by Gail Griffin
As we stepped outside the inn that night to walk the two blocks back to Bear and Poppy’s place, I was stopped short by the sky: azure deepening to indigo, riddled with stars. Sheltered from the brightness of the Denver-Boulder corridor, Gold Hill made a kind of shallow bowl-shaped star catcher. Was it that night, or was it later, that we sat in the backyard, faces tilted up, watching the star show play across the blue-black dome that became more crowded as it darkened? Occasionally a transcontinental jet would blink soundlessly, far above, or a comet would streak a brief arc. I reached for Bob’s hand in the dark. As always, he quickly surrounded my fingers with his own. His hands were large, muscular, squared off. Capable and safe, and somehow definitive.
*
When Bob came to Michigan for Christmas 1999, he had been in Colorado for two years. That December I had recently been granted my third sabbatical, so we were eyeing the next year together in Colorado. When the gifts had all been opened and nothing remained under the tree except my new kitten, Scout, who was trying to climb it, I reached for the mysterious envelope lodged in its branches—manila, with a red bow stuck on it and my name written on the front. Inside were sketches, clearly not Bob’s, of rings. They looked pseudo-medieval, as if rendered by a Dungeons and Dragons geek. Some, I noticed, incorporated griffins in my honor. And there was a letter, which ended with a question: would I spend the rest of my life with him?
Across the room in a chair, clad in the gray sweats he wore to bed in winter, Bob wept as I read the letter, carried away by his own moment.
And at that moment, I balked. To this day I wonder why. Precisely what step was I unwilling to take, after ten years together? Was it he who made me hesitate or myself, his limitations or my own? Was it because the sporadic nature of our visits hadn’t allowed us enough time physically together? A fear of hitching my life to another, of what exactly this would bind me to? The institution of marriage, which I didn’t hold in particular esteem?
But was this, after all, a proposal of marriage? The letter hadn’t actually included the m-word. Something about the ambiguity seemed appropriate to our brand of togetherness.
Bob was now talking about having met with an artisan about designing a ring for me and finally deciding not to proceed without consulting me. We talked a bit about designs. Finally, after a pause, he said, “You haven’t answered my question,” and I let it spill from me: “Of course I will.”
We would complete the ring project in Boulder, we decided. As we talked about the year to come, I issued what I guess amounted to an ultimatum, though it felt like a simple statement of fact: I want to come to Boulder, but I cannot live and write a book in the Concrete Palace. Not long into the new millennium, when Bob was back in Colorado, one of our phone conversations began this way: “How would you like to live in Gold Hill?” Bear had offered a solution: he too would be on leave next year and he and Poppy were planning to travel; having passed the test of Morgaine-sitting to Poppy’s satisfaction, would Bob now consider occupying the Gold Hill house and caring for her for a year?
I couldn’t imagine living in that weird Neverland. But on the other hand: no rent, room to live, a cool house, and a great dog. “But hon, the Oldsmobile has to go.”
“What?! It’s a classic!” Which is what he always said.
We both bought SUVs. Packed to the roof, mine left Michigan in June 2000.
*
It never took Bob long to settle into a new place. He made his space, poured his martini, and was home. I am a different animal, hypersensitive to my physical environment. I have to work hard to make a place mine. And this was the strangest place I’d ever perched. I had asked Poppy about cell service and she looked confused, turned to Bear, and said, “I don’t think anybody’s ever gotten a cell signal up here, have they?” We had dial-up Internet, with its burbles and hisses and bleeps that suggested you were calling the moon or another century. We did have a working TV with several channels, so I got Bob hooked on West Wing. Usually we had hot water, sometimes not, which made personal ablutions iffy. We adjusted in increments; we grew into the place. One night Bob’s friend Ron, now his boss, and his wife, Jan, drove up for dinner at the Gold Hill Inn and found us sitting side by side on the porch, waiting for them. They got out of the car, already laughing. I guess we looked like an Old West version of American Gothic.
Our days found their routine. Bob left early to drive “down the hill.” I read, wrote, walked Morgaine. Occasionally I was visited by Merlin, Gold Hill’s sole cat. In a place where any animal smaller than a big dog was speedily picked off by coyotes or mountain lions, Merlin had somehow beaten the game. A big orange tom, he nominally belonged to Bear and Poppy but spent long periods out and about, appearing at various friendly houses every few weeks to pay respects and see what was on offer, foodwise. Mostly he sheltered across the street from us at the home of Sharon—the arithmetician of the town sign. He was, even beyond most cats, the embodiment of insouciant cool.
At the end of his workday, Bob would generally call to find out if we needed anything before he drove up. When he got home, NPR came on and the gin bottle and martini glass came out of the freezer. When he started dinner prep, there was music.
