Blog Archives

Bolder Boulder

3/11/2012

Plexiglass Man, Boulder, Co

Colorado: the word still jumps up and holds magic for me. I first came to Colorado when I was a shy 17-year-old, wanting to spend a year somewhere interesting before university. Nothing in my life had prepared me for a place like Boulder. It was a utopian wonder. This college town of 95,000 is usually on the top ten list of best places to live and it’s easy to see why. Boulder embodies everything from American life that is ideal, joyful, worldly, conscientious, progressive, deserving of fondness, and wacky. It’s Jimmy Stewart’s Bedford Falls with an edge. Other than all the intellectuals, environmentalists, social activists and Buddhists, it attracts a lot of eccentrics: New Agers, topless women, mountain men down from the mountains for a falafel and a bath, and a lot of naked stuff: someone called Naked Guy, World Naked Bike Ride, and people who run naked through downtown with a pumpkin on their head every Halloween. There’s also the “Q-tip” people—a cult of survivalists living in the nearby mountains who dress entirely in white with little white turbans. You see them occasionally on the streets of Boulder and they really do look like giant Q-tips.

Boulder gets more sunshine than any place in the country. A greenbelt protects the city from suburban development and the mountains sweep right down into people’s backyards. You can take a walk from your house and, depending on where you live, find yourself all alone in the mountains—with perhaps a herd of elk nearby—within ten minutes. The pedestrian mall downtown is always brimming with life: buskers, musicians, tarot card readers, a guy who can curl his lanky body into a 20-inch Plexiglas box, and ZIP Code Man, who can pinpoint exactly where you live when you holler out your zip code. The mall is also full of cheerful people strolling or reading books or talking at the outdoor cafes and restaurants. Everyone is beaming with health and everyone is crazily attractive, sometimes so much so that you crave to see just one ugly person walking down the street. I once met an Ontario couple who told me they moved to Boulder but had to leave because everyone was too happy. It was too much for them. I thought about this the other day when I arrived in Boulder and saw those same vibrantly happy people all over town. I wondered if this kind of happiness is sustainable. Are people here really happier than people who live in say, Buffalo or Regina? I suspect they are. Most of the people who live in Boulder come from someplace else, have had the gumption to get up and look for a better place, have left the french fries and Tim Hortons, and crappy weather behind, making it one of those cream of the crop places you come across almost always in scenically gorgeous settings. On a hike the other day in the Boulder foothills, my friend Aliah—who has spent years searching for the perfect place to live (no wonder we’re friends)—told me Boulder is the place she has settled on. “It’s just always so consistently positive and alive here. There’s always something creatively wacky and fun going on.”

She’s right. It was like that when I was 17 and it’s still like that now. I wonder why I didn’t stay for good. It must have had something to do with those good-looking people all over town—they are a little much. (But to get an idea of all the wacky stuff that makes Boulder, Colorado so great, see: Keep Boulder Weird.)

Meanwhile, I’m staying at my sister’s place for a few days just north of Boulder, in Fort Collins, another college town also full of cool stuff.

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Plexiglass Man, Pearl St. Mall, Boulder

Naked Pumpkin Run, Boulder, Co

Friends Don't Let Friends Drink Corporate Coffee

Boulder, Colorado

Laurie Gough on public piano, Ft. Collins, Co.

Fish bike anyone? Fort Collins, Co.

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The Road to Freedom Lies in a Broken Transmission

3/7/2012

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I’m on the road again. This time, on a road trip in an ’87 Dodge camper van headed for the American southwest. I’m with my husband and our nine-year-old son Quinn who we’ve taken out of school in our home of Wakefield, Quebec, promising we’ll keep up his French and drill him on his times tables. We just missed a tornado the other day as we drove through a winter storm where trucks careened into ditches all around us. The next day, in rural Nebraska, our van suddenly refused to exceed 30 miles an hour. It barely climbed hills. We pulled into a dirt-poor prairie town full of 1950s trucks driven by ancient farmers and found a mechanic named Chad. He told us our transmission was probably blown. We were faced with either leaving the van with Chad in Hooterville and taking a bus to my sister’s place in Colorado, or hobble along on back roads, hoping we wouldn’t break down completely with nothing but cows to witness the event.

The wise choice was leaving the van with the mechanic, boarding a Greyhound, and returning for it whenever it might be fixed. But the idea of the bus, and worse, deserting our beloved van with all our stuff in the forlorn little town made me queasy. Still, we decided it was best. As we crawled along the main drag looking for the bus station we realized we were also on the road that in seconds would lead out of town and eventually, to Cheyenne. Suddenly I felt a reckless freedom that can only be attributed to the open road and to seeing Thelma and Louise fourteen times. “Let’s do it! Go! This is so Thelma and Louise!”

