The Garden of the Gods at dusk.
The energy here prepared
Travel Diaries Continued
We eat dinner at a Souper! Salad! (One of the exclamation points is shaped like a butter knife; the other is shaped like a spoon. That should have given us a clue). It’s a large, one-room cafeteria style place. You get your plate and find yourself in an assembly line of the hungry. People are so intent on filling their plates that they’re unintentionally rude, reaching past you for peppers, getting snooty when you don’t move fast enough. They pile their plates high, like the Leaning Tower of Vegetables. I hit the end of the line behind some short, fat woman who is a veteran plate packer. She holds two plates mounded in salads oozing with bleu cheese dressing. She’s going to eat healthy, by God, if it kills her. Leigh and I find a table and sit down. I look around. The place is full. Old people who couldn’t afford to spend a lot to eat out. Young couples with children who eat a little salad and then big gobs of ice cream. And a lot of really fat people who come here because it’s all-you-can-eat and they can “pack it in.” I’m sitting here in the lower middle class side of Colorado Springs watching Americans eat themselves into the shapes of walruses. Yes, they do it on the East Coast, too, and we’re a nation of slow, fat slobs with clogged arteries, diabetes and high blood pressure. When they finish, they waddle to their cars, drive home and park their floppy carcasses in front of the TV—with a snack, I’m sure. What bothers me the most are the kids. I see kids in the morning with potato chips and Pepsi. They’re chunky and waddle like little penguins. What we eat and drink, our bodies get used to and we crave more, and these kids don’t have a chance in hell unless they’ve got some superhuman will power to change at some point. After we finish, we drive up the hill to the
Garden of the Gods. Leigh has been here twice before. I’ve been here once. It’s
a wonderful, protected area of towering red sandstone rocks and trails,
against a backdrop of snow capped mountains and that beautiful deep
blue Colorado sky. Leigh takes photos of the hills. I take “paper
pictures” for
the website. (Mendel was here). Finally we find it. We’re on the back side of the small mountain. We pick our way around until we stumble out to the entrance. Leigh loved the adventure. It made me nervous. There is a very real, ancient energy here during the daytime, and it’s a little more pronounced at night when, without sight, the rest of your senses are heightened. There are spirits in the Garden of the Gods and I was left with the feeling that they like the place to themselves at night. I knew, walking round in the darkness that if I had to stay the night, I would feel presences that would fill me with terror. Our day consciousness is so superficial. We are silly, frightened beings convincing ourselves that this is it and we are in full control. We are so wrong. Our car is the only one in the parking lot. We’re back to our motel by 9:30. We download our pictures and read. I continue with Trout Fishing in America.
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