Thursday. Much better than going through all that getting out of the house crap on Thursday morning and then dealing with a ten hour drive.

We visited the Olympic Training Center when we got into Colorado Springs, where Corinna trained before competing in the 1996 Atlanta games. Unfortunately, we got there fifteen minutes before the visitors center closes, and in the two decades since her Olympic performance, considerable security has been added and you can't just wander around the campus like you could in the early 90s. Fucking terrorists, they find a way to wipe their hate-boogers on everything.

We stayed with friends while in Colorado which is of course even better on every level. I got up on Friday morning at the crack of down, or maybe it was a little before that, wanting to get sunrise shots in Garden of the Gods. Which would have been much easier if I'd had a chance to scout the day before. I hadn't been to the park since 1992, so it wasn't real familiar. And in the pitch black, just finding the parking lots and trails is tricky.

The parking lot was bizarrely full at 5:00 a.m. I mean, I found a parking place but there were at least 100 pickups and SUVs in the lot when I got there. Maybe the occasional sedan. Setting up my tripod on a trail in the dark, a woman passed me on her morning constitutional, I asked her what was with all the vehicles. She said the Army comes up to hike on Friday mornings.

They all left quite loudly as the sun was coming up, one soldier per vehicle. I'm thinking, first of all you can't carpool? And second of all, if the Army is putting on a hike, shouldn't they all come in big long green trucks? I'm guessing these are reservists doing the part time soldier thing or maybe the Army looks more like a bunch of independent contractors in fatigues than it used to.

Then, my image of getting the sun peaking out sharply from behind a big red rock, a long exposure with the aperture blades really showing in spines coming off the sun, yeah. It was overcast and hazy as all get out, the sun had a huge diffuser on it. But I still had fun lugging all my gear through the park and experimenting with different lenses and whatnot.

And these are subjects that look different all the time. I could do a few weeks or more of spending several hours in the morning and evening in the Garden of the Gods. I've seen what other photographers have been able to do with these rocks, and maybe some of them just got lucky but I'm betting more of them made a study of the place, a part time job for a while.

But I was on short time. We had to move on to Denver for Corinna's next gig. I can really see the appeal of Colorado as far as all the people who move there. For outdoor recreation, except for an ocean they've got everything. See also a great place for photography and just the beauty of nature. Add to that what appears to be a booming economy and legalized weed, what's not to love about Colorado?

I mean other than the fact that if the climate keeps going the way it's been, there's probably not enough water there to support all those people. I could really see how much less snow cover there was on the mountains, and the last time I was there was October (of 1992), this was mid-December and most of the peaks were naked. Whether it's fossil fuels or not, the climate, it is a-changing.

Denver turned out to be much denser than I anticipated. I'd heard over the years about their robust public transit, including a bunch of rail, and thought it was likely over-subsidized bullshit. Like the White Train, Kansas City's streetcar that cost over $100 million to serve barely over two miles that were already well served by bus. But driving in Denver, I wished I could get on a bus or a train, the car was a real millstone and I didn't have the time to park it and figure out the transit system as I was only there for a few hours.

I dropped Corinna off at her gig in downtown Denver and needed a couple of items I figured would be easy to find at a Target. My phone told me there was a Target 2.5 miles away. I charted the course, let the bitchy Google maps robot talk me there and back. I was late picking Corinna back up because it took over two hours to make this journey by car, and I started at 2:45 in the afternoon, so it's not like I was in rush hour the whole time.

I'll give Denver this, though, they have the density of a big city (it appears they have roughly 1.2 or 1.4 million more people than Kansas City's metro has in about the same space, so almost double the density I'm used to navigating), they're polite. When Gertrude (our nickname for the bitchy Google voice) told me to cross six lanes to make a left turn in a half a block, I was able to get it done by signaling a lane change and looking over, not once but five times. I wouldn't fancy the odds of pulling that maneuver in Chicago or New York. Or even Kansas City, drivers here are assholes when it comes to letting people merge or change lanes.

