We Could Be Lewis and Clark, If Lewis and Clark Were Obsessed with Bikes, Giant Cacti, and the Neighbors

The Neighbor’s Chaos Oozes into Our Yard. Photo by Wendy Stieg

The Verge: Cactus Week Looms

Today is a good day. We stand quietly at the verge of the next chapter. Wait. Not even a chapter, a book. Tomorrow, we find out whether the buyers get their loan. I am only phrasing the next parts of our lives in the positive. One giant affirmation. I am so excited about this new book. And also a little bit worried. Not about the outcome, we will make it all work somehow, and I just know the moving gods are smiling upon us. But I do worry about Cactus Week looming. Paul is sure Cactus Boss will arrive intact once we get to Montrose. I get a headache every time I think about it. Maybe that is why images of past moves have started swimming to the surface.

If you are unfamiliar with Cactus Boss and our previous negotiations involving giant desert plants, there is a whole backstory here: The Cactus Dispensation & The "No Math" Exit Strategy.

Who doesn’t have a shaved cat and extra-large cacti? Photo by Wendy Stieg

Today I got to thinking about Lewis and Clark. Paul is from St. Louis. Lewis and Clark stopped there on their great journey that sparked westward expansion across the American West. Paul says St. Louis is a great place to be from. I am beginning to think Lewis and Clark may have felt similarly. They stopped there, too, but they certainly did not stay. Paul moved to Colorado in his early twenties. He's still here. I suppose we have a few things in common with Lewis and Clark. We are curious and maybe just dumb enough to go live in places we have never lived before. Lewis and Clark had a generally westward movement pattern. 

Apparently, this has become less of an isolated incident and more of an ongoing life philosophy: Safety Third!

Our Great Migration looks like someone was sitting in the back of a bumpy pick-up truck with an Etch-a-Sketch and was trying to draw a straight line. Our pattern went like this: Summit County, then Southward Expansion to Leadville, in Lake County. Then, Lake County and a Northwest Expansion to Gypsum, in Eagle County. Then leaving Eagle County for the Great Southward Migration to duh duh duh….Cortez, in Montezuma County. And every single time I revisit this journey, my brain immediately says: WHYYYYY??? There is an actual answer to this: Because Paul.

The Corps of Questionable Decisions

Lewis and Clark had many famous people from history along for their expedition. We have an expedition party too: There is Wendy, the Manager, there is Paul, then Gibby, the trusty elderly chocolate lab, plus his two side-kicks, Velcro, the shaved cat, and Gumdrop, who has now bagged four birds since the last time we met him. And of course, the entire Cactus Menagerie. Keep in mind that despite our gifting of said cacti, not everything is figured out. Lewis and Clark had no formal maps, and we have GPS on our phones. But give us time, we could still get lost. 

Velcro the Shaved and Gumdrop the Bird Murderer. Photo by Wendy Stieg

One update on the menagerie: Kelsey and Josh now have some of the menagerie. They are good friends of ours who have recently moved to Mancos and were in need of something in their home. Paul saw an opportunity and gave some of the menagerie to them. They may not understand Paul’s “gifting” practices with plants, however, but they will know eventually.

On the Montrose end of things, Paul has already had several scouting and reconnaissance missions to the new neighborhood. This is because we did not do our homework very well when first purchasing our current home. While I love to joke about our neighborhood, it is still a great house, and it is oddly hard to leave. We renovated it, and it is beautiful. But we do have a bit of an odd neighbor. Paul is having a field day with our next-door neighbor. This neighbor has an entire backyard devoted to fixing things. It is Fred Sanford in microcosm. He also has his "lawn" hanging over his chain-link fence, presumably to what, dry?

