Originally written/posted;
Thursday, May 24th 2007
Just checking in to let some of you know what’s up since I haven’t been replying to messages or comments for a while, or even been online much at all. I had been taking a little vacation from here (*my old blog on another site) for a few weeks, nothing serious, just needed to sort some stuff out in my head & catch up on the outside world a bit. Then on Mother’s Day I called my Mother and got no answer. Unusual for my parents; yes, they are homebodies and border on anti-social, still they could have been off fishing or been forced to show up at some family thing.
My parent’s lived out here almost my whole life, my dad was Air Force and we were stationed here still when he retired, so we just ended up staying here.
He is from Colorado, the Four Corners/Durango area, and finally three years ago, having both retired, moved on down (or up) to Cortez.
The next day, again, no answer, so I started hunting down my aunts phone numbers, and since I had moved last year, and also wiped my hard drive I couldn’t find any of their numbers, so I called information, got only one number (how dare my relatives have unlisted numbers!) and of course it was for the one Aunt I knew would probably be out and about, so when I got their answering machine, I left a message that I was getting paranoid and tell my mom to call me…
My daughter always trusts her instincts more than I do, I over analyze and try to eliminate everything else before I act on mine, she persisted I needed to get a hold of someone, so I started calling the hospitals and finally the Cortez police. The officer said he got requests to drop by and check on people all the time, no problem, and he’d get back to me soon. 20 minutes later he calls me from the hospital (I’d called the wrong one) and put my mom on the phone, my dad (who is 71) had a brain-stem stroke on Mother’s Day and was in a coma. He’d had a series of smaller strokes in the days leading up to this one, but they weren’t aware they were strokes, he had been tired and weak and even fell down a few times so he’d been in for tests at the end of that week and were going for the results Monday. He had gone to bed Sunday afternoon, feeling tired, and around 3 my mom had tried to wake him up and he was unresponsive, so she called the ambulance. Mom had only just called my Aunts a few hours before I managed to get a hold of her. She was of course, in shock and all, I’m sure. They’ve been married 48 years and together for 50 years. They met when my dad was stationed in England, they dated for the two years he was there, got married in mom’s hometown in the 600 year old church she was baptized in, etc. etc. and she’s been here ever since.
She later said she couldn’t bring herself to call anyone right off because then she would have to admit to herself this was really happening.
Me and my youngest spent half the day scrambling to pull our stuff together, throw it in the car, do a car guts check so it would actually make it to Cortez and back, arrange for a house/cat & fish sitter, (who happened to be my most wonderful friend, Tony) grab our travelin’ supplies and finally hit the road which wasn’t until just after 8pm.
My oldest daughter, her Fiancé and my oldest granddaughter decided to follow us out, but ended up leaving a couple of hours after I did. She’s expecting grand baby #3, and has been having some complications off & on, so we weren’t comfortable with her traveling and under the emotional circumstances… but she’s like me, she’d pick up her own severed head and stumble around till she got where she wanted to go while dragging along a rabid crocodile chomping on her leg.
We got into Cortez at 3:30 am and drove strait to the hospital.
He had developed pneumonia the day before, but was doing pretty well, and had actually started responding to voices and trying to open his eyes.
All the details aside, we did what we could down there, came back Monday night as he was seeming to have stabilized and I felt okay heading home to get things here squared away enough to be comfortable with leaving for a longer period.
As we expected, things don’t look good and have deteriorated, so I’m on my way back to Cortez tomorrow morning. On my own this time. The girls have said their ‘I love you’s’ to their Grandad, spent their time with him and were able to say goodbye. They need to attend to life here for now.
I’ll be driving on the triple 6 highway once again, they can rename it 491 all they want, I’ll always call it the triple 6. I’ve been up and down that road all my life, half my dad’s relatives live in that area of Colorado & NM. I’ve been on it day, night, rain & shine, snow, even stopped for an emergency pee break on it. I always knew it wasn’t just another highway, I’d heard and read about the history, I knew all the stories about reported supernatural experiences & what not, and of course I knew what the number itself is supposed to represent… This last trip I didn’t need to drive the older, original part, actually considered the active, ‘haunted’ stretch, which would be from Cortez to Gallup, NM. I’m going to make a point of seeing/driving that part maybe next Summer. It’s my thing.
I have no idea how long I’ll be down there, and I won’t have too much access to the internet. My kingdom for a laptop and traveling internet!
Well, the only positive is its Spring and I don’t have to drive over Soldiers Summit in another blizzard… that was scarier than anything hwy 666 could throw at me!
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