Snow's almost all melted now

Eight days have passed since my last post. We have been really busy getting ready for and taking a little 3-day vacation. It required a lot of up-front planning at work for the troops to get along without me. To be sure, I am expendable, but they are used to me doing all the "sweeping" out in front of their industrial curling stone.

On the evening of that last post it was a wonderful specimen of Spring in the Midwest--the metaphorical Jennifer Aniston of weather. Well you can kiss that all goodbye. In this past week Jennifer moved out and the metaphorical Rosie O'Donnell moved in. Tonight it was a balmy 90 degrees, with the humidity hovering around a similar number. There was no breeze to cool the brow or give battle to the various insects that attempted to call me home. Today is the first day of summer; the solstice, the longest day of the year. Ahead of us lie three months of the heat we longed for all winter. It's here, fans.

Really, we all love summer. On all but the hottest, most humid days outdoor activity beckons. The fortunate ones among us can take a week or two and visit another part of the country or the world. We can charcoal a steak, a slab of ribs or a salmon fillet without concern for the cold. You can throw on shorts and a T-shirt and go anywhere except church or your arraignment. Baseball is king, but the NFL opens for business at the end of July giving hope of crisp fall days ahead.

Starting tomorrow the days will grow shorter. Imperceptibly at first but by August the change will be noted. By the middle of September it will be striking. And watch out--September will be closing on us very shortly causing us to wonder where the summer went.

Good Evening

Amazingly at 9:30 this evening we have the windows open, the attic fan rumbling softly in the hallway and are totally comfortable.

It is a pleasant sixty-six degrees out, partly cloudy and if weather like this endured here throughout the entire summer, Kansas City would be as overcrowded and angst-ridden as Orlando or San Francisco. The humidity is seventy-three per cent which is high for normal comfort but at this temperature it makes a soft late-Spring evening. But the weather won't stay like this for the coming season. Soon it will be a hot, sticky mess. The sky will be colorless, the inhabitants irritable and the nights a festival of greenbugs swarming around the street lights.

Normally June in this outpost on the prairie has worn on far enough that heat has begun to peak in the 90's and humidity builds about that high. About every third or fourth day the atmosphere can tolerate itself no longer and a cold front pushes through creating a thunderstorm which clears the air for a day. Then the cycle starts all over again but the cold fronts grow weaker as the summer takes over, and they grow further apart. Soon there are none, only the heat.

But tonight we will sleep well in the strange coolness. It is an April evening in the middle of June. The heat is forecasted to return but for one night it has to wait and the attic fan runs. I hope that is OK with Al Gore.

Westbound and down

Hallet's Peak and Flattop Mountain, as seen from Estes Park.

It's getting close.

In just a month or so we will pack up the car, and head west. Just for a week, mind you, but this vacation is a sacred ritual on a par with Christmas Eve Midnight Mass at the Vatican, or the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It is eight days reserved for all of our family traditions and quirks to manifest themselves, to rule and then quickly drop out of sight for another year.

The destination is, of course, is Colorado. Estes Park. A cool, pleasant little tourist town nestled in the lush mountain valley first settled by Joel Estes in 1859. The summer weather is clear and warm during the day, usually tempered by a cooling afternoon thundershower. Evenings are often chilly enough for a sweatshirt or jacket. And overnight it gets just plain cold. The cold greets you in the mornings, finally losing its grip to the nine o'clock sun. That's what we go for: the cooler, dryer mountain air. It's like the whole town is air-conditioned in the middle of summer, a break from the hot, humid flatlands here in western Missouri.

We are like football coaches with their pregame rituals. There are simply things we must do. We stop at the same motel in Hays on the first day out. We go to the Wal-Mart next to it to buy the items we inevitably forget. We go even if we remembered everything, just because. Ask a coach.

The first night in Estes Park is always pizza night. It goes back 30 years to our first voyages to Woodland Park. Always arriving tired after a 55-mph journey from Kansas City we would order a pizza instead of cooking our own food. President Reagan got the speed restriction repealed out from under the big-government crowd which shortened the trip, but the pizza tradition stuck.

Everyone likes a trip to Bear Lake

Once there we have some non-negotiable things that are on the books each year: Saturday afternoon mass at the beautiful stone and timber church; a trip to Bear Lake, of which faithful readers already know; breakfast out at the 'Egg and I' restaurant (and maybe another at the Big Horn, at the other end of town; the girls' shopping trip to Longmont, Loveland or anywhere a Ross Family Store has rooted; mini-golf at Tiny Town; a root beer float with real ice cream at the A & W; and lunch on the last day at Penelope's, the best burgers in Larimer County.



Another end-of-the-trip routine is the annual Tiny Town Invitational, a family mini-golf contest with a traveling trophy. Last year, I beat out Brett and Katie by one stroke with an all-time personal best of 38. The trophy, a child's pennant emblazoned with "Estes Park" sits proudly on my desk, waiting to be handed off to the next winner in July.

