“They call me Baby Driver
And once upon a pair of wheels
I hit the road and I’m gone
What’s my number?
I wonder how your engines feel”

-Baby Driver (Paul Simon)

    Call me Baby Boomer Rubber Tramp. I should be making preparations, getting my pairs of wheels ready to hit the road. But I’m not gone, or even going. Not this year, I guess. What’s my number? This year is 2020, and nothing appears right. All seems more than a little out of focus, as if we’ve become collectively drunk. So much for perfect vision, or whatever 20/20 used to mean. But none of that matters anymore…

   So, instead, I’m preparing to “hunker down” for the winter, which will be fast approaching – I can only hope. I sit solitary and content in the high timber of the Colorado Rockies, 12 miles below the Wyoming border, where we have wildfire, as has much of the rest of the state – and most of the West – for the past couple of months. Unprecedented. A lot of things are being described as “unprecedented” it seems; I don’t think that’s ever happened before…

   But I’m not hunkering down because of the fire. Au contraire! I have my Ford F-250 Super Duty pickup truck loaded for evacuation, and my 1978 vintage “Free Spirit” camper trailer ready to roll in case we all need to haul ass off this mountain, if that damn fire runs over a couple ridges and comes barreling down onto the Village of Red Feather Lakes. Let’s hope it doesn’t.

   Nah, I’m hunkered down because I can’t go to New Mexico for the winter and bask in the Land of Enchantment as has been my plan these past few years. I wish I could. I really do. I enjoyed it immensely and wrote about it in a previous blog called the Rocky Mountain Rubber Tramp. The adventure was charactered by vehicles, a camper, and a dog: a Nissan Pathfinder (“The Bronze Bomber” aka “BroBo”); the aforementioned ¾ ton Ford pickup truck (“The Beast”) and 19’ trailer (“Cochise”) and, most importantly, my 12-year-old short-haired collie/shepherd-mix canine companion, rescued from the Humane Society in Boulder (where dogs are always rescued and never harmed) named Rambeaux. My son named her. We compromised on the spelling. But…that’s another story…

   I’m not sure why I feel the compulsion to name the vehicles I own, but I always have, especially pickup trucks. I’ve had “Sweetness”; “Brown Sugar”; “Babe the Big Blue Ox”; and “Bubba,” and I truly loved them all. I couldn’t pick a favorite. It just wouldn’t be right. They were family. Giving them names seemed to recognize that. Everything has a name. Helen Keller immortalized that phrase as a child growing up, while she became deaf and blind from an incurable illness. She flourished in a world she could not hear or see, and became a symbol of perseverance, of the human spirit overcoming adversity, of facing the sunlight and seeing no shadow.

   If she were alive today, we would see her wondrous smile, and anyone who tried to pigeonhole her into an algorithmic pile of political ideology or social issue stance would immediately be snatched by the almighty hand of infinite justice and cast into eternal conflagration, screaming in horror until their eyeballs exploded. (Well, maybe that wouldn’t actually happen, but it’s a nice thought.) However, I digress…

   I’m hunkered down and not preparing for Rubber Tramping in my camper to New Mexico because all the state park campgrounds there are closed due to the latest pandemic – the one from a laboratory in another country called COVID, and not from the laboratories in this country called OPIOID. Hard to keep up with all the pandemics these days, but I’m sure we’ll all just get used to it.  That’s the “New Normal”. Everything has a name.

   New Mexico got tired of out-of-staters flocking into their campgrounds and other naturally enchanting destinations, so the governor issued an executive order stating that anyone not from New Mexico had to self-quarantine for 14 days after entering the state, and any New Mexicans leaving the state had to do the same on their return. The guv got a little ticked when Texans rolled in big for the Fourth of July weekend and didn’t practice safe social distancing and appropriate mask wearing, and cases of the virus began to spike. Dang Texans. Isn’t it enough that they snagged hella water rights to the Rio Grande and spell chile with two “i”s? Everything has a name, alright: Pinche Tejanos!

