Afraid of nothing, including the devil himself

“In rye by the sea, come sing a song with me. Imagine that the world is really flat.
We will dance to the edge of the devil’s darkest ledge … landing on our feet, just like a cat.”
__ Mike Murphy

The numbness is striking. No peace for the peacemaker, a witness to madness, the silent partner to silence. 

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

I am not sure, but maybe I’ve seen the edge. Perhaps more than once.
Maybe it is like Hunter Thompson said, “The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is, are the ones who have gone over.”
Mental illness is no stranger to strangeness. And strangeness is relative.
I don’t know why, but I have never been afraid … not of the devil, himself.
There is this surreal moment a few years ago. Three of us, respectable businessmen, gathered around a table in ‘high end’ bar in Denver.
One fellow hears the clock ticking. Tick, tick, tick, … tick. He feels the need to do something, today. For him, the fight is against the future. His battle is internal and eternal. To do the things he promised himself. He worries about his legacy, how to take care of his family, or does he even care? What is his place in the world?
Another, at the table, thinks of the dark days of a past that has nearly consumed him -- the terror of being out of control. He actually tries not to think, because he knows, he has done unspeakable things. His battle is with that past. He must try and forget.
Finally, the third is afraid only of feeling nothing. The numbness is striking. No peace for the peacemaker, a witness to madness, the silent partner to silence. For him, he is at war with now, this moment, today. He is afraid of nothing … not the devil, himself.
The hillbilly’s beat-up vehicle drops out of the fog at the lower end of the pass and the small city’s lights illuminate the low-hanging cloud cover draped over the southern quarter. Billy Joel sings, “It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday, The regular crowd shuffles in.” Hey, it is 9 o’clock! Without the dogs, and the work, I guess he might be making love to his tonic and gin.
First week on the job and still finding out the “the who” and “the what” of the circle he finds himself in. It is an odd road traveled. The technology… first you are up, then you are down. The camera you were using… it is a museum piece now. No more paste up. No light tables. No dark room. He remembers all the way back to the days of hot type. Like anything else, grow or die. Challenging, but he stares it in the face. He’s afraid of nothing. Not even the devil, himself.
Every day Mom and Dad pack up everything, as if they are leaving, but they can’t. They are not really sure how long they have been there. Or even where ‘there’ is, because, as Dad says, they have moved the roads around on him. It is not really different, but it’s the same. They seem happy, most of the time, except when they are not. They talk about home, but sometimes they know it is gone. It only a memory, but sometimes, it’s forgotten. It’s almost like a permanent vacation, with no work to bring you home.
When, I leave, it tears at me. Kind of like dropping a kid off at school, but worse. They must be afraid.
I pull myself away and leave them there.
I am not sure, but I think, I looked over the edge.
But, I am afraid of nothing. Not even the devil, himself.
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View from the Hill: We all remember a big mouth

When I wasn't in the river, I was on the hill

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Mouth Cave was probably the most known of the in-town holes because it was the biggest. Isn’t that the way of the world? The big mouths are always remembered.

Confucius said that a “man who stands on a hill with his mouth open, will wait a long time for roast duck to drop in.” Maybe so, but the caves of Dolores certainly had other uses. And as a youth, when I wasn’t in the river, I was on the hill.

Perhaps in Mouth Cave, or another part of ‘the Face,’ or ‘Hidden Cave,’ maybe 'Wildcat Cave,' or the ‘Gap,’ on the ‘Shelf,’ or up on top, near the pond. As far as I remember, Mouth Cave’s naming convention was about the only universal moniker out there, with the possible exception of the “D.”

Everything else went by the name used by the person calling it that, at any particular time. It was one of the joys of living near and playing on “The Hill.”

Every generation was afforded the opportunity to name and rename the little hidey-holes, passages, nooks and crannies of the greatest playground on earth.

The term “The Hill,” was in universal usage, however, referring only to the sunny side of the Dolores Valley, as evidenced by certain official titles like “Hillside,” one of the three main streets in the little burg.

Up there, scattered somewhere between the Mountain Mahogany, rattlesnakes, sandstone, Yucca, Pinion and Juniper trees — little bands of neighbor kids would constantly and consistently hone their skills in rabbit tracking, imagination development, and Colorado-style mountaineering.

Development of other more nefarious skills was not out of the question either. BB gun warfare, porn stashing, and activities that may have interested the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms— perhaps gained some juvenile footholds in unsupervised expanse of near wilderness terrain.

“I doubt there are very many old Dolores homeys that haven't stood on that hillside right about there,” says longtime Dolores resident Ellis Miller recently when looking at the above vintage black and white photograph taken from the hill in the vicinity of 8th Street. “It was a good place to grow up, was it not?”

“Me and my buddies were always up there exploring. Wonder if kids do so in this day in age?” says Gary Willett, in a recent Facebook Post.

Miller, also in a Facebook post, remembers the ritual of painting the “D.”

“That was done every year or so by the "D Club" which was that exclusive fraternity of DHS athletes who had lettered in a sport. When I was little, I remember some of the high school students up there with ladders and little scaffold like swings hanging from the trees above the cliff. It was a magnificent ritual, and to my knowledge nobody got killed or maimed.”

Lisa Berry, in another communication years ago, commented on the accuracy of the maiming claim.

