Reading: Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust

Moving: hiked five miles

Watching: a gorgeous day; a windy, snowing day; and not as much Sunday television as I should have wished

Listening: Cowboy Junkies

20 May 2001: Yowza!

I finished A Handful of Dust this morning and promtly went outside to sit in the sun. As with Silver, it was only way I could avoid the screaming horrors. The title gives away that This Book Will Be About Mortality and the Pointlessness of Life but the first half of the book distracts you. It's Woodhousian, early 1930s England with house parties and reprobate sponges and dreary hosts and a vicar who hasn't quite adjusted to being on permanent Home Leave (all his sermons give reverence to Our Great Queen and speak of savage sun and beasts although in fact he left India 20 years before). Also a mild little flirtation affair.

Then a kid gets kicked in the head by a horse and dies and everything goes to pot.

In Brave New World, John Savage learns everything he knows about "civilization" by reading Shakespeare, and boy is he in for a surprise when he gets to England. A Handful of Dust ends in 1934, two years after Brave New World was first published. I don't know who might have used this fate to better advantage, Dante in The Inferno or Sarte in No Exit, but imagine spending the rest of your natural life deep in the Amazonian jungle with the outside world thinking you're dead because the psychotic who is keeping you in the jungle has told rescuers you're dead because he wants you to stay with him forever because he likes to have Dickens (those books that the ants haven't destroyed, and which instruct him about civilization) read to him from cover to cover, again and again.

So I needed to sit in the sun.

And it was a beautiful morning. So very very clear and crisp, really remarkably blue and wonderful. We drove only a little bit west of Golden, maybe 40 miles, to hike in Golden Gate Canyon State Park. We hiked up to a place called Frazer Meadow where once upon a time someone (Frazer) built a cabin and a barn. These buildings are about as old as the cabin in High Meadows on the western side of Rocky Mountain National Park, but they're in much worse shape: only six or seven thousand feet up instead of nine or more means a longer growing season, a longer rotting season. It was lovely. In the west, over the Divide, clouds gathered in a perfectly ordinary and expected (expectable? like respectable and expected?) Colorado summer way. And so we headed down.

The clouds moved in quickly and the sky was completely overcast by the time we returned to the trailhead--only a five-mile hike. And rain had spat at us a little. We drove back to Denver to get smoothies at Wild Oats before picking out exterior paint swatches at Belcaro and buying a window lock at Home Despot and doing some grocery-shopping. When we emerged from Wild Oats with our Deep Blue Dream smoothies, were we so cold because we were wearing damp hiking clothes? or because we were drinking frozen fruit? or because it was fucking cold? And the paint store was closed and screw the lock and who needs food anyway, plus, most important, Blake was home in front of an open window. And home we went.

The entire contents of the Dust Bowl upended over Denver in the three miles home. We watched an antenna rip from a rooftop and fail to do anything from "The Omen" to passersby. We saw cars be pushed across lanes and people struggling to cross streets bent double in the wind. Birds flapped futilely, immobile in one spot and the eggs untended. We dashed from the car, I to the house to get Blake out of the wind (he was fine; his window is quite protected) and back to the car to get our gear and back to the house to get the porch flowers under shelter and RDC to the back yard to take down the umbrella over the patio table and to throw the garden furniture into the garage.

Whew. I had not seen wind that strong since Hurricane Bob in 1991; the news reported gusts reached 90 mph. Against televised requests from the Denver police, RDC scurried out to fetch us burritos; luckily no branches fell on him specifically or more broadly on Cassidy. We ate; we watched "60 Minutes"; we watched 15' of "The Simpsons" season finale before the storm, moving south, obscured the satellite signal and continued to do that through "Malcolm in the Middle" and "The X-Files"; we were able to watch "The Sopranos" season finale.

Before "The Sopranos," I ventured outside with a broom. I am glad again not to have planted my vegetable seedlings yet, because after the wind came snow. My poor trees, with cherries about to ripen and the nectarine branches so frangible, I beat as much soggy spring thundersnow as I could from their burdened limbs. I talked to my mother during the evening and told her it was snowing; she didn't believe me. Because of course I lie all the damn time.

Is this a great town or what?