but he could go now. we nearly always spend four days together fishing, and in fact he set up four days out of his schedule before the AYCJ pass went on sale.
BUT, jetblue doesn't fly to WY. AND with a jet pass in your hand, you don't want to spend too much time in one place (especially if it's a place you've been before), so i cut back to three days. sorta. my plane will leave about 01:00 tuesday morning, which will actually cut out one of the evenings for the drive back to DIA.
i'm flying early enough that i'm up at 04:45 – a time you'd be much better off staying up until, not a clock setting you should wake up at. i've only had three hours sleep. the grind of not getting enough has me pretty ragged … i'm way way behind on writing here – and that'll almost certainly get worse.
of course the good news is when it's this early, everything for me is just on autopilot. i don't feel pain. i'm not crabby. i just flow.
the denver flight is fairly open. after some more sleep, a super-nice flight attendant strikes up a long conversation with me, having spotted my AYCJ pin from last year. he thanks me profusely several times for being a jetter.
“listen man, the favor you're doing me by offering this pass is FAR bigger than the favor i'm doing you for buying it. you guys don't have to offer this, i'm sure as hell glad you do.”
“you don't understand. last year was the first time jetblue showed a profit for september. it has to be because of all-you-can-jet.”
whether or not this is true, i couldn't tell you … but it doesn't completely surprise me. aside from the raw money the sale of passes would bring, jetblue uses a stepped pricing structure. AYCJers must get their tickets at least three days ahead of time and most of them actually plan more than a week ahead of time (planning a whole schedule, like i do, is common). if jetters take enough seats, the prices on that flight go up. most people flying during the shoulder season are business people and they don't give a damn how much they pay for their tickets … so … ka-ching, jetblue makes money.
toward the end of the flight, the guy across the aisle strikes up a conversation with me. he too is a jetter – headed toward boulder – and i spew a ton of information about all the places he's going and is interested in. i've met a lot of jetters, and aside from their collective built-in age bias (it freaks them out that the old guy travels like this), all but two of them have been really nice people. here's a binding sense of adventure, not unlike people you find on a eurail pass, and it's nice to be part of that fraternity.
on the ground my brother picks me up in his $25/day rental jeep. (we both use tricks i won't share here for getting cheap rental cars that go well beyond priceline and hotwire – i'll give you the smallest hint … two of the rentals i'm getting on this trip i'm paying for in british pounds, and are less than 50% of what i could get using hotwire.) this is a mistake on the rental company's part. we come from a l-o-n-g line of men that are infamous for abusing rental cars in the wilderness. i've driven a sedan into places that have, literally, caused ranchers to spew their coffee when they saw me. having a two-wheel drive doesn't keep me from driving on any given road, but it does make me drive with a great deal of forethought. with the 4WD, the technique is a little different: shove it in low and punch it.
and there's the added bonus of covering the entire vehicle with an infinitesimally fine layer of WY dust.
if i was staying for one extra day, this vehicle would never be fully functional again. pity that it's not.
in my largest crime against humanity yet -and i'm sorry to say it's up against a fair amount of competition- i don't even do the 35 mile detour to stop by my mom's house and say hello. i was there a little over a month ago, so as long as nothing happens between now and whenever i see her again, i'm fine. if she kicks it in the meantime, i'll carry an anvil for the rest of my life.
but, by not stopping by, we'll get a chance to fish today and wouldn't otherwise. unlikely lifetime anvil versus definite fishing, the choice is pretty easy.
time spent alone with my brother is very rare. we get, maybe, 30 waking hours this way a year. i really enjoy it, he's fiercely protective of it.
we stop at jim's burger haven for “a square meal on a round bun.” good, huge, thin, burgers.
and push our way across to state line and talking about wildlife, engineering, his family's madness, how the hell i manage to keep going without working a day job and firecrackers, stopping for the latter as we cross stateline.
i've never written about fishing before and i'm not sure i want to start now – especially when you as a reader don't actually care about it. but to be very succinct, my brother and i both use a technique that is completely antiquated called “wet” fly fishing. the exact manner and style we use hasn't been practiced by people in well over 50 years.
aside from fleeing from a burning building, fly fishing is probably the thing i do the best with the least amount of practice. even so, our stopping at the timberline lakes of the snowy range is an iffy proposition as far as actually catching anything goes. the water is pure and crystal clear – giving fish maximum visibility at preditors. the lakes are fairly accessible, giving them a high amount of pressure. and we're late in the season, meaning the little fishies have become beyond wary.
oh yes, and in one way this is the strangest day i have ever seen in the rocky mountains. i was born and lived in the front range for almost 30 years and for the very first time in my life, i haven't seen a single cloud – not one – in CO or WY. all things atmospheric have heavy influence on fish and the lack of clouds definitely is not a good omen.
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| the front range of the rockies as seen on wide-angle from denver. no clouds. all day. completely unheard of. (snow fence runs to the right) |
we're staying at the “sage and sand” motel in saratoga – what my brother and i call “the high plains drifter” because it's painted entirely red. dinner is whatever we choose from the kum & go convenience store across the street (_your_joke_goes_here_). there's a loose affiliation of multi-millionaires that occasionally hangs out in saratoga who in their self-serving grandeur, call themselves the conquistadors del cielo, which roughly translated means people who have no business being in wyoming, but act like they do. they're in town right now.
i'm so wiped from the last several days that i don't even go to the town hot springs, instead i crash hard hard for the night.
lots of high altitude work tomorrow, i need the rest.
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