Denver survival tip # 5,280

Take that, New York: We've got crazies here too.

Other than that, things are slow and serene here a mile above the sea, except that it is HOT. I find that I eat little these days; most of my caloric intake is of the liquid kind. Whatever I can get my hands on -- water, soda, smoothie -- if it is cold, I will take it. Most days (even hot ones) I enjoy warm water with lemon, but today I just haven't had the heart.

It occurred to me this morning, as I was watching a travel show about Macchu Picchu*, that I should talk a little about altitude sickness. (Maybe I have done this at some point. I've been so tired lately. Maybe my brain is leaking.) At any rate, the host was fighting the effects of altitude sickness, stopping and taking rests and drinking lots of water. Smart girl, because that is exactly what one should do when facing altitude sickness.
Altitude sickness is a reality here, too, certainly in the mountains but also (to a lesser extent) in Denver itself. When you come to visit our fair city, be sure to drink lots and lots of water. And just when you think you've had enough, have some more. You may find yourself getting tired more easily, or getting a lot of headaches. When that happens, sit down and take it easy. And ... wait for it ... have some water. If you don't heed your body's signals, you're likely to start throwing up. You don't want that. Double up again on the water if you plan to have much coffee or alcohol -- better still, until you know how your body handles the lack of air here, lay off altogether.
(A related aside: A few weeks ago, while my mother and I were both sick, one of my good friends here -- fit and athletic, not quite 30 -- was rushed to the ER because he appeared to be having a heart attack. He was blacking out, having pain on his left side, the whole bit. Turned out, he was dehydrated and had had too much coffee that day. And he's lived here for a while. Word to the wise, dear readers.)
All this, of course, makes the heat that much more thirstifying. Now I will leave you and get some more water.

*According to Wikipedia, Macchu Picchu is 7,970 feet above sea level. Obviously that is higher than Denver, but not higher than many places around here. It's nothing to live 8,500 or 10,000 feet above sea level just a half-hour or so from here. That's probably the elevation of most of the places where we take little day trips.

East Coast-West Coast rivalry

Maybe this is a good time to go over one of the other peculiarities of living here, after so many years of East Coast citizenhood: the brand-name changes. What you know as Kroger, we know as the far more comical King Soopers. Same store -- I still even use my old Kroger card, and they carry the Big K brands -- but a much sillier name. (My mother-in-law can't keep it straight. She calls it Super Bob. And when it annoys me, I call it King Stoopers.) You call that ice cream Edy's, but we call it Dreyer's (or "Breyer's with a 'D'" -- why would they pick a name so close to another brand?). And Hellmann's mayonnaise becomes Best Foods.

Why, I ask you? Why? Any clues? It's really not that big a deal to drive over the Mississippi. Heck, if you live in O'Fallon, Illinois and work in St. Louis, you do it every single day. I wonder if the citizens of O'Fallon compare Edy's and Dreyer's, looking for differences. The mind boggles.

Advice for newcomers to Denver

When you open anything fresh from the store -- a bottle, an aluminum can, one of those cans/jars with foil or paper over the opening -- it's a good idea to point said vessel away from you. If it was packaged somewhere other than Denver, i.e. somewhere less than a mile from sea level, the change in pressure will cause the air inside to expand. Which means that when you open said vessel, it might just go, "Pop!" and empty some of its contents all over you.

Even those of us who have been here for a couple of years forget sometimes.

Time to change clothes.

Getting around, part two

I must start with a couple of corrections. I’m not going to edit the previous entry; I’m going to let it stand as a monument to the confusion that is Getting Around in Denver.
First: I realized when I turned toward I-25 this morning that I do not, in fact, live east of the highway. I live west. If I get off the highway and go toward the house, I see mountains. That’s west. And therein lies the rub with “directional” directions: People sometimes screw them up. Once I was half an hour late to an appointment when someone gave me directions coming from the east, and I was coming from the west (“Well, I’m coming from downtown,” I had said, “so which way is that?”).
Second: I made mention of 1st Street, when what I meant to say was 1st Avenue. All the numbered streets are Avenues*. In Denver, there is a difference. I’m not even sure if there is a 1st Street, but if there is, it’s a completely different slab of pavement than the one I was talking about.
* See, 1st Street would be in LoDo. If you’ve heard of a Denver neighborhood, LoDo’s probably it (thanks ever so to “The Real World”). Once it was a warehouse district filled with ne’er-do-wells; now LoDo is cleaned up, a twentysomething’s paradise of cocktail bars and overpriced restaurants. My husband used to work in LoDo, and it is still the only part of the city where I absolutely require my breadcrumb trails still.
LoDo was the original city center, which was oriented along the South Platte River, which runs northeast to southwest. If you look at a map of Denver, you’ll see what looks like a jaunty beret of streets sitting cocked on the northwest corner of the city’s otherwise blocky self. That’s LoDo. The cross-streets, which are numbered Streets, are completely different from their Avenue counterparts. And as you approach LoDo, all the normal roads you know and love end, and if you get in the wrong lane, you end up on the wrong road.
Somehow, in LoDo, my sense of direction flies completely out the window. I’ll be convinced I should turn right, when, as it happens, I should have turned left. There must be a memorial doughnut-shaped path worn in LoDo that’s named after me. And so I really have no advice about how to get around there (and we won’t even discuss parking), but I’m happy to accept any offered.

