Never Forget

At Schneider Park and the Saturn Statue, south of a kink in the Animas River, a kettle of vultures rises and falls, aloft and alive in the thermals.

Those vultures, they’re rising and falling in interlocking clockwise and counterclockwise spiral yaws against the infinite infantry blue sky.

The vultures are on patrol over the Spirit Trail, Tech Cutoff Trail and Ella Vita Trailheads around the Greenmount Cemetery; the blue of the sky is broken by the fat grey and white rain clouds and olive dun peaks around Durango, Colorado.

I think about Orem, Thursday night.

Yeah, that applies. Nature can teach you things. Nature can remind you of things.

From my Holiday Inn Express Balcony, I can hear the Animas River gurgling as I lift a canister of Boost Oxygen to my mouth to inhale the 95% Aviator’s Breathing Oxygen; it is 10 AM on September 12, 2026 and I need to file a dispatch, maybe this will help.

I’d gotten it at the Walgreens across the road an hour earlier, impulse buy, you understand—but I am on my way to the Jicarilla Apache Nation for Go Jii Ya, a fall harvest festival out at Stone Lake I’m blessed enough to be a guest for, that place is at altitude.

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