A redneck birthday party

Today is my birthday. Colleen asked me what I wanted to do. Then she asked what ELSE I wanted to do. I said I would like to go to a mountain stream. Because she had to pick up some farmer dude at the airport tonight, we decided to go someplace relatively close, to our old stomping grounds, the magnificently beautiful town of Golden. I just love Golden. It is surrounded on all sides by mountains. Coming down from the west is a roaring stream called Clear Creek. It really does run right through the Coors Brewery.

Golden has really changed in the three years we have been away. Yuppy college-age people throng to Clear Creek. These are the kids who would never think to volunteer to fight for our country. They will be running the corporations and government agencies that will employ the returning vets, and probably treat them badly.

The males ride down Clear Creek in inner tubes. Each time they go over a small water fall, dropping two feet at the most, they give themselves two-thumbs up. The females have no body fat whatsoever, and wear something called bikinis, which cover just enough of their bodies to prove my point about the lack of body fat.

Our redneck family also went to the Clear Creek. We fished for a while, and skipped rocks. But the family member who stole the show was Jon (Huck). Jon was standing on a rock right in the middle of the roaring stream, casting out his fishing line. Coming downstream behind him was a large Igloo cooler (minus a lid). We yelled at him to try to catch the cooler (our oldest two boys had confiscated our cooler earlier in the summer and kept it in their man-cave they live in in a Denver suburb called Wheat Ridge.} Jon snagged that cooler with one quick motion, and brought it safely to shore. About a half-hour later Jon came excitedly running up to us (he had wandered downstream). In one hand he had the lid to the cooler. In the other hand he had a four-foot-long snake! I persuaded him to let the (smelly) snake continue to live near Clear Creek, but that dang cooler no longer belongs to the college yuppies.

Jon and Greg spent the rest of the time diving into the roaring current and riding it downstream. No inner tubes needed thank you very much. Then we all went to the local pizza joint and pigged out.

Do you prefer wide open spaces? Colleen does. I like the protective quality of being surrounded by mountains. Durango, where I lived in southwestern Colorado in the 1980s, is like Golden, except it does not have Golden's proximity to a large city. Golden and Durango are two of my favorite places on earth.