Hermes—Mercury to Romans—is a god of many things, including commerce and trade. Here he fittingly presides over Denver’s latest resurrection, the warehouse and railroad yard section north of downtown re-branded as RiNo, River North. Decades ago, artists made avant-garde studios and galleries of those neglected industrial sites as only artists can. We went to Ironton Gallery exhibits when the neighborhood surrounding its creative buzz was rusted and vacant, the street leading to it empty. Then developers discovered there was money to be made and Ironton became a distillery.
Hermes in RiNo
Upscale restaurants, boutique hotels, and hipster shops have risen from factory ashes. Curious, I went to a Sunday afternoon flea market being staged in one of RiNo’s cavernous old brick buildings. Dozens of vintage clothing booths (and by vintage they mean 70s – 90s) few among them or the customers as vintage as me. Coffee and alcohol bars booming, people squeezing their way through the crowd with lattes, microbrew beer and long-stemmed wine, looking at 80s jean jackets in great condition. Strollers and babies and dogs. Curtis Park’s low-income housing is blocks away. I see none who look like those residents among these shoppers. Hermes, primarily a messenger god, is often the bearer of bad tidings.
Your writing prompt, should you choose to accept it: Describe a place you once knew that is no longer the same, whether for good or bad, physical or in your mind.
Sad… for me to read, at least. But that’s because I am unmistakably old. Where the people I hung out with in my twenties were “artsy” but church mouse poor, living in houses and spaces that nobody else would touch, earning enough money to pay the rent, buy some cheap wine, some grass from time-to-time, buying our clothes from Goodwill, living on the edge — many of today’s young, self-styled “hipsters” are far, far different. Somehow they manage to climb the capitalist/consumerist ladder and have babies, dogs and even a house when really making it. We know many of the young who aren’t able to get to that level; getting by in a shared apartment and working long hours at “white-collar” jobs. So I always have to remind myself that it’s not everybody. It’s just weird seeing an entirely new world occupying the same space as I am, but of which I will never be a part. A world where they take their babies and dogs to brewpubs, ride electric scooters and bicycles everywhere, still concern themselves with how their hair looks, find the money to go to music shows every weekend (maybe not EVERY weekend), constantly occupy themselves with what’s on the other end of their phone screens, their laptops, and on and on. It’s strange to see such a “brave new world that has such people in it.” That’s all I’m saying, it’s just strange to get to this end of the ribbon of life. It’s okay though. I’m okay with it. Once an outsider, always an outsider.
On the road west of Eldora the pavement ends, becomes narrow winding dirt with a stream to cross. Friday after work, my dad would come home, gather the fishing gear, put it and me in the car and drive to a parking spot as far up that rough track as we could get in his beat up ’49 Chevy coupe. We’d sleep under the stars—he’d sleep while I spent hours enthralled by the starlit sky. Early in the morning we’d hike to Lost Lake. We seldom saw anyone else. Now the approach road edge is packed with parked vehicles, never mind the closer spots, and even in mid-week the trail is busy. Though I didn’t have the words as a boy, those trips with dad taught me the beauty, the necessity of solitude in nature, so much more difficult to find now.
Abnoba is a Celtic goddess associated with forests and rivers, I learned today. Proud of my Scot-Irish roots, I will imagine her casting her gaze over a wee bit of her domain in the southernmost tip of the Appalachian Mountains, Red Mountain, Beinn Dearg to the ancient Scots, upon whose southern crest my childhood home sat, at 1540 Valley View Drive, Birmingham, Alabama. This little glen was threaded by Valley Avenue, whose western terminus in the 1950s was at its intersection with the western terminus of Valley View Drive. Beyond that intersection, Valley Avenue suddenly shriveled into a single unpaved lane, two tire tracks of dusty, gravelly red clay, a weedy median, and to either side, a grassy expanse of variable width that ran westward for several blocks, serving as the ancestral path for the extension of Valley Avenue all the way westward to Green Springs Highway in the late 1960s, and later even beyond. To either side of this dirt track was a knee high prairie filled with broom sedges, low shrubs, and patches of tangled thorny blackberry vines. It was a domain for limited unsupervised-by-parents exploration for the boys of the neighborhood in their late elementary school and early junior high years. In fact, Homewood Junior High, now Homewood Middle School on the current map, formed the unofficial terminus for safe exploration of this “wild” land. I was in an age cohort with three other neighbor boys, Ted Huck, Mike Morse, and Bill Cobb. Some set of us, or as singlets, we took many forays into this “terra incognita,” on foot or on bicycle along the dirt track. Sometimes, we returned to the neighborhood by retracing our steps. Less frequently, we might walk or ride to the rear of Homewood Junior High, and then, having reached pavement and civilization, circle briefly south, then east, and back north until we reached our neighborhood via the thoroughfare that was Claremont Avenue. I do not recall us playing “Army” in this grassland expanse, though when younger we had played “Army” with great frequency in the much smaller, two lot sized, grassy field that sat adjacent, east and south of Ted’s house at the eastern intersection of Valley View Drive and Valley Avenue. Bike riding, exploration, blackberry picking, insect collecting, reptile hunting, kite flying, these were the uses we made of that “terra incognita” in ancient times. As the 1960s came to an end, the inevitable arrival of land developers transformed this area into new streets, new suburban neighborhoods, new apartment buildings, and new small businesses. I dream nostalgically of that idyllic past. I pity the boys who live in those neighborhoods today. There is no “terra incognita” for them to wander, only asphalt pavements and carefully manicured, often fenced, yards. Beinn Dearg, done that! Abnoba is banished. The Golden Age of Boyhood is no more.
