Tuesday, September 11, 2012

1819 Rocky Mountain Low

I took a trip recently that laid me over for a brief time in Denver airport. You might think I was pleased to be in Rocky Mountain High land but not so much.
Whatever country road old John Denver must have taken on his way home it certainly didn't wind its way through Denver airport.
My first view of the airport was from above, as the jet swooped down from the barren plains of Wyoming and over an arid section of Northern Colorado. I was a little disappointed, as I was on the Great Plain side of the plane and so missed the majesty of the Rockies.
But I did get to see an artistic approximation thereof. I think. The Denver Airport has these massive sculptured tops on it that I think are supposed to represent the peaks of the Rockies. It's hard to tell because they are all white, look more like cones than mountains and appear to be made of fabric. Also, some of them have windows in their tippy-tops, which I don't remember from either geometry or geology class.
Then again, the white cones also look like they could be teepees. Perhaps the artist sought to invoke the traditional abodes of the Plains Indian tribes, and so stylized his mountains to look like tents.
Unfortunately, to my inartistic eye it also looked like the entire Denver terminal building was covered with tents for, um, fumigating. Which was certainly a possibility. I'd been reading a lot about the problems they were having in Texas. For all I knew Denver was another nexus for mosquitoes and West Nile virus.
Mountains, Teepees or insect killer.
Art is in the eye of the beholder. And perhaps not for unsophisticated folks like me.
Thank God I'm a country boy.
America, ya gotta love it.

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