Chapter43 – Closing in on Denver

 

  

As we closed in on Denver, I got scared, again.

The growing signs of snow on either side of the narrow highway only reminded me of home, and the early season blizzard that had buried most of the New York region, reminding me of my uncles, and reminding me that the bus rushed towards the one place they would expect me to go.

The panic of Pittsburgh returned. But I had no friendly fellow passengers to cheer me, only a bus packed with bored elderly people, migrant workers and sobering cowboys with muddy boots. No one looked at each other. Most didn’t even look out the window. And yet as we rode, I felt as if I stood out – wondering why I was making the trip, what I expected to find when I finally reached the place where Louise lived.

I frequently drew the now-ragged letter from my pocket, looked over the Boulder address, and then over the words into which I had read so much and yet which now seemed to say nothing of what I once presumed.

Although I had brought the book, “The Drunken Indian” I had purchased in Philadelphia for something to read while crossing county, I could not keep my mind on it, nor read well with the bus’ movement so I eventually stared out the window again.

Signs for Route 40 passed a regular intervals, although I refrained from marking the passage by keeping track of mileage posts as I had during my approach to LA. As urgently as I wanted to see Louise, I was also in no hurry to get there.

Around the bus darkness kept me from seeing much of the landscape, though occasional headlights illuminated pine trees though near Dinosaur, I got glimpses of the scrubland that made a maze of the horizon by day.

I stared out until my eyes hurt then re-read Louise’s letter again, though the blue ink had faded so much I read as much from memory as I did from the paper.

While I pictured my uncle’s mobster friends waiting at the bus depot in Denver when I stepped off, I worried more about how Louise would receive me. She had sounded enthusiastic on the phone. Would she feel the same tenderness she had felt when we worked together at the print factory?

These images flashed into my head, inspired by weariness and need, recalling our moments together at the bus stop where my hand slipped under her shirt – drawing outraged gasps from the old ladies also waiting for the same bus.

Or even those precious moments at lunch when the two of us crowded into a phone booth, where we served to feed the factory’s rumor mongers, for whom we had become the sole subject of speculation.

What if I got there and she didn’t want me? Was it possible to go back east – with so much of my uncle’s money (mob money) already spent? Would I want to go back to the pointless life that my family offered?

Some older couple kept the bus updated on the historic details of the area through which we had just passed, talking about the elaborate drawings in the cliffs nearby discovered as some point after the last war with the British in 1812 and how out of these ridges came some of the richest findings for Dinosaurs, explaining the name of the park on the Utah side and town on the Colorado side.

Their conversation diverted me, even down to the talk of drenching rains that occasionally interrupted the flight of dust devils in this world of extremes. Although winter and darkness hid most of the most curious features such as sagebrush, saltbrush, greasewood and pygmy forests, I pictured them just the same, along with the green canyons loaded with cottonwood and other trees that pockmarked the landscape if viewed from above. But I did get glimpse of Douglas Firs as we rolled on.

Seas of evergreen began to wall in the narrow road on either side, looking odd against the backdrop of snow outside. The headlights made the landscape glow, but not the trees. They remained dark and terrible, like ghosts of Christmas past waiting to drag me back through the sins of my childhood .

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but woke with a jolt each time I nodded off and my head leaned against the cold glass.

After spending several weeks in the moderate temperature world of East L.A., I felt the change down into my bones. Even when the bus’s heat kicked on and the warm air rose from near my feet, I could not get warm.

Most of those that had gotten on the bus in Las Vegas got out in Salt Lake City – though I could still see one or two of the wilted high rollers sleeping away their misery a few seats behind mine.  Others seemed less put out by the change of environment, going back to it from a brief stay elsewhere, perfectly comfortable with the cold. Several young nuns sat in the seats near the driver so they could take advantage of the wide windshield and the headlights that partially illuminated the landscape ahead. The young nuns oohed and aahed as they pointed to the sharp peaks to either side.

Old men dominated the back seat with an ongoing game of cards they had probably started in Las Vegas. The crack of the shuffled deck and the ring of coins provided a continuous musical score to the trip, accented by curses each time a bump disrupted the game or one of the old men took in too many hands in a row.

Sunrise struggled to break through the thick mists and high clouds that the driver warned us foreshadowed additional snow. He kept telling us that we needed to reach Denver before the snow started. Otherwise, we would risk slipping off the side of the mountains in the descending spiral of roads that brought us down into the city along the route we on.

We passed through Craig unmolested, though daylight showed a rippled land with ridges and canyons extending as far as the mists would let us see. Beyond Craig, we saw more frequent road signs counting down the miles to Denver.

We had passed into history. The roadside was thick with buildings the pioneers might have built, log cabins sitting side by side with prefab metal buildings and miles of cyclone fencing. Overgrown yellowed grass stuck through the layer of snow like seasonally confused wheat. Old drums of oil rusted in yards along with 1940s style cars lacking glass or headlights. We passed signs for Kremmling and Hot Sulphur Springs.

The old couple who had previously enlightened me on Dinosaur did as much now, reading out of their guide book as we rolled passed – a bit of distraction I didn’t mind as my head raced ahead towards what I would find when finally I got to where I intended to go.

The couple read things about an Indian tribe who used the area as a camping site and spa.

Indian legend claimed the heat that warmed the springs came from the fire of a wise medicine man once even claimed the waters could stop wars. But young chieftains refused to stop, and so the fires would burn forever with the hope that war might someday end.

