He hadn’t heard from his mother since he’d fled New Haven, and he hadn’t yet informed his family of his change of plans—they were just a couple of hundred miles to the south, and they had no idea. New thoughts and experiences had kept them mostly at bay, which was part of his plan. If he couldn’t be close to his mother, if past misfortunes had to interfere forever, if he had to be blamed for them, maybe it just wasn’t worth it. Before he knew it, Mead was fully mired in bitter reverie over his family, what it once had been and what it had become: something, nothing. The cinnamon roll vanished unnoticed; so did Nina when she came out to refill his mug. She assumed it was memories of that old girlfriend that had him so abstracted, and she said nothing.
The scent of those flowers! Would he ever be able to smell petunias again without reliving Molly’s drowning, the getaway-turned-nightmare, the family’s arrival home to the porch of petunias illuminated by the ambulance’s spinning red pinwheel? Would the gray ghosting of a sphinx moth always bear the unbearable knowledge of catastrophe? He couldn’t get off this mental track until he’d made a decision. Time was ticking. He’d spent weeks on the bus, at Gothic, roaming the hills with Noni, the BFC, Heap, and on his own. Now he felt he was finally closing in on something, and the summer was into its shorter side. “Okay, I will come to New Mexico,” he said. “Now leave me alone!” Nina looked startled and veered away, but Mead snagged her back and said, “No, not you. By the way, can you tell me the way to Magdalena Park?”
“It’s just up the highway,” she said, “but I thought you were going to New Mexico to see that girl?”
Mead set off through Allenspark and its twin hamlet, Ferncliff, which had been spared the glitter and gold of Aspen or Telluride and the taffy-and-tack raunch of Estes Park. Wildflowers punctuated the ponderosa pine forest, and gaillardia’s red-and-yellow spoked wheels colored the verge. Fuzzy mullein stalks lined the roadway, the tallest pointing with a longer yellow finger toward the COFFEE 25¢ sign, a Colorado blue spruce poking the hot day’s blue sky. He watched a big Weidemeyer’s admiral butterfly as it settled at damp gravel to sip salts, fanning its brilliant black-and-white wings. Come winter, everyone said, it was hard to beat the cold in these thin-walled cabins, hard to make a living when the tourists went home, hard to take the cabin fever. These things would not concern Mead, back among the crocketed, cosseted towers of Yale. That is, if George would have him back after this Colorado caper. He quaffed fresh, sweet water from Silver Spring, rejoined the highway, and continued north.
Soon he came in view of a great peak standing largely on its own on the very eastern edge of the high range. A truly mountainlike mountain, it rose in three sharp ridges to a double summit. The knees of the ridges ran down into the pines, but everything above was stone—massive granite outcrops and vast rockslides rising thousands of feet into the azure air. A green sign beside the highway read MAGDALENA MOUNTAIN: 13,311 FEET.
So taken was Mead with this mountain that he almost failed to notice the old log lodge across the road. He liked its look: logs weathered almost black, green composition roof, not a garish sign in sight. Along the roofline of the westward-pointing ell, above an open second-story porch, ran a dark brown wooden sign with white block letters: MAGDALENA PARK LODGE. On a whim, he walked in and asked about a room. Laura, the welcoming blonde woman at the desk, gave him a key, and he climbed the rustic wooden staircase. Its gnarled banister, polished smooth by hundreds of human hands, received his own ready paw like a warm handshake.
After taking his gear to room 14, he settled into a pine-slab rocker on the upstairs balcony to watch the mountain as the late sun brought it alive. Afternoon clouds had gathered, spit out a quick cloudburst, then dispersed into virga to the north. Now the western sky contained the summit and the sun, nothing else. Each ridge, tooth, furrow, chute, and suture stood out, every stone. Instead of the olive-pink smear that described the mountain’s face in many lights, Mead beheld a mountain whose pocks and wrinkles, warts and fine features displayed themselves sharply and without vain reticence. He remained on the balcony until the mountain swallowed the sun.
