Ornoth

If brevity is the soul of wit, I’m surely both soulless and witless, because I find it impossible to write a travelogue of anything less than “War and Peace” proportions. Let’s see if I can tighten up the tale of our recent week in Boulder and Denver...

Boulder Flatirons

Orny & Inna @ Boulder Creek

Boulder Creek

Zenko Kyudojo

Liberty Puzzle

Red Rocks

Denver From Red Rocks

Red Rocks Amphiteater

DIA 4am Monkey Dance

Wed 17 July

Travel day. First time flying Southwest.

Having just gotten approved for the TSA’s Global Entry, this was my first time using the TSA Pre✓ benefit. But even with Pre✓, I was delayed for a wipe-down search of my laptop and cell phone.

Inna and I arrived in the evening to find Denver in the middle of a heat wave.

Got our rental SUV and drove 45m to Boulder. At speed on the highway, the hood started flapping upward; the rental outfit (Enterprise) hadn’t properly closed it.

Arrived at family friend Valentina’s house and sacked out.

Thu 18 July

Breakfast at Dunkin followed by wandering Pearl Street—Boulder’s downtown pedestrian mall—in dry 100° weather. Inna bought a Liberty Puzzle, and I got a Motawi Tileworks and a book by Ajahn Sumedo at Lighthouse Bookstore. Other stops included the tourist info center, Häagen-Dazs, and University Bicycles, which was nothing special.

Returned to the SUV to find a parking ticket; I’d used ParkMobile, but had forgotten to change the plate number from our car to the rental's. Ticket was eventually waived upon appeal.

Scoped out residential neighborhoods, which seemed fine.

Finished with an excellent meal at Aloy Thai followed by chatting with our gregarious hosts. I was amused to learn that our Jewish intellectual hostess’ main concern about potentially changing her name would be how to get it updated on her old diplomas.

Fri 19 July

Breakfast with hosts before scoping out outlying neighborhoods like Table Mesa and Bloomfield. Followed that up with a very pleasant drive up Boulder Canyon into the mountains, stopping at 6,666 feet of elevation to rest and admire Boulder Creek.

Despite obvious coolness, as a small town we felt that we already had a pretty good understanding of what Boulder is like, so we hung out for a while in Barnes & Noble, where I picked up a manga volume.

Dinner al fresco with hosts featured a lot of talk about religion (Judaism, Buddhism), meditation, and finding meaning in life.

Sat 20 July

Our last morning in Boulder began with checking out the Pearl Street Arts Fest, which included playing cards under a canopy provided by Elevations Credit Union that featured cooling spray misters, and a return engagement at Häagen-Dazs.

Mid-morning I visited a beginners’ practice session by Boulder Taiko. Teacher Julia seems to have an active community. Amusingly, one of the students was a former kyūdō teacher who had just moved to Boulder from Georgia!

Leaving Boulder, we drove down to Denver and checked into our AirBNB, narrowly avoiding getting dumped on by a brief afternoon thunderstorm.

Having planned dinner with friends Max & Jenn, we synced up and made our way straight over to Colorado+ Brew Pub. Conversation was lively and informative while a violent thunderstorm swept through, repeatedly triggering all the cell phones in the building to blare emergency weather alerts.

Inna and I stayed up a bit too late into the evening working on putting her puzzle together.

Sun 21 July

While Inna slept in, I’d planned a full morning of activities back in Boulder, so I was up very early to make an 8:30am meditation group.

With the normal leader (Terry Ray) on retreat, they had a substitute leader and an abnormally small group (a total of four of us). The hour-long session was held in a sunroom in Ms. Ray’s home, the last house at the top of the foothills above town. With the sliding glass doors open to the morning sun, it was a nice, peaceful setting.

After a brief final chat, I hoofed it across town to the Zenko Kyudojo, the national headquarters for the school of kyūdō that I practiced with back in Boston. I was welcomed by Aki, the late founder’s granddaughter, who runs the Boulder dojo. We joined about a dozen others for a two-hour practice. They were very friendly, and it was a pleasure to chat and observe their form. As usual, the weather was gorgeous, to the point where people were actually excited at the prospect of coming rain! I found the practice very inspiring and it reminded me how much I enjoyed and miss kyūdō.