The torch is passed at the '08 TTI.

Also on the last day or two there is shopping to be done. A few presents to tote home to friends; fudge, T-shirts, ear-rings, jelly, the usual suspects. Katie always needs a T-shirt, sweatshirt and a polo to get her through the next few months.

In between arriving and leaving there is much swimming, sunning, walking by the Big Thompson River, and enjoying the magnificent scenery. Every morning is a flawless gem. The afternoons are pleasantly warm, but the breeze whispers through the tall pine trees suggesting a gathering storm. It's possible to enjoy some quiet time reading or napping. And you have to practice for the TTI.

All too soon it's over. We have to pack up the car, get up before sunrise and head east. Back down into the heat, and featureless flatlands. Back to the daily grind of work, and waiting for the weekend. But for a few days it is great to escape the unforgiving prairie summer and enjoy being together in a friendly setting. There is still one more tradition to go--lunch on the way home at the truck stop in Colby. I know, lunch at a truck stop doesn't hold much for most people, but these are the vacations of the insignificant.

The Little Ranger

Santa Fe M-119







A few months ago I posted a picture of an old Santa Fe doodlebug on display in the Travel Town museum in Los Angeles. It was a long shot, not very clear and it was copyrighted -- Ahhh! -- so once I realized that it had to come off. Unfortunately de-posting the photo also de-posted the post itself. Still, I wanted to leave a post that had the sense of what 'Little Ranger' was.

So here is a better snapshot of a Santa Fe motorcar, which as you can see, also has a 'trailer' car attached behind it for added capacity. Doodlebugs were usually one-car affairs with a cab for the engineer, fireman and brakemen; a compartment for baggage and light freight; and the rear half of the conveyance was a passenger compartment. A Doodlebug could pull a trailer for seating additional passengers when needed, and two or three freight cars for mixed-train work mostly on the branch lines.

This was the train that called at my hometown of El Dorado, Kansas; the postwar 'Little Ranger,' trains 25 and 26, which linked Eldorado (that's the railroad spelling with no space and lower case 'd') and Augusta with the Emporia and Winfield terminals where the real Ranger--Santa Fe's mainline train between Chicago and Houston--made daily stops.

The Little Ranger rolled in the daylight, both north- and southbound, meandering from Emporia to Ellinor, Bazaar, Matfield Green, Chelsea, Eldorado, Vanora, Augusta, Douglass, Rock, and finally Winfield where folks could catch the southbound Ranger. Through this pastoral Flint Hills countryside she carried the mail, milk, Railway Express, newspapers, and the citizens of Chase and Butler counties off to Chicago and the East, or maybe Texas or California. Back then, trips like that were big events in the lives of ordinary people. Very few could afford air travel and it was much less prolific. In a place like El Dorado the arrival or departure of the Little Ranger often was an occasion for someone. The depot, a 1903 brick county-seat-plan similar to Iola's or the one still standing in Garden City, was a little beehive of activity for a few moments until the train scooted on down the track which lay square in the middle of Gordy Street.

Santa Fe M-177

The Missouri Pacific also operated a passenger train from Wichita, through El Dorado, Eureka, Yates Center, Osawatomie and into Kansas City. The Sunflower, as it was known, didn't hold the quite as fast in my heart as the Little Ranger. Santa Fe's trains were really the best in America, capturing both eye and imagination. The classic steam power they used was just ending and the beautiful red, yellow and silver passenger locomotives were famous everywhere, as were the names Chief, Super Chief and Grand Canyon Limited. Little Ranger didn't connect with them but they all rolled under the same upper-quadrant semaphore signals up on the main line. It was a pedigree thing.

Both trains lasted until 1959. After that boarding trains was done in Newton or Wichita. Santa Fe razed the old depot in 1961. The private car tracks behind it were pulled up and it was paved over for parking. The MoPac depot survives today, magnificently restored and used as a community building of some sort. MoPac, like Santa Fe, Burlington and Union Pacific, took great pride in their station buildings which were the faces of those companies to the burghers.

With two refineries, an asphalt plant and the agriculture trade, Santa Fe and MoPac carried on at El Dorado with freight commerce. Alas, today the U.P. runs only one or two short trains a week on the old MoPac line between Wichita and El Dorado. East of there, the tracks have been gone for years. The old Santa Fe track on Gordy Street, the original 1872 branch from the main line at Florence, has been paved over. Santa Fe operates its busy transcontinental freight line around the east side of the city which joins the old line to Winfield just south of town.

Life goes on. But just for those of us from 'Eldorado' and Kansas who lived by train whistles, and waited at crossings as the trains that settled and built this part of the country rolled by, I pray the Little Ranger and her kind not be forgotten.