   Quarantine. I almost forgot what that meant, because it wasn’t a word used much before this latest virus, the present bug. It conjured up a memory from my youth – as many things do when you’re hunkered down. I remember when my cousin had to quarantine at my grandmother’s house when we were kids because he had the mumps. The family was worried that he could give the sickness to his three brothers and sister, so he stayed at our grandparent’s place because they were old and old people weren’t as prone to getting the mumps, I guess. I was able to visit him because I’d already had the mumps which meant I couldn’t get them again. Good ol immune system. I hope it still works in humans. Comes in handy.

   I remember it as my grandmother’s place because she was always there, baking something in the kitchen or doing laundry with one of those old-time roller machines and wash basins in the basement. My grandfather was usually at the family cheese factory during the day or nipping around in his car. That’s how things worked back in those days. Give it a name…

   The strongest recollection of that time was of my cousin and me dismantling an old Wurlitzer jukebox from the 1930s that had been sitting inoperable and idle in the laundry room section of the basement for as long as I can remember. I’m sure it blasted out the hits from post-Prohibition through the Depression to the end of the Second World War, and still had 78 rpm records that were a bit smaller than the 33s of my youth and much more brittle, being made largely of shellac and not vinyl. I didn’t recognize any of the band’s names, and when we put them on the turntable of my grandparent’s console stereo, they just spun fast and sounded scratchy. No wonder my grandmother wanted us to get rid of it. She was a temperate, fundamentally devout woman who probably had less than favorable memories of the debauchery that took place in the saloon section of the basement when that jukebox was jumping. I could only imagine – and wish that I had been there…

   My greatest remembrance of my grandmother now is of her hands. I see them as I type this, without closing my eyes: the nails close cut, never painted or polished; knuckles like knots in a tree branch, strong and purposeful; a simple wedding band as the only jewelry, probably never removed since it took it’s place; liver spots and veins; clenched as if in prayer.

   Grandma’s Hands. That was a song written by Bill Withers and covered by others, including Gladys Knight (sans the Pips). The version that I remember best is from Gil Scott Heron, because I had his album, Reflections, and that was my favorite song.

“Grandma’s hands clapped to church on Sunday mornings…

Grandma’s hands used to issue out a warning…

Grandma’s hands, they keep on calling to me…

But I don’t have grandma anymore.

When I get to heaven I’ll look for grandma’s hands.”

   I think of how many loaves of bread my grandma’s hands kneaded, how many batches of Christmas cookies they baked, how many chickens they plucked, weeds pulled, flowers planted and cared for, quilts made, dishes washed, laundry folded, pickles, beets and other garden harvest canned or frozen, lamps lit, fires started and roasts drawn from the oven. I think of her getting a little stern with me when I was slow to clean some fish I’d caught ice fishing while staying with her when my folks were on a rare trip out of town. She grabbed the biggest northern and started scaling it without even gutting it until I felt shame and took over. “Gosh all Friday!” she said as she went back up the stairs. Gosh all Friday, indeed.

   I told my grandma when I was a boy, if I ever had a daughter when I grew up, I would name her (my daughter) after her (my grandmother), and I did. Everything has a name, and Amanda is shared from my memory to my progeny. It means “worthy of love.” I think it’s a beautiful name, and it has a lot of options for nicknames, which I’ll leave to your imagination or acquaintances. I have my own, thanks.

   Everything’s on hold, it seems, waiting for this bug to get squashed before the next one arrives. I guess being quarantined and hunkering down could be a lot worse, especially if we didn’t have wonderful memories, a vivid imagination, and acquaintances we can recollect and call to our attention by simply closing our eyes and shutting out all the white noise of these dysfunctional, digital times.

   Fires and other natural disasters, viruses and other bugs, this party or that party of political stripe and color, blah or blahblahblah – none of that really seems to matter when you can shut out the din, turn within and think of something uniquely your own. Give it a name.

   Maybe Helen Keller wasn’t really handicapped. Maybe she was given a gift. I would have liked to have seen her hands, and held them in my own.