By Mike Rosso
I just got off the phone with an old friend on the east coast. I told him about how dry it’s been here and he informed me about how much rain they’ve been getting. Apparently all of our June moisture found its way to New Jersey, leaving us high and dry – literally.
By Mike Rosso
I recently returned home from celebrating my Mom’s 91st birthday (Dad is 96). Most of my family, me being the exception, have settled in Sonoma County, California. It’s a truly stunning countryside there. Rolling hills of grass and stately oaks. Miles and miles of vineyards stretching above and beyond the horizon.
By Mike Rosso
Hal Walter’s column this month struck a chord with me. I too worked for both the Pueblo Star-Journal and Chieftain newspapers years ago. I was employed as a photographer and Hal came on board about six months after I left. We finally met in Salida shortly after I moved here in 2001.
By Mike Rosso
Last night I began watching the Netflix series Wild Wild Country, a six-part documentary on the Rajneesh commune in rural Oregon in the early 1980s.
This story has fascinated me since those early days as I had a friend in Durango who fell in love with a member of that cult, began dressing in various shades of red and orange, sold all of his belongings, and moved to Oregon.
By Mike Rosso
Wow, another year has come and gone and we are now staring down the barrel of the late Twenty-teens.
By Mike Rosso Last month we featured a cover painting by Beatris Burgoin of the Sangre De Cristo mountain range, looking east from the San Luis Valley. This month, we are looking at that very same range, but west, from the Wet Mountain Valley. This was not intentional, but turned out to be a nice …
By Mike Rosso
Over the years, many members of my family have, little by little, settled in Sonoma County, California. That includes my parents, siblings, niece and a few cousins.
By Mike Rosso
It’s hard for me to fathom, but I’ve called Salida home for 16 years come this November. This is the longest I have lived continually in any one place, including the town I was born in.
Yet, I don’t yet consider myself a local. I reserve that title for those who were born and grew up here, who raised families here, whose ancestors are buried here. I know quite a few locals, those who decided to stay here for their own particular reasons. But there are many Salida natives whom I’ve never, nor will ever meet. They left the city long ago for better jobs, more culture, bigger cities – for any number of reasons.
By Mike Rosso
I don’t watch network or cable television. Because of this, I don’t have access to the 24/7 news cycle, but am aware that the sheer volume of information flowing from TV, newspapers, magazines and the internet may be rendering some folks numb to the rapid changes occurring all around us.
By Mike Rosso
Last month’s tagline poked fun at the dwindling shoulder seasons in Salida, but a quick walk downtown on a late May afternoon reveals the truth: we are officially on the map. Both in-state and out-of-state plates abound, sidewalks are more crowded, the bays at the local gas station are nearly always full. Trailers loaded down with ATVs, mountain bikes and kayaks speed along Highway 50, headed toward other Colorado destinations.
By Mike Rosso
I just finished watching PBS’s three-part series, The Great War, about the first large-scale, post industrial global war. It was quite an eye-opener. I’ve been fascinated by that devastating conflict since reading All Quiet on the Western Front by German World War I veteran, Erich Maria Remarque.
By Mike Rosso
What a difference a month makes.
At 7:30 a.m. in early January, I walked the five blocks from my house in minus 8 weather to the Salida bus station. I didn’t mind the cold so much, knowing I was bound for Northern California where the climate was certain to be milder.
By Mike Rosso
It’s a pattern repeated throughout Colorado; a small town gets “discovered,” thus becoming a magnet for retirees, lone eagles, trust funders and those simply looking for a quiet place in the mountains.
Naturally, these folks need someplace to live, so the demand for housing goes up. But what if the supply does not keep up with the demand? This usually leads to inflated prices for real estate and rental properties.
By Mike Rosso
The “monsoon” season has arrived, helping to dampen down the landscape and snuff out the recent forest fire. I put “monsoon” in quotations because, when I consider that term, I visualize palm trees battered by tropical winds, violently bending at 90 degree angles. In Colorado, it translates to brief afternoon rainstorms, sometimes, but not always accompanied by thunder and lightning. No, matter – we’ll take it. Moisture is always welcome in our high and dry climate.
By Mike Rosso
Last month, our intrepid proofreader Meryl announced that she and her family would be relocating to Vermont this summer and she could no longer help to find those obscure typos, misspellings and other grammatical transgressions in our publication.
By Mike Rosso
Readers sometimes ask how we come up with our cover art. There’s not one particular method for this. Often we seek out the artwork, scouring the Internet for photographs or other mediums by the many talented artists who live and work in Central Colorado. Sometimes it’s luck: we run across a striking image in a gallery or on a website, or meet an artist who offers their work to us. On rare occasions, folks submit artwork for consideration, but those rarely end up on the cover.