The next morning, after a peaceful night in a warm trundle bed under knotty pine, James came downstairs for breakfast. Afterward, on the back porch, he met the proprietors. Up for hours already, they were taking a well-deserved coffee break in the morning sun. “Pull up a chair,” said the man. Keith and Marion Dever were handsome, robust, both ruddy of hair and cheek, in their fifties. They wore the glow of people devoted to what they do and the furrows of constant obligation and hard labor.
“I love this place!” Mead said. “How long has it been here?”
“Well,” said Keith, “my dad and mom, Danny and Crete Dever, bought the place in 1922. They renovated the homestead, put up some rental cabins and the store. Then—was it 1929, Marion?—they began the lodge.”
“He built it mostly with fire-killed logs,” said Marion. “But it took years to finish, because Danny would never take a loan.”
“Right,” said Keith. “Opened the lodge in about 1933. Danny and Crete ran it for many years while their partners, the Nowels, ran a furniture company on Longmont and built all the rustic pine furniture.”
“Crete is a power to reckon with,” said Marion of her mother-in-law. “Danny died just last year, and we’ve run been running it ever since, with our daughters. But Crete is still with us. She’ll probably live to a hundred.”
Mead took it all in, then showed his cards. “Marion, where did the name Magdalena come from? It’s sprinkled all around this area like powdered sugar on that good French toast Keith made me.”
“Yes, it is, isn’t it? Well, the lodge is named for the ‘park’—never a town, but a sort of little village that Danny began. You know, in Colorado, park just means a sort of clearing in the pines—like Estes Park, Winter Park, South Park, and so on.”
“And Magdalena Park came from the mountain, I guess,” said Keith. “Then there’s the Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene up the road—have you seen that yet?”
“No!” Mead said. “That’s a new one on me. How do they all relate?”
“It all gets a little fuzzy back then,” said Keith. “Crete tells a story about a priest who was camping up here around 1916. Buzzoli, was it, Marion?”
“Bosetti, I think. Joseph. Crete would know.”
“Anyway, this priest saw a meteor overhead. Looking for a crater, he found that rock outcrop on Cabin Creek, where he vowed he would one day build a chapel.”
“That’s right,” said Marion. “He was Italian, all right, but he had a Scottish friend named William McPhee. I’ve heard Crete tell this so often, it feels like my own story. McPhee put up some money and also bought the spot.”
“Just in time, too,” Keith chimed in. “The highway department was going to blow up the rock to get rid of that curve back when they were carving Highway 7 out of the old stage road.”
“Lucky,” said James.
“They don’t care about the beauty,” Marion said. “A few years back, they widened the road right here and took out some beautiful big pines in front of the lodge. You’ll see them on the older postcards in the store.”
“And the name?” Mead prodded.
“Well, McPhee built only a little wooden chapel. The Chapel on the Rock as we know it came later. But everything since then is a blur of bedsheets and broken pipes. So I don’t know if it’s always had the same name.”
“I keep intending to look into the history more,” said Keith, “and write it all up someday. But we keep so busy here in the summer, and then we usually recover in Mexico over the winter.” As if on cue, Keith mounted his golf cart and buzzed off to see about some delinquent plumbing. Mead followed Marion into the big kitchen and accepted another cup of strong coffee.
“So whether Magdalena came in with the mountain or the chapel is a toss-up,” she said. “This mountain, like most of them, has had different names over the years. I’m not sure when they settled
on this one.” She shifted her weight, put her hand on her womanly hip, and bit her upper lip in concentration. “Or, for the life of me, why. But it’s a pretty name, don’t you think?”
Mead, leaning against the huge double-door fridge from the 1940s, took a sip of his coffee and said, “It certainly is. Well, I have one remote possibility.”
“Oh, what’s that? Leave it to strangers to teach you about your own backyard! We used to have time to explore such things . . .” Her wistfulness was as thick as the lingering scent of the breakfast bacon. Mead cut through it by telling her about Erebia magdalena. “But I have no idea whether there is any connection.”
“Well, that’s very interesting. Come to Annie’s nature talk tonight. Maybe she knows something about it.”