“When I was a junior or senior, I can't remember, a handful of us went up there and hung over the top with ropes and buckets of tar. When finished, I was carrying the open buckets of tar back down the hill. The little old lady living at the bottom didn't like us crossing in her yard and had set up one of those bird type sprinklers at the bottom of the trail. I was waiting for the sprinkler to go around...wait, wait, GO! I took off running down hill to miss the sprinkler and failed to see the clothesline. Well, I was ‘clotheslined’ and the little ole, mean lady had two buckets of tar spilled in her yard. I also had one hell of a rake mark on my neck. Had a volleyball game that night too.”

From my experience over the years, the territory’s benefit lies in its limitless possibilities.

I recall, up the alley from the house in which I grew up on 7^th Street, and over near the hill, there in the oak brush, was an old swamp boat with the big fan that once had propelled it from the back of the boat. Behind Fredrickson’s house, the canvas in most places on the watercraft, was rotting off the steel frame and most of the moving parts were rusted to seizure state, but I don’t know how many hours I spent piloting that rusting and tattered relic through the jungles of Viet Nam, down the Piranha-infested waters of the Amazon, or on through the shark-thick seas of the Pacific Theater in WWII. Neighbor kids, I know for a fact, had similar experiences in the years it resided there and I am sure there were comparable artifacts of enlightenment all along the hillside lengths of the little town.

But the fun was not confined only to humans. My sister and I had a Beagle named Suzie that we raised from a pup that would chase rabbits, dawn to dusk, baying at every third breath, up and down on that hillside until someone physically carried her home. Even then, it was difficult to keep her from returning to the prime, rabbit-running locale on her own. She managed to keep up that game for almost 20 years.

Countless fires had blackened the roof of Mouth Cave and thin, powdery, grey-colored, soapy-tasting dust provided the floor. That didn’t matter much though. Because you could stand there at the edge of the cliff, looking out the gaping hole at the view of the town below, and wonder, and imagine, and dream. Waiting for the roast duck to drop in. Just like generations before, and exactly the same as generations that followed. The big mouths are always remembered.

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In our river valley, the devil was in the details

The other pond was for recreational purposes, I guess. 

 By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com


"When was the last time you spent a quiet moment just doing nothing - just sitting and looking at the sea, or watching the wind blowing the tree limbs, or waves rippling on a pond, a flickering candle or children playing in the park?" __ Ralph Marston

I am not real sure of the details, but when I was a young buck, there were a couple of ponds near the river in the upper end of the town of Dolores, Colorado. One pond was fenced all around by a big chain-link barrier with locked gates and had something to do with the drinking water supply. The other was for recreational purposes, I guess. At least that is the way we looked at it.

My compadres and I spent fair amount of time at what we called “the town pond,” or the one sans chain-linked barrier. It was a favorite year-round destination.

In the winter, the fire department would sometimes flood it by pumping water out on the top for a refreeze and its smoothing effect to make a better skating surface. We played hockey for hours there, but later found larger and better options downstream near the bridge as you come into town.

I remember at least once, a group of high school kids dropping a small car, part of the way through the ice into the pond, while cutting doughnuts out there.

But the summer fun I recall quite fondly because of the “lively” aspect of our endeavors and the ‘nature’ of our experiments,

The ecosystem included, but was not limited to, frogs, ‘crawdads,’ snakes, salamanders, various sucker-fish, ‘mud dogs,’ carp, small trout, maybe blue gill?, or even Pike, and bugs galore. Perhaps even a small pet alligator or two, at least until the first hard freeze, may have found freedom there … I don’t know. It was a lively place.

I personally owned a seine, with a tightly meshed bow-crossed frame about three feet square, that you could drop in the shallow, crawling waters … wait a few minutes, and then pull to the surface with all manner of evil creatures on it. I remember pulling it up several times, only to drop it right back in hurry, because I was not sure what the wiggling mass discovered flopping in the netting was when I brought it to the surface.

Another favorite feature was a makeshift raft, (let’s just call it ‘The Calypso,’ Aye, I sing to your glory,) created by nailing two sheets of four’ by eight’ plywood on each side of several square wooden fence posts. You could pole it anywhere in the mucky mess of a pond and fit three or four of the delinquent, would-be life scientist passengers on at a time.

When archaeologist excavate the area 1,000 years now, imagine the significance they will ascribe to the thousands of unpaired canvas shoes they find in progressive layers of fossilized tar pits … slime, muck and goo, that would suck a Converse All Star Chuck Taylor Special, right off your feet and down deep into the mire, never to be seen again for thousands of years.

There must have been selenium, or other mutation-inducing glop filtering into the pond because, to this day, I have never seen freshwater crawdaddies, the length and girth of those Big Boys wrestled from that location.

Dam building was also a beloved activity, acquired skill, and required course of education, incumbent on students of pond-life. Small streams fed into the top end and often, an overflow ditch, cut in bank between the pond and the river, ran a healthy watercourse between the two connected bodies of water. But what flow could not stand a few modifications and improvements by a troop of adolescent human beavers?

Nearby, just downstream, on the river bank, were the Post Office is now, was a huge willow thicket with bent over clumps that made excellent lodges for the beaver army that tunneled through, and wove together, and dug under room-like caverns, hallways, and hidey holes. And then, down from there, the Big Rock with a diving hole right off the point, and long dark suckers swimming in the backwater behind.

You learned to respect the river, and love it. You cared about the pond. You lived and played in the willows. The crawdads, frogs, snakes, and mud dogs were just some of your friends. No matter how much you dammed it, altered it, slopped in it, swam through it, rafted on it, trapped creatures from it – in essence, it flowed through you. But, I guess, I am not real sure of the details.

Andy Pleasant and myself, on a makeshift raft near the river in Dolores.

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