By Mike Rosso
After taking one issue and a few weeks off, we’re putting the final touches on the March issue. We hope you enjoy the wide variety of content offered up this month by our talented contributors.
by Mike Rosso This is not the column I intended to write. I was thinking of something seasonally appropriate, giving thanks for the past year while looking ahead to the new year. Instead, some 57-year-old white guy from Hartsel decided to play God, forced his way into a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs, and …
by Mike Rosso There was a big news story this past month that hit close to home. The national grocery chain Whole Foods, after protests from a small but loud group of customers, decided to stop carrying products grown and processed by Colorado inmates through a work program run by Colorado Correctional Industries (CCI). Here …
by Mike Rosso Our cover tagline speaks of embracing change, and not just the change of seasons – although Rita Roberts’ painting goes a long way toward invoking just that – but also the changes that occur in our everyday lives. Change can happen when you least expect it, or it may happen due to …
by Mike Rosso Let me begin by declaring that I am not a poet. My attempts at poetry were limited to bawdy limericks penned in grade school. My college journalism teachers did not cover poetry along with the Five Ws. But I do enjoy the medium. Langston Hughes and Charles Bukowski are among my favorites, …
by Mike Rosso Only 18 Months to Go … Would I be wrong to suggest that no matter your political leanings, we can all agree the national media is spending way too much time currently focusing on the 2016 U.S. presidential election? We’re talking about an event taking place a year and a half from …
by Mike Rosso About the Weather Inside, the calendar says April 25. Outside, the remnants of the most recent snowstorm have finally vanished, leaving a good dosage of moisture to help jump-start the local flora and fauna to do their spring thing. But the natural world seems in no big hurry to begin its annual …
by Mike Rosso When we approached Buena Vista artist Brynn Ronning about featuring her artwork on our April cover, she offered us quite a few suitable “springtime” options. But there was something about that typewriter, maybe a bit of nostalgia – the clacking of keys versus the sterile sound of today’s computer keyboards. Perhaps it …
by Mike Rosso When we approached Buena Vista artist Brynn Ronning about featuring her artwork on our April cover, she offered us quite a few suitable “springtime” options. But there was something about that typewriter, maybe a bit of nostalgia – the clacking of keys versus the sterile sound of today’s computer keyboards. Perhaps it …
by Mike Rosso Back in September 2014, Time magazine released an edition called “The Answers Issue.” In it was a compilation of answers to some of today’s most burning questions, such as, When did we start saying ‘groovy’? When will we discover alien life? and When do men lose their virginity? Believe it or not, …
by Mike Rosso Here it is, our final issue of 2014. Looking back, we’ve covered quite a bit of ground – geographically, culturally and historically. Along the way, we’ve sadly lost a few of our readers as well as a valued contributor, but we’ve also gained new subscribers and some brand new voices to the …
by Mike Rosso It’s nearly impossible to be a stranger in a small town. Live in a city of 5,000 or less for any length of time and you get to know all sorts of folks. Some ordinary, some quite colorful. And it’s easy to take for granted many of the more engaging folks, until …
by Mike Rosso “This won’t last long.” My hiking pal David LaVercombe and I had just taken refuge underneath a cluster of fragrant spruce trees as the storm raged around us. We were about three miles up Greens Creek Trail when we first heard the thunder. Then came the raindrops – cool and refreshing at …
by Mike Rosso Notes It’s late June as I write this, and the summer solstice has already come and gone. It’s hard to believe. Seems I was only just cleaning out ashes from the woodstove. Now we’re rushing headlong into the thick of summer, along with the accompanying festivals, tourists and RVs on the highway. …
The curtain has risen on yet another tourist season here in Central Colorado, and it’s looking to be a busy one. There also seem to be a lot of new faces in town and an uptick in housing sales that presumably has area realtors licking their chops.
One curious theory about the popularity now gaining traction is the idea of a post-Amendment 64 Colorado. Folks could very well be saying goodbye to more conservative states such as Wyoming and Texas with the perception of a more lenient attitude toward marijuana, demonstrated by voters in 2012. I’ve heard it referred to as 420 Tourism.
As I write this we are only days away from the next “big” election. Along with this comes a high level of anxiety among the populace that, in some cases, is alleviated somewhat by the Major League Baseball playoffs and World Series.
Not having even basic cable TV service, I can only begin to imagine the frustration, confusion and feelings of helplessness that the massive barrage of political ads helps to manufacture. Thanks again to Justices Scalia, Roberts, Alito, Kennedy and Thomas for enabling so much unaccounted-for cash to dominate the election noise this year. Unfortunately the small media outlets such as this magazine are not the recipients of so much cash in the form of advertising revenue. All that money goes to the big boys at the TV and radio networks. And what a coincidence that a “close race” adds even more to their coffers. We can only hope they use some of that money to hire actual investigative reporters, rather than repeaters. More likely it will be used to fill the coffers of the CEOs, but so it goes.