So he did. After wandering the local hills, he returned to the lodge’s great room and settled into a log-slab armchair. The entire room was furnished with varnished rustic-work—tables and chairs, rockers, desks for writing postcards or novels, bookcases, a broad table with a topographic map of the area under glass—all built of native lodgepole pine. Two enormous elk heads hung out from log-and-batten walls, their racks far too heavy for any animal to actually carry, or so it seemed to Mead. The thick neck pelage of one shagged into his own lengthening hair when he sat beneath it. The mane of the other hid the old black-and-white television, which suited him fine. A grand stone hearth shared pride of place with an upright piano. Sofas faced the fire, sturdy in spite of heavy use by heavy people for many years. Skinned log beams spanned the ceiling, and down the middle of the room ran a crossways beam supported by gnarled, barkless tree trunks. Garlands of aspen leaves hung from the rafters, from faux candlestick lights, from antlers of the elks, and all around the rustic frames of old mountain scene prints. The dry leaves, copper after seasoning for a year or ten, imparted an autumnal smell and a papery rustle as a breeze from the front door played with them each time a guest entered the lodge.
The room began to fill up. Mead chatted amicably, without purpose, with this retired teacher from Omaha, that minister from Wichita. He noticed a tall blonde woman, western-dressed, enter from the rear and begin to set up a projector and screen. This was to be an intimate fireside chat. When she was ready, Marion introduced the speaker to the assembled guests and neighbors and some folks in off the road.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like you to meet Annie Cloudcroft—or Mountain Annie, as everyone around here calls her. Annie lives in Allenspark, and she has done just about everything up here in the Front Range, from waiting tables to fighting fires. She came to Magdalena Park from Wisconsin with her folks when she was a little girl, and she worked for us at the lodge as a teenager. Annie graduated from C.U., then went to work for the Forest Service as a ranger—is that right, Annie?—oh, the Park Service, that’s right, in the summertime, up in Rocky Mountain. Now she is what you call a freelance naturalist: She works for the school districts to get the kids outside—that’s so important!—and writes booklets on the plants and animals of the area. You’ll find them in our gift shop, and Annie will be happy to sign them for you. Well, like I say, Annie’s done about everything—just so’s it’s in the mountains. We’re so lucky to have her here tonight to tell us about the summer wildflowers around here. Annie?”
“Thanks, Marion,” the woman began after polite applause. “That’s right, just so it’s out in the hills, among the wildlife. Of course it’s thanks to you Devers that I came here to begin with, and that I finally came to stay.” The lights went down, and the first slide came on. Half an hour later, a blue gentian on the screen, she concluded, “In the mellow autumn, the blue and fringed gentians line the high meadows just before the aspens turn. I invite you all to open your eyes to the small wonders around you as well as the big ones.” At this she gestured to the looming elk beneath which Mead was seated, and their eyes met.
Refreshments were served beside the rocky mountain mantelpiece. Soon the cluster of questioners had gone back to their picture puzzles or magazines, leaving James and Annie to talk together. “I was pleased to see you include local butterflies,” he said after introducing himself. “Most naturalists seem to ignore them, let alone regular folk.”
“Well, they’re pollinators for my wildflowers,” said Annie. “And perhaps that’s because most folks just don’t see them at all.”
“I think you’re right. Did you take that super shot of Weidemeyer’s admiral?”
“Yes, thanks; down the Middle St. Vrain, in the willows. But you’re right. Butterflies do seem to receive short shrift in national park interpretation, and it makes no sense, since everyone adores them in the abstract. The truth is, I think, most people just ignore insects altogether, except when they’re trying to get rid of them.”
“Wasn’t it Nabokov,” James asked, “who said ‘It is astounding how little the ordinary person notices butterflies’?”
“It was. In Speak, Memory, I think.”
“So how come you do?”
“What, know that quotation? I love Nabokov.”
“No, notice butterflies.”
“Well, I try to notice everything out there. It’s my job but also my passion. Besides, I have a friend who teaches butterfly classes sometimes up at the Y camp out of Estes, and he’s helped me to see them better. He often uses that quotation in his classes. Now I always notice butterflies, even at the expense of flowers and birds sometimes.”
