Manitou Springs is one of those great old mountain towns that still retains the beauty and character the original town founders likely intended. There are tiny shops full of trinkets custom made to lure tourists in on their way to the Pike's Peak...and the fact that the town is very near a major trailhead is obvious when you visit the Manitou Springs Library. While the library itself is likewise very tiny (an ancient, creaking ship of worn wood and musty books), a good number of people came in during my short visit, and several were clearly just coming off the mountain to reconnect to civilization and the cursed blessing of its electronic wonders.
The Manitou Springs Library looks like an old mansion that the city council decided to turn into the local library. I can't find a history of it, but just walking through the interior you know there has to be generations of stories underneath the stacks and behind the walls.
Just like any other library, it is set up with all the most up-to-date technology (self check out, computer stations, etc.) but the building itself is a creaky antique with odd little alcoves, small doors to nowhere, and yards of quirk and curiosities. It sits nested among long-settled neighborhoods on winding, narrow streets, and is set well back from the main street with a long, sloped lawn and many old growth trees surrounding the property.
When you walk into the the library, you can either go up to the main floor, or down to the children's floor (this is also where the somewhat makeshift bathroom resides). The main library consists of two public rooms, the larger of which contains the majority of the stacks, the computer stations, work tables, and a couple of easy chairs that look like they were left behind by the original owners. The smaller, sub-room houses the DVDs which, as you might expect, garnered the largest amount of local foot traffic.
The work tables do not offer electricity, so I knew it was going to be a short trip, but it was somewhat early on that I heard conversations about oncoming storms and wanted to get moving to the next library sooner than later anyway. It was fun to watch the hikers (all youths, all a bit rolled in dirt but so tech savvy it was mind reeling) reconnect with obvious relief to the larger world and comforts of home, family, and friends. Who knows how long they were out of contact--I was effectively out of range with almost no wifi opportunities for a couple of days at Big Bend and felt completely untethered and weirded out.
Part of the reason we travel is to disconnect at least a little, but it's kind of a shock when you realize just how dependent you are on all the phones, apps, tablets, and laptops--and most of all, the connection to the internet. We're so affixed we may have missed the historic moment in time when we all became, for all intents and purposes, cyborgs. Finally (ahhh).
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