Long Way Home (20 page)

I'd have gladly spent an extra day in Salida, but I had too much ground to cover, all those challenging western distances to address. First on the next morning's agenda was a drive over Monarch Pass, at 11,312 feet. I'd never crossed a peak that high before. Though I had a phone and a full tank of gas, the what-ifs started to plague me. What if I got a flat? What if a flash blizzard occurs? Is there such a thing as a flash blizzard?

Only a handful of cars and trucks were on the road, and that increased my feeling of isolation. The mountains, so scenic from a distance, grew more foreboding as I approached the pass. The air turned thin, and I shivered and switched on the heater. Above the tree line, patches of dirty snow appeared. A gray cloudiness, dour and steely, replaced the radiance down below.

Yet I made it without a hitch, of course, and pulled over to see the Continental Divide. John Steinbeck crossed it in Montana and grandly called it the “granite backbone of a continent.” As he stood astride it facing south, he realized a raindrop falling on his right foot would end up in the Pacific, while the drops that fell on his left were destined for the Atlantic.

WHILE DOC HOLLIDAY
was busy shooting up Leadville, Wyatt Earp opted for the quiet life of a faro dealer in Gunnison, a town that evolved through the usual phases of the West, first as a mining camp for gold and silver and next as a railroad hub. Cattle ranches are Gunnison's bread and butter now, and the spreads are sizable and stretch over hundreds of acres.

The sight of tawny pastures and grazing stock warmed me after the chill of Monarch Pass. It would have been different in winter. Gunnison sits in a valley at almost eight thousand feet, where the cold air of the Rockies collects and often drives the mercury below zero for days at a time—thirty-two in a row is supposedly the record—but the constant sunshine takes the edge off the bitterness, the ranchers claim. That's a bonus, because the average temperature in January is minus seven degrees.

It's surely redundant to say that Gunnison is sublimely beautiful. Its namesake river is another blue-ribbon trout stream, and the surrounding mountains arrest the eye at every turn. The rate of unemployment is high for Colorado—the state's overall rate was only 3.2 percent that October—but the landscape nourishes and compensates. More than half the residents are bachelors, perhaps a legacy of the frontier.

WELCOME HUNTERS
! cried the signs and banners downtown. Deer season had officially opened, and the men in bright orange caps and camo outfits would be the last tourists until the snow fell. Every merchant around wanted a piece of them.

One gift shop's ad led with the word “Vegetarian,” defined as Old Indian for Bad Hunter. W Café took a motherly stance and advised, “Don't Hunt on an Empty Stomach!” The Last Chance Saloon could only muster the lame slogan “Coldest Beer in Town.”

The hunters all gravitated to Traders Rendezvous, the largest retailer of big game trophies west of the Missouri. Harold Clark, the store's founder, was behind the front counter when I walked in. He wore a Stetson, a down vest, and a green neckerchief, as if ready to audition for the Sons of the Pioneers.

“Mind if I look around?” I asked.

“You go right ahead,” Harold replied distractedly. “Looking's for free.”

The Rendezvous was a little spooky. I hadn't seen so many stuffed animals since my last visit to the Museum of Natural History. The specimens included deer and elk, but also bighorn sheep, bobcats, mountain lions, and a truly scary grizzly bear that stood tall, with its claws ready to maim you and its teeth bared to devour you after you'd been maimed.

The store traded in exotics as well, and they carried impressive price tags. The head of a Cape buffalo cost $1,695, while that of a Rocky Mountain goat would set you back $2,995, but you could bag an ordinary elk's head for your rumpus room for only $495. A buck's sun-bleached skull and antlers were considerably cheaper, although less of a conversation piece.

Harold Clark sat doodling on a pad, oblivious of the dead animals in a way that I was not. He'd come to Colorado about forty years ago from Ohio, where he owned a pawnshop, some furniture stores, and other businesses. Not long ago, he sold the Rendezvous to his son Randy and worked for him now. A recent stroke had hampered his ability to recall some names, he told me, but otherwise he felt as sharp as ever.

“Is Randy a fair boss?”

“Sometimes I don't think so,” Harold answered. “But then I realize he's copying the way I did it, so I don't complain.”

“Where do you find all these trophies?”