We came from disparate musical territories. I found my musical awakening with the Beatles. He was born five years earlier, which put him in a different generation, musically speaking. He went through puberty accompanied by Jerry Lee Lewis and early Elvis, but it was doo-wop that really rocked his world. He couldn’t listen to the Ink Spots or the Platters without slow-dancing around the room, bobbing and weaving with me or his own reverie. He even managed to lure me into the province of country music, for which I’d cultivated the usual northern/intellectual/upper-middle-class disdain. I probably heard Randy Travis’s album Old 8 × 10 for the first time on the Oldsmobile’s tape player as we sped through the dark hills on the Massachusetts-Vermont border at night. I asked Bob to play one track over and over. It’s bobbing, lilting tune and unabashed romance had hooked me: “I want you to know that my love for you / Is written in stone.”
The overlap in our musical Venn diagram contained the Stones, Janis Joplin, and especially Bonnie Raitt—white performers with prominent roots in black music. Bob’s tape collection included lots of blues and jazz, territory not unknown to me but still foreign. The witty suggestiveness of blues lyrics became part of our private language. After he hauled in armfuls of logs from the stack in the yard, I’d drape my arm over his shoulders. “My wood man is a good man.” If I came into the kitchen at a great musical moment, he would turn and whirl me around the room. He loved to dance 1950s style, as he had learned from his big sister, turning me in complicated patterns, under and over, back and forth, one hand or two, reeling me in and spinning me out. “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby!” It came out more statement than question, but I always answered.
“I definitely is.”
*
I had to learn to breathe. On my first trip, I had been startled to feel lightheaded even at the Denver airport. By the time we got up to Gold Hill, walking up the gentlest grade was a challenge, and there is no flat plane in or around town. Plus, the world had neglected to inform me that alcohol’s effects increase proportionally as oxygen decreases, so I found myself unaccountably smashed on two gin and tonics.
I acclimated fast, because it was on me to walk Morgaine each day. All I had known about border collies was how pretty and alert their faces are. I quickly learned two more significant facts. First, they must walk—and run—daily, for long distances. It’s imperative. And second, they are “eye dogs.” That is, their herding history predisposes them to study faces for signals. Morgaine was the most patient of dogs, but every time I looked up from the computer, she was watching me. When I rose to get a glass of water or go to the bathroom, the watching went on high alert. This took some time to get used to.
In the early afternoon, I reached a stopping point and asked, “Wanna go?” And then such joy, as if the entire world waited
for her, as I guess it did. I generally took her around what locals called the Loop. Sometimes we began by climbing up into the Meadow, a broad hillside of tall grasses and wildflowers, forested on top. It was from those high trees that coyotes yipped and howled some nights. On the Meadow’s far side was the cemetery. Some graves from the mining period endured. Some told little tales of great sadness—two parental markers fronting five small stone lozenges roughly carved with single names, one name appearing twice, a baby named for an older sibling gone. A dilapidated wrought-iron fence with a gate surrounded a sunken, time-blackened slab. I had seen much older stones in Massachusetts, and even in the cemetery in the village where I grew up in Michigan. This was the paradox of the West for me: the relatively recent story told in these stones measured against the mountains’ saga, told in geologic time. And then too, somewhere in this landscape, far less visible to my eyes, was the story of people who honored their dead in ways other than by carving their names into stone.
Morgaine hurried me back down to the road, where she would trot out in front of me, turn, and drop into position, demanding instructions, shifting weight from one front paw to another like an expectant tennis player, eyes like shiny flint. On my cue—“Yoouuu better go!”—she was off, a bullet tearing the air, paws barely skimming the hard road, ears and red coat streaming behind her. It was a thing to see. And the whole routine had to be repeated, all the way home.
Our halfway point was a rocky footpath on the right that led to the top of a high hill. Morgaine clambered happily up; I came laboring after. It became a goal to do the hill without stopping. At the top was a big rock where I sat to recover, while Morgaine waited patiently. I could look out over the Front Range—the sharp top edges of the Flatirons were actually visible—and across the plain far below to the misty spires of Denver. Breezes floated, sweet with grasses and wildflowers. I thought about Bob, in his office or at a meeting, hustling, making friends, making notes, greeting everyone he passed, doing his day. How far away the East felt, with its complexities and histories, and how distant my life there seemed. I saw how easy it is to fall into the delusion that the West is simpler or freer; I understood how white people came to think that way. The landscape seems so vast, the sky so wide, that they swallow your own narrative and drown the uproar of the “real life” that suddenly seems less real. And Bob commuted between these realities every day when he drove down the hill and back up again.
After a few minutes of rumination and deep breathing, we set off through a brief strip of dense forest where we once startled a whole herd of deer. The little path came out on a dirt driveway cutting through the Colorado Ranch property. No one seemed to care that we were there except the horses, who came over to snuffle my hand. I fed them weeds; Morgaine was completely uninterested in them. The ranch fronted on Gold Hill Road, where we turned right and headed—blessedly downward—into town. We both slurped water and panted and sat on the porch for a while, looking over the roofs and backyards of the town and listening to the day.
*
There is not much red or orange in a Colorado autumn, but there is gold in those hills. The sky seems to get bluer as the aspens leave their silvery green behind. Early that fall I happened to read that the largest stand of aspen in the world is in the Gunnison River valley in Colorado. A stand of aspen looks like thousands of trees, but in fact it is a single root system, of which the individual trees are simply varied expressions.