A couple tidbits: Practice was interrupted a couple times thanks to a rabbit whose warren was in the backstop behind the outdoor targets. I also learned that the standard draw is 90cm, but mine is about 100cm, and that you add 1kg of draw weight for every 5cm beyond 90.

A bit after noon I drove back to our Denver BNB. Although we only had three days in Denver and a lot of ground to cover, we weren’t up for sightseeing and took a down day: Inna napping while I walked to a solo lunch at Swing Thai before doing more work on her puzzle. Then we hit up High Point Creamery, the local ice cream shop, before I realized it was time for another meditation group.

This group, nominally led by the also-absent Lloyd Burton, was attended by about fifty aging white people in folding chairs in the basement of a church. The sitting and dhamma talk were provided by monastic woman Ayya Dhammadhira.

Afterward, Inna and I made a quick trip to the grocery store for supplies before staying up to complete her puzzle.

Mon 22 July

With a new day we went straight to Denver’s uninspiring downtown, hitting the visitors' center, their 16th Street pedestrian mall, and a quick tour of the local Accenture office.

Next we drove all over town, checking out residential neighborhoods, which all looked good, absent much information about home prices. Lunch was burritos at Illegal Pete’s, followed by ice cream at Häagen-Dazs.

Tiring of looking at the urban jungle, Inna wanted to do more sightseeing up in the mountains. We canceled lunch with my college roommate Ric and drove out to the spectacular Red Rocks park and amphitheater. We crawled around a bit, while Inna got her first experience with shortness of breath at altitude. We also took a scenic drive up into the hills to Kittredge and Evergreen, maxing out above 7,800 feet.

After a brief stop at Tattered Cover Books, Inna and I both attended another meditation group. This was another small group of about ten people, mostly beginners.

Then it was back to our BNB to pack up for the trip home.

Tue 23 July

3:35am. Yeah, that’s what time I wanna get up.

Trip back to the airport was easy, except when passing the notably odiferous Purina Cat Chow factory, where Inna loudly bemoaned, “It’s like we’re in Bigi’s mouth!!!”

Denver’s parting shot was that we couldn’t find our airline; it was like living in a real-life nightmare, where every airline on the planet had a ticketing area except Southwest. Just what you need at 4am on a Tuesday morning... But we eventually found it in a completely different part of the airport and successfully made our flight home.

Overall Impressions

Denver and Boulder claim to have tons of bright sunshine, more than just about any other temperate city. It’s true; the term “high desert” really does seem to fit, as it’s bone dry, but not devoid of tress and normal plant life. Boulder especially reminded me of California: sunny and very expensive, and expatriates love it; but without California's pretentious people, the job competition, and not imminently sinking into the ocean...

For such a large metropolitan area, insight meditation is surprisingly decentralized, with individual teachers doing their own thing, with their own small followings. I didn’t get any impression there’s a big retreat center nearby, either.

While I didn’t hit any bike shops in Denver, the ones in Boulder were all pretty lame: very little selection of road bikes, no real local maps or information about group rides, events, or clubs. There might be some shops that cater to roadies, but I didn’t find any.

Two things I feared really never materialized. Although there's a little bit of a western vibe, it's not particularly bad. At the same time there's very little ethnic diversity. And the drug culture is annoying, but it’s not quite as in-your-face as I feared. On the other hand, last week several events and venues were shut down after prairie dogs were discovered bearing fleas infected with (literally) The Plague, which apparently is a regular occurrence!

Aside from that, the biggest drawback to living there is exorbitant real estate prices, due to Denver’s growth and Boulder’s unique self-imposed limitation on sprawl. Ironically, Boulder’s limits on expansion haven’t resulted in any increase in population density; there’s no real urban core, as it’s smaller and less populous than Manchester, NH! Boulder in particular seems like any bland small town. There's great support for my interests (cycling, meditation, kyūdō, taiko...) but it just doesn't seem to have very much character.

Denver’s certainly more urban and diverse and has more employment opportunities, and is somewhat more affordable.

In the end, I’m sure I could enjoy living in the area, although as with any other city, there are trade-offs that must be weighed.

