!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
A few miles out of town, we meandered up a valley road, then drove along a hillside to a rutted two-lane dirt path. Mike eased the car up to a boxy house covered with vertical honey-colored cedar slats, parking next to his parents’ Buick station wagon. Once inside, I stopped cold, mesmerized by the view filling windows on three sides. The ceiling rose up behind, to five more windows letting in the last evening light. On the right, clouds, cherry melting into orange, hugged the divide we had just come over, thirty miles away. In front of us rose the hills outside of Aspen, its ski runs all we could see. To the left, a massive ridge, so close and high I had to tilt back my head to see its treeless top, grey and granite with snow-filled crevices. Ski trails ran down its face, trimmed with dark green firs, a rocky halo at the tree line. As a walked through the open room, each step brought a new perspective of this rocky, bulky natural sculpture. I could feel the pull this view had on Mike and his father.
Jack smiled and waved at me, sweeping his hand around while saying, “We only had the house studded in this summer. Right now, I’m finishing wiring all the electrical, and I’ve put up the insulation in the bedroom walls downstairs.” He turned to Mike, continuing, “Shelly’s old bed is in that big room down there, the one with folding doors.” He went over to a table cluttered with tools, picking up a wire cutter and some screwdrivers. “Why don’t you help me with the last few outlets, Mike?”
With that, G came out up, smiling. She took me by the elbow, guiding me to a couch and chairs. The entire floor was open, with a kitchen towards the rear, and a dining/living area filling the rest. “I want to hear all about Radcliffe, and your studies, what you’re thinking, doing. Mike says you’re taking classes with Jerome Kagan?”
“He’s such a wise and curious man, I want to learn everything he can tell me.”
“Tell you about what?”
“About how people grow, starting with babies, all the way to…the end. How they create their inner world, and how that personality engages with the rest of life.”
G nodded, silently encouraging me. I told her of my plans for graduate school, a Ph.D in psychology, then studying and working with children. I told her about Cambridge, how it had become my home, how Boston was a special place. As I talked, her eyes seemed to mist over, perhaps recalling a life she too had dreamed about, but left behind. Then see asked, “And Mike, you and Mike, how are you getting along?”
With her eyebrows raised expectantly, her lips and cheeks a gentle smile, without a word she tugged out of me all the things I wanted to tell her son, but had felt too stifled to try. How he sometimes wouldn’t wait for me to figure things out on my own. “His mind’s so quick, he can’t wait for me to do something like adjust the mirrors in the car. He knows I’m just as smart as he is, why does he have to be so impatient?”
While she listened, G opened her mouth, her lower lip across her teeth, and explored the back of them with her tongue. Slightly embarrassed, she apologized, “Sorry. I’ve got something under here, feels like food caught, but it;’s inside, like a cyst or swollen gland. Go on.”
“How do you do it, you and Jack. Stay together for thirty years, without driving each other insane?”
With a rueful smile, she replied, “Companionship is different from love, or friendship for that matter. Learning how to live with someone is a life-long proposition.”
“But how do you do it?” I almost pleaded. “Where do you begin?”
“It’s never easy. People are particular, they each have their own thoughts, ideas, emotions, and ways of doing things. We can change a little to make someone else happy, but in the end, each of us is trying to make herself, himself happy. That’s a good place to start. Then, to live with someone else, day-in, day-out, you have to really…” She struggled as if finding the right words to express her thought. “The other person has to be so important to you, that you simply can’t live without him. It helps a lot if he feels the same way.”
“How do you know that?”
Just then, Mike and Jack came back upstairs, my question hanging, unanswered.
Next morning, Jack & G left for Cincinnati, leaving Mike and I to explore on our own. Following a rock-filled creek, we drove 10 miles up from town, rounded a bend, coming to a mile-long valley ending abruptly at a mountain resembling a massive, off-kilter cathedral, complete with two towers. Small mounds of branches and mud plugged the meandering creek, interrupted several times by piles of bleached-white logs, backing up the sluggish water into a series of small ponds.