“We have scouts in every western state. Trophies just turn up, you know? Someone dies, or there's a divorce.”

“Most couples probably don't fight over who gets the Cape buffalo's head.”

“I'd say you're right about that.”

Harold wondered what had brought me to Gunnison, so for the umpteenth time I talked about Steinbeck and my trip and how I'd been charting the changes in America since I'd been abroad.

“It's gonna change a whole lot more if Obama's elected,” he snorted.

“For good or bad?”

“Bad! You won't be able to own a gun anymore!”

The point wasn't worth arguing. So many gun owners shared Harold's belief that it had acquired a bizarre reality irrespective of the facts. On this particular subject, as with abortion, the possibility of an intelligent discussion had gone by the boards.

Harold made it clear, or tried to, that Obama's ethnicity didn't matter to him. “I'd rather live next door to a black family than white trailer trash,” he swore. He spoke next of an African-American comedian he'd seen on TV who distinguished between the words “black”—a positive—and “nigger”—a negative.

“Who was the comedian?”

“Was it Bill Cosby? I don't remember for certain. I'm just guessing.”

The country's problems were due to the Fannie Mae scandal, he went on, repeating a line the talk show hosts had been beating to death lately. If people quit running up so much debt on their credit cards and acted like responsible adults, Harold insisted, we wouldn't be in this mess.

“When I get my bill at the post office,” he boasted, “I buy a money order right there and then to pay it.”

From the Rendezvous, I went directly to the Gunnison Brewery, ordered an ale, and sat across from some hunters, who were decompressing. They were grimy and bedraggled, as if they'd been on an infantry slog, and drank hard liquor with sugary mixers—Jameson and Sprite, Jack Daniels and Coke. The bartender poured doubles for the price of singles. His attitude mirrored the informality of the West. He'd never call you “sir” once, much less three times.

The hunters hadn't roused any deer. “We saw some elk,” one said, and then stated a universal truth. “You always see what you're not after.”

Later, I checked Gunnison's voting record on my laptop. Harold Clark belonged to a conservative minority, and maybe that accounted for his vehemence. In 2004 the Democrats carried Gunnison County by a wide margin, even with their stance in favor of gun control.

IN OURAY, COLORADO,
the self-styled Switzerland of America, I saw the best sign of the trip, a small brass plaque on a nondescript brick building:
ON THIS SITE IN 1897, NOTHING HAPPENED.

Ouray was my kind of town, one with a sense of humor. I came to be there for the usual reason, plain old curiosity. When U.S. 50 morphed into a dull, multilane highway in Montrose, I meandered south instead on a less traveled road through Ridgway and over Owl Creek Pass at 10,114 feet, then dropped from the San Juans to the town.

On its outskirts, steam rose in billowy plumes from a hot spring, once the sole province of the nomadic Tabeguache Utes, who visited every summer to hunt and take the waters. Something did happen here in 1879, in fact, when the Ute chief Ouray ceded his territory to some settlers chasing after gold and silver. A modest boom ensued, and the town grew up around it.

The San Juans, sparsely timbered with pines and firs on rocky outcrops, surround Ouray. Tourists love the dramatic alpine setting, and the merchants make no bones about trying to please them, yet they, too, worry about being discovered and ruined like nearby Telluride.

Ouray greeted me with a bruised-looking sky, heralding the chance of snow. The mountains did not beckon, as they do on a bright, clear afternoon. Instead they seemed to draw down and close in, wintry in every aspect. I could feel the town turning inward as it switched over to survival mode, waiting for the ice climbers to arrive and toss around some money.

Bundled in my heavy jacket, I explored the little city center and collected another amusing sign from the battered door of a tavern, this one handwritten:

It's not that we don't like kids,

but we don't drink beer at your

child's daycare, either.

Early voting had begun in Colorado, as it does every year fifteen days before an election. Any resident can show up at the Ouray courthouse and cast a ballot, no excuse necessary. The turnout had been light so far, I heard, although the number of absentee ballots was much bigger than usual.

A trophy elk, sculpted rather than stuffed, stood guard outside the lodge of BPOE 192. The Western Hotel, once a stagecoach stop for those journeying to the high country, had shut down for the season. The sky grew darker and weightier, clamping itself to the top of my head, and a frigid wind blew right through me. The remedy, I knew, was age-old—whiskey and some grub.

