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a quarterly print supplement : fall 2013
M AT T E R H O R N questions, curiosities, & resources : fort collins, colorado
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The Life of a
Train Hopper 4
r i d i n g the r a ils Loses its Allure page
The Life of a Train Hopper: Story and photographs by Emily Clingman
Locomotive Life Loses
its
A ll u r e
S
ay the word train in Fort Collins, and you’re likely to hear some grumbles about how annoying the trains are—always holding up traffic or waking people up at 4:00 a.m. But have you ever wondered what’s on those trains barreling through town at night…or who? This is the story about a bona fide train hopper—a local, turned nomad, whose moniker is D-Rags. D-Rags was 17 when he first jumped the rails. Home life wasn’t that great. High school wasn’t his thing. He was living out of his car. Some friends of his friends came to town that summer and threw out the idea of hopping a train to New Mexico. D-Rags, having nothing else to do and an itching for deviance, shrugged and tagged along. (continued on page 4)
Made of earth and Fire page 10
wolverine farm expansion page 3
owls of colorado page 8
The FOG OF NIGHT page 14
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publisher’s Note Break out your headlamps and lanterns, this is the Night issue—that other half of the day, the time when some of us sleep and dream, some of us work, some of us party down. Creatures come out at night; books get read and movies get watched; people go to bed together. The world is just the same at night, only we can’t see it that way. If we were owls, we would see a lot more than we do with our human eyes. In these pages most of the news is gone; what remains are cultural signposts of where we are at, here in Fort Collins, with all our human follies and good intentions and exploratory natures. We’re spelunking the world from the ground up, our necks will give way before our curiosity does. As always, we thank you for extending your attention span, and we applaud your efforts to dig deeper where you—where we all—live. Is there any darker night than the earth under our feet? Unlike the digital version of Matterhorn available online, this newspaper is ready to burn. We heartily recommend heading off into the hills, reading this through till the end, and then turning it into a nice warm campfire to light up your night.
wolverine farm publishing f o rt c o l l i n s , c o lo r a d o
:
l i t e r at u r e w i t h t e e t h
managing editor
publisher/designer
Molly McCowan
Todd Simmons
editor-at-large Charles J. Malone
board of directors
copy editor
Meg Schiel contributors
Jenna Allen Evan Brengle Emily Clingman Elizabeth Escobar Greg Halac Bill Hepp Sarah Justus Beth Kopp Casey Metz Amy Palmer Steve Sadam Matthew Sage Robert D. Stefanek est.
2003 : A 501( c )3
Heather Manier Bryan Simpson Nate Turner Kathleen Willard Wolverine Farm Publishing a 501(c)3 non-profit organization based in Fort Collins, CO. We publish books, this community newspaper, and collaborate with other non-profits, businesses, and people toward a more mindful engagement with the world. Donations accepted online or by mail to: Wolverine Farm Publishing PO BOX 814 Fort Collins, CO 80522 n o n - p ro f i t o rg a n i z at i o n
Wo l v e r i n e Fa r m P u b l i s h i n g ’ s
MATTERHORN A Quarterly Print Supplement # 11 Fall 2013
NIGHT special thanks Firefighters, fire weed, fire researchers, carpenters, the fire in our bellies, and the fire shining down on us, everyday. The Fell Types used in this newspaper were digitally reproduced by Igino Marini (www.iginomarini.com). Our cover is a delightful mix of real and fake headlines from various sources. Masthead photographs © Fort Collins Archives. Everything herein © 2013 Wolverine Farm Publishing. All rights held by the individual authors and artists unless otherwise noted. All photographs © Wolverine Farm Publishing, or © by the company, organization, or individual in question, or used freely from the public domain. Send monetary donations, comments, questions, story pitches, books and/or music to review, agricultural tools to try out, bicycles to ride, etc., to: Wolverine Farm Publishing, PO BOX 814, Fort Collins, CO 80522 Especially seeking letters to the editor. Please send in by October 31st, 2013. Letters 1-5 will be published and rewarded. For more information, please visit: www.wolverinefarm.org. front matter
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(continued from cover)
That was about 12 years ago. Today, we’re sitting on the patio of Avogadro’s Number. D-Rags is settling into his memory while taking a drag off his cigarette and staring into his beer. “We got a ride [from Fort Collins] to the Springs,” he says. “It’s a bigger yard there.” They found a break in the yard’s fence and partied that night until they passed out under a bridge. Though he and his buddies didn’t hear it happen, a man was killed near them while they were sleeping that night. “He got shot or stabbed or something,” D-Rags says. “I guess it happens all the time.” He pauses for a minute, then tells me how he first hopped a train. “You want to hop out in the yard. That’s called the jungle,” he explains. “You ask other bums where the trains are going and you gotta watch out for Bulls,” referring to the yard police. His face lights up. His grin comes back. “You just get on a gondola,” he continues. “It’s like a box car but with no doors. We fell asleep—which you shouldn’t do.” He laughs. “We wound up in Pueblo’s yard.” They jumped out in Pueblo and ate at Carl’s Jr. They bought batteries from Family Dollar for the radio. Back at the yard, they sat on a hill and waited for the train. “It was a full coal train,” he says. “It was going pretty fast; wasn’t quite in the yard. Trying to climb the ladder with a huge pack was super shady.” D-Rags hopped over the joints through the cars to get to his friend nine cars away. “The joints jerk and go down,” he says, then, shudders. “We had wet rags on our faces to keep the coal dust out.” They rode into Texas. It took a day and a half. They got off in a small town in the middle of the night. They went to an all-night diner and washed the soot off their bodies, which were black from the coal. They fell asleep in a field and hitchhiked to Amarillo the next day, then to Clovis, Texas, where D-Rags spent a few weeks with his friend’s family. They stayed a few weeks in Clovis, got really drunk, watched some punk shows and ate a lot. Ready to resume their journey, D-Rags and his buddy headed to Albuquerque. When they arrived, they found dogs and razor wires for miles and miles. It was really awful, he recalls, then mumbles something about bums and crack heads and having to carry a jimmy stick—a hollowed out pool cue with a steel bar shoved inside—for protec-
tion. They quickly decided to hitchhike out of Albuquerque, and headed for Flagstaff, Arizona. While sleeping under an overpass, a family driving by in a motor home woke them up. “They gave us all kinds of groceries and twenty bucks,” DRags says, then, laughs. “But they didn’t want to give us a ride.” They eventually caught a ride from a Mexican trucker who didn’t speak English but offered D-Rags a beer. “He was cool,” D-Rags says. He thinks about Flagstaff for a minute and says, “It was nice, kind of like Fort Collins.” Sitting with D-Rags more than a decade later, it’s clear that thinking and talking about train hopping are similar to train hopping itself—kind of erratic, impromptu, and with lots of sidetracks. After that first ride, D-Rags rode trains every summer. “[Riding] a train is like riding in a big dinosaur,” he explains, taking another drag off his cigarette. “You get butterflies about it the night before, but once you get on, it’s not that bad.” In fact, the train ride itself is kind of boring according to D-Rags. Sometimes even miserable. It’s not really all that crazy, he says, just a lot of sitting. “You read a lot and bring a ton of water because it’s hot in the sun all day. If it rains or is cold, that’s even worse.” It’s what happens between the train rides that bring back the most memories for D-R, and that characterize the culture of ardent train hoppers in America. For one, train hopping is absolutely illegal. (Don’t try this at home folks.) “Bulls can shoot you,” D-Rags says with a nervous chuckle. “The FTRA have been in shootouts with the Bulls.” The Freight Train Riders of America is a train gang that roams about the country in freight cars. They are known to be violent, linked to hate groups, and have distaste for occasional or seasonal joy riders, as members of the FTRA are usually “lifers”—they ride until they die. Many of them are convicts on the lamb. They’ve been described as the Hell’s Angels of the railways. D-Rags looks up to the sky and mutters, “Scumbags…murderers.” Nights in the jungle are disturbing, at best. Train yards, especially in