“That would be a great place for a golf course,” I observed cheerily.
“I don’t think the beaver would like it,” Mike laughed.
“Beaver?”
“See their homes there, the mounds of dirt? And their dams, all those white piles of trees they cut down.”
“Beaver?” I repeated. “I thought they were all gone, like the buffalo. Trappers killed them off, or something.”
“Well, not around here, apparently.”
Mike turned off the pavement onto an irregular path, parked, and announced, “We’re here. Ashcroft.”
Expecting a town, all I saw were a few grey buildings, devoid of all adornment, wind snaking though the holes created by missing slats. Behind me, dogs howled incessantly. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing across the road.
“Oh, Toklat Lodge. They keep huskies there, tourists come up in the winter for dog sled rides, and cross-country skiing. Remember ‘Sgt. Preston of the Mounties?’ These dogs were in that show. Come on, let’s take a little hike.”
Mike’s idea of a “little hike” meant three miles steeply up a dusty trail filled with roots and rocks, which quickly made me regret my choice of footwear. “I can’t do this, Mike. My shoes, they slip on the rocks, and my feet hurt.” My legs had quickly tired as well, but I dared not mention that.
“We’re not at the top yet, not at the lake,” he whined.
I stood firm. “No, I’m not going on another hike unless I can get some sturdier shoes.”
Reluctantly, Mike turned around and started back, but not before he found a branch under one of the trees. Pounding its end onto a rock, he said, “Here, use this as a hiking stick on the way down.”
The next day, new boots on my feet, my hair in its plump single braid, wearing a stylish cotton red-striped oxford shirt with khaki shorts for comfort, I agreed to accompany him once again on a walk to what Mike touted as “the best mountains you’ll see anywhere.” Another narrow road rising steeply next to another fast-flowing creek, another mountain sharply peaking towards the clouds, this one uncannily like an Egyptian pyramid.
Passing a small corral where several horses waited with saddles, Mike pointed, “Look! When I was ten or twelve, we took a ride out of here, from this ranch, up to the backside of that ski area. Not Aspen,” he said, motioning to the left, “but the Highlands, over there,” gesturing to the right. “Wanna try?”
I could not imagine what it might feel like, to sit legs splayed widely while tilting back and forth, side-to-side at the whims of a nervous equine. “I thought we were going to do this hike…”
“Right. Maybe some other time.”
A few minutes farther, as we got closer and closer to that jaw-dropping Pyramid Peak (that was its actual name, according to Mike), we rounded a corner to the right. Twin slabs resembling gargantuan bells emerged suddenly in front of us, their faces etched with layer upon layer of grey granite,. They looked like no mountain I had ever seen, certainly not like New England’s rounded slopes, tree-covered all the way to the top. I kept staring.
Finally, “Is that where we’re going? Can we walk up to their base? What are they?”
“Those,” Mike slowly announced, “are the Bells, the Maroon Bells. And, yes, that’s where we’re going, walking right up to them.”
“How far?”
“Maybe a mile and a half. Two lakes, then we turn around, unless we want to camp out over night.”
With my new boots, and my crooked hiking stick, I had an easier time. Each step, each corkscrew in the trail, brought another exhilarating vista. Used to the thin air now, I felt more invigorated than exhausted by the effort, willing to give Mike a hug when we reached the silvery lake set amongst the boulders at the bottom of the Bells. He smiled, shook his head, and said, “See. I knew you’d like this”
That night, as we lay in the Shelly’s old bed, I looked around at the shiny insulation between the wooden studs lining the bedroom walls. “This is such a friendly room,” I observed.
“Friendly? What do you mean?”
“These walls – they’re sparkling at us, almost like they’re winking. I feel a little bit happy here, “ I tried, hoping I could convince myself. Mike smiled with a short, contented close-mouth laugh. Squeezing my shoulder, we fell asleep in the luxurious expansive confines of that 19th-century four-poster.