Four days after returning from Asia via Tokyo, I undertook a new adventure: Japanese ritual drumming—or taiko—in the form of a four-week beginner’s workshop offered by local group Pittsburgh Taiko.

Big drums have been used in Japan for centuries in religious rituals and to inspire troops in battle. However, kumi-daiko—the current style and form of performing in ensembles—wasn’t established until 1951 by an inventive Japanese jazz drummer.

Taiko Beginners Workshop

My first exposure was seeing the local group Pittsburgh Taiko perform at the local lunar new year celebration back in 2016. A month later, Inna and I went to see them perform alongside Japanese-American taiko master Kenny Endo.

I’ve always been a fan of percussion (except for vibraphone, which hardly qualifies). I’ve done my share of playing around, including both West African hand drumming as well as rock kit, so I was intrigued.

When that local group offered a beginners workshop in the fall of 2016, Inna and I registered. However, when it rolled around, I was in Maine to caretake my dying mother, and in my absence Inna, who is also into drumming but has no affection for things Japanese, opted to sneak out halfway through the first session.

However, a year and a half later, I saw them again at this year’s lunar new year, and learned they were going to offer another beginners workshop, which I was finally able to attend. We had 10-12 students, which matched the approximate number of people in their performance group.

The first sessions were painful. One of the first things I learned is that your stance is supposed to result in your hips being at about the same height as the barrel-like chudaiko drumhead. Since that isn’t much more than two feet off the ground—and impossible to adjust—it resulted in my essentially having to play while performing a front split. Neither comfortable nor stable for someone of my height! That was reinforced by four days of severe DOMS that followed the session, thanks to my woefully underdeveloped cyclist’s arm muscles.

Week two started with even more pain. Although the group does some warmup exercises before playing, they illogically start with ballistic exercises like jumping jacks, and only do gentle muscle stretches afterward, which is backwards and dangerous. Going from a cold start straight into an exercise that involved simultaneous hopping and kicking caused me to severely pull a calf muscle. Initially that injury made even walking difficult, and kept me off the bike for two full weeks.

We started making progress in that session, when we were introduced to the first two lines of the standard practice piece called “Renshuu”. However, after staying to watch the experienced group prepare for an upcoming performance, I noticed the discouraging ring of tinnitus.

In week three we learned most of the rest of Renshuu, and we took the opportunity to record video of the teachers playing it, so that we could practice at home, which was helpful.

Things started coming together for the fourth and final class. We spent some time going around the room round-robin style, giving everyone a chance to play improvisational one-measure solos. I can’t say mine were particularly great, given my lack of familiarity with the instrument and its playing style.

We also played Renshuu through a couple times before the teachers sat down and had us (as a group) play it for them in formal performance style. As you would expect of any Japanese art form, taiko isn’t simply about making music as a group; it’s also about synchronized and choreographed movement, elegance, and visual appeal. Our first “performance” went reasonably well, and marked an emotional peak for the class.

Beyond the drumming, one of the things that appealed to me about taiko was its potential as an exercise in mindful movement, much like my kyūdō (Japanese archery) practice did back in Boston. In that respect, it was half successful. At first, I was too busy trying to understand the rhythms and use the correct hand; but the more familiar I became with each piece, the more attention I could spare to focus on my body, my stance, and the timing and expressiveness of each movement. It might become a meditative exercise at some point much further down the road to proficiency.

Which brings up the obvious question about whether I will continue with it. Taiko would suffer with the same limitation as kyūdō: it’s not a core priority. When we talked about the possibility of a followup workshop, I found myself reciting a litany of dates I couldn’t make: two weekends in Italy with Inna’s family, two more for a meditation retreat, and that doesn’t even include all my summertime cycling events! I’d like to continue and will make an effort, but I won’t have much success until the end of the busy summer season.

Of course, continuing would also raise the question of public performance, which isn’t something I’m particularly comfortable with, either. A nice idea, but realistically my lack of any inherent musical ability will out, and I’d rather that not happen in front of a knowledgeable audience.

All the same, it was an interesting experiment and experience, and hopefully something I can make room for during months that are a little less packed with more important “interesting experiences”!