Nederland

It was such a fun time going to the lecture at CU that after dinner, I didn't feel like going home quite yet. When I got back to my car I wasn't quite sure where I might go, but after starting it up, I remembered that Nederland, a small town up the canyon of Boulder Creek, was having a festival that weekend, starting on Friday afternoon, and that it might be fun to check it out.

Normally I'm a sucker for smalltown festivals. Driving across the country, I love stumbling upon them by serendipity. If a parade is involved, then it gets an extra bonus.

In this case, however, I had mixed feelings. The name of Nederland's spring festival is "Frozen Dead Guy Days," so called in honor of a specific frozen dead guy (here's the background if you want to know). The logo shows a skeleton wearing a ski cap and holding a popsicle with a frozen corpse inside it.

It's not that I have anything particular against festivals of the dead, especially when they occur around Halloween time, but lately I've come to believe the skull image is way, way overused lately in our culture. A couple years ago, you couldn't go into the mall and buy anything from the casual men's clothing stores that didn't have a skull image on it. Nevertheless, I thought it might be worthwhile checking it out, if nothing else just to wonder around among the musical venues and, of course, see the parade on Saturday, which would no doubt feature lots of death/skull/corpse costumes. I wasn't sure if I wanted to see the "coffin races" that were soon to follow. It seemed like bad luck, all in all.

Since it was still Friday afternoon, I thought I might just skip ahead, and instead of going to the corpse parade, I go up to Nederland on the first night of the festival to see what was happening. All this went through my mind as I came up to the first stoplight on Arapahoe, and in a spontaneous decision, I put on my blinker, headed down to Canyon, then took a left heading up the creek into the canyon itself.

Right as I turned the corner, I saw a young man standing at a bus stop, no doubt waiting for the bus to Nederland. He was wearing a winter coat and a stocking cap, the kind that everyone wears for skiing and hiking, and which the skeleton is wearing in the Frozen Dead Guys Days logo. He was holding out his thumb, begging for a ride.

Without even thinking much, I decided to pull over and offer him a ride. He hopped into my passenger seat and introduced himself as Nick. He looked to be college age.

"Wow, what they said is true about Boulder," he said. "Hitchhiking is easy." Turns out he had just put out his thumb about thirty seconds earlier.

"Where you from?" I asked him.

"New Jersey," he said.

"Ah, the Great Megalopolis of the East," I replied.

He asked me why I was going up to Nederland. "Purely on a whim," I said.

He told me what he knew about Nederland. "They say that if you take Boulder, it's even more Boulder than Boulder is."

"I've heard that too," I said.

As we drove up Boulder Canyon in the last strains of daylight, he told me how much he loved my car.

"We used to have a BMW almost exactly like this when I was a kid," he told me. "Everything looks almost exactly the same."

I told him that it was a solid car, and even though I'd had to put a bunch of money into it last year to get it even in this good of a shape, I was hooked on BMWs and didn't ever want to own anything else, if I could help it.

"Yeah, I know what you mean," he said. "We used to call our car 'Captain Kirk' when I was a kid."

Somehow that made me feel better.

About halfway up the canyon, Nick let it spill that he was the grower and seller of a specific kind of herbal medicine product that is only partially legal in Colorado. He offered me some of his product as compensation for the ride, and being in a whimsical mood, I said yes.

"I've got to pull over though, for safety's sake," I told him. So I parked at a pull-out along the road beside an informative sign about a forest fire in the canyon many years ago. We shared some of his product, something I hadn't done in a while. As usual, whenever I'm in that state, I started running my mouth off about the history and geography of the area. He didn't seem to mind as I paced around. He said he enjoyed looking at my car, because it brought back so many memories.

After a couple minutes we got back in the car and started up the canyon. As I do when I'm in that state, I was super paranoid about driving and could hardly talk because my eyes were riveted on the road. Since I'd nearly lost my life the week before in the Poudre Canyon, all I could think about was how I didn't want to die now.

I told him that I had mixed feelings about going to the festival. "I'm not so into death imagery, I told him. I usually try to avoid anything with skulls." I told him what I knew about the background of the festival, and the real "frozen dead guy" that the festival was named after.

By the time we got to Nederland, the sun had gone down. I had driven the last half of the drive with a horrible cotton mouth, so much that I could barely talk at times. Also I was running low on gas---the reserve light had come on halfway up the canyon. So I pulled over at the gas station as soon as I got into town.

Nick hopped out and thanked me. We shook hands and he walked off to find his destination. I told him I'd remember his face and look for him around Boulder and Fort Collins, where he said he spends lots of time.

After filling up on gas and buying a bottle of Perrier water in the convenience store, I parked in the RTD parking lot and walked around town for a brief time in the dark.

It was thirteen degrees, according to the bank clock by the creek. I didn't want to drive back down the canyon yet, in the state I was in. But I didn't feel like going inside anywhere for very long either.



It turns out there was nothing go on, festival wise. The most interaction I had was buying some hot tea at a diner. With my mind finally calmed down, I thought I was in a state enough to drive again, so I headed back down the canyon. A half hour later I was back in Boulder where I had begun.

So even though I didn't really do anything, I guess I technically had a good time at Frozen Dead Guy Days by the fact that I avoided becoming one.