matterhorn Fall 2013
big cities, are littered with communes of homeless people and drug addicts. “Once I was hanging out in this shanty town in East L.A.,” D-Rags says. “[It was a] crack park; everyone was smoking crack. I woke up next to a huge pile of homeless people shit.” He sits up straight and talks a little faster about some of the things he’s seen or done in the yards or in the towns he stayed in between train hops— bums killing bums, sleeping on used heroin needles under a Portland, Oregon. bridge, staying in roach motels, smoking pot in a burned down school until some guy came in with a gun and they had to high-tail it out of there. Living the life of a wanderer was harsh. There’s a lot of hitchhiking. “Once we walked like nine horizons,” he says—walking for nearly 12 miles until the next ride. And a lot of waiting. “The hardest thing about squatting is doing it in the city,” he explains. “It’s the worst. It’s a pain in the ass. You’re tired, the sun’s already down. Anything will do.” He’s slept just about everywhere, even in a planter in California, where the sprinklers came on in the morning and drenched his backpack. “I’d sleep in that,” he says, pointing to an electrical box next to our chairs on Avo’s patio. As he thinks about all the things he saw and the vagrant life he was living himself, he pauses and says, “It was really shitty like 70 percent of the time, but the other 30 percent was fucking great.” “A lot of people ride trains because they are homeless, want to stay out of prison, or because of mental issues. Or they’d rather travel then be a home bum (street kid),” he says. “For some of them, it’s a family thing,” he says with nostalgia. “They’ve been riding through the generations.” D-Rags hopped trains for about seven years. Some of his favorite times were riding to California and hanging out for a while. He hung out with a cool rockabilly chick in San Diego, got a job in a skate shop, found a whole pizza on a park bench in Venice Beach, saw a lot of punk concerts, met some cool hippies in Needles, drove a BMW around Palm Springs, traded a bracelet for a pitcher of beer. “It was wild,” he smirks proudly. Eventually, D-Rags settled down. He laughs as he remembers a falling out with his cohorts and wound up calling it quits and taking the “Shamehound” (a Greyhound bus) back to Fort Collins. He never got caught. Getting off the trains was pretty easy, as the yard workers were usually pretty cool. “They won’t rat you out,” he says. “They’ll tell you where the guard towers and the yard cops are.” Security in the yards became a problem over time, however. The yards were implementing body heat sensors, especially along the border. It became riskier. It’s been about five years since he’s hopped a train. He’s 29 now, working a steady job as a bouncer at a local bar. Things are getting pretty serious with him and his lady. D-Rags is still rough around the edges, sporting piercings and a black hoodie embellished with patches of his favorite punk bands. His vagabond days are just memories now. Will he ever hop a train again?
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“I want to,” he says, as he smiles and takes a drink of his beer. “But just for a joy ride, maybe to Wyoming or something. If I ever have a kid, he’s gonna hop a train with me.”
Emily Clingman is a local news writer and photographer. Her work can be found in The Northern Colorado Business Report, The Johnstown Breeze, Scene Magazine, and other publications across the country. Read more of Emily’s writing at www. emilyclingman.com.
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th e Ow ls of
colorado Article by Molly McCowan Oil Painting by Linda Wells
T
here is something magical about making eye contact with a wild animal—seeing a creature so in its element, so in tune with its surroundings, that when it looks into your eyes your mind halts its incessant clattering, and you are left breathless. It’s a kind of Zen, these rare, silent moments with an animal so effortlessly wild. Of these startling moments of stillness, my encounters with owls are among the most memorable. Although few and far between, I have been lucky to glimpse a handful of owls in the wild, long after they had already set their wary sights on me. Most owls are nocturnal, making them difficult to spot—not to mention they have excellent camouflage and are usually nearly silent while in-flight. They are amazing creatures, and an issue of Matterhorn themed around the night seemed hollow without them. Interested in learning more about owls, or general birding in Colorado?
Take a look at these resources: www.coloradocountybirding.com www.coloradobirdingsociety.net16.net www.allaboutbirds.org
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G reat H o r n e d Ow l
Barn Owl
One of the most commonly sighted owls in Colorado (and one of the most widespread throughout North America), the Great Horned Owl can be found in many different environments, including forests, deserts, wetlands, grasslands, and even cities. These large, thick-bodied owls are fierce predators that can take down prey such as Peregrine Falcons and other owls. They also eat frogs, mice, scorpions, house cats, and—believe it or not—skunks. The oldest Great Horned Owl on record was at least 28 years old when it was discovered, in 2005 in Ohio.
Barn Owls are scattered throughout the Eastern Plains of Colorado. They can usually be found near abandoned barns, or flying at night in open spaces. If you’re driving through an open space at night and you see a flash of white wings in your headlights, it’s probably a Barn Owl at work.
B o re a l Ow l The small-bodied Boreal Owl nests in the higher elevations, most commonly in Alaska and Canada. In the lower 48 states, it is found only among the mountains of the West—particularly the Rockies. We are very lucky here in Fort Collins, as this little owl can be found in the Poudre Canyon. Visit AllAboutBirds.org to hear this owl’s distinctive, staccato call: it might sound familiar!
Flammulated Owl This small owl is common in scattered areas along the Rockies, including Pennock Pass in Larimer County. It used to be considered rare, but is now thought to be one of the most common owls of the western pine forests. If this owl detects a person, it will call softly so that it sounds farther away than it actually is. Unlike most owls, this species feeds almost primarily on insects, especially crickets, moths, and beetles.
Eastern Screech Owl Eastern Screech Owls have been found in the northeastern half of the Colorado plains. When discovered during the day, these owls will often freeze like statues, depending on their camouflage-like coloring to save them from detection. They are extremely territorial, and have been known to strike humans on the head when they think someone is too close to their nest. They can sometimes be found along Boulder Creek, in Boulder County.