Getting around, part one

Getting around Denver should be easy, as the whole metro area is on a grid. In theory, it ought to be easy to figure out which side of town you’re on at all times. So why is it so maddening?
The first thing that’s frustrating to newcomers is Denver Directions. Newbies to North Carolina are amused by country directions – “Turn left at the old tree stump in front of the Hicks house, and when you get down a ways, turn down by the light pole that’s over by the pond at the church cemetery. You can’t miss it.” And, of course, you always do.
I never thought much about peculiarities in regional directions until I got here and registered my daughters for school.
“As far as where to park, you can go to the west side of the school. Or, you can turn south and go down a block,” she said.
West? South? I had arrived in town the afternoon before and was still in the trail-of-bread-crumbs phase.
“That’s a right turn,” she said with a small smile.
“Thank you.”
Everyone here, almost without fail, gives, well, directional directions; and, for some reason, I can’t master it, even after almost eighteen months. A couple of days ago, someone asked me, “Oh, are you east of I-25?”
I looked at my friend John. “Help,” I whispered.
“Yes, you are.”
“Thank you.”
I say “thank you” a lot.
Here’s a hint, if you’re traveling to Denver: If you’re in the city and looking at the mountains, you’re headed west. (If you’re south of the city, all bets are off, as the mountains wrap.) So, after eighteen months, all I can tell you is: If I’m not looking at the mountains, I’m headed either north, south, or east. And I am a person who prides herself on having a good sense of direction.
It helps, with the grid system, to know whether the road you’re on is a northie-southie or an eastie-westie (that’s Robin lingo, not Denver lingo). Once you’re east of Colorado Boulevard (one of the main northie-southies), the north-south cross streets follow a pattern – flora-named streets with two As, two Bs, and so on until you cross the Zs and end up in Aurora. And once you’re west of Santa Fe Boulevard, the north-south cross streets go A-Z, then A-Z again until you hit Sheridan, and then one of several western suburbs. (Another Denver peculiarity: The main north-south streets on the west side of town are known, at least in our house, as the “Victorian poets” – Lowell, Tennyson and Wadsworth.) Aurora and the suburbs have their own grid; that’s another story.
The numbered streets run east-west and number well into the hundreds. I’m sure there’s a designated, nice, round numbered-street where Denver ends and the northern suburbs begin. What it is, I don’t know. I have discovered through trial and error (but mostly trial) that if you’re in the hundreds, you’re Somewhere Else.
There are loads of small clusters of streets that you’ll see over and over, all of which have names here at the house. There are the Civil War roads (Lincoln, Grant, Sherman), the Southern States (Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana – no North Carolina, but there is a Raleigh on the west side of the grid), the Presidents (Madison, Adams, Monroe), and the Ivy League (Yale, Harvard, Vassar). This helps me because I can combine Colorado Directions and Country Directions – our favorite Indian restaurant is in the Ivy League area of Downing, over by the hospital; Target is at one of the Southern States and Colorado, behind Shotgun Willie’s, the strip club with a sense of humor (they advertised green bean casserole wrestling at Thanksgiving!).
There is one more peculiarity about directions in Denver: If you’re sending something to an address south of 1st Street, you must write “South” before the street name, or it will never get there. And there is absolutely no correlation between a street and its southern counterpart. In fact, there’s little correlation between one block of a street and another.
Example: I can tell you that I live on South Forest Street and you will know that a) I live south of 1st Street and that b) it’s east of Colorado Boulevard (because it’s a flora-named street, remember?). Now you can find my house, right? Wrong. Because, as with every non-major road in Denver, Forest (and S. Forest) ends every three or four blocks for a park, or a school, or a highway, or a shopping center or some such. If you’re lucky, your road will pick back up a block or so down and roughly in the same place. If you’re not (which is more likely), you will wander around and around wondering where on earth your road begins again. Eventually you will find it, a mile or so away, and you will wonder why in the hell you didn’t just ask for directions rather than thinking, “Oh, South Forest, I know where that is.”
All it means is, you’re not a native. Only natives think it’s easy getting around this place.