Oh, and yes. And someone beside you. So that when you saw sunlit sandstone cliffs and mammoth bones and heard wind whistling through caves, as she’d done in South Dakota, there would be someone to ooh and aah with, which made the oohing and aahing comfortable and fulfilling instead of stab-your-heart-out depressing.
These were essential things.
She scratched at her scalp and dandruff swirled in the air, caught by the sun. Disgusting. This air was dry, no joke. Perhaps her scalp was emitting the particles of fog in her consciousness, an indication of her unclear thinking and the reduced activation of network areas of her brain. Her whole head, inside and out, was a dry-hot mess. What she needed was a brush, soap, and water, which is when it would get better. She would get better. Life would clarify. Make sense.
Soon. Maybe tonight. Tonight, she’d be turning a key to the rest of her life.
—
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.
“Hi,” she said to a young couple, who acknowledged her vaguely.
“Hi,” she said to the next man, and the one after that, and the one after that, and none acknowledged her at all, as if she were a ghost, though the next one said, “Have a nice walk,” and actually looked her in the eye and smiled.
She hiked on, cold but happier now because of that simple smile. She stepped aside for the line of teenagers who were coming down the mountain at a fast clip, and then again for two gray-bearded men, and then again for two women runners, and then again for an athletic middle-aged guy who looked so much like Pierce Brosnan that it probably was Pierce Brosnan, and she wondered for the first time in her life who would name their kid Pierce, and she then decided to name the nighttime blues that came often at dusk “The Pierces,” because that’s what they did to her heart. The heart that was flat-out and obviously lonely and broken.
On her way back, as she neared the parking lot, a man approached her and stood in the middle of the hiking path. “Why, good afternoon,” he said, in what struck her as a rather formal and serious greeting, though she was secretly happy to have someone acknowledge her existence on earth.
“Heya.” Her eyes went from his to the chubby face of the blue-eyed toddler in his backpack, who said, “Ball ball” and pointed to the visible moon in the now-clear sky. She raised an eyebrow; clearly, the kid was as brilliant as the Colorado weather was changeable.
“True that,” she said to the kid.
The dad ran his hand over a very unruly, wiry beard, and she wondered if all young men had wiry beards and if so, at what age they began to come in better than this Brillo-pad-looking thing. In a soft voice he added, “You checking out the Colorado Trail?”
“No, just stretching my legs. On a car trip.”
“Us too. My wife is napping in the car. She’s exhausted. I’m trying to give her a break by just wandering around the parking lot here. I keep checking to see if she’s awake, but no.”
Ammalie nodded. “It’s more tiring than I thought it would be. Driving, I mean. It’s exhausting, and I’ve been thinking how all the views, the space, well, it’s…kinda loud. Can space be loud? Everyone makes travel seem so easy, and it’s kinda not. It’s just not. People are such liars. And I don’t even have a kid to occupy,” and then she added, “besides myself, I guess, ha.”
Now the man was crouching to tie his hiking boot, and so she was face-to-face with the child, who was puffing out his cheeks, then making popping noises while digging his little fists into his brown curls. “Hi, kid,” she said.
He popped his cheeks at her in response.
“You look happy to be alive,” she said.
He popped his cheeks again.
The dad snorted as he stood. “Kids are good like that. Kinda like dogs. None of the trappings of worry. Such as, money. Such as, dying. Such as, not crashing the car. You know what I notice? There’s a lot of crosses. I mean, there are lots of crosses alongside the road. Especially in New Mexico.”
“That’s the direction I’m heading. I saw lots in Nebraska and South Dakota and Wyoming, though. Crosses and snow fences. I know what you mean.” She drew a big breath in. She hadn’t really talked to anyone for days. “I was thinking, on my drive. Snow fences are there to prevent death, you know? And crosses mark the death that happened anyway. How human it is! This need to protect life, or mark death if it happens.”
He blinked at her a moment, as if deciding whether to continue this conversation. “I hadn’t thought about that,” he said at last, scratching the wiry curls on his chin again. “What I’d been thinking about is the ribbon of roads, which are built on wagon tracks, which are built on walking paths, which are built on animal paths, and what a very human and animal need it is. To travel. Yeah, we are just wired to travel. We like to move. And if we can’t? Like, city kids living in poverty? Like I used to be? Well, people will find ways to travel in their brains, aka drugs, and that might be why we have such a problem. Or we start stealing so we can travel, also a problem. I almost got pickpocketed at my local grocery in Las Vegas last month by a kid. I grabbed his arm and he said he needed a bus ticket, needed to get home, he was sorry, but he needed to travel. Humans are basically just animals with a few extra words.”
She snorted agreement.
The man flashed a smile. “I call these thoughts ‘Road Thoughts,’ kinda like ‘Deep Thoughts,’ which I used to watch with my dad, and he’s like the same age as you, which means you’re old enough to remember from Saturday Night Live, right? Heh. Anyway, nice chatting with you.”
She laughed and felt a momentary wave of connection, and when he stepped out of her way, she waved goodbye to the lip-popping youngster, who balled up his hands and waved backward, at himself. That kid would be middle-aged and creaky with his own cultural references someday, or, at least, one could only hope.
—
She drove on and dropped down into South Park with its blue crags of what she’d read were the Collegiate Peaks—who would pick college names for such untamed, uncultivated, wild landscapes, especially when such beautiful words were available? Mount Princeton, good f—ing grief. But it was towering and granite-faced and impressive, and it also signaled that she was getting close.
Snow swooped across the road in ghostly bands—spooky. Being alone suddenly spooked her out. Life spooked her out. Death spooked her out. Probably she should turn the car around. Chicago and a familiar home and her humdrum life were maybe not so bad after all, though those too had been spooking her out.
But no, onward, damnit. She just had to think. If the key didn’t work—what would she do then? Why, she’d continue to sleep in the car until she worked out a new plan. But no, that wasn’t realistic, or desirable, because she was cold and achy and hungry for a real meal and wasn’t sure she could take sleeping in the Grey Goose for another night. It was harder than she had thought to be crouched on hands and knees all the time; yes, the sleeping bag and puffy air mattress had been well thought out, but it was still the back of a car. Moving everything over to one side so she could lean half the backseat forward to create a horizontal sleeping area was a drag. Getting out to pee in the middle of the night was a drag. Crawling around inside like a crab was a drag. Having cold feet was a drag—she needed a microwave to heat up a rice pack, rice packs being one of the best inventions known to humankind. Heating up one thing at a time on her tiny butane camp stove—first water for coffee, then a can of soup, then more water for tea—that was a drag. She’d gotten better at it—what a newbie she’d been—but truth be told, so much of this was a drag.
On the other hand, the Grey Goose was doing fine, running well despite her two hundred thousand miles, and recently named thus because geese were adaptable, strong, went everywhere, and, when left in peace, were good, steady long-distance fliers. Plus, they headed south in the fall, which is exactly what she was doing.
Yes, it was just fine. Sure, her life did seem deserted and untenanted, suddenly—yes, that was the word—an untenanted life. And sure, she seemed to have an aimlessness of soul. And sure, there was a fogginess that had moved into her brain. And sure, she was still grieving Vincent, guilting over Vincent, even after more than a year! But she had the Grey Goose, she had some keys, she had America to drive across, she kinda had enough money to make it work, and she had herself, and so, surely, it was just not that bad.