Burr owing Owl Burrowing Owls can be found in the plains of Colorado during the summer. They are recognizable because of their long legs, and are usually found on the ground in open country. They are active during the day and night, and they collect animal dung to put in and around their burrows, which attracts insects that they eat. Many prairie dog “villages” on the plains—especially near Denver International Airport—have nesting Burrowing Owls.
Western Screech-Owl Until recently, this owl was considered the same species as the Eastern Screech Owl. Draw a diagonal line through the state of Colorado (from the northwest corner to the southeast corner): everything south of that line is where these owls live, primarily in the mountainous regions of Western Colorado. They can also be found in urban parks and neighborhoods.
Lo ng-eared Owl Long-eared owls can be found yearround in parts of Western Colorado, and sometimes, during the winter, in the plains of Eastern Colorado. This owl’s hoot can sometimes be heard from almost a mile away, and like some other owls, it has asymmetrical earholes (the left is higher than the right) to help it locate prey by sound.
Sho rt-eared Owl One of the most widely distributed birds around the world, the ShortEared Owl can be found year-round in the northernmost plains of Colorado. It can also sometimes be found throughout the rest of Colorado during the winter.
No rthern Sawwhet Owl A small-bodied owl, the Northern Saw-whet Owl can be found in all types of forests throughout the U.S. In Colorado, it can be found year-round in areas west of the Rockies, and it sometimes winters in areas with dense vegetation throughout the rest of the state. This owl feeds primarily on woodland mice.
No rthern PygmyOwl Northern Pygmy-Owls are found primarily throughout the foothills and into far western Colorado. They prefer open coniferous forests, mixed aspen and oak woods, or dense canyon vegetation.
Spot ted Owl Sightings of this owl are rare, but it has been found in Colorado, and it is known to nest in scattered central and southern areas of the state.
S n ow y Ow l Sometimes seen during winter migration, they prefer wide-open fields such as airport lands. They like to be on the lookout from high vantage points, so check telephone poles, tops of buildings, fence posts, etc.
Molly McCowan is the Managing Editor of Matterhorn. Comments? Questions? Reach her at molly@wolverinefarm.org. Linda Wells (“Great Horned Owl,” original oil painting for Matterhorn) is a fine artist living in Loveland, Colorado. She enjoys painting plein aire landscapes, wildlife, horses, and pet portraits at reasonable rates. Find out more at www.lindawellsart.com.
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Made of Earth & Fire Article & Photographs by Todd Simmons
M
y friend Phil Benstein moved like an exhausted ashen ghost, but with a stubborn and determined stride that said, Do not get in my way. A volunteer firefighter with the Rist Canyon Volunteer Fire Department, Phil was in the middle of fighting the High Park fire when I saw him briefly one afternoon. He was quickly checking in at work, still wearing his stained firefighter’s clothes, and was eager to get back to the front lines. It was the only time I saw him during the 21 days that the fire burnt over 89,000 acres and 259 homes. Likely caused by lightning on the night of Wednesday, June 6, the High Park fire was first reported on Saturday, June 9 and lasted until June 30, 2012. Besides fighting the fire, Phil had other connections to it as well—one, as a potential victim, as his house was set in the path of the fire deep up Davis Ranch Road in Rist Canyon, and two, as founding director of the Northern Colorado Rebuilding Network, or NCRN. Stemming from the nearby Crystal Fire in 2011, Phil saw an opportunity to build safer, stronger, and smarter homes in the wake of a disaster, and with a few other dedicated volunteers, went through the motions to establish a nonprofit organization with credibility and a simple mission: their disaster relief efforts would put people back in their homes, only this time with sustainability in mind, and in the case of forest fires, with fire-resistant building techniques and materials organized by a wide network of professionals. At that time, though, seeing Phil walk by, hardly a word spoken between us, the look in his eyes was more than enough: putting the fire out was priority number one; when that job was done we could talk about rebuilding.
competing for resources and attention in Congress. Because of that fire, it starting organizing around fire prevention—it had widespread support because a lot of people died, a lot of timber burned at a time when wood was a primary energy and building source.” Now with Smokey the Bear still lingering in our brains, we see a plume of smoke coming out of our forests, and we immediately react and try to put the fire out, or at least we watch the news and hope that someone is putting out the fire. Dr. Cheng takes it a step further: “American society has evolved in a way that, when it comes to wildland fire, we look to the Forest Service to solve the issue. They get a lot of resources and it’s a very important part of their mission, and in many ways they were extremely successful. But there is the realization that there is a need to bring fire back to restore those fireadapted ecosystems. [And]...not just accepting that fires are going to happen, but setting communities and people up to—and the quote that was told to me is this, ‘where fire becomes just another weather event.’”
Phil invites me to a NCRN-sponsored “Dirt to Drapes” event at the Bellvue Grange. I walk into a room full of people who’ve lost their homes, community members with questions, as well as professionals such as contractors, architects, and tree removal companies. I watch and listen to people describe how they’ve rebuilt, both emotionally and physically, after disaster strikes, and listen to opportunities for people to rebuild, in NCRN’s view, safer, stronger, and smarter homes. I meet Suzanne Bassinger, High Park recovery manager Phil Benstein, NCRN President & Founder for Larimer County. She agrees to answer a few Ponderosa Pine that pre-date Columbus can still be found along the Front Range. Don’t worry, I’m not going to reveal their locations, questions via email, and a few days later I ask her how we bring about our culture because surely that would mean the death of them, but I will reveal their secrets: fire to embrace and learn from this disaster, learn to live with fire. is an old friend of forests along the Front Range, though these days the friendship “Education, education, education. And that includes not only at the local veers toward the overbearing and destructive. Earlier this summer, at the suggestion level (and Larimer County has a strong FireWise program to help local residents of Phil, I sought out Dr. Tony Cheng, director of the Colorado Forest Restoration understand the impacts of living in the Wildland-Urban Interface, or WUI) but Institute at Colorado State University, to talk about how fire evolved with our also at the State Forest and US National Forest level. Our legislators need to forests, and with our habitation. Dr. Cheng launches backwards in time to the understand that policy needs to support the periodic controlled burning of forests 1300s and seamlessly works back to the present day. so we don’t see this tremendous buildup of fuels.” “Fire is a big part of how this system adapted. Wildlife adapted to it, plant She continues, “And I have learned a sobering fact: our ability to recover communities adapted to it. But now we’ve had well over a century of both human from this disaster will come down to our own community effort. We do not have inhabitation and fire suppression, which has altered the vegetation, which results in ‘someone else’ or ‘some other agency’ to bail us out of this. Yes, we are very, very fire behaving differently, because there are less native grasses, more trees and woody grateful to the funds we have received from the State of Colorado, non-profit shrubs. So the fires that we do get burn with greater intensity, in a lot of places, agencies, and the federal Emergency Watershed Protection Program money our especially in these lower elevations where we happen to live, and where our water legislators fought so hard to get for us this year. But it is not enough to address the comes from.” magnitude of the impacts of the High Park Fire. Both for the landscape, and for The suppression of wildfires can in large part be traced back to a specific fire the families affected, we all need to work together to address these very long-term that happened at the beginning of the 20th century. impacts on our landscape and on the lives of fire survivors.” “In 1910 there was a big fire called the Big Blowup in Montana and Idaho,” Dr. Cheng explained. “It was an important event for the Forest Service. The Forest Service was established in 1905, and as a new agency it was trying to find its feet, This past June I visited Phil at his house—it survived the fire with torched