What? Fence-Lawn? Huh? It has been drying for over a month. Photo by Wendy Stieg

Always Conduct Reconnaissance Missions

Picture this: Paul and I hiking in the Canyons of the Ancients when we very first got here. He is wearing his Sepp Kuss t-shirt proudly. He loves all things bike. Sepp Kuss, for those of you not fully entered into all things Tour de France, is a very good rider who happens to be from Durango but lives in Andorra and is married to a Spanish woman. Many of the Tour de France guys live between there and Girona, Spain, and train around those parts. Ok, so there’s Paul, proudly wearing said shirt, and we bump into this nice couple. I think that was even Tour week. Anyway, we hadn't been moved in for that long. We discovered two things in that conversation: we met some cool new neighbors who love bikes, and we realized our neighbor had a Trump Flag in his yard. They told us about the Trump flag, and we were like: ohhhhh, how did we miss that?

Paul actually called me a few weeks ago and it was like 9 p.m. He was engaged in some serious reconnaissance and wanted to know about our new neighbors-to-be. He specifically went at night so he could see...what? I don’t know what he expected to see, but we did learn that our next-door-neighbor-to-be has twinkle lights that are pretty bright and turned on at 9 p.m. What does this even mean? I guess we will have to find out! I do know that the whole next-door-neighbor thing in Cortez evolved into a grand idea about what Paul wants to do for his podcast.

Paul’s Vision

He imagines filming himself driving up Highway 491, heading north, capturing the quintessential Cortez moments, complete with Popeye’s Chicken, Arby’s, and something called Yellow Car Country Wines and Meads. They specialize in wine slurpees. Billboards and storage facilities are littering the landscape as you head into Cortez. Imagine the opening scene from Entourage. Paul sees it like that, except he is going to buy the soundtrack to Sanford and Son. Quincy Jones’ finest sitcom song ever. So imagine that scene set to the theme song to Sanford and Son. I hear the harmonica in my head as I think about this.

Gibby is on the move. Photo by Wendy Stieg

This is a vision honed after two years of living next door to Sanford and Son in microcosm. Our next-door neighbor has an entire backyard devoted to fixing things, building things, repairing things, and activities whose purpose remains unclear. His ability to actually fix things remains to be seen.

The week our house had its open house, this neighbor’s fence decided to lean heavily into our yard. Not fall. Lean. Dramatically. Into our yard. Our neighbor recently started fixing the fence, and the project is now complete with wood, giant fence posts, cement, string, tools, and various items casually littering our yard. He has been working on it for two weeks, and somehow, today, it looks worse.

The Real Discovery

By this time, you’d be crazy not to wonder why we even came here. Paul did seriously believe that because Colorado has been in a boom, that maybe this was the last great place yet to be discovered. No discovery occurred except maybe our own. Paul and I had been through a lot. I think we came here to heal. Cortez signifies to us, anyway, the closing of a book. We are about to start a new one. Our new story involves Montrose, which is a gateway to wilderness, skiing, incredible beauty, and a part of the state yet to be discovered, by Wendy and Paul. Lewis and Clark had their Corps of Discovery. Wendy and Paul have their Corps of Questionable Decisions. Our new book is filled with the Uncompahgre Wilderness, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Ouray, Colorado’s “Little Switzerland,” and, of course, Telluride. As I ready myself for this new book, I picture myself as a giant. I am standing with one foot in the American West in the North American Continent, and the other foot in Catalonia, Spain, in the continent of Europe. But for now, I am happy to get to know Montrose. 

The mountains were perfect. The windshield had other plans. Photo by Wendy Stieg

Maybe we really have been explorers all along during our Corps of Questionable Decisions. There was Southward Expansion. Northward Expansion. Montezuma expedition, and now, onward to Montrose. Now, as our cast of characters, Wendy the Manager, Paul, Gibby the trusted, Velcro the shaved, and Gumdrop the bird murderer, together with their prickly menagerie, brave the northwestern part of Colorado. We don’t need a guide; we need a moving truck.

Turns out Michelangelo and moving trucks may have been trying to tell me something all along: Michelangelo and the Moving Truck