Anyway, we were staying with Corinna's cousin who's Dad is from Ethiopia and we went to a charming little Ethiopian restaurant and had a massive tray of assorted delicacies. Corinna and I fed each other per tradition, we had to do at least three times since we're married. And there was mead, though apparently the Ethiopian tradition isn't to ferment it to dryness, it was sweet and still working a little bit, more petulant than sparkling, quite refreshing. As the snow started to fall.

My Scion xB, I love this car, it's nearly perfect. But like all heroes, it has a mortal weakness. Snow is my car's Kryptonite. I'm not joking even a little bit, I can spin the tires on dry pavement because the car is so light, and we discussed going ahead to Wilson, KS where our next Airbnb was on Saturday night even as it was still Friday evening. But they were only calling for one to two inches and Corinna had a poetry slam she wanted to go to. So off she went to slam and I went back to Dave and Mandy's to chill out. Watched a little hockey, which Mandy educated me about (I'm hazy on the rules of the game since the last one I attended was in 1977). We talked football, they're huge Broncos fans of course, so we had lots to talk about on that score. Writing this after Christmas, I guess I'm glad our visit was before the Chiefs beat the Broncos on Christmas night.

It was more than one or two inches. By morning at least eight inches had fallen where we were. Dave took me to Autozone where I purchased chains for my car. I wish I'd taken pictures of this whole process because it was fascinating. It was also zero degrees out and I was futzing around in the snow on my knees. And Corinna was. And Dave was. It took a couple of hours to get them on right, they're tricky as hell. You end up having to roll on them a little, retighten, roll a bit more, retighten etc.

Then what you have is a car that sounds like a B17 bomber is flying through it. But the chains work. They hurt my ears so bad I put in ear plugs, but I'm certain I wouldn't have gotten out of Dave's neighborhood without them.

Then we're on I-70 and it's not without patches of snowpack, but it's mostly clear and cars are flying past me. With the chains, you're not supposed to go over 30 mph. Dave said I might be able to get away with 40, and I did end up testing that theory. After a while, we heard a slapping sound, one of the cables turned out to have broken. We ticked it in to a hole in the bungee and went on until we heard more slapping. At which point we rolled the dice and took the chains off.

There were some scary ice covered bridges as we got closer to Wilson but the front range and Western Kansas hadn't gotten quite as much snow and the plows had done a good job of blading and treating it. So our five hour drive from Denver only took eight on top of a couple of hours in the driveway. When we checked in to the lovely historic Midland Railroad Hotel in Wilson, KS the idea of driving more that day was Not Funny.

And the hotel was gorgeous. Extremely high ceilings, lots of wood, and the bar, after that long cold drive (my toes were cold all damn day, despite wool socks and Red Wing shoes). I wanted a drink. Corinna wanted dessert. It turns out, you don't have to just have one, the bartender suggested hot buttered rums for us. If you've never had one, it's brown sugar and the same spices you'd generally find in eggnog dissolved in boiling water, topped up with a dram of dark rum and a pat of butter. I mean to tell you, after a drive like that, I could probably have downed three or fourteen of these things, though I ended up just having the one and after some quality time with my phone capturing Pokémons and crushing candy to let the cortisol from those icy bridges subside, I fell deeply asleep and woke to a spectacular continental breakfast (most times it seems 'continental' means stale donuts, but this one was great with hard boiled eggs, summer sausage, kolaches and so on).

Actually, scarier than the ice covered bridges was exit 199. Gertrude informed me that my exist for Wilson coming from Colorado was #206, and this turned out to be true, but #199 said it was the turn for Wilson Lake and I wondered if the hotel was actually on that road—I've been through Wilson a couple of times in the past, not super recently, but the place I thought I'd booked the room was on the same road that goes by Wilson Lake on the way to Lucas. Anyway, I slowed down a lot as I took that #199, and it was a good thing. I was slowing down because those ice covered bridges, I wasn't sure if the off ramp would be bladed and treated as well as the highway, but I was still expecting a straight shot ramp, and it turned out to be an old cloverleaf turn off. If I'd hit that going anything near highway speeds, we'd have vaulted straight into the field, it could have been really, really ugly.

