Chapter 11
Friday, August 31, 1984. It had been seven days since we had last seen the beautiful southern shores of golden California.
I awoke around eight thirty in the morning from a deep, dead sleep on the living room floor of Kerry and Sam’s Aspen condo with my blankets warm around me and the soft carpet as my mattress. I turned sideways to see Lucas still asleep on the fold-out couch. Declan was nowhere to be seen; his blankets all rolled up neatly and stored on the side of the room. I could hear the chirping of the birds outside; a chainsaw cut through the mountain air and hammers banged at a nearby new homesite.
Someone’s vision of paradise was being renovated. Everyone wanted to live here; new homes were going up everywhere.
Sam drew the Venetian blinds in the living room to unveil the majestic mountains above us. Kerry played music in the kitchen as she rattled the breakfast plates and pans, making bacon and eggs for us all.
The rest of Lucas’s family was supposed to arrive from Kansas later in the day. There had been seven kids in his family. Anna was the oldest, followed by Kerry, then Faith, Lucas, Kenny, Trent, and Nate. Nate, Lucas’s youngest sibling, had died a year before in a car accident. The three older girls all had jet-black hair and Mediterranean skin; they were all beautiful. Lucas’s dad had left his family years before. His mom had raised them all on her own on a mere nurse’s salary.
We planned on doing the whole Aspen pub crawl again when they arrived in order to celebrate as much as we could: new beginnings, family reunions, the marriage of Kerry and Sam, and the beauty of life.
Lucas, Declan, and I resolved to hike the huge wilderness behind us before the rest of his family arrived. We set out right after breakfast in our running gear, with crazy neck scarves, a knapsack stuffed with raingear (that Sam had lent us), a coconut, three apples, a trail map, and two large containers of water.
The beginning of Hunter’s Creek Trail, right outside the condo, started out rocky, and crisscrossed the creek at several points with its wooden foot bridges. It seemed to be a crazy zigzag into the wilderness. At one point we had to cross the creek on a large fallen pine, for the small bridge to the left of it was gone; it had probably been gutted out by the constant onslaught of rising raging water. The sound of water rushed in from every direction as we steadily climbed; the music from this symphony pleasantly filled my ears. This was the freeway hum of the wilderness, I thought. The fresh smell of pines was a welcome replacement to the raw exhaust smell of the real freeway; it overwhelmed my senses. The beautiful mountains were such a welcome contrast to the gray Los Angeles skyline of my past.
I knew aspen trees by their rounded green leaves. Sam had pointed out the crisp, defined leaves to me the night before in the wall photographs that he took. I fancied myself an expert now.
After a slow, subtle climb, our trail opened into a great room; a meadow that was filled with yellow petal flowers everywhere, just like the great poppy fields that surrounded the city of Oz, or that dreaming image of Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass standing up to their waists in their tuxes. The band on that old album cover looked out at us as we walked toward them. We were in awe.
“Can wisdom be taught?” Lucas spoke like Socrates to Plato and Xenophon. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or it was a serious question to engage us once again in a discourse on the mysteries of life.
“Teaching can only guide us; true wisdom must be acquired through experience,” I fired back at him, pulling the BS from somewhere, someplace; maybe an old Kung Fu episode where the young pupil “Grasshopper” asks the same question of the great master as they both sit with legs crossed and palms upturned to the heavens. Lucas laughed at my answer.
We swam in a freshwater lagoon that was fed by the gurgling stream that we followed. We dove into the wake-up-ice-cold water with our running shorts on. After the refreshing dunk, we shook off and continued up and along the wooded path, veering off the trail for about fifteen minutes in order to explore an abandoned, roofless log cabin that was thick with the overgrowth of decades of brush; the seedlings had probably taken root inside the open structure before we were born. I marveled at this one-time shelter. It had once housed somebody’s significant-but-now-forgotten life.
How long had this place been here, I wondered. Years? Decades?