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windows—but his garage and woodshop burned to the ground. Many of his neighbors lost everything. We take a walk through the woods around his house, and it’s an unsettling mix of many burnt, standing dead trees amidst whole patches of survivors. The landscape looks confused. Phil talks at length of the countless fundraisers that NCRN hosted, raising over $200,000 to give to more than 50 survivors. We visit homes that are in the middle of construction, and Phil points out new techniques that make these homes more resilient to fire. We drive to a neighbor’s land that suffered catastrophic damage—thousands of dead and scorched trees spread out in all directions, and in the middle of this charred land his neighbor is just starting to rebuild. It’s an exhausting prospect, and an emotionally unsettling one, the daily visual reminder of what happened, and what will, at some point, happen again. “You’re not just remodeling,” Phil says. “You are starting from scratch, and you have an opportunity to apply what has been an incredible recent advance in building science that doesn’t require high technology, but just due diligence and care. In the last ten years, building science has changed. A lot of little things matter. You know, it matters in construction whether you caulk the bottom sill; when you’re doing a king stud and a jack stud, it matters if you caulk between those two pieces of adjoining pieces of wood. Or if you caulk the top plate. They say a tube of caulk is worth $200 over the life of a house. Over 30 to 50 years, that tube of caulk is worth $200—what did you pay for it, three bucks, or maybe you bought the expensive stuff for eight dollars? Putting the insulation on the headers, how you do your corners, are they insulated or not, that little tiny energy hill truss—all those things added together produce homes that drain less energy from the grid, require less fossil fuels being transported around and used up, and people are happier because their quality of life is better and they have extra money to spend each month on things in our community.” He continues, “I still think how a community recovers, and the way in which they do the recovery, is just as important at the outcome. If we don’t take this opportunity as a community in Larimer County, to really get some good lessons learned, to increase our ability to recover, then the next disaster we’ll have similar outcomes. That’s why I think it’s important that people stay in touch with this, at least on some level.” On the drive down Davis Ranch Road, Phil and I stop to take down a widowmaker—a dead tree that is hanging precariously over the road, caught up in the limbs of another tree. We attach a long climbing rope to the dead tree, and tie it off to the hitch of his truck. Phil eases the truck forward, and the 50 foot tree comes crashing down to the ground. We cut the tree into manageable sections and move them to the side of the road. We drive down, down, down when Phil notices a section of the road beginning to wash away. The fire took the ground cover, and now water is taking the road. Phil pulls his truck over, and we get out and start hauling rocks to the washout. One rock at a time we shore up a diversion to the descending water. We direct the water with dead logs, do the best we can with what is at hand. This is a temporary fix, two guys hauling rocks, channeling water downhill. But it’s something, and in this case anything besides nothing is progress. Living in a land of forest and fire, of people and science and politics, we need to educate ourselves as much as possible, learn what we can from the experts, and then learn more; we need to stop and move rocks to where they are needed, and take out the widowmakers when they’re hanging over our heads. In the words of my friend Phil, a lot of little things matter.
To learn more about NCRN, go here: http://www.nocorebuilding.org
Todd Simmons is the publisher of Matterhorn.
OLD TOWN ACUPUNCTURE CLINIC 723 Cherry St. Fort Collins, CO (6 blocks west of College) Our hours are: Mon.-Fri. 8 am-6 pm Sat. 8 am-2 pm Call for an appointment: 970-482-3700
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Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O’Nan
Wild Nights!, by Joyce Carol Oates
I often imagine that my favorite literary characters reflect some small part of myself. Honestly though, I know that I am no Sal Paradise or Jean Valjean. Conversely, I could be Manny DeLeon. Manny is the protagonist of Stewart O’Nan’s novel, Last Night at the Lobster. As general manager, he leads his team through the final day of business at a Red Lobster restaurant. The higher-ups are shutting them down for “not making numbers.” This is not the sort of material most novelists would stoop to present, but despite the seemingly mundane plot, O’Nan’s book is both absorbing and moving. O’Nan avoids romanticizing the plight of the common man. Manny’s story accurately captures the tedious banality and demoralizing self-abasement symptomatic of corporate employment. When Manny silently sings “Happy Birthday” to ensure an adequate amount of hand-washing time (the manual requires it), I found myself nodding in sympathy. When Manny has to wipe a child’s barf from the mother’s shoes, and act like he’s happy to do it, I nodded again. While Manny’s character is not one many would most like to resemble, he reflects how millions of people actually are. We all need to pay for food and rent, and the jobs that allow us to do so are frequently not the ones we dream of having. Manny’s life may not be exciting, his job frequently frustrates and disappoints him, but he is making the best of it, and in that he enacts a heroism many of us actually can identify with.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I was getting into with Wild Nights! by Joyce Carol Oates. The premise—fictionalized scenarios of how several famous American authors met their ends—left me skeptical. The first two stories, about Poe and Dickinson respectively, describe the writers after their deaths. Poe is the keeper at a lighthouse off the coast of Chile. Cut off from any human interaction, he has only his dog and his own (progressively more absurd) thoughts to keep him company. Dickinson is brought back to life, or some version of it, in the form of a “RepliLuxe” (a ghostly robot doll), to keep her 21st century hosts company. This story quickly becomes intense and odd. Then, with her last few stories, Oates takes the facts and puts just enough of a spin on them to make you question what the truth really is. For instance, Oates will have you believe that Mark Twain was not much more than a corrupt old man in his later years, and that Hemingway’s suicide, though the result of a sick mind, was an abstract sort of delight. Though Oates prefaces her work with a cautionary warning that it is a work of fiction, don’t be fooled: there is much of the authors’ actual lives to be found here. It is indeed a wild ride, but one message that is ever present throughout Oates’ book is that literary art is enduring and necessary, and with this collection of stories it is something that Oates herself proves.
