These little fellows . . .

. . . showed up in my garden in the first week of August after the first rain we've had since June 12, when it snowed. I believe they either came from the sky or from Fortification Creek which is two blocks away across two streets. I was thrilled to see them.

Methylene Blue to Microanatomy

by Carol Valera Jacobson
August 2008

Methylene blue is antidote
to cyanide poisoning;
metopon was invented in 1941
derived from morphine;
a square kilometer is .3861 acres;
metropolis is a mother city;
a mew is home for hawks;
Michael is one of the four;
Micah was a prophet;
Mickey Mouse is a character;
microanatomy first appeared in 1899.

What was I doing on the day
I looked through my Webster’s
Ninth Collegiate Dictionary
on pages 748 and 749?

Faint blue spots on both pages,
egg dye drops on black and white.

So. I asked my mother

by Carol Valera Jacobson 2008

So.
In a round-about way, I asked my mother if she would be my oral history partner,
and she agreed without hesitation.
I was surprised by how quickly she responded in the affirmative.

* * *
“A timeline,” I asked her, “Could you please write me a time-line of your life; say, including the years we lived in California. 1960 to 1970.”
Mom smiled her shy smile; remembering, I think, what she was doing then. She had four young children; I was 10, Arthur was 8, Thomas 6 and David was a wee four years old. I had finished 4th grade at Sunset Elementary in Craig. Mother was 31, still young and curious and leaving a conventional marriage.

She’d bought a 24-passenger school bus, had it painted a desert sand color, removed nine rows of seats, loaded everything she thought she would need in the back and threw us kids in on top, and drove to Palo Alto, California where she hoped she find relief from her fatigue. After a while, she started attending Foothills College in Los Altos Hills. We rented a house three blocks from Stanford University. For a long time, she used that big bus to go to the store, church, school. Then she parked that bus in the back of the driveway and bought a VW bus to drive us around

We attended Mayfield Elementary, then we went to elementary school on the Stanford campus. Film strips, chalk dust, noisy, happy children. I went to class with the young sons and daughters of the Stanford faculty. Bright children. I was eleven. The same age as Harriet the Spy.

* * *

“Don’t you remember,” she asked, “the marches I took you to . . . the civil right marches?”

We went to a Unitarian church in Palo Alto. We ate marzipan and raw almond/cashew butter, sunflower seeds, oatmeal and fresh figs from the trees in the back yard.

1965. I started 5th grade. My mother was going to school, living on child support and a social revolution was swirling around her, sweeping through the county, to create a more liberated society.

Hippies are defined as: a young person, especially in the 1960s, who rejected accepted social and political values and proclaimed a belief in universal peace and love. Hippies often dressed unconventionally, lived communally, and used psychedelic drugs.

* * *

When I try to remember her in those years, my impression was of a thin woman, with long black hair, hiding her teeth with her lips just a little bit when she smiled. Shy. She wore cotton: simple shifts and straight dresses without binding, tight waistbands. Practical, functional, even funky clothes when all the other mothers she’d known in Craig were wearing straight skirts with their arms bound in tight sleeves, tottering on pointy-toed shoes with too much heel.

Yampa Bench Road August 2008

Saturday August 24, Terry and I drove 200 miles along the Yampa Bench Road/MCR 14 and 14N. It took about eight hours, and the scenery is breathtaking. These are photos taken along the road and in approximate order.

Farmer's Market in Craig

Carly Comes to Craig

My niece, Carly, came to visit for a week; her first long, solo road trip. She visited for a week and was wonderful--charming with good manners, a delight.




She's 18, just graduated from Durango High School, going to Fort Lewis College in Durango. My brother Arthur's daughter.

With a cheerful nod to my mother, here are the other photos of the beautiful Miss Carly.

Craig Air Show 2008

In the ongoing celebration of Craig's 100th birthday, we had an airshow. Terry convinced me to go up, and I did. First, the instrument panel...the plane was older than me, and so was the pilot.


Then there was the view of the south part of Craig and the power plant with Trapper Mine behind it.


Then there was the landing.



Terry was considerably calmer than I was. The pilot was great. He lives in Crawford, Colorado with his wife. He has been flying over 50 years, commercially for a major airline and now, just around the country. It took him two hours to fly up from Crawford.

Great Divide, Colorado

Terry and I drove through Area 3 (on the Colorado State Hunting Map) so Terry could have a feel for the terrain and animals as he begins to field more and more calls about hunting season.

I have been telling people that you have to love sagebrush to live in this country. It is everywhere and an admirable plant.

The first picture is of an elderly windmill set on a hill looking toward the Little Snake River. The Little Snake, its drainage system, and the surrounding area—low, rolling hills, distant peaks, stone bluffs and sagebrush—were part of the huge cattle industry that operated here in the late 1880s and early 1900s. Thousands of cows were herded into and out of this remote area, down the Little Snake to Brown’s Park and back up to the railroad in Wyoming in the fall.



As I look around, I am astounded that this dry country with its sparse grass could possibly support that many cows. I have to stop and remember that the grass and vegetation has changed since the herds grazed the original grasses down.

The windmill sits several miles east of Great Divide, an early homesteading community. It thrived after the Homestead Act, when many individuals and families moved West to take on the challenge of taming the west by proving up on a homestead—160 acres. Proving up meant living on the land for two years, building a house of some sort and working the land. They quickly found out 160 acres could not support them in crops or livestock; many sold out and moved to town. Others bought up to increase their holdings so they could run cows or sheep or put up hay or grain.

Great Divide is a crossroad with several empty buildings and several occupied homes and then, after a while, this windmill.

We took CR 21 along the Little Snake, a quiet, little brown river that the dog could walk across; a working river, feeding the few alfalfa fields and providing water for farms, irrigation, cows and the deer, elk, and antelope that make this such a good place to hunt.

We saw a large herd of elk sleeping and browsing along the river.