Who had lived here? Were they miners or just squatters? Did they pay taxes? Or just build this place on someone else’s land way out here in the country? Why did they leave? My mind constantly worked like this. I was fascinated by people and history and old pictures where I could look at the pocket watch a person was carrying and see if I could picture myself in their skin, just sitting in that parlor as they did back in 1897 or 1913, waiting for the photographer under the black sheet to flash that big flashbulb that he held in one arm so high.
Born into a time
Born into a place
Given a face
On the pavement
I had written these lyrics as part of the chorus of a longer, more intricate verse many years before. It expressed my fascination with history, old forgotten photographs, and the souls that they belonged to. I constantly wondered what part fate had in my being born into the place, time, family, and heritage I had been born into. If I had been born into a Mormon family living in the foothills of the Wasatch Range, would I be a Mormon and a different person today? Or would I be the same person I thought I was now? Would I still be asking questions and still searching for something that felt like the truth, regardless of who I had been born as? How does one’s environment affect one’s person? I knew that there could never be an answer to these questions though, and this secretly killed me. It made my head explode.
From the roofless structure we moved out and began to ascend the mountainside again, leaving the trail at last and moving straight up, with the landscape growing thicker with shrubs, bushes, and heavy vegetation that made the climb suddenly more difficult. Branches scratched at our bare ankles as we pushed higher. After a few short rests, we made it to a grassy clearing at the top. I was out of breath.
And then we saw cows, several of them . . . Cows just grazing amongst us! Cows at the top of the world! Bovine beasts, these were the sacred animals of all of Hinduism, just grazing on the roof of creation.
“Cows? How the heck did a bunch of cows get up here?” I asked the others in utter bewilderment.
“Surely not the way we came up,” was Decky’s matter-of-fact reply. He was bent over with his hands on his knees, still breathing heavy, and looked around for answers himself.
Lucas smacked open the coconut on a rock and gave us each a section of the broken shell that held the white moist meat. Sitting on the hillside, I now observed the rolling trail that traversed the tops of these grassy and wooded foothills that we rested on, all the while biting into the white flesh of the coconut and grinding it with my back molars, chewing the cud in a circular motion. The cows must have followed the easier rolling path to have gotten here, I thought as I rested. We had, more or less, come straight up the face from the roofless shelter, and I could see now how the actual trail was a slower and more gradual climb. I wondered if these were, in fact, wild cows, if there were ever such a thing, or if somebody actually owned them and they had lost their way.
Luke and Declan pushed ahead now that we had rejoined the trail, with three of the cows and a threatened bull quickly moving a safe distance away on their approach. The wind began to pick up and could be heard rustling through the leaves of the trees as distant thunder rumbled throughout Greater Aspen. I looked out at the grand cathedral below us. It would not be long now before the rain came, I was sure of it.
Walking swiftly toward the edge of the ridge, I tried to catch up with the others. I took in the view of birches and aspen groves in the valley below the trail. The undergrowth springing out from the ridge was laden with an array of violet, red, white, and yellow petal flowers. A hummingbird flew within a few feet of me, buzzing like a giant queen bee. It flew close enough to sense my presence and hovered there for a minute; its tiny eye studied me as I studied it, before the creature quickly changed direction to disappear over the hill forever. The whirring sound it made as it zoomed away was reminiscent of the aerocar sounds from the Jetson space family cartoons.
With the echoes of the thunder and the sudden bursts of wind, I softly sang a Doors song as I walked. The lyrics of the late Jim Morrison were there with me as the rain crept in. His deep voice echoed in the soundtrack of my mind . . . We were all “Riders on the Storm.”