—Evan Brengle
—Elizabeth Escobar The Night Country, by Loren Eiseley
Joyland, by Stephen King “Hey folks welcome in, time to take a little spin where the air is rare, this is where the fun begins.” Stephen King’s newest book, Joyland, sports a cover that looks like a pulp crime fiction book straight from the 1960s. Once I opened the cover and plunged into the story, however, I was diving into a new world. Peppered with carnie lingo and just a little bit of cliché, this book is a definite page-turner. The protagonist, Devin Jones, takes you along for the ride, keeping you spinning until the murder is solved. You might just be up all night reading this. King has a talent for instilling a sense of creepiness and foreboding into the everyday. The world of the carnie folk (pre-Elitches, and other large corporatized amusement parks) is brought alive, both in the day-to-day operations and behind the scenes. What happens at night when the gates shut, when all the kiddos have had their fill of Ferris wheels and Pup-alicious? Oddly enough, it isn’t as scary as one might be led to believe, even with the ominous undertone, but there are enough elements to keep the story going. It’s a coming of age story, and the haunted funhouse adds a magical dimension of the paranormal. Fans of Stephen King will be delighted with a fun, light read injected with a dose of humanity and compassion. Dive into this light summer read and solve a murder. —Sarah Justus
The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, by Paul Bogard As someone who very much enjoys looking at the stars around Fort Collins at night—I can’t name any of them but that doesn’t stop them from being pretty—I immediately perk up when I come across any information regarding stargazing. And at first glance, I thought Paul Bogard’s The End of Night was going to primarily focus on the loss of stargazing opportunities in the modern world. While Bogard does discuss that to some extent, the secret gem of this book is Bogard’s in-depth discussion of the various ways in which the loss of true darkness affects the planet and those of us looking up at the stars. The book opens with a historical retrospective of how humans have lit the night through the last few centuries, culminating with today’s excessive light pollution that affects an incredible range of our lives: health concerns associated with shift work; ecological damage and the wider impacts of that damage; and the misconception that more light implies more safety. In the search for true darkness, Paul Bogard sheds light on an important phenomenon many of us are missing. —Amy Palmer
Loren Eiseley’s The Night Country is a loosely woven collection of essays held together by an odd mixture of themes; childhood, paleontology, literature, and the importance of letting one’s mind wander. As Eiseley labors to direct our gaze to these mysteries the book’s most fascinating subject emerges— by accident, it is Loren Eiseley himself. When The Night Country was published in 1971, Eiseley was near the end of his career as a revered archeologist and anthropologist (at the time of his death, in 1977, he had 36 honorary degrees). Despite this prestige, The Night Country reveals Eiseley to be a painfully introverted old man, a lonesome insomniac, extremely well-read across far-flung disciplines, and scolded by colleagues for his unscientific “mysticism.” The book is organized into 14 short chapters. These vignettes alternate between autobiographical stories, tributes to great thinkers, and Eiseley’s own raw observations. He is at his best when telling stories. The writing becomes less dense and florid as he tells of his work as a sort of anti-Indiana Jones—a socially awkward “bone hunter” who finds more dead ends than dead hominids. In the end The Night Country returns to Eiseley’s childhood, where it began, but in a much more personal way. It is here that Eiseley offers his most powerful insight—that the “missing link,” for which he has searched in deserts and caves, is us. We are a species in transition, imperfectly evolved but headed towards something better, provided that we cultivate, rather than “correct,” our creative fantasies. If you find yourself sleepless during some late hour, visit The Night Country and the shy but brilliant man who mapped it. He will be awake. The Night Country is Eiseley’s sprawling mind, and it is wildly interesting terrain. —Casey Metz
Book reviews by Wolverine Farm Bookstore Volunteers. If you’d like to volunteer with the Wolverine Farm, go here: www.wolverinefarm.org
WOLVERINE FARM PUBL ISH ING C O. & B OOK S T ORE WOLVERINEFARM.ORG : 970.472.4284 : 144 N. COLLEGE AVENUE FORT COLLINS, CO 80524
matterhorn Fall 2013
A Late Night
Ghost
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Walk
Article by Beth Kopp Photographs by Charles Malone
T
he word poltergeist comes from the German words poltern (noisy) and Geist (ghost). According to our tour guide, Shane, there are a lot of noisy ghosts haunting the businesses and basements of Old Town. We have just begun the Late Night Ghost Walk, and after asking our group “if anyone has an aversion to smells,” Shane and his assistant Shirley take us into the basement of Beau Jo’s. My friends and I suppress our giggles as we follow behind. Shane is wearing a top hat, carrying a duck head walking cane, and speaking in a Victorian English accent. He carries a flashlight, positioning it under his chin as he tells us all about the murders, scandals, and spirits of Old Town. Thankfully there is only slight musty odor in the basement. Fort Collins Tours offers many different guided tours to choose from. And they change them up so no two are the same. During our tour, we also go into the basements of Starry Night Café and Walrus Ice Cream Shop. The basement of Walrus is surprisingly spacious with high ceilings and a tunnel connecting two rooms. Reportedly this area was once where hearses delivered bodies to the morgue to be embalmed or cremated, although no documentation exists backing up the claim. We get rained on outside of the Museum of Art, which was once the burial ground for Camp Collins in the 1860s. The dead soldiers are supposedly still hanging around. We have an experience at the Armadillo garage involving an EMF (electromagnetic field) device. The boarded-up garage is one of the most “active” places on the tour, near the place where James Howe murdered his wife in 1888. It was later the site of several suicides and also housed seats from a gruesome plane crash in 1951. Although we didn’t actually see a ghost, the EMF detector certainly thought there was some sort of energy hovering by my left arm, causing plenty of goosebumps and hair-raising creepiness. The stories told on the tours can also be found in the book Ghosts of Fort Collins by Lori Juszak. This slim volume is packed with historical anecdotes, personal encounters, and local folklore. There are chilling stories about a library park suicide, haunted hotels, spiritual portals, murders, and hangings. One of my favorite chapters includes the legend of the Hell Tree, which admittedly has no historical basis. It’s a story locals tell about a goat farmer who hanged his farmhands, shot his wife in the bathtub, and eventually hanged himself in a big tree on the property. The haunted tree is said to either be near Laporte or on the other
side of town where the old Strauss cabin sits. Teens and college students still go out searching for it. It’s all enough to keep you awake at night. Or at the very least, fodder for some really great campfire tales. In my opinion, there’s no better way to learn about the more interesting parts of a town’s history than through its ghost stories. Lucky for us, Fort Collins is full of them. More information on the Fort Collins Ghost Tours can be found at www.hauntedfortcollins.com. Ghosts of Fort Collins, by Lori Juszak, is available at Wolverine Farm Bookstore. Beth Kopp is the Manager of Wolverine Farm Bookstore.
