Backroad to Boulder

On my drive from Telluride to Boulder I discovered a whole, vast section of Colorado that I had never explored before! That kind of revelation I find immensely exciting and satisfying. For my Hawaii friends, Montrose is to Telluride what Kahului is to the West Side. It is a town about 90 minutes away that provides less expensive and vastly more options for all the crap you need in your life. Telluride, by the way, years ago passed an ordinance that disallowed all chain stores and restaurants. Target? Drive to Montrose. Safeway? Hop in the car. Sears, Sports Authority, JC Penney, Walgreens, Subway, Taco Bell...you get the idea. It is simultaneously liberating and inconvenient to live in a town where consumerism is unique, expensive and at times, incredibly inconvenient. But you sort of make a day of it, stopping at the hot springs on the way home for a soak or a margarita in Ridgway.

My point to all this is that I decided that I would take an alternate and possible more lengthy route up through the state to spend a few more days in balmy Boulder with Kelly and Clio before flying home to North Carolina. Why, you ask? Well, for starters I was rather hung over. Surprisingly so, considering the few drinks I consumed and the early hour at which I collapsed into my bed. But there it is. I'm getting old--or at least my liver is. We had a fun evening out at the Excelsior, wine and pasta and lots of laughs, myself, KJ, Dawn, Peggy and Meghan but I was neglectful with photos and cannot show you our bleary faces. I am the only unwed unmother of the group, which is neither here nor there, but we toasted our friend and the town doctor who was in Montrose giving birth to a little carrot-top as we dined. Way to go, Sharon!! I think we decided to leave when the table beside us asked to be moved!

So anywho, I get up on Thursday morning and make some final rounds in town, dropping an old snowboard off at the freebox (I will explain this one later as I sense this entry will be wordy and devoid of photos--actually, I take that back, read THIS), getting a cheap ski pass (THANKS Jeremy!), saying farewell to a few folks and treating myself to a yummy spicy hot chai--sometimes sugar can jump-start a hangover but apparently not this time. Nineteen degrees!!! Yes, Indian summer in Telluride can be oh so un-summery. Quick stop at my new an improved and scaled-down storage unit to drop a couple of things off and THEN...an alternate route to Boulder. Typically, I would have shot up on I-70, which is beautiful in its own right, passing through Glen Canyon and over Vail Pass--you can get there sometimes in under 6 hours, which is making really good time. I sensed that with my impaired state and no cds or companionship, the highway drive might prove to be, well, dangerous. For real. So I shot over from Montrose to Gunnison (the Kahului of Crested Butte), where I noticed that a good 92% of the humans out and about were heavy-set hunters hauling trailers with what initially appeared to be upside-down chairs and couches, but upon closer inspection (through my camera's zoom lens) actually revealed themselves as deer and elk legs--hooves sticking straight up in the air! Oh and lots of McCain/Palin signage.

Even though I had eaten a sub from this cool local Subwich place in Montrose, it became alarmingly clear when I reached "Gunny" that I wanted--no, cancel that--NEEDED a major source of grease. For those of you who have not yet visited a Sonic, they have these cheese fries ("Super Sonic size, please" I ordered) that you actually need a fork to eat them with and are immensely satisfying. That and a cherry limeade that was almost too big for me to pick up with one hand. Now, I had a moment, as they say, while I was waiting for my order of sugar and fat, and it was a pause hallmarked by pure and undiluted gratitude. I am watching a Sonic employee walking--no, trudging--to work, perhaps from her house a short distance away, drawing her final puff of inspiration from a cigarette, and crushing it out on the garbage can before entering her workplace. And I'm watching her, and suddenly I am thinking about my time off, driving around Colorado, and all the people working in all the less-than-desireable jobs that are making this possible for me. The immensity of it was rather overwhelming, even in or maybe because of my state of mind. From the guy who works at the rental car desk in Boulder (that's his JOB), to the state highway people that care enough to get funding to post signs about watching for wildlife, to the construction workers who stand out there in that sun and wind and cold, telling us when to slow down and when to stop--they are out there ALL DAY, and then go home eat dinner go to sleep and do it all over again the next day. And that woman in the Subwich place, all she did was lean over the meat slicer and slice meat for ever single order that came in. All day. And the people that work in the gas stations, sitting behind that counter all day, just ringing stuff in for strangers, all.day.long. A convenience store is their work environment! And how about the who-knows-where-they-are Asians that built my cell phone, so I could talk to Hilary while I drove past the Collegiate Peaks later that day? They are probably in some crappy factory, just eking out a living so I won't have to be bored for part of the day. And then back to that girl coming in to work at Sonic in Gunnison, which, by the way is one of the coldest towns in Colorado because of the way the cold air settles into the valleys at night there--she is probably making, what, $15,000 a YEAR? If? I just suddenly got it. The thought and feeling of how priveleged I am almost made me lose my appetite. And then she handed me my Super Sonic Size Cheese Fries and I had to ask for a fork so I could eat them as I drove my SUV towards Monarch Pass with the heat on high.

Highway 285 heads up north of Monarch Pass, through the center of Colorado and even though it took me a bit longer than the highway drive, it was worth every minute. I must have seen thousands of horses. Hundreds of sheep and goats. Tens of thousands of cows. Red-tailed hawks, deer and elk, all hanging out talking about how much they don't want to be someone's upside-down chair at the end of the day.

By the time I got to the outskirts of Denver, I realized I needed a map to navigate the snarl of highways towards Boulder--and then remembered (!) that I had found a stack of maps when I cleaned out my storage unit and the Colorado map was on the floor in the back seat area. Well, being too stubborn to stop driving (mostly because I had passed a few hunters and didn't want to end up behind them again because it was actually a lot of work passing them in the first place, with no passing zones and steep hills and such) I tried to open and read the map as I swerved around corners, and quickly concluded that that tactic was actually life-threatening. So I winged it. And ended up in the southEAST corner of Denver, exactly the opposite of where I wanted to be. Consulting the map was useless as, it turns out, my map was published some time in the early '90's. Yes, cities change.

But I made it. Kelly and Clio were home and happy for my return, and we ordered some innovative Asian food that was brought directly to her front door. All was well. Highway 285 opened my heart to the interior of the state and Sonic opened my eyes to the cogs of the world.