Ah, life in the hinterland

[aztecan]

Life in a rural area has its perks 

http://www.daily-times.com/ci_12087238?source=most_viewed

This is about eight miles south of where I live.

HUGS,

Mark

[Robert]

mark.

I'm reading Farewill to Ormes.  It's an autobiography my English professor from CC wrote.  He writes about teaching English in Raton for 3 years just as the depression hit.  Then his next gig occured in Segundo, a coal camp just went of Trinidad, CO. where is also coached the girls basketball team.  Pumas (mountain lions) galore, he writes.

He spent most of his time climbing and hiking solo in the Spanish Peaks.

robt

[Robert]

hi mark.

I've been doing some more reading this morning and have to add this item from the book about life in small towns that I just mentioned.  It's a very revealing nugget that once again proves that old addage of the more things change the more they stay the same, small town or not.

In the mid 20's, after his graduation from college, my professor took a job in Hanover, Colorado, east of Colorado Springs, on the  old Pueblo Road and few miles beyond Fountain.  It was so small and such a poor community that there wasn't "...enough money in the community to buy two pounds of sugar the same day."

He (Professor Ormes) met the father of one of his students.

"He's a lazy boy amine.  You whupim if he don't learn.  YOu whupim till he pay 'tention to you and learns."

One day the words were still in his mind.  Whip him. Skin him alive.  "Mervin, you will step outside and wait in front of the door.  I will attend to you when school is dismissed."

"Ye, sir"  Mervin spoke with alacrity.  He as almost eager, as though they were to be partners.

...

"Mervin, you will go out and brink in a stick from near the toilet." 

He waited.  The boy was completely under his control.  An odd sense of power unfamiliar to him, surged in his veins.

"Are you going to whip me?"

"I'm going to flog you.  Step over to the bed and face the wall.  Take down your trousers."

The boy complied.

"Knell down and lean over the bed."

(Professor Ormes) ...was aware of a stiffening, pleasurable, in his own trousers.  The beginning of an erection.  He had the stick in his hand and was looking down at the bare legs of the boy when he got control of himself.

"Now get up and pull your pants up....."

The boy looed at him with a kind of reverence as he left.

He (Professor Ormes) sank to his knees and threw his bulk into the boy's print on the bed.  "Oh God!"  The words were a supplication.

He could not wallow in forgiveness....He could hardly be thankful that he had not quite done anything.  Every crime was in it.  Rape, brutality.  He thrashed at the very comfort of the bed.  The (fathers's) words  he had listened to and soaked up were not the cause.  The cause was in himself.  He wished it had a form he could cut out with a knife  He could not trust himself.

He had been crazy.  Utterly mad.  Perhaps we are all mad, he thought.  But that wasn't true.  He couldn't imagine anyone he knew, anyone decent, being sucked into this state, this abyss under the world.  It was he alone who stood on the brink.

Mark...what strikes me about this passage is just how universal this is over time and distance and space.  Life is a small town.  And I'm equally in awe of the man for being so open about his life.  He wrote this biography in 1984, when he was 79 years old.

robt.