So one shining October weekend we drove west to the Gunnison. Now, there are only a few zillion acres of aspen in proximity to the river, so I’m not sure how I thought we were going to find that one record-breaking stand. Perhaps I just wanted to wander around near it. If Bob thought our quest was an exercise in absurdity, he never said so. We drove around fairly aimlessly until at one point, coming up out of Crested Butte, we found ourselves looking down a long valley toward a snowy peak. From a point high up on the left, a wide, brilliant wave of gold poured down the hill and up the other side. Miles and miles of it against the dark firs and purpled mountains under that electric blue Colorado sky. All one being, one life.
I have a picture of Bob standing in front of it.
*
We absorbed the local lore and learned the names of distinctive characters. Bear was not the only one with a Gold Hill identity; one longtime resident with a long, snowy beard was known universally only as Prospector. Whoever else he had once been had been left behind down on the plains. Everyone had a story about Twinkle, the town mule, who wandered from house to house all day. Recommended by Bear and Poppy, we were seconded by Sharon Conlin, our neighbor across the street, a wise and witty psychotherapist who also turned out to be the trickster responsible for turning the town sign into an arithmetic problem. There may have been weed involved. Anyway, we were accepted into Gold Hill society and became part of a small group that often convened for dinner or drinks. The women were artists or therapists or both, often affiliated with Naropa University, where Allen Ginsberg founded his Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Many of the men were scientists, retired or otherwise. Nearly everybody skied and kayaked and snowshoed and rafted the white water, and they were all thin and muscled and leathery-skinned. Bob and I, both round and given mostly to indoor pursuits, were distinct anomalies. As such we were objects of fascination, too. When Bob took his job, the local paper ran a story calling him CU’s Alcohol Czar. Bear confessed that for the first year of their acquaintance he suspected that Bob might be a narc insinuating himself among the residents of Gold Hill. Given the quality of the locally grown, very pure weed that was always in ample supply at dinners and parties, they had reason to worry. Bob, constitutionally conservative as he was, stuck to his martinis. I availed myself of all that was on offer. Word would go around that there was a party at, say, John and Cherry’s the following night. Everyone would show up with their dogs and some wine and food to contribute; we got good and loaded, ate very well, and waddled home under the stars.
Sometimes these gatherings, with no change in personnel, took the guise of the Gold Hill Literary Society. Or rather, one of them: there was also one that met monthly around the woodstove down at the store. This was the other one, and its rules were fairly lenient. You could bring something original, or you could bring a passage of some book you were enjoying. Or you could bring nothing. Your original could be new, or it might be something everyone had heard six years ago. Everyone had all been friends for years—raised children together, seen each other through divorces and deaths, traveled together, and come home again to this town, this little joke on the world. Frankly, we felt honored to be included.
Periodically, to great and excited heraldry, Jack and Linda appeared. Their cabin was on the lower reaches of Horsfal, but they were usually elsewhere, in their California desert home or tooling around the country in their shiny 1950s silver Airstream. When they returned to Gold Hill, a party always materialized, generally at their place. Linda was like a little bird, quick and vocal. Jack was a very tall man of few words, a John Huston type, a retired engineer and a great storyteller, careful and slow. There were always stories at Gold Hill gatherings: tales of fires, snowstorms, extramarital affairs, accidents, characters done and gone. One night Jack told this one, well known to everyone but Bob and me.
On a November night in 1972, a few days after a big snow, he was driving home from work along the Shelf Road when he saw in the beam from his headlights a small figure in the road, waving him down. It was a young girl. She was not wearing winter gear, and from one of her wrists dangled what he soon was able to identify as a handcuff. He got her into the truck, wrapped her in his coat, and headed toward town. Her name was Annabelle. She told him that a man had kidnapped her and her girlfriend off the street in Boulder and taken them to his motor home, where he handcuffed them together. Then he had driven them—and his dog—up here, forced the girls out onto the side of the road, and shot them. The impact of the shots sent them over the edge of the Shelf. Annabelle thought her friend
was dead, but she herself had been only slightly wounded. She had managed to pull her friend’s hand out of the cuff and climb through the snow up the cliff to the road. Would he take her home to Boulder?
Two details would emerge later: before bringing them up here, their abductor had sexually assaulted the girls. And it was Annabelle’s eleventh birthday.
Jack looked at the wound in her leg. The bleeding was slight, probably slowed by the cold. So he continued into town. Remembering that a volunteer fire department meeting was taking place at a neighbor’s house, he stopped and carried Annabelle inside. The volunteer firemen administered first aid and called the Boulder sheriff’s department.
But Jack wasn’t done yet: what if Annabelle’s friend was still alive? He went home, put on heavy boots, loaded his pistol, and he and two guys from the fire department headed back up the Shelf Road. They found the imprints in the snow of the man, his dog, and the two girls. Jack shone his flashlight down the cliffside. The beam found a small body, face-up in the snow. They scaled down what Jack estimated to be a forty-degree incline in the dark, in deep snow, and checked for vital signs. There were none. The trio climbed up and headed back to town.