Bus Notes
Damn, it is cold in Boulder at 5:30am in January, which is not much of a surprise as I wait for the bus driver to open the door to my ride to the airport. In 2019 we voted to approve additional tax for light rail between Boulder and Denver. While the Regional Transportation District continued to collect the tax, light rail never happened, we got this Flatiron Flyer bus instead. Gotta love bureaucracies.
The ride costs me $1.35 for the senior fare. While I appreciate the gesture, I not sure why they bother. I’d pay ten times that amount, given that driving my car to the airport and parking for a week would cost me over $100 for tolls, gas, parking, and wear and tear on the Highlander.
I’m not interested in sitting next to anyone. It’s hard for me to put together a coherent sentence at that time of the morning, and sometimes for most of the day. I dump my pack and courier bag on the window seat and sit down. I can’t image that the bus will be full this time of the morning. My white hair lets me get away with stuff like this.
The ride through town passes the last of the Christmas lights. Some like to hang on to the season, other folks are preoccupied or lazy, and I just like the tiny colored lights on a small tree in our courtyard, particularly when it is snowing, that is if it ever snows. If I let my imagination run toward the beautiful, I could be an aesthete.
At the Table Mesa stop, the person in front of me tells her companion, “So odd that we have seen so little snow.” Her companion turns to look at her and says, “That because climate change is a hoax.”
We leave town and head uphill to the east out of Boulder Valley. When I first got here some time ago there would be stream of red taillights headed out of town on the Denver-Boulder Parkway early in the morning. Not nearly as many folks commute to Denver now. That commute has been replaced by a stream of headlights coming into town early from the ‘burbs beyond the Boulder greenbelt. There are plenty of good jobs in Boulder, just don’t try to buy a house here.
The driver dims the overhead lights as he starts out on the Northwest Parkway, one of three parts of a circuitous toll road that goes most of the way around Denver. Dick Lamm, our governor starting in 1975, stopped the link that would have put a toll road between Golden, a town due west of Denver, and Boulder, northwest of Denver. His was an anti-growth stance with unintended consequences.
The two-lane road between Golden and Boulder has got to be one of the more dangerous roads in Colorado, particularly in the winter with black ice and blowing snow. When we commuted to Golden from Boulder, Blue Eyes called it the Mongolian Trek.
His thought was that if you don’t build four-lane roads, you can slow or stop growth. He was right, but there has always been an exploitative, get-rich-quick mentality in Colorado, starting with the mountain men in the early 19th century. This place was bound to look like a strip mall from Fort Collins to Pueblo, albeit a strip mall with some really nice places in between to call home
Lamm was also part of the gang that stopped the 1976 Winter Olympics in Colorado. He was right about that too. We had ski areas in place but not much else, and the Olympics would have been a financial disaster. He basically killed his future political career when he said that terminally-ill elders had “a duty to die and get out of the way.”...and perforce, he did at 85, a good run.
Lamm made Colorado a better place. We need politicians who are thinking about their entire community; and are unafraid to take a stand for the truth.
Odd to think about Lamm as this bus blasts out toward DIA on part of a highway Lamm fought against and lost, except for the Golden to Boulder section.
We pass the imposing blue horse statue with bright red eyes that sits at the entry to the airport. The red eyes only light up at certain angles. Christian wing-nuts hate the demonic aspect of the statue. That, and the fact that a portion of the statue fell over and killed the sculptor, Luis Jiminez, only adds to its mystique.
The airport looks like giant nomad tents set up in the desert with a huge bird on the south end, that bird being a cleverly-designed Westin hotel that has a roof arched like a wing-span.
I trundle off the bus and up a long escalator to the south end of the terminal. Building the terminal has apparently been a job for life for the construction crews. Ever since groundbreaking in 1989, folks in hard hats have been wandering about the building tearing down something or adding something, or just wandering around.
The people at TSA have become a good deal more mellow over the years. I remember the post 9-11 TSA goons as these small nazis roaming up and down the endless lines of travelers yelling, “Laptops out! Pockets empty!, Shoes off!” Those folks are gone to other components of Homeland Security where small nazis now hide their faces, and have been replaced by people who say good morning and smile when they hand back your ID.
My courier bag was inspected. I made a styrofoam jacket to protect my laptop. It’s held together with high-speed tape, the sort of tape used to make temporary repairs on aircraft surfaces, or in my case a sea kayak. The sticky and tough shiny silver tape was apparently of interest. Who knows why.
Next came another escalator down to the train platform that takes passengers to the three concourses. Then up two more escalators to the concourse and the gates.
Through this entire morning, I’ve marveled at how efficient and simple it has been. Nothing has been perfect, there could have been heat lamps at the bus station, the TSA scan tech should have understood that I used high speed tape like duct tape...bitch, bitch, bitch, etc. But everything worked. And there is a metaphor for this country in this.
In spite of our problems, many of them self-inflicted, we make stuff work in this country. Keep it up. Don’t lose faith in our strengths, and we will have a future.
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