But by the next day in Wilson the roads were already improving, the sun was shining brightly and we headed toward Lucas, which was the target when I pulled this hotel up on Airbnb. When I punched in Lucas on Airbnb, in fact, the old railroad hotel in Wilson was the only option I was offered. At $81, it wasn't as cheap as our Salina Airbnb had been, but it was certainly reasonable given the accommodations (and given that it's the only game in town).

There's more to Wilson than I remembered. And we didn't end up hitting any of the stuff I remember, the old jail and the little lodge with the kolache bakery, I think those might have been off that earlier exit I'd had my little freak out on the night before. That lodge was what I thought I'd booked when I Airbnb'd the Midland Railroad Hotel. I only vaguely recalled it from almost nine years ago when I passed through there on the way to the World's Biggest Ball of Twine in Cawker City.

Checkout wasn't until 11:00 at the Midland but we were eager to get to Lucas. Lucas, Kansas is the chronosynclastic infindibulum of the folk art world. It's impossible that such a tiny town could have so much of the stuff. Or if that's not impossible, it's impossible that such a small town could grow so much of it on their own. There's art in the Grass Roots Folk Art Museum that's not local but Miller Park, the Garden of Eden, the Deeble House, these are all phenomena that occurred spontaneously in a town with one gas station and one diner. I think you can get a mouthful to eat at the bar and grill on Main, too, and there's Brant's meats and a community theater but it's still an awfully small town to spawn so much art.

Imagine my shock when we rolled in to Lucas on a Sunday morning in December and everything was closed. Well, not the gas station or diner, but the Garden of Eden, the Grass Roots Folk Art Museum, that stuff wasn't going to be open until 1:00 p.m.

It's not shocking, I know, but it is a bitter thing to realize that you could have stayed in that nice warm hotel bed until 10:45 when you're standing in 9ºF with the wind sweeping off the plains sufficient create subzero wind chill.

So then on top of it, Corinna wasn't that impressed. She's not as into folk art as I am, and with us being limited to what's on the outside, well. I don't know. She finally got hooked on Miller Park, the collection of rock sculptures that had at one point been moved to Hays but has since moved back to sit next to the Garden of Eden. Miller Park is easily my least favorite art in Lucas but Corinna was really getting into it.

I guess there's no accounting for what resonates with someone. That's the way it is with all art, you either respond or you don't, and nothing is universal. It's how I can really like Megadeth and really not like Metallica—and given the fact that Dave Mustaine was a founding member of both, you'd think the similarities would carry over to where a fan of one is a fan of both.

I think if we'd gotten inside the Deeble house, the Grass Roots center and the Garden of Eden house, there would have been more Corinna dug. Also, if the snow hadn't been covering a lot of the details on the Deeble house's backyard dioramas.

Which I guess just gives me an excuse to go back. Visit the world's biggest toilet and all the rest. Maybe on my way to or from another crack at shooting Garden of the Gods.

Indiana Brewers' Cup

Back when I got into homebrewing and beer judging, I started out traveling to judge a bit. But this was also right around when I started having babies with the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster and it became evident pretty quickly that I'd be luck to just judge local competitions. Which for a few years meant two or three a year, as Kansas City was a regional site for the National Homebewers' Conference, plus the Bier Meisters competition, and for a while there was a pretty good small competition at Renn Fest that got me in to that carnival for free.

I know what a lot of people picture when I say I'm going to judge beer. They say things like, 'I'm gonna judge a few beers tonight myself, and I know exactly what score they're getting.'