White men tried to market the place just after the American Civil War, but apparently couldn’t get wagons up the steep and narrow roads. Not until the railroads arrived in the early 20th Century did the place become a popular spa.

We rolled on with signs popping up for Rollin’s Pass, although I could not tell if we passed through this or not, and lost track of the pursuit when new signs indicated the next town of Granby and the huge lake associated with that town.

The whole time the bus climbed higher and higher into the mountains, my ears popping with each level as if I was rising through water.

Behind us, the land fell, an amazing world of canyons, snow and trees, changing into the lower peaks of the mountains into which we were rapidly rising. The new feeling of awe came over me, a feeling similar to the one I felt the first time I saw the Empire State Building up close when I was five, the mountains making me seem trivial in the scheme of things, making all those places I’d just passed through such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas seem insignificant.

Despite claims about how humanity was undermining nature – the rhetoric of melting ice caps and other silly science, we could never out build what nature had constructed. And while we would later look as great tragedies the fall of our towers in New York, I saw the jagged sky line as something holy that human kind constantly violated with too few voices of protest raised against the abuse.

Fear like none I had experience before gripped me as the bus huffed and puffed to make its way up the winding curves into those mighty jagged jaws. At times, the road was so narrow that edges of stone came within inches of the window against which I leaned my head, jolting me back as if the stone would break through if the bus hit a bump.

Everything became bigger than life: trees, boulders, misty valleys. The road and the miles to Denver alone shrank – but ever so slowly.

Even the hours seemed to expand, minutes stretching out as if influenced by the landscape.

I ached from sitting; and exited the bus at each rest step to stretch my legs and take some of the frigid air into my lungs.

Yet standing outside without the thin metal and glass of the bus made me feel incredibly exposed. So I clamored back into my seat even before it had enough time to cool, impatiently waiting out the rest of the time until the bus continued its trek.

We climbed the mountain as if we rode on the threads of a cork screw, weaving around each peak, often facing back briefly the way we had just come, looking down on the road we have just traveled to reverse again with the next sequence of turns, milage markers matched by markers indicating elevation, my ears popping at even the suggestion of a significant rise: 5,000 turning into 6,000, then 7,000, and 8,000 feet.

At some point, we ceased climbing, riding a ridge of some sort until we stood high above Denver itself, which at 5,000 feet, was a fish bowl filled with glittering electric fish below us, each twinkling with all of the energy the electric company there could supply, an oasis in the desert of cold stone that seemed cool and remote despite its being below us.

We seemed to descend into it out of the clouds, the bus reversing its inclination from struggling to climb to holding back so that we wouldn’t fall too fast into that abyss.

And falling was a risk because the road grew no wider than when we came.

The bus swung wide around each descending curve so that from the window at which I saw no land existed between me and sheer fall, and at times, I thought I was falling, that the bus was falling, that we sailed through air towards an eventual and thunderous impact I grimaced to greet.

Never before nor since had I been so scared, or so thrilled.

No carnival ride could have provided such a chilling trip as each curve the bus took, going round and round, sometimes feeling as if it teetered on the edge of the fall I feared, pulling back at the last minute so that it could repeat the experience a moment later.

This road, too, served traffic coming up as well as going down, so that on occasion the bus had to “squeeze” even more closely to the edge to accommodate a truck or camper, halting my breath and almost my heart until that passage was accomplished.

More than once I thought I would die on that road, and that fear drove out the long-standing fear of finding my uncles waiting at the bus depot when we pulled in.

Although weather had treated us well and snow had not blockaded the road as it had the interstate through Wyoming, previous precipitation had left the sides of the roads with mounds of dirty snow and streaks of black ices across the lanes of the road as sunlight melted the snow above which refroze again on the flat surface. The tires of the bus skidded often and often at inconvenient times, adding to the skipped beats of my already over zealous heart.

If anyone else had similar feelings in the bus, their faces didn’t show it – each carved as if on Mt. Rushmore. Even the usually exuberant cowboys seemed more column than in the previous miles, having exhausted their hoopla – and perhaps coming back to a place that held only the misery of daily jobs for them.

Fear faded as we drifted closer to the City of Denver, mists parting and bringing us into a bowl of lights that seemed as grand to my mind as Lake Tahoe was to Mark Twain.

Perhaps because I was so fearful in the bus’ descent and so terrified by what I might expect when I actually arrived that I became caught up in that eternal presence with my awareness of everything sharpened. That moment, those lights, the stale smell of the bus, the heat blowing into my face from the vent, the chill touch of the glass, remain vivid in my mind as when I first saw them, and I felt as if we were being submerged into a bowl of sparkling water.

The fact that we were descending into a city that was a mile above sea level struck me only later, although I was aware of how the city seemed to be cupped into the palm of a hand, with each of the Rocky Mountain’s peaks like fingers rising above it.

Eventually, we slid into the outskirts of the city, and traveled along flat streets that seemed unnatural to me after so many miles of tilting up or down. The city looked so normal once we reached it, that this too seemed bizarre to me, though the character of the city became clearer the nearer we came to downtown, where images of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” came back at me, and had me searching the webwork of allies for signs of Neil Cassidy and the other characters.

The city, however, brought me back sharply to the season as piles of snow littered the sides of the streets from passing plows. Snow had apparently fallen a day or two prior to our arrival and the city had just managed to dig itself out. The bus skidded on slick stretches of black ice several times before reaching the depot at the center of town.

 

  On the lamb menu

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