“This mentor wouldn’t be Michael Heap, would it?”
“It would. Do you know him too?”
“I’ve just spent a couple of days with him up at Loveland Pass. He’s the one who steered me here, as a matter of fact.”
“No, really?”
“Yeah—you see, we share a common interest in the Magdalena alpine. Do you know that great black butterfly of the arctic-alpine?”
“Do I! I take groups up to see it sometimes at Rock Cut on Trail Ridge Road. That’s the only place I know where you can see it so easily, without a hike. Of course it was Michael who taught me about it. Where did you meet him? Is he around now?” The two went on to speak in the cool of the porch outside, as the fireplace was a little warm and Keith was holding forth with stories beside it. They watched a crescent moon sit on the summit of Magdalena Mountain before setting somewhere on the western slope.
Mead mentioned the prolific use of the name Magdalena in the area. “Maybe I’m going to have to become a biblical scholar to figure it out,” he said.
“James,” said Annie, “if you’re interested in Magdalena around here, I can give you a couple of tips. Follow me back inside.” Back in the great room, Annie strode to the bookshelf in the back. It should be here . . . right.” She pulled down a black book. “I told you I loved Nabokov. This is his newest novel. I just finished it and left it here for others to read. Take it back to your room tonight. I think you’d better have a look inside.”
“Gladly. And? You said you had a couple of tips.”
“You really should see the chapel, it’s lovely. And while you’re at it . . .” She paused, uncertain as to whether she should go on. But if he was a friend of Michael’s . . .
“Yes?”
“Well, if you really want to learn about Mary Magdalene, you could do worse than to visit the old monastery near the chapel.”
“Oh?” said Mead, thinking she must mean its library. “And why is that?”
“Because . . . she lives there.”
33
Annie had packed up and gone, and James was settled in by the fire to examine the book she’d instructed him to read, when a guest burst through the front door. He was clearly distressed. “What’s the matter?” asked Keith, rising from his chair, fearing a fire.
“It’s bad,” said the man in a quavery voice. “We’ve got a bat!” The problem was a bat in the cabin, and the man and his wife were terrified. Keith shrugged and asked him if he’d tried to sweep it out. “Won’t sit still,” said the agitated guest. “Won’t fly ou
t. What will we do?”
Someone suggested sending him back with a can of Raid, which is when James offered to deal with it. He fetched his butterfly net, followed them back to their cabin, caught the bat, and released it into the alpine air. It was a tiny Myotis to cause such a fuss, happy as a gnat to be free. Everyone was happy. James thought, if this butterfly deal doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll have a future in extermination. But that wasn’t funny: several of his entomology major friends from State had ended up doing just that. He also thought, no wonder people don’t notice butterflies.
The Devers retired, leaving James to douse the lights and the fire. He took his place again after tossing on another log. Now, the book. It was Vladimir Nabokov’s newest novel, Look at the Harlequins!, just published—Annie had bought it hot off the press. Mead wondered if it would flesh out Nabokov’s visit here with Winchester, which George had told him about. George had been working out of C.U.’s Science Lodge before he adopted RMBL for his summer field base. He was completing his PhD at Harvard, where Nabokov was curating the Lepidoptera while teaching Russian at Wellesley, and they became friends. Nabokov traveled in the West each summer, his wife, Véra, driving, him collecting on sunny days and writing on cloudy ones. Winchester invited the author to go afield with him in Colorado, and on July 13, 1947, they did so. GW collected VN at his cabin at Columbine Lodge and took him to Tolland Bog, near the Moffat Tunnel on the D&RGW railroad line, in search of Boloria selene tollandensis and other treasures. James knew all this from his prof. But what had this new book to do with it, or with anything?
He began on page 1, always a good place: “I met the first of my three or four successive wives in somewhat odd circumstances,” he read, then told the elk head beside him, “Uh-oh, maybe this isn’t what I need to read right now—sounds like romantic vertigo to me.” But he persevered, and well before breakfast, he came to familiar territory:
Magdalena Mountain Page 27