It's fun, but it's not the scene people picture. I suspect it's very similar to judging a barbecue competition. If you're just eating a slab of ribs or powering down some burnt ends, that's dinner. And an awesome dinner, at that. But if you're judging at the American Royal, you're examining how the bone pulls away from the meat and looking at the smoke ring and doing a bunch of stuff that basically takes that dinner and makes it into an academic exercise. It's not about what you like, it's about whether the target, as defined, was hit, and if not, they why not and by how much.

This was the first competition I've judged that had a professional section. KCBM is a biggie, but it caps at 600 homebrew entries and calls it a day. Indiana Brewers' Cup allows 850 homebrew entries and 650 professionals. They're segregated, of course. But a couple of the flights I judged were professional brewers entries and it was really interesting. Because one of those flights was American IPA, a genre I'm generally fond of. But judging isn't about my personal preferences, it's did the brewer hit the style as defined in the BJCP guidelines? And to sum up a 'no,' I think the highest score I gave on that flight was a 41. There were plenty of beers I'd drink buckets of given the chance, but as far as the way they squared up to the style, meh.

For the uninitiated, these things are judged on a 50 point scale. There's a fixed number of points available for aroma, appearance (which gets only three points), flavor, mouthfeel and overall impression. I used to split points up, give 2-1/2 for appearance for instance, until a registrar unloaded on me. And he was right: I was saying my palate is so refined a 50 point scale is inadequat: I need a 100 point scale so I'm scoring this beer a 27.5.

Fuck off, your palate ain't all that.

But anyway, those 50 points. I can't take them home with me, they're not really good for anything else, so your entry, homebrew or pro, I try to approach it with a presumption of greatness: you have 50 points, when I find flaws and deviations from style, you lose points. A lot of times an entry will smell fucking spectacular, and I'll give it maybe ten or eleven of the points available for aroma, finding maybe one little detail to ding it. It'll look great as far as appropriate color, head/head retention, etc. Maybe hazy, so two out of three on that one. Then I take a sip and holy cow, did you use a donated car as an adjunct? I know I've filled out score sheets with an 11 of 12 on aroma and a 7 of 20 on flavor. It happens.

And of course, in the homebrew entries you sometimes have a brewer who is competitive, is playing to win, and another who is going like, Dude, I fucked up but I don't know where, why does my beer suck? In the pro categories, there's no such doubt.

Though the reasons a pro brewer would enter a competition like this, well, if you medal you have free advertising than your Bo Pils or Dark Belgian Strong or whatever won a medal. And the judges you're trying to impress are the nerds who freak out about beer and their family and coworkers ask them for recommendations, look in their fridge to see what you'd buy if you cared about good beer, etc. So that score sheet is research into both a targeted demographic and a demographic influenced by that target demographic, so why not enter?

So if my assessment of those American IPAs was harsh, the Belgian Strongs I judged the next day, again pro category, damn. Usually you get to a mini-BOS (when there are forty entries in a category, you have four pairs of judges evaluate ten beers each, then the senior of those four pairs sits down and comes up with a first-second-third among the winners of the sub-flights.

So at the after-party, which looks a lot more like what people envision when they think 'homebrew competition,' there were tons of beers, brewers, etc. Including, after the awards ceremony, I got to meet the brewers who took bronze in the Belgian Strongs. I'm like, dude, usually there's eight beers at the mini-BOS and three or four of them are obvious clunkers and get kicked straight away. That category, there were eight beers on the mini-BOS that deserved to medal. If you think third place sucks, the second place beer got a 48/46 in initial judging.

I said you have 50 points until you give me a reason to take some away. I've given a 50, I think two times in my twenty years of judging. When you smell, examine, taste an entry and really can't come up with anything they could do better relevant to the style, that's Fifty Point Entry. They are rare. A 48, that's almost as rare, and for such a score to wind up with a silver, I just gotta say WOW.