Well, Jim, it looks like I didn’t comment on your wonderful reply to Tidbit #8, as we were trying to recall in our conversation yesterday. I would say the golden age of childhood is no more, have my own memories of long bike rides into the woods and swampy regions of Florida, being gone for hours without anyone worrying about it. And reptile hunting was a prime activity in Florida. I seldom took one of those bike rides without encountering a snake or two.
I was going into my junior year of high school the summer of ’69 and attended Denver’s big 3-day music festival at Bears Stadium earlier in the summer. Last night I watched the PBS documentary on Woodstock. Of course I’d seen the famous film of all the music, but this documentary told the background story and captured the gestalt of the experience incredibly well. Like how the whole thing almost didn’t happen, because a few weeks before the town cancelled the venue and the festival had to be moved. How most of the infrastructure, like fencing and out buildings, didn’t get built because of time. How an expected crowd of 50, 000 turned into almost 400,000. How a republican, conservative farmer connected with hippie kids from all over the world and praised them for coming together so peacefully on his land. How the town came up with donated eats when the food ran out the second day. How we somehow knew in those times that a kid with long hair and a beard was one of us, not a terrorist with an automatic assault weapon.
The faces captured in that film really tell the whole story of a pervading spirit that held an event, which might have become a a disaster, in check. Those who attended say it changed their life. A sharing of beliefs, a natural love for the folks around you, and the idea of common humanity. It was a utopian idea that a shared respect for each other could make magic things happen. I grieve that an event like Woodstock could never happen today. I wonder how many of those fresh faced kids still hold the values they had then. I pray they will come out of hiding and vote in 2020.
Wonderfully wistful remembrance, Deb, thanks for posting it. I also saw your forwarding post of The Denverite’s job opening, but am not putting it up here. (Interested in a 3-day a week online journalism gig? Check out the Denverite.) I’m currently teaching part-time for DU’s University College grad school creative writing program and working on a manuscript of my essays on translation from my blog that will be published as a book by a New England press in 2020. With my own writing/translation projects, that’s quite enough for me at the moment.
We planted a tulip poplar late last summer, planning for the day when the forty-year-old magnolia inevitably relinquishes its mission as focal point of our back yard. The poplar will grow fast in the last sunny spot we had to offer it. Thirty years ago, when I first sunk a spade into the baked clay of this narrow plot, only the magnolia flourished here. My vegetable bed moved from the north line of fence to the south, then a new two-story garage colonized the back third of the yard, its west wall only a few feet from the trunk of the magnolia. This season, with neighbor trees gaining maturity, the summer sun lands here just long enough to grow a single tomato plant. Young men resembling toddlers I once knew tromp outside, take a seat in the shade, and trade songs from their phones through the air to a Bluetooth speaker.
How we can stay in one place and watch the world transform around us: the growth and dying of trees alone, not to mention those young men reminding you of the children they once were. Bravo.
Spokane, WA
Kendall Yards was once a railroad yard across the river from downtown. It was closed and cleaned and slated for high-priced, high-rise housing. Undoubtedly gated to keep the riffraff out. But a recession arrived, the developer went bankrupt, and the land was sold to a visionary. His plan was a community that was affordable, with townhomes, apartments, and single family homes — all built using green construction. Community gardens would dot the acres. A biking/walking trail ran adjacent, overlooking the river gorge. Restaurants, shops, coffee bars, and a natural grocery would be added. And a park and playground would complete the setting.
This developer’s vision has come to pass. It is a wonderful mix of all ages and ethnicities mixing in a social setting which encourages interaction. People visit from throughout the nation.
Hermes has brought good tidings to the Northwest. And I tip my hat to him as I sip iced tea, with my dogs by my side, and chat with visitors who are visiting Kendall Yards.
Denise, so encouraging to hear a story like this, about your home, and remember that such good things are happening, though we seldom hear about them.