The rain came through quickly. We had to take emergency cover underneath some pines overlooking the valley. Lucas took two ponchos out of the backpack and quickly snapped them together to make a tarp that could accommodate the three of us. With the poncho cover now over us, sheets of pouring water hit the plastic fabric hard in a sweeping movement, like a wave moving across the ocean. We sat and looked out at the tiny world below us while the rain came, the theatre of Aspen, a virtual self-contained ecosystem . . . with crashing thunder out amongst the distant heavens, and postcard 3D mountains, two in the foreground and one, snowcapped, in the far distance, encapsulating it all. The stream that we had hiked up wove far below us between the mountain fields, and it seemed so terribly small and distant to me now.
And the high fields that the cows roamed in sort of reminded me of the fields back home in Dracut; without all of that elevation around them, of course. I remembered the long, white, wooden roadside fences out in Kenwood where I would go on my summer runs; the fields out on the farm where my father’s aunt Vera lived. Vera and Uncle Arthur had apple orchards and native corn; dairy cows grazed on their neighbors’ fields.
Frank used to tell me stories about Uncle Arthur’s old carriage house in Dracut (right next to the barn), where he hid his Indian motorcycle in 1938. It had taken him a few years of savings from his paper route to buy it. He’d hitchhike from his house on South Street in Lowell almost every summer day at the age of fourteen to ride the thing. It seemed like such a long trip to me, over the Bridge Street Bridge and down Willard Street into Dracut, all the way to Uncle Arthur’s farm. Frank probably smoked cigarettes all of the way there to pass the time (he told us he started smoking when he was thirteen). He probably even skipped school so he could polish and admire his motorcycle all afternoon. I could see Uncle Arthur just laughing at Frank in the carriage house as Arthur walked back and forth about his daily chores on the farm. Arthur never said a word of it to Frank’s father (my grandfather) for this was their secret. What a cool uncle old Arthur must have been.
In Aspen, the storm blew over; it had passed quickly. With some distant rumblings of thunder still audible, Lucas set out ahead of us, fast to find a descending trail.
Going down the rocky trail at a good pace, my feet jumped out in front of me, one before the other, almost as if they were acting on their own. I thought of the crazy mountain cows now at least a mile behind us, up so high, and that bull. How lucky we were that it hadn’t come at us with its horns thinking we were matadors, or maybe rodeo clowns with our crazy head scarves. The bull always had to protect its wandering herd.
But the girls only wanted the matadors. Could I ever be a matador? Why had I ever gone to California? She was gone now, and I was gone too. I had stared out at her beautiful West through the screened bedroom window in the humid New England night. What had happened to the fireflies that lit the bushes along the driveway of my childhood? What had happened to the tiny blinking lights?
I so wanted to be a little kid again. I dreamed of watching episodes of the TV series Lost in Space in the warm living room of my house on Eighteenth Street. In my dream, my mother baked pan pizza for me out in the kitchen; I never wanted it to change. But now, I was suddenly twenty-five. I was afraid and alone in this huge, beautiful world, where hurt seemed to lurk around every corner if you made yourself too vulnerable, and all this blowing-in-the-wind vulnerability suddenly wasn’t cute or comfortable anymore.
Thoughts came screaming into me all the way down the trail. All kinds of songs stayed in my head too. There was always a soundtrack playing wherever I went. There was a song from the Alan Parson’s Project that this guy Wrench back at UMass used to play all of the time. We called the guy Wrench because he used to steal street signs around campus and hang them up in his room. The song was called “Time.” You’d hear it coming from his open door. Every time I heard it, I thought it was the saddest song I ever heard . . . especially when I thought about Colette now, for it was a breakup song and had some really sad, never-see-you-again lines.
I was a third of the way across the continent trying to regain my footing as I quickly descended mountainside trails. It felt like Colette and I were separated by more than the Rocky Mountains and the great western desert beyond them though. The realization that we may not ever see each other again was terribly unsettling. I was alone.
We clamored all the way back to the condo, feet moving fast. Lucas led the way with vocal outbursts of mock Three Stooges calls and the knuck, knuck, knuck yells of Curley; yells that echoed in the halls of the great cathedral.