Dreaming of Colorado

I was dreaming of Colorado last night. Specifically, dreaming about the people I worked with at my first after-college job at a small daily newspaper in Durango. As always in dreams, my words flowed eloquently and seemed deep and full of meaning. Now as I sit here trying to remember or reconstruct those words, I find they come up short. I know a key portion of the dream had to do with the metaphorical significance of the river that runs through Durango, the Animas. The full name is El Rio de las Animas Perdidas, or "the River of Lost Souls." I was thinking about how we were all "lost souls" at that time, each living in our own realities, protected in a way from the outside world by being in a remote small town in the middle of nowhere. There was the movie theater projectionist who edited the local poetry column in the newspaper. There was the bookkeeper/accountant who also wrote poetry but his was good enough to be published in the New Yorker magazine. But he didn't flaunt his poet's mantle, he wore it quietly and looked more the role of a bookkeeper, a Bartleby the Scrivener. There was the clean-cut flat-top guy who dressed himself and the rest of his family in German Bavarian garb for their bicycle outings. Sieg Heil! And there was the ex-Marine advertising manager who broke down in tears one day as he was telling me about his experiences in the South Pacific in World War II. And there were the numerous people "going back to the land," living communal hippie lives and using the Last Whole Earth Catalog as their Bible. And, of course, there was me, thinking I had stumbled on a quaint little Utopian outpost where Art mattered and we would all live happily and peacefully forever.