Best Friends
Back in February I got a call from my friend Ken Vargo of Howard. He was wondering if I had any interest in joining him for a trip to Southwestern Utah in early March to volunteer for trail-building at the Best Friends Animal Society.
Having had few opportunities to spend time in the red-rock country of Utah since I moved here from Durango, I decided to take the trip with Ken in his trusty VW Westphalia van along with his dog, Buster.
This would be Ken’s third trip to Best Friends in as many years and he had made all the arrangements. Ken works for the U.S. Forest Service so has lots of experience with trail building; skills that are a good fit to help out at what is considered North America’s largest no-kill animal sanctuary.
Honoring our Veterans
I was never a member of the armed services. My father was. He served during World War II as a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, flying paratrooper missions over Germany. I graduated from high school two months after the fall of Saigon, which officially ended the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
For some reason I still have my selective service card – maybe for historical purposes, but I also recall that my lottery number was pretty high, something like 320, so I wasn’t too concerned about being drafted to fight in that ill-conceived conflict.
Okay, raise your hand if you’re relieved this year is coming to an end.
For my family’s and my health and well-being, 2012 hasn’t been too bad. Dad got through some major surgery back in January at the age of 90; Mom is hanging in there, helped by the company and love of her sole grandchild Olivia; and my siblings seem to be doing fine.
Mostly I am glad the elections are behind us with the accompanying bluster, anger, anxiety and misinformation. Now we can get back to the usual cooperation and civil discourse …
Of course, if the Mayans are indeed correct, none of us will be around to fall off the supposed “fiscal cliff” anyway, but that’s another matter.
Where thou art, that is home. – Emily Dickinson
This new year 2012 begins right here, at home. I decided to ask our regular contributors – and some new voices – to interpret their thoughts on “home” for this issue. What you’re about to discover are a variety of stories, memories, opinions, essays, artwork and poetry on an elusive topic for which everyone has some experience and thoughts on. Home isn’t necessarily where you were born or where you currently hang your hat. Home can be a longing, a state of mind, a place of tranquility or a place of contention. Where thou art …
Pedallers and Hackers
This month’s cover art was provided by Nathrop-area photographer Taf McMurry. She made our job very difficult after providing dozens of great photos depicting all kinds of bicycles in a variety of artistic stylings. We decided we needed to run at least one more of her images in this issue so we did, on page fifteen.
Although we don’t consider this to be a “theme” issue, the fact of the big race scheduled for August in Central Colorado was enough to devote several pages of content to the velocipede.
If you haven’t been on a bike in a while we hope it inspires you to get back onto one or at least go out and ring a cow bell for the racers coming here from all over the planet this month.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” – Emma Lazarus
This excerpt from The New Colossus appears on a bronze tablet that resides in the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. It is very likely that statue was the first sign to welcome each one of my grandparents to their new home back in the 1890s.
By Mike Rosso
February 2011 was a tough month for dictators – and journalists.
While covering the uprisings in Northern Africa, many journalists were abducted, arrested, beaten and in some cases, lost their lives.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper was roughed up on the Egyptian streets by Hosni Mubarek’s thugs. Worse was the vicious assault on Lara Logan, the veteran correspondent for CBS News. In an age when the entire field of journalism is under attack, is it any wonder that one of the first things that occurred during the recent uprisings was the shutting down of the internet and the intimidation of reporters?
Have you noticed how home projects always take at least three times as long as planned?
I am currently in the process of remodeling the enclosed porch on the rear of my house (okay, it’s a mud room). A project that began in late fall and, at this point, with luck, might be done by the next election.
I have no one to blame for this delay except myself. Granted, the recent holidays and publishing deadlines did put a crimp in the work schedule, but it seems I can always find other things to occupy my spare time; laundry, house cleaning, snowshoeing, visiting with friends, eating … time that could be spent in my grubbies, the radio turned up, clutching tools, getting this project completed.
So why am I bringing this up here?
It’s all about love.
I’m a cat person.
There, I’ve said it. Somehow I tend to relate more to those independent-minded, self-absorbed masters of the art of lounging than their canine counterparts. Cats have always been part of my adult life. Grey tabbies mostly, and, if I may indulge in a little Buddhist philosophy, am pretty sure each one was the same tabby, reincarnated, having returned just to keep me company and for my personal amusement and enlightenment.
“Wanna buy a magazine?”
It wasn’t the first time Ed Quillen approached me with the proposition.
“Can you show me some numbers, Ed?” I replied, also not for the first time.
“I’ll see what I can do,” was his tentative response.