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matterhorn fall 2013
Fog of N i gh t : The Hidden Dangers of Permethrin Spraying Article by Robert D. Stefanek
W
hat do you really know about West Nile Virus? According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), West Nile is primarily transmitted to humans by mosquitoes. The virus can become neuroinvasive, meaning that it affects the central nervous system. If you contract such a case, you may develop meningitis, encephalitis, or paralysis, and may suffer permanent neurological effects. You have about a 10% chance of dying. For those who contract a neuroinvasive case of the virus, let alone die from it, West Nile is unarguably a horrible, life-altering event. But they are also terribly, terribly unlucky. The CDC states that less than 1% of people with West Nile will develop a neuroinvasive case. 20% of people experience flu-like symptoms that may persist for weeks or months. 70–80% have no symptoms whatsoever. So far in 2013, there have been 65 reported cases of West Nile in Larimer County, including 12 neuroinvasive cases, none of which have been fatal. In other words, given that the county’s population is over 300,000, you have a one in 25,000 chance of contracting neuroinvasive West Nile this year. If you fall into one of the groups particularly at risk for the disease—the very young, the very old, those who work outside, and those with compromised immune systems—it makes sense to take special precautions against mosquitoes. The rest of us have far better things to worry about. Motor vehicle accidents alone kill more people every year in Larimer County than West Nile Virus has killed total since it first made its way here in 2003. (There have been 12 total deaths from West Nile, only two of which have occurred since 2003.) Don’t worry about West Nile. And don’t be sure that you are saving lives by spraying for mosquitoes carrying the virus.
The Hidden Dangers of Permethrin If you listen to the City of Fort Collins, residents have little to worry from permethrin, the pesticide twice used to spray for mosquitoes in August. A visitor to the City’s FAQ page for mosquito spraying could easily take away the impression that if you close your windows and keep yourself and your pets indoors for 30–60 minutes after spraying, maybe cover your garden and wash your vegetables with soapy water, all will be well. Permethrin, after all, “degrades in sunlight and in water,” so it should all be gone by morning. The City is not alone in believing that permethrin is basically safe. Adrienne LeBailly, the director of the Larimer County Department of Health and Environment who makes recommendations on behalf of the county, says that “in general, the risks you hear are usually overstated.” She says, “Personally, I had my windows open and my whole house fan drawing outdoor air into my home both nights that spraying occurred in our neighborhood.” However, if you dig deeper into the body of scientific literature on permethrin, a murkier picture develops. Here are some things that the City doesn’t tell you about permethrin. Permethrin doesn’t just kill mosquitos. According to the National Pesticide Information Center (NPIC), permethrin “is highly toxic to honeybees, fish, and aquatic invertebrates.” While permethrin does degrade in water and sunlight, it persists in the environment for weeks or even months. As the NPIC notes, permethrin has an average half-life (the time required for half of the compound to break down in the environment) of 39.5 days in soil, and can persist for more than a year in the sediment of aquatic systems. After 20 days, as much as 60% of permethrin may remain on surfaces, even those exposed to daylight. Permethrin can stay on the leaves of plants sprayed with it for one to three
© Hilary Kukla
weeks; the edible parts of plants grown in soil treated with permethrin still had trace amounts of it after 120 days. The point is that when permethrin is sprayed, it gets everywhere—your gardens, your lawns, your soil, your car door handles, Old Town Square. And it doesn’t all magically disappear in a few hours with a little water and sun. Permethrin also isn’t harmless to humans. Permethrin is a neurotoxin that slows down neurons by interfering with sodium channels. In insects, fish, and other aquatic organisms, it causes muscle spasming, paralysis, and eventually death. In humans, it is metabolized quickly enough that it isn’t deadly except in very high doses. But it still gets in there, disrupting your nervous system. The EPA says that permethrin “exceeded the Agency’s LOC [Levels of Concern] for toddlers exposed to permethrin through food and drinking water, and through post-application exposure during high contact activities on lawns and indoor surfaces.” In other words, if your toddlers, like mine, constantly touch everything and put it in their mouths, they may be getting enough of the chemical to be considered dangerous. The EPA also decided that permethrin was “likely to be carcinogenic to humans” if it was eaten.
Focusing on the Future The primary issue with permethrin, at least for humans, isn’t what happens today; it’s what happens tomorrow. The persistence of permethrin in the environment means that we are all exposed to it at low levels for months and weeks at a time. The City has sprayed for mosquitoes several times in the past, and if its current policy stands, it will spray again in the future. Robert Peterson, a professor of Entomology at Montana State University, studies the comparative risk of © Jill Steinhauser mosquito spraying versus that of West Nile. He holds that the risks of mosquito spraying are negligible: “The benefit of the application, of the treatment, of this public health intervention, outweighs any conceivable effect to the environment,” as well as to humans, he says. “But one thing that I want to make clear is that we’re not talking about no risk.” Mike Calhoon, the City’s West Nile Virus program manager, agrees with that assessment. “This is an issue of risk management: the risk of the effects of spraying a pesticide on a community versus the risk of a West Nile Virus epidemic in a community,” he says. Calhoon believes that spraying is part of a “reasoned, well thought-out response to elevated West Nile risk in the community.” We are all exposed to carcinogenic and otherwise harmful chemicals on a daily basis. The problem for many is that if you attempt to limit your exposure by, say, growing an organic garden, the City is overriding that effort in the name of West Nile. And politically, spraying is an understandable decision for the City to make. After all, if you get West Nile today, you’ll know why. As Peterson says, “You can see those people, you can count those people experiencing a very serious disease.” Meanwhile, if you get cancer 30 years down the road, it’s hard to trace it to mosquito spraying over several decades of your life. We’ve been down the road before where a chemical once considered safe turns out to be anything but. Humans are notoriously bad at evaluating risk. Parents will drive their kids to school to avoid kidnappers, despite driving being a much riskier activity. Attach the word “virus” to a word or phrase—Human Immunodeficiency, Ebola, SARS—and it tends to inspire in people a fear that loses sight of the actual statistical chances of contracting it. With mosquito spraying, we’re trading short-term piece of mind for an unknown future. It is potentially a foolish choice, but it’s one humans will make again and again. Robert D. Stefanek lives and writes in Fort Collins, Colorado.
The
Lyric
An Informative Chart!
Watch Free Cartoons whilst enjoying a Refreshing Sangria while you snuggle up with your bros and lady bros in the rose petal bath in theater 1.
Reunite with your long lost cousin during Happy Hour, where you can drink a $10 Micropitcher of your favorite beer and wrestle with our in-house muscle man, Hans von Hans.
Later, meet up with your special lady/man friend to watch an Iranian documentary and enjoy a delectable Baked Camembert. The most spirited couples might be invited to view our collection of Nic Cage wigs in the attic.
