Leaving Ned

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Today is the grand opening weekend of the Happy Trails Café in their new location, just across the street from the train cars where they used to be. I have been saving my punch card with two free coffees earned up from a winter of hibernating in their train cars, the perfect place to write until sunset.

During the short walk to the cafe from my house, humming birds zip overhead. The breeze reminds me that up here in Ned, spring is chilly. Inside the new café, the yellow walls carry in the sunshine. On the counter is a bouquet of lilacs, brought up from “down bellow,” Boulder, where May is summer-hot. On this perfect, sunshine day, it is easy to appreciate living high.

I will miss living here. Something about getting ready to leave a place like Ned makes me look back, as if by writing it all down, I can take it with me.

I want the nights at the First Street Pub, dancing in a trance, slipping out the back door to smoke in a circle under a grey-blue sky so cold that the stars branch out like quartz crystals, heavy and ready to fall with the coming snow. Back in the dark warmth of the pub, long, gypsy skirts swirl over the worn dance floor, moving together like a quilt of spinning disks. Mischievously late in the night, we girls skip home through the snow and howl at the neighbors’ dogs.

I want to keep the lessons of driving through deep snow… and one brief moment of grasping my steering wheel. As my truck and I slide towards the creek beside Hesse Trail, all my body weight pushes through my wrists onto the steering wheel. My truck, the rusty, red beast, slides on its underbelly, nose first over a muddy ledge.

And I want that holler coming from my throat at the end of that same long day, when an old Ford F350, driven by a man with an eye for geometry, yanks out my little truck from the creek bed like a fish on hook. Meg and I, prepared for success, have a box of beer waiting for whoever will be our hero. We salute him with a roadside toast. PBR never tastes so good.

I want to keep skiing in May with Kaelin up Caribou. I want to keep the surprising details, like sophisticated connoisseurship of microbreweries among the patrons of Backcountry Pizza, no cell phones, and the normalcy of hitchhiking up and down the canyon. And how on the weekends, Ned fills with people looking a little different and acting a little different... neater, I guess. They definitely shave more often than most of the locals up here. They come for something they cannot find “down in Boulder.”