Colorado on My Mind

Colorado has been top of mind and prominent in the news over the past week. Severe flooding has resulted in death and destruction far and wide along the northern part of the Front Range. It wasn't just remote mountain communities, even the city of Boulder has hit; images of flooded University of Colorado dormitories are almost as startling as the aerial shots of nature's wrath in small towns.

I have more than one connection to the Centennial State. Currently, my nephew Kenny (my father's namesake) and his family live in Loveland. They're out of harm's way, but his mother-in-law's place was hit pretty badly. I just spent time with my cousin Marilyn at a family reunion at her childhood home in Oregon. She currently hails from Colorado Springs, a veteran of the wildfires that plagued the area in June, but thankfully much farther south than the current flood zone. These tragedies made me wonder about the many, many other extended family I have in Colorado--"distant cousins," rendered even more distant by time and the many miles of mountains between us.

My late father was born in Denver ninety-three years ago. His father's family moved to Colorado a couple of decades earlier, hoping the mountain air would be better for their son's ill health. It was. My grandfather John grew into a healthy young man, enamored of the nascent technology of radio communication. He enlisted in the army during World War One. Thankfully, John was spared the scourge of trench warfare and the horrendous influenza epidemic that killed so many in 1918-1919. John Morris returned from his wartime service to Colorado and married his sweetheart, Gladys. She soon gave John a son (my dad Kenneth) in August of 1921. He would be their only child.

My grandparents were, by all accounts, a normal couple of young newlyweds struggling to get by in a post-war recession. They moved into a basement apartment in his parents' home in the mountain town of Boulder, now the city of so much current strife. Grandpa John could only find work in the big city of Denver, some 30 miles down a twisting, hilly road to the southeast. John commuted daily via his treasured motorcycle; he stretched his gas money by giving rides to a fellow commuter in his motorcycle's sidecar.

The morning of Friday, January 13, 1922, my grandpa John and his passenger set out at first light for Denver in a thick winter fog. Twenty-three year-old John hugged the thin painted center line of the two-lane mountain road and kept his speed moderate, due to the poor conditions. A truck coming the opposite way
was following the same plan, hugging the center line. But that truck's inside headlight was out. When John saw only one headlight coming toward him, he thought it was another motorcycle and judged himself safe--until it was too late. So the sidecar passenger reflected, having survived unscathed. Young John Morris' jugular vein was severed; my dad became fatherless at only five months of age.

Five years later, my widowed grandmother and her only child moved on to San Francisco with a sister and her two kids to start another life. My dad was raised with those two cousins in California, but they had moved out of state by the time I was born--one to Oregon and the other to Wyoming. Road trips around the West became a staple  of my youth. Many of those trips were visits to Colorado, reconnecting with my dad's grandparents, aunts, uncles, and the many, many cousins. As a boy, I marveled at the homes in Denver, all built of brick and stone according to fire-proofing ordinances. I loved the beautiful Rockies, and all the far-flung Colorado towns of the Western Slope and the Front Range that seemed to be bursting with relatives. My Colorado cousins were plentiful and, without exception, just a whole lot of fun.

Dad kept up with our Colorado cousins pretty well, but after my parents' divorce, my connections pretty much lapsed. I spent the night with one set of cousins when I was passing through, back in my college days. I got one similarly-aged cousin on the phone when I was a groomsman in a college friend's wedding, but she was going out of town when I was in. Most of those cousins' names and addresses were kept up through my father, and passed with him.

The current nephew's relocation to Colorado is a complete coincidence with my family history. The recent connection with Marilyn and the flood news have me wondering about all of my other long-lost cousins. Where are they now? Have they been affected by the floods? I need to stop just wondering, I need to re-establish my Colorado connections.

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Have you lost track of distant relations you'd like to reconnect with?