She kissed me again. No tongue the second time.
There were days I had doubts that Boulder, Colorado, was still a small town.
Well, that day I had no doubts.
TWENTY-THREE
Saturday broke from the gates like a day that was intent on setting a new standard for late November. The morning was glorious. The air was crisp, clear, and dry, and the sunrise lit up the eastern horizon in shades of vaporizing gold.
I knew all about the beauty of the sunrise because I was heading east at the moment when the sun completed cresting the earth, my head up, my jersey zipped all the way to my Adam’s apple, my spin well above a hundred, my padded butt barely on the saddle, my bike weightless between my legs. The back roads in Boulder County belonged to me alone.
I covered fifty miles of asphalt at a brisk pace and was back home sipping juice on my deck by nine o’clock.
The phone rang. Sam.
“You been outside yet?” he asked.
“I’ve done fifty miles already.”
“Me, too,” he countered. “Actually more like fifty yards. I walked out to get the paper. Who am I kidding? Given the size of my lot, that’s more like fifty feet, isn’t it? Astonishing day, huh?”
“Couldn’t be better.”
“We’re going to get blasted, you know.”
My living room deck faced the mountains. There wasn’t a cloud in sight between my house and the Continental Divide, or from Pikes Peak down south to whatever peak that was past Longs Peak way up north. “Really? You think?” I said.
“It always happens. You get a run of unseasonably good weather like we’ve had lately, and then you get a day that’s like, I don’t know… perfect-like this one-and then five minutes later you’re walking someplace and the wind is blowing hard enough to send you to Nebraska, and then five minutes after that you’ve got snow in your flip-flops.”
He was right. That’s just the way it usually happened. While I considered the image of Sam in flip-flops I took another glance toward the Divide.
Not a cloud. Not today-maybe tomorrow we’d get blasted.
I said, “How are you doing, Sam?”
He didn’t exactly respond. He said, “There’s somebody I have to talk to in Gold Hill. Want to come with? Bet it’s pretty up there.”
Lauren and Grace were at some weekly mother-child yoga event that Adrienne thought was the greatest thing going. I was tempted to go some Saturday morning just to watch. Grace had the not-so-svelte physique of a well-fed, chunky baby. My daughter could no more do yoga than I could fly. I left them a note about my plans and headed to Sam’s house.
Depending on the weather, on a typical weekend before Thanksgiving the ten-mile drive from Sam’s house on the west side of Boulder up the Front Range to Gold Hill can take as little as twenty-five minutes or as long as-well, a long, long time. The road that curls up Sunshine Canyon into the mountains was paved for a while and then it isn’t paved for a much longer while. In some places the dirt and gravel portion of the track is particularly steep and curvy, and in winter, with the sun low in the sky, some of the canyon stretches don’t see the direct rays of the sun for months at a time. After a heavy snow and a deep cold snap, ice on the road can freeze as hard as a traffic cop’s eyes.
The final descent into the valley that was home to the pioneer mining enclave of Gold Hill is a particularly spectacular section of trail. The road drops a few hundred feet in altitude-and about 150 years in time and attitude-in less than a minute.
Very few villages in the Rocky Mountains have managed to check the natural progression that leads from Old West town to Old West ghost town. Some of the ones that have managed to freeze themselves in time have become polished tourist magnets like Telluride and Georgetown, but only a precious few of the surviving nineteenth-century burgs have managed to remain invisible to the hordes of annual visitors who show up clutching tour books. Gold Hill was one of those few. Gold Hill was hard to get to, its fewer than two hundred full-time residents didn’t exactly lay out a welcome mat for guests, and any attempt to find a location for a Golden Arches or Starbucks within the range of a.30-06 from town would likely be met by a crowd of passionate locals prone to carelessness with torches.
The Gold Hill Inn, the town’s enduring fine dining destination, was open only during the summer months because too few Front Range residents could be counted on to make the drive up to nearly nine thousand feet in the inevitable springtime slush or the usually predictable autumn ice. Winter? For most people, casual travel to Gold Hill was too risky during an average snow year. I’ve always had the impression that four or five months of regular visits by curious flatlanders were about the maximum the residents of Gold Hill could tolerate anyway.
I hadn’t asked Sam about his business in Gold Hill. The mountain enclave was in Boulder County, and Sam was a city cop, not a sheriff’s deputy, so I suspected that his business was personal, not professional. But I also knew Sam well enough to know that if during the course of an investigation he wanted to talk with somebody who happened to reside a few steps outside the city limits, he would usually find a way to do so. The solution might be by-the-book legal, or it might be less-than-by-the-book creative. But the job would get done.
The fact that he was on medical leave from the police department? That would be no more of an impediment to him than the countless potholes we dodged in the dirt lane up to Gold Hill. Or the fact that I was certain he was under orders not to drive for a while after his heart attack.
Did I mention that to him? The driving restrictions? I didn’t. When I arrived at his house, I had offered to drive. He had declined. That’s as far as it went. I knew from experience that I could strongly encourage Sam’s sense of self-preservation. But insisting on it only put my own at risk.
We parked on Gold Hill’s main street across from the Gold Hill Inn. The street may actually have been called Main Street, but I didn’t look for a sign. I was enjoying the gorgeous day and was reveling at being up in the mountains in a town that was so charmingly frontier yet didn’t look as though it had been imagined by Disney set designers. As soon as I stepped out of the car onto the dusty dirt lane, I knew that, despite the fine autumn day, the air in Gold Hill-three thousand-plus feet above Boulder in altitude-held a chill that warned of imminent winter.
It should have felt ominous to me, but it didn’t.
Sam led me across the road toward the ancient building I’ll probably always think of as the home of the original Lick Skillet Café. My first wife and I had made frequent treks up the hill to the Lick Skillet for memorable meals in the late eighties before Dave Query packed up and trucked his culinary imagination down the mountain to Boulder and Denver.
The destination Sam had in mind was packed with locals. About half of the patrons seemed to make Sam for a cop before the cleft of his substantial butt cleared the jamb of the doorway. He pointed me toward an open deuce in a far corner. On the way we passed tables covered with platters that were plastered rim-to-rim with eggs and bacon and potatoes and flapjacks as big as hubcaps.
“Breakfast is hard for me,” Sam said. “I miss meat that’s been treated with nitrates. Outside of cheese, that’s what I miss most. Brats, bacon, salami…”
I thought the waitress was just the slightest bit tentative as she approached our table. Sam waved off the menus and ordered an egg-white omelet, sans cheese, sliced tomatoes, and dry wheat toast. He asked her to be sure that the omelet was made with very little butter. Almost speechless, but eager to endorse his choices, I told her I’d have the same.