So we did. We left that tiny fifties Nebraska town in the dust and headed for Cheyenne. I felt light as the prairie wind, even though we were clocking 20 miles an hour. If there’d been any cyclists in that part of the country (there aren’t) they would have sailed passed us. As we listened to Huck Finn on the iPod, what we did see on that back road were hawks soaring on thermals, golden grasslands stretching as far as the curvature of the Earth allowed us to see, a freight train chugging along at the same speed as us, and little white shacks straight out of Brokeback Mountain. You never see this on the interstate.

Incredibly, we didn’t break down. It took us eight hours to drive less than 200 miles, but we made it all the way to the Rockies. Today, we found out that it wasn’t the transmission after all. It was the cheap gas we bought just before the van started going wonky. I’d never heard of this. This doesn’t happen in Canada. All the gas stations in Canada are the mega, well-known ones—you know, the ones owned by the oil companies ripping us all off and polluting the oceans. But at least you can trust the gas they sell. I’d never imagined you could pull into a little town on a Sunday morning and buy gas for fifty cents a gallon less than it’s sold everywhere else, and then have it screw up your vehicle. But I looked online and it seems to happen in the U.S. with surprising regularity.

But at least we found that back road through the lonely rolling endless plains where the buffalo once roamed. Out there, you could almost see their ghosts.

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Ten Things You Probably Don't Know About San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

3/6/2012

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San Miguel at dusk

Set in the high desert mountains of Mexico nowhere near the ocean, the city of San Miguel de Allende is to Mexico what Burlington, Vermont is to the U.S.

With maybe a bit of New Orleans thrown in for extra fun.

I lived in San Miguel for nine months over two winters and got to know the place pretty well. But every time I visit, like just recently for the San Miguel Writers’ Conference, I learn something new about this city that everyone describes as ‘magical’ (I know! So cliché!)

I do know that 10% of San Miguel’s 80,000 residents are expats from the U.S., Canada, Europe and elsewhere, people who’ve left their lives behind to immerse themselves year-round in San Miguel’s cultural offerings and perfect climate. But I always thought that most of those expats (with the exception of myself and maybe 50 others) were retired. I was wrong.

The city that once lured Diego and Frida, the muralists Orozco and Siqueiros, portrait photographers and Beats (Neal Cassidy died mysteriously on the town’s train tracks), continues to entice artists, writers and musicians from the world over. And they’re not all over 60.

Which brings me to my first Ten Things You Probably Don’t Know About San Miguel:

1) Although in the daytime you might feel like you’re in a commercial for relaxed-fit jeans from Sears, once it gets dark, all the young people—gringos and Mexicans alike—come out from hiding. (Nobody knows what they do in the day.) At night, they flood the bars, pubs, nightclubs, cafes and the town’s central square, the Jardin. Typically they’re American or German twenty or thirty-somethings, disillusioned with the politics and stiffness of their own countries. It reminds me of what Paris of the 20s must have been like, an underground world pulsing with creativity, full of writers, artists, musicians, dancers and photographers. In San Miguel, you can rent a pretty place to live for less than $400 a month, eat fresh yummy tacos for under two dollars, and talk to your friends over Mexican coffee about how screwed up the rest of the world is. It’s the ideal place for this.

2) San Miguel is safe at night. I often left bars at 2 a.m. (see #1) and never had a problem walking home through the streets at night. At that hour, if you’re a woman alone, the taxi drivers can be creepy (although always polite in the day), but walking at night is fine and actually, totally enjoyable.

3) You can buy fantastic clothes at the Tuesday Market for two dollars. There are endless rows of tables filled with piles of new clothes that didn’t sell in the U.S.

4) The best thing you might ever eat in your life can also be found at the Tuesday Market and it’s called a gordita. It’s a thick corn tortilla filled with stuffings and salsas of your choice, then grilled. They’re about $1.50.

5) Gorditas make you fat. The word ‘gordita’ actually means ‘fat’ in Spanish. The term is also used affectionately for a cute chubby girl—probably one who eats a lot of gorditas.

6) You can take zumba classes every morning of the week with a kick-ass local instructor who all the local women swoon after (even though he’s gay.) Classes are two dollars.

7) And if you’re really into exercising you can run through the park every morning with the locals and then run up 514 steps (Choro Steps) for a view of the whole city.

8) You can get free wireless internet all day long at the local Starbucks. (I know it’s Starbucks but it’s the most beautiful one you’ve ever seen, in a 300-year-old high ceiling colonial building. The gringos protested its arrival, but the locals all wanted it.)

9) Houses in San Miguel are cheap to buy right now since so many Americans are flooding the market trying to sell the second homes they can no longer afford.

10) Even though it’s a cliché, San Miguel really is magical.

11) Bonus addition to the list: Because San Miguel is such a writers' and artists' mecca, it hosts really cool workshops, like the 2016 Summer Writing Workshops (where American novelist Diana Spechler will teach Writing A Page-Turner, Playwright Merridith Allen will teach Writing the Play that Moves You, and I, Laurie Gough, will teach The Art of Memoir and Travel Writing. Come join us in San Miguel this summer! It will be fun!)

***Read Laurie's latest book*** Stolen Child: A Mother's Journey To Rescue Her Son from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

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