NO SUBSTITUTIONS, LIMIT 1 PER CUSTOMER (DON’T BE “THAT GUY”). EXPIRES 12/31/13
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matterhorn fall 2013
the Night S h i ft Article by Bill Hepp
I
am a brewer. I have worked the graveyard shift on and off at a large local brewery for the past 12 years. Brewing and fermentation goes on around the clock; as long as there are sugars and healthy yeast in the same tank together, there will be some bump-a-bump bump going on. And when fermentation is complete, the yeast must be moved off the beer, and the beer must be moved and cooled down. It might get dry-hopped, it might get some juice added, it might even receive some spices. The beer is passed through a filter and force-carbonated, and then it is ready to be packaged. It is a lengthy, tedious process that utilizes heavy machinery, high pressures, big motors, compressed air, and steam. It has the potential to be messy. It can even be dangerous, especially when one is tired. Like at 4:30 a.m. There are many things that seem to only happen at night when no one is watching: Owls swoop silently through the trees, raccoons eat trash, malt transport pipes come uncoupled and hundreds of pounds of malt are sprayed all over the roof of the brewery. I shovel it into piles and wonder how many pigeons it would take to eat it all. I pick up the phone and call in backup, thanking all the stars that I have on-call support. Fall-protection gear is put on and the pipes are mended. The wheel in the sky keeps on turning. Going from the day shift to working nights is dreadful, but it does have its perks: no bosses, no coworkers, few distractions. You can sleep as late as you want, unless you have scheduled a dentist appointment for 11:30 am, at which point life becomes a prickly torture. Sleep deprivation corrodes your nerves and your senses become irate. The world is dark, so one relies more on smells, hearing, sensations of cool and warmth on your arms and face. The world at night is the same but it is not; you feel like you are walking through a dream and you are. More advanced levels of fatigue bring feelings that none of this matters, none of this is real. The stars and the moon are the only reality, the dark silhouettes of trees, the scurrying raccoons. Nature is the only reality. This man-made stuff—stop lights changing from red to green, machines, money—is not real at all. It’s a complete farce. And we are the fools, the slaves, dupped into subservience, chasing a mythical carrot. With this comes the realization that I am no better, I am not above anyone else who hurries to work in the morning full of stress and anxiety. In fact, I am worse. I am willing to whore my circadian rhythms for a few extra bucks by working nights, to the detriment of my family, friends, and my long-term health. But isn’t this the dictate of capitalism? Isn’t this what the roar of machinery commands? We must make more and more. We must trick people into consuming more. We must work longer hours for less money… Yes, the disconcerted mental tailspin into the dark abyss. This is by far the biggest, scariest hazard of working nights. It’s 12:30 p.m., the middle of the day/night. I just woke up and it is so hot. I am thirsty. The valerian I took this morning has worn off but I am still sleepy, yet I cannot sleep. Perhaps I should close the windows and turn on the portable air conditioning unit that I got on Craigslist. I guess I will, its just going to get hotter in here. Might as well start cooling down the bedroom before this evening. I get up to use the bathroom and get a drink. Walking downstairs, I relish the quiet in the house, the sleeping dog, the slight rattling of the fan placed on the floor by the screen door. It is overcast. I vacuum and mop the kitchen floor. I drink water, eat, and go back to bed. I am waiting to go to work at the same time you would usually be getting ready for bed. Stepping into my backyard as the very last light fades from the sky, I feel weird, completely out of sorts. Even though I slept all day, it wasn’t the same as normal sleep. It was hot, restless, sheet-twisting, sweaty sleep. The crickets are loud; they sound like sleigh bells ringing in slow motion. There is one single cricket just outside the back door that I can pick out from all the rest. This cricket’s chirp is slightly behind, just a little out of time. I’d bet this cricket was up all day while the other bugs were sleeping. I know how it feels, little guy. Telling myself I only have to stay awake for eight more hours, I get on my bike
and ride off into the night. Televisions glow inside living rooms. Sirens sound on College Avenue. The train groans through town, blowing its horn to wake the dead. Surely the cemetery must be empty by now. My bike lights blink. Cottonwood trees rustle like running water. Flowers bloom in darkened yards. The Old Town Library is deserted. It looks smaller without a ring of cars around it. Stopping at Schrader’s, I find the pug guy hanging out. He lives in an old Winnebago with four pugs. He has a large cushioned chair strapped to the back that looks like the captain’s chair from Star Trek. I always imagine him sitting in it, with the Winnebago doing 90 down I-25. A cardboard sign in the window of his motorhome reads: “hug a pug it will change your mood.” It makes me wonder, for good or bad? Inside Schrader’s, he is talking with some kids who are wearing a large amount of metal in their faces. He is wearing a security guard uniform, but it looks fake, like he is dressed up as a security guard for Halloween. I buy two Go Fast energy drinks and leave. Exiting the quiet night and entering the brewery, the industrial noise of pumps and motors is almost offensively loud. I am dazed by the bright lights. Still, I can discern what is happening by the sounds: wort is transferring to the kettle and heating to a boil, weak wort is draining from the lauter, the rollers on the mill are whirling into action. I walk through the empty hallways to the time clock and punch in. I hit the coffee machine. We do “shift change” in the brewing control room with the lights on. The air in the room is stagnant. I can almost smell the leftover stress from the day. I turn off the brewhouse control room lights, raise the sun shades, open the windows, open the door, and crank Dead Meadow’s first album. Cool night air drifts into the office, dispelling the day’s anxieties, wiping clean the slate. Fuzzy distorted guitars wail like an exorcism through the desktop speakers. I am so tired I don’t even know how I am going to get through the night. I remind myself that I have yet to have a night shift that doesn’t end. I keep moving, walking around, checking on the brews, weighing hops, watching the sparge water. There is no one here. There is no one even around. It’s kind of nice. The parking lot is empty. I get a terrible craving for crappy candy and I know where to find it: Skittles, Starbursts, Reese’s peanut butter cups. I group the Skittles by color and try to guess the flavors. Why not? Around 2:30 in the morning, odd, arcane subjects become fascinating. I watch all of the videos about WWI at Khanacademy.com, trying to understand what is so wrong in the Middle East. I have never been interested in that in my life. Lawrence of Arabia was gay? He was in love with a young Arab man? If my father only knew, I’d bet he wouldn’t like the film so much anymore. Today I woke up at 2:00 but I got back to sleep and slept until 5:30. But I am struggling. I do not feel rested. Once again, at 4:30 in the morning, I am shoveling black malt off the floor, sweeping and vacuuming. So what. But I am dwelling on it and can’t seem to stop. Why is work and life unfair? There are no answers. There are the hands of time, and then there is the moment at hand, and never the two shall meet. I do what I can, right now, and at 1:37 a.m., and at 4:51 a.m., because that’s all we have. I complete shift change with the morning brewer at 6:00 a.m., with the lights back on and the windows mostly closed. With crossed eyes I ride west on the Poudre trail. People emerge from the undergrowth by the river where they spent the night. They clutch packs, sodas, despair. They light their first cigarettes of the day, moving slow, squinting in the morning sun. I ride past them into the next moment. The upper reaches of the foothills are lit bright orange. The sun seems insane. I want to hide, it is so bright. But I must get some exercise, so I ride up Bingham Hill. It is a gorgeous morning: swallows darting, meadowlarks singing, clouds scudding across a sea of blue. The air smells cool and clean. The road rises to meet my wheels. I have made it through another night.
