Today's Reading
DENVER WAS AN unsurprising hell—no one, not even a nutcase such as herself, delighted in the trauma of speeding, merging, honking traffic. She felt like she was in a flock of berserk geese, all of them nearly flying into one another in a moment of panic. But soon after, she was on the exit that took her into the mountains, and then, yes, it was like freaking angels singing. Early October, the aspens bright yellow, lit up by a fall-tilted sun that was playing hide-and-seek with storm clouds.
She pulled up to a rest stop with a sign that read KENOSHA PASS, parked in the gravel pullout, and sat, dazed. Beautiful, truly beautiful; now we're talking. This is where calendar photos were born. Golden leaves, green pines, blue peaks, buttery sunlight slants. She closed her eyes and rested, heard herself make a gurgling sound as she fell into a brief moment of sleep. This was a new skill set of middle age that kept surprising her—a lifelong insomniac who could now zonk out in a car. It was a brief moment, though, and when she opened her eyes, she was surprised to discover that the sky and weather had undergone some kind of seasonal surgery. Now it was blustery, the sun hidden, and there was a hint of spitting snow.
She let out a dramatic sigh—she had noticed her new penchant for those too—and gave up on her daydream of a sandwich in a sunny splotch on a fallen tree. Instead, she stayed in the car and ate and read the Colorado sign's details, something about South Park Ranching and Kake's Charcoal Kilns, which she knew nothing about, did not care about, and never wanted to care about, though she had the vague notion she should. If she had been with Vincent, he would have found a way of cajoling her into caring, if only because he cared, which she would have found annoying but maybe simultaneously endearing.
The parking area was crowded—mostly with people in their twenties or thirties and unaware they were in the best years of their lives, brazenly heading into the mountains despite the dandruff-like snow—the planet having the same dry-scalp problem she did, apparently. Something about these hikers' tenacity both annoyed and endeared them to her, and she took inspiration from their bravado and sighed and got out to pee, which was her version of living it up bravely, she supposed. There was no Porta Potti or outhouse, so she crouched between the two car doors, even though someone might see her bare ass briefly as they whizzed by on the road. Arrest her, already.
She had become an animal. This lunacy could put her in jail. Jail! She should think this trip through a little better. Mari kept telling her so with an increased pitch and vigor in her voice, and Mari was right, and Mari didn't even know the whole truth. The trip was dangerous on several levels. Dangerous because she couldn't think too far in advance—Just one key at a time, she kept saying. Dangerous because Powell or Apricot might come looking for her and see what a mess she was. Dangerous because she was about to break into a house, dangerous because she knew she was flipping out—and that worst of all, she was flipping out for the first time in her life, which meant she had no experience in how to handle it.
* * *
SHE CONSIDERED THE tangle of keys dangling and clanking on their key ring, turned the one that started her car, then turned it back off and did the drama-sigh. "Learn to live a little, push yourself a little, eh?" she said, and forced herself out, bundling up with hat and mittens and scarf, muttering a scattering of cusswords about the cold, the curses somehow feeling deeply satisfying and absolutely necessary.
She was asked immediately to take a young couple's photo with a JUST MARRIED sign soaped on their window—first some shots with the mountains behind, and then some that included the parking lot, because the two women were trying to fit in the sign that said 9,999 FEET, which they clearly found amusing, giggling and falling into one another with laughter, something about one foot shy of five digits, and she had to relent and smile at how in-love people found nearly anything amusing. Plus, she suspected they were high, the pot shops being plentiful in this state, maybe the 9,999 kind of high. Very high. She might be a bland-white-bread-middle-age-invisible woman, but she wasn't stupid. She started humming a Billy Joel lyric, "She's been living in her white-bread world," as she tried for several angles in an effort to cut out the cars, including her own dirty beast, since they made the photo ugly, although youngsters these days could probably just fuzz out the ugly of any photo, a skill set she had not yet cared to embrace and would die without embracing.
When they were satisfied and offered a giggly thanks, she had the audacity to say, "May I suggest to you? May I suggest this is the best part of your life?"—another song lyric and surely one they would not know—and before they could respond, she started walking quickly up the trail. Her thighs were reluctant almost immediately, her lungs reluctant very soon after. "Hi," she said to a man who was jogging down the trail and surprised her on a corner. He moved on quickly with a snarly grunt.
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