Welcome to the Mountains Now Behave! By Geno Kennedy
$15.99
Description
Review
My name is Carol, mother to Jody in Nederland.
Jody sent me a copy of your Welcome to To The Mountains the end of August. We had an amazing summer here. Best in 10 years. I honestly started to email you a couple of times between canning and jamming and relishing in preparedness for winter. Well.. winter is upon us now with her usually beautiful vengeance. It has been snowing for the last 19 days non stop. 10 feet so far and temps -4 below 0.
This book should be in every tourist information bureau from Colorado to Alaska. We live on the Alaska Highway and get mega amounts of travelers and truck drivers. Long hauls... Your stories make for a good read. Emotionally up and down like a dog's breakfast from the humour to unbelievable terror.
Those fancy-shmancy tourist guides are sure deceiving ! You have done an excellent job of story telling. I found myself placed right there in each situation. Half the battle in writing an analog is creating a visual effect to go hand in hand with the element of many surprises. I couldn't put it down until I read the whole thing! and even reading it over again the story lines became more intense, like reading between the lines.
You give a new definition to," When the Roll is Called up Yonder."
Looking forward to a Volume 2.
P.S. I hear that Colorado Kool-Ade is equal to our Screech, A.K.A white lighting. Hope to meet you in person if and when I get down to visit my beautiful family ( we have one airline that holds you for ransom to fly out of the north.) Adieu mon ami avec le livre. --Carol from Canada
LITTLE MOUNTAIN TOWNS ARE STRANGE PLACES, and no one knows that better than their residents, who cope with both isolation and invasion, with five-foot blizzards in May and T-shirt days in December, with backyard wildlife and toxic remnants. Oh, and the people who stick around for years can get more than weird, too.
Geno Kennedy, who hails from Gilpin County, has captured much of the weirdness and the attitude that seems to go with altitude in this book actually, not much more than a pamphlet at 60 pages.
It's a collection of stories and advice, mostly aimed at visitors and newcomers, as with these driving tips:
"People out of gas as they head up to go camping, what, you think they have a 7-11 on top of the Continental Divide? Three guys in a van stuck 100 feet into a 500-foot-long snowdrift. What were they thinking? The only thing they had was shorts and beer. A family of four watching their rental car slowly sink into a mud bog while Dad tries to call a tow truck on a cell phone that doesn't work up here...
"Slow down if you're heading down. If you burn out your brakes you're toast. If you're heading up don't push it or your vehicle will overheat. Watch out for people heading down with no brakes. If you're driving a tank or a mobile condo and get a bunch of cars stuck behind you, pull over and let them pass. We're not on vacation, we're heading to work."
Kennedy's observations are accurate, his stories are entertaining, and his advice is generally sound. His topics include: our weather ("Bring shorts and longjohns. And a shovel."); water ("The water in the mountains is never warm enough to swim in, never clean enough to drink."); wind ("Buy a concrete tent if you can find one."); animals (After a porcupine encounter, "My dogs still won't talk to me."); vehicles ("Everyone here has a cracked windshield. It's like a badge of honor."); and the locals (Women can find men in mountain bars, since "the odds are good," but they should keep in mind that "the goods are odd.")
That's the good part. The bad part is that this book, like so many other self-published books, needed some work from people besides the writer.
The typography, for instance, is a sequence of centered lines. It looks like poetry at first glance, but most of it isn't. Sometimes the line breaks make sense, often they don't. So it's not as easy to read as it should be.
Then there's the grammar. I get tired of seeing "would of" instead of "would've" or "would have," and it's jarring. The same holds with "your" where it should be "you're," and both mistakes are common in this text.
Maybe that's nitpicking, but after years of editing, every time I hit one of those, it stops me, and keeps me from enjoying the prose and this is prose that I truly enjoyed, since it captured so much of what makes life in these little mountain towns so interesting.
So enjoy it, and encourage your in-laws to read it when they come for their summer visit. Then hope that there's a second edition that fixes the problems with the first one.
Ed Quillen --Ed Quillen -- Denver Post Columnist
Jody sent me a copy of your Welcome to To The Mountains the end of August. We had an amazing summer here. Best in 10 years. I honestly started to email you a couple of times between canning and jamming and relishing in preparedness for winter. Well.. winter is upon us now with her usually beautiful vengeance. It has been snowing for the last 19 days non stop. 10 feet so far and temps -4 below 0.