The bartender at Buen Tiempo was another casual Coloradan, informal to the point of being rude. He ignored me to discuss a planned trip to Central America with a pal, while I waited and exercised Zen-like control to keep from shouting at him. He'd seen
Cocktail
too many times, and turned a bourbon on the rocks into a performance piece.

The food was good, at least. I ate
carne adovada
, pork in a spicy adobo sauce, and talked with Gail Kelly from Ridgway, who played bass in a bar band and also worked as a massage therapist. Thrice married, she had a son aged twenty-seven, and currently dated a drummer from Grand Junction she'd met on the Internet.

All this I learned in minutes. Along with informality, the West fosters an easy intimacy. People don't seem as defensive, nor as inhibited by their mistakes and defeats. The idea that you can always start over still motivates behavior. If you fail to strike gold, it's time to head on. Westerners seem more adventurous, too, when it comes to embracing new experiences. Gail wouldn't be the last massage therapist I ran into between Ouray and San Francisco.

“I'd like to visit Dublin someday,” she confided. “I've got Irish roots.”

“Have you voted yet?” I wondered.

“No, I probably won't. I totally lost interest when Hillary quit the race.”

The night was brutally cold, and the splendor of the San Juans no consolation. I watched for the first snowflake at my motel window, sure that a flash blizzard, if they existed, would soon bury Ouray and trap me for weeks, but I'd just caved in to loneliness again. Even my traveling library let me down. Thoreau sounded cranky, and Emerson world-weary rather than wise. Miller's rants annoyed me. As for
Travels with Charley
, I couldn't bear to open it.

OURAY LOOKED BETTER
in the morning, crisp and clean, though I needed some boiling water, courtesy of Mr. Coffee, to melt the frost from my windshield. Frost covered a pasture at Potter Ranch in Ridgway, too, where Herefords grazed amid the steamy hot springs, an idyllic scene perfect for a cowboy's Christmas card.

Beyond Dallas Divide, Highway 140 was a desolate road through increasingly remote country. Fewer than two thousand people live in the six or seven hamlets between Placerville and the Utah border, a distance of one hundred miles or so.

The Uncompahgre Plateau, composed primarily of granite, shale, and sandstone, provided my first glimpse of desert colors—a subtle palette in a scrappy landscape of rabbitbrush and sagebrush. Higher up in the hills, some piñon and juniper grew.

Insofar as this region ever flourished, its benefactor was the Uravan Mineral Belt, where miners dug the yellowcake uranium used in the Manhattan Project's bombs. You could go to the movies at the Uranium Drive-In or the Radium Theater in Naturita, and play poker for big pots at the saloon. Naturita's poor and tired now, but it isn't a ghost town like Uravan, at least, razed to the ground with superfund money because of its nuclear glow.

Highway 140 could induce one to fall asleep at the wheel, its distractions were so minimal. On occasion, I saw a vacant trailer on an abused-looking lot, somebody's dream homestead come to grief. The plateau might well be the preferred refuge of tax dodgers and aspiring bounty hunters, UFO spotters and adepts of the Rapture.

Bedrock, south of Paradox, has a landmark general store. It's a two-story building of bricks and timber, with a porch sporting a pay phone and an ad for Dad's Old-Fashioned Root Beer. There's also a post office, established in 1883, that operates from a storage shed whose conveniences, such as they are, include an outdoor privy.

A dog indulged in a midmorning nap on the porch. After so much emptiness, I was delighted to see another creature, even a four-legged one. He snapped gently to attention when he heard the car's tires, as sociable as could be. I couldn't identify his breed—maybe he was a mongrel. He was black with a white chest and one white paw. I'd have called him Blackie.

The Bedrock store had an old-fashioned flavor like Dad's and a woodstove, not quite potbellied, that threw a welcome heat. I warmed my hands over it while Blackie nuzzled my ankle. He obviously had the run of the place.

Rose, the store's owner, acted shy initally, and I attributed it to her isolation, but she corrected me. All through the spring and summer, rock climbers and mountain bikers kept her plenty busy. They stayed overnight in a string of huts, and her store was the first they reached in four days. This year, too, the Dolores River, now almost dry, raged with snowmelt and attracted rafters by the score.