pigeon

blackberry brandy around the mountain lake

Roger Zelazny — walking through shadow. Look it up if you don’t remember it. Pretty sure that’s what me and Cael accidentally did in the scraggly range somewhere between Fort Collins and Red Feather Lakes. I surely don’t remember exactly where we were, probably didn’t know at the time exactly where we were, but now, looking at maps, I would bet a modest sum it was Lady Moon Lake we walked around while incrementally emptying a bottle of off-brand blackberry brandy into our young dumb bellies.

We had come down from Red Feather earlier in the day, after giving up on finding a place to hike near there. Cael used to live there, during some formative portion of his youth. He was disillusioned because they had street signs now. We traipsed from spot to brush-covered spot, looking for all the places where as a child he had stashed weapons, trinkets, money. Unlike (presumably?) the French trappers he told me about, we didn’t find any buried treasures. We talked to a few crusty old folks who remembered him.

He asked one of these guys, a shopkeeper of some sort, to recommend some good places to hike. The guy started describing some trails and how to get there, and Cael had objections to each of them for various reasons, and finally the guy was like, “Or you can just hike through shit around here if you want, I don’t care.”

Back outside in the haze of the sun, Cael told me, “That guy never really liked me much.”

We wandered the rest of the town. He showed me where he used to work, where he’d met women. A few other people remembered him. We mailed two postcards each and bought some blackberry brandy. Filled our water bottles at the pushbutton well.

We drove around forever, looking for the perfect hiking trail. The first place we tried was a high-altitude turn-off on the side of some random mountain. Clouds had moved in and it was getting kind of dreary but I was still willing. Our packs were killer heavy, Cael was jittery. “No aspens here,” he explained. We drove back down closer to Red Feather, found an area that looked kind of inviting. Packs were still killer heavy, so we turned around again and said fuck it we’ll do a hike some other time. Drove to a campground next to a small windy highway, tried to run around playfully amidst the rocks, but it wasn’t quite working. Got back in the car.

Needing to feel the use of our legs, we turned off on a side road, followed its contortions, turned onto a smaller road, then a gravel one, then a smaller gravel one, and parked in front of a little tarn, felted by the ministrations of a light rain. Should we walk around it while deciding what to do next? Hey, grab that bottle of blackberry brandy!

Walk, swig, talk, repeat. Follow the Pattern.

He finally told me some of what had been bugging him. This place ain’t home any more. He don’t even want to be here. I said well let’s leave, that’s the whole point of the trip isn’t it, we can go wherever we want? We finished off the brandy, both a little toasty, two car doors slammed in the alpine quiet, and we retreated on down 74E, looking for — something.

On the way down we smoked pipes and belted out the Indigo Girls, louder than the Tercel’s tinny little tape player. Closer we were to fine, now, having given up on the false promises of nostalgia in Cael’s old unincorporated home town. We sang loud and bad and the sky was serrated with clouds and the sharp shards of the sun. Downhill all the way, downhill towards the promise of civilization in Fort Collins.

Obviously driving while intoxicated is bad; I’m not proud of that part, I’m not celebrating that part. I’m not even sure if I’m celebrating anything. Looking back, the scene seems darker now than how I was able to see it then. I had it all gold-dusted up with ironic misadventure, but there’s a rich vein of sadness in the rock of this memory.

There’s a moment in The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch when Charles Arrowby describes singing:

Singing is of course a form of aggression. The wet open mouths and glistening teeth of the singers are ardent to devour the victim-hearer. Singers crave hearers as animals crave their prey.

I think that’s what Cael and I were doing, but our prey was whatever was stalking us. Threatened animals, cornered by our own freedom, snarling back against nobody giving a shit.

In Fort Collins, there was still more driving, looking for a place to sleep. There was no room up at Horsetooth. It got late. We settled for gross food from “39¢ Hamburgers.” I gave in and exceeded my tenuous budget and got us a motel room. Cael used the room phone to call Anna, this ex-lover of his he’d been romanticizing for the past several days on the road. She’d been steadily not answering, but now, finally, she answered. He said I could come with, but I demurred and got some solid rest alone in the motel. He came back and said it was weird. She tried to kiss him. She said he was not like himself.

“Am I like myself?” he asked me.

Also, she told him she had cancer. I was glad I hadn’t gone over there with him.

The next day, we got back in the car yet again. My endless supply of homemade gorp was good but getting old fast. Traffic sucked, it was heavy post-rain hot. We crept down I25 toward the shadows of Denver. We shot a polluting truck with my orange Nerf gun. I called Leann from a Safeway payphone. She said, “I think I’m going to have a heart attack,” and “Come on over tomorrow!”

And that, of course, is another pigeon.