This book should be in every tourist information bureau from Colorado to Alaska. We live on the Alaska Highway and get mega amounts of travelers and truck drivers. Long hauls... Your stories make for a good read. Emotionally up and down like a dog's breakfast from the humour to unbelievable terror.
Those fancy-shmancy tourist guides are sure deceiving ! You have done an excellent job of story telling. I found myself placed right there in each situation. Half the battle in writing an analog is creating a visual effect to go hand in hand with the element of many surprises. I couldn't put it down until I read the whole thing! and even reading it over again the story lines became more intense, like reading between the lines.
You give a new definition to," When the Roll is Called up Yonder."
Looking forward to a Volume 2.
P.S. I hear that Colorado Kool-Ade is equal to our Screech, A.K.A white lighting. Hope to meet you in person if and when I get down to visit my beautiful family ( we have one airline that holds you for ransom to fly out of the north.) Adieu mon ami avec le livre. --Carol from Canada
LITTLE MOUNTAIN TOWNS ARE STRANGE PLACES, and no one knows that better than their residents, who cope with both isolation and invasion, with five-foot blizzards in May and T-shirt days in December, with backyard wildlife and toxic remnants. Oh, and the people who stick around for years can get more than weird, too.
Geno Kennedy, who hails from Gilpin County, has captured much of the weirdness and the attitude that seems to go with altitude in this book actually, not much more than a pamphlet at 60 pages.
It's a collection of stories and advice, mostly aimed at visitors and newcomers, as with these driving tips:
"People out of gas as they head up to go camping, what, you think they have a 7-11 on top of the Continental Divide? Three guys in a van stuck 100 feet into a 500-foot-long snowdrift. What were they thinking? The only thing they had was shorts and beer. A family of four watching their rental car slowly sink into a mud bog while Dad tries to call a tow truck on a cell phone that doesn't work up here...
"Slow down if you're heading down. If you burn out your brakes you're toast. If you're heading up don't push it or your vehicle will overheat. Watch out for people heading down with no brakes. If you're driving a tank or a mobile condo and get a bunch of cars stuck behind you, pull over and let them pass. We're not on vacation, we're heading to work."
Kennedy's observations are accurate, his stories are entertaining, and his advice is generally sound. His topics include: our weather ("Bring shorts and longjohns. And a shovel."); water ("The water in the mountains is never warm enough to swim in, never clean enough to drink."); wind ("Buy a concrete tent if you can find one."); animals (After a porcupine encounter, "My dogs still won't talk to me."); vehicles ("Everyone here has a cracked windshield. It's like a badge of honor."); and the locals (Women can find men in mountain bars, since "the odds are good," but they should keep in mind that "the goods are odd.")
That's the good part. The bad part is that this book, like so many other self-published books, needed some work from people besides the writer.
The typography, for instance, is a sequence of centered lines. It looks like poetry at first glance, but most of it isn't. Sometimes the line breaks make sense, often they don't. So it's not as easy to read as it should be.
Then there's the grammar. I get tired of seeing "would of" instead of "would've" or "would have," and it's jarring. The same holds with "your" where it should be "you're," and both mistakes are common in this text.
Maybe that's nitpicking, but after years of editing, every time I hit one of those, it stops me, and keeps me from enjoying the prose and this is prose that I truly enjoyed, since it captured so much of what makes life in these little mountain towns so interesting.
So enjoy it, and encourage your in-laws to read it when they come for their summer visit. Then hope that there's a second edition that fixes the problems with the first one.
Ed Quillen --Ed Quillen -- Denver Post Columnist
About the Author
About the Author... I wasn't even going to have this but my friends said... Geno... You have got to say something about you so whoever reads this book doesn't think it was written by a dumb hick. Well, I'm not dumb, at least not real dumb, but I am a hick and proud of it. It took me thirty years to get this way. Honey, I am home. I am a refugee from Poughkeepsie, New york. Sorry Mom, It wasn't for me. I am a quiet, shy, humble man. Not really! I'm a left-handed Leo from New York. Ain't nothing quite, shy or humble about me. Close your eyes now and see if you can spell Poughkeepsie. I'll buy you a beer if you can. Only kidding. I moved to the great state of Colorado thirty years ago. I have never looked back. I have lived above 8,000 feet for twenty-nine of them. It changes you. You stop and smell the roses.