Bill Hepp lives and works in Fort Collins. Sometimes, he chases stainless steel chickens.
WELL INTO THE WEE HOURS, writing draft after draft, he struggled to create something new. Not only new, but new and amazing! How he yearned to break the bonds of mediocrity and show the world true original genius! But alas, inspiration was elusive on that long, dark night.
Then, as a sliver of bright light broke over the horizon, it came to him: play to your strengths! Do what you were born to do! Just crow, dammit. JUST CROW.
RESOURCE CLOSED SEVEN NIGHTS A WEEK
Open six days a week
M-F Sat
Acupuncture - Chinese Herbs Massage - Qigong - Diet Therapy
Hugh’s Acupuncture clinic fort collins source for acupuncture and traditional chinese medicine
970.215.7419 : www.hughsacupuncture.com
Reclaimed Building Materials 970-498-9663
10AM - 6PM 9AM - 5PM
1501 North College Ave (Just South of W. Willox)
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PLEASE ENJOY RESPONSIBLY
September 15th, 2013 8pm MdT
matterhorn fall 2013
Fall’s Night Sky: What to Look for By Greg Halac, Outreach Coordinator for the Northern Colorado Astronomical Society (NCAS)
OCTOBER 15th, 2013 8pm MDT
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november 15th, 2013 8pm MdT
matterhorn Fall 2013
Autumn Weather Trends As autumn arrives, the summer monsoon weather pattern typically gives way to clearer skies and fewer evening storms. Earlier sunsets provide ample opportunity to take in the night skies, and moderate temperatures (in the plains) make for pleasant evenings. Be aware, however, that skygazing is a sedentary activity. Dress far more warmly than you think appropriate—a common rule of thumb is to wear clothing suitable for going outside on a day that’s 20 degrees colder than the forecast temperature. If you aren’t dressed appropriately, skygazing becomes unpleasant in as little as 20 minutes due to the cold. September offers the last good opportunity to view the sky from Colorado’s mountains. Mountain sites are usually far away from city lights, and the additional elevation often provides more transparent skies. However, the mountains get cold, and snow usually blocks access to remote sites by October.
Light Pollution Besides avoiding clouds, the most important factor in improving the skygazing experience is to get away from city lights. Those lights turn the background sky from black to gray, and drastically reduce the number of stars that can be seen. Cities create “light domes” on the horizon, through which only the brightest objects are viewable. The Denver metro area light dome is obvious at least 50 miles away. Ridges that block out the horizon in the direction of the major cities greatly improve the perceived darkness. The Pawnee National Grassland has been a favorite dark sky site for Front Range astronomers, but oil drilling projects have introduced a number of bright lights to that region recently.
The Moon Earth’s moon is a spectacular object to observe with a telescope. As the moon orbits Earth, the sunlight’s angle continually changes the appearance of the surface features. The terminator separates the lit and unlit regions of the moon, and corresponds to lunar sunrise before the full phase, and lunar sunset afterward. With the longest shadows, and lunar peaks catching the sunlight in otherwise unlit regions, the terminator provides striking views.
The Planets Throughout the fall, the planet Venus will shine brightly above the western horizon for a couple of hours after sunset. Venus will be catching up to Earth in their respective orbits around the sun through the rest of 2013. Over the fall months, a telescope will show Venus’s white, cloud-shrouded disc growing in size as it gets closer to the earth. A telescope will also reveal the planet’s appearance changing gradually through the season from roughly a half-lit disk to a thinning crescent. Saturn consistently amazes people who view it through a telescope for the first time. In 2013, September offers the last good opportunity to view Saturn in the early evening—the earlier in the month, the better. Saturn’s rings are stunning—many people can’t believe they are really seeing the planet and not a picture. A number of Saturn’s moons can often also be observed in a dark sky. By the end of October, Saturn will be
lost in the glare of the sun and not conveniently positioned for evening viewing until Spring 2014. After the brilliant Venus, Jupiter is the brightest planet in the sky. However, Jupiter doesn’t rise until about 1:00 a.m. in mid-September, 11:00 p.m. in mid-October, and approximately 8:00 p.m. by mid-November (with the end of daylight savings time). It typically takes another hour to rise high enough in the sky for crisp telescope views.
Meteor Showers Three major meteor showers occur in the fall; expected peak dates are October 21 for the Orionids, November 17 for the Leonids, and December 14 for the Geminids. Unfortunately, a nearly full moon will light up the sky for all of these in 2013, limiting visible meteors to only the few brightest ones. A common misconception is that you need to be looking at the constellation for which the shower is named to see the meteors. Actually, members of the shower can be seen anywhere in the sky, but appear to have originated in the constellation—that is, tracing back the meteor path will point to the “radiant” position. The meteors themselves are typically grain-of-sand size particles left in the orbital path of old comets; they burn up entering Earth’s atmosphere. Meteors are best observed wrapped in a blanket from a lawn chair in the darkest sky available—away from city lights. Telescopes are useless for observing meteors since scopes see too small an area of the sky, and the meteors move too quickly. Binoculars are recommended for scanning the sky as a change of pace, but you see more of the sky—and will see more meteors—without binoculars. Meteor counts typically increase significantly after midnight. At that time, the Earth has rotated so that observers are on the leading edge of our planet; before midnight, the meteors must catch up to Earth. This is similar to rain striking a moving car—many more raindrops hit the windshield than the back window.
Skywatching Sites & Opportunities The Northern Colorado Astronomical Society (www.ncastro.org) formed in 1995, with most members from the Fort Collins and Loveland area. In addition to co-hosting monthly astronomy-related talks with the new Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, volunteers from the club regularly hold skygazing events in the area. The club also brings telescopes to a number of area schools to introduce school kids and their families to wonders of the night sky. Public skygazing events are held monthly throughout the year at Fossil Creek Reservoir (between Fort Collins and Loveland). April through October, Bobcat Ridge (near Masonville, west of Fort Collins) is the site of monthly talks and skygazing sponsored by the Fort Collins Natural Areas program. Being away from the cities, Bobcat Ridge’s skies are darker than Fossil Creek’s, so most events there are scheduled with no (or only a thin crescent) moon to light up the sky. Using members’ telescopes, visitors can enjoy views of double stars, star clusters, nebulae, and other galaxies. An excellent monthly guide to the evening skies is published on the website www. skymaps.com. These pack an impressive amount of information onto a two-page guide suitable for beginners thru experienced observers. Some people enjoy observing satellites orbiting the earth; the definitive website guide for these objects is www.heavens-above. com.
A pumpkin beer with an unexpected twist? Yep, Pumpkick. Brewed with all the right spices and a hearty helping of cranberries, it will kick you right in the glass. Let’s socialize & mobilize! /NewBelgium