Perry Station to Knox Station

This was another short hike and I'm glad for that because the Colorado summer heat was cranked wide open. Both Perry and Knox are small stations on mostly residential streets.

Here, the light rail and the accompanying Greenway make a straight shot to the state capitol building.

Just across Perry Street from the train station, Dry Gulch joins Lakewood Gulch.

Where two or more streams join, it's called a confluence and such a place is interesting on many different levels. For instance, many well-known confluences are also sacred sites. Whether it's psychological or physical, there's often a positive energy to such places. 

Confluences often have cultural and economic importance. The nearby confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek is the birthplace of Denver, bringing life giving water, river commerce, and gold placers together to draw people from the Eastern United States to the new West.

Often, the mixing of waters from different sources will cause chemical reactions that make the separate streams visible far downstream. This water is surprisingly clear so that the effect is missing.

I tried to get a photograph of some very healthy looking minnows but they were too small.

Just downstream, the gulch widens out into a long pond.

Knox Station is just across the Lakewood Gulch here.

The retaining wall at Knox Station exhibits one of my favorite pieces of station art, Illuminating Path, by Jose Aguirre. It is a tile mosaic that looks like woven beads. It was constructed by students of the local La Academia.

Ways accumulate meaning. These railway stations would be railways stations whether there was art there or not...whether there were people there are not. There are plenty of abandoned railway stations in the world. But place one mind there and they self organize into places saturated with meaning. And they accumulate art.

A path is more than it's physical being. It has meaning..it has accumulated the meaning of all the people that have been there before. Many of the roads of the world were built on paths worn into the Earth by

bands of ungulates long before humans arrived, and they became footpaths, then highways for horses and carriages.

I come across paths in forests that have not been used for a long time. I recognize them for what they are...a mark on the landscape, but I also feel things. "I wonder where this path leads. I wonder who has used this path before me. I wonder what this path was used for."

Abandoned railways sometimes become foot trails. The Rails to Trails Conservancy exists to do just that. And the meaning grows.

Geometries, meanders and confluences, have meanings that do not exist in their physical nature, often deep significance grading to the religious. I look down a path that provides an unimpeded view of the state Capitol and something clicks in my mind. I want to record this meaningful thing.

Minds organize.