This morning I made my way to the megalopolis of Del Norte to collect my earnings from note cards. When I came home I saw a certain little black, white and tan dog was looking up at me with deep Australian Shepherd yearning. Well, OK. I ate my lunch and headed out. I'm an obedient owner.
At the Refuge I noticed a maroon truck with a topper that I've seen there before. Before long, Bella's path ran alongside that truck's driver. She was on a bike or??? I couldn't tell. It was a woman about my age. As I began to pass, she stopped and flashed me a huge happy grin. I stopped for that and rolled down the window. "Isn't this GREAT??" she said.
"Absolutely." I got out of my car and saw that the thing she was on which from a distance, looked kind of like a bike. It still kind of looked like a bike, but also like a scooter. She explained it to me, told me all about how it worked, why she had it. "I love it! I can't run anymore but this is GREAT. She told me about a friend of hers who used it to run her sled dogs, "Kind of ski-jouring with this thing," she explained. "They have to run 30 miles/day." I was imagining that feeling, both excited and wistful which is NOT a bad combination. Then she said, "You want to try?"
"Can I? I can't get on my bike any more." I was so excited, hopeful.
"Let's go over here to the gravel. That might be safer for you." At the moment, we were on soft snow. We walked across the road to where the snow had melted. When she saw me walk that six feet she said, "You look kinda' busted up."
"That's because I am kinda' busted up," I answered, laughing, and I told her about the implants, the injuries, the whole litany, but briefly. I'd already learned that this woman had also loved to run. "Well, you know, I loved to run, more than anything. Wait, I'll just show you a painting." I got out my phone and showed her Joy. "Back there we were carrying cameras everywhere and I decided to paint it." I misted up.
"Is that here?" She asked, looking at the landscape.
"No. It's California. There was no work here in the 80s so I moved to California."
I tried the bike-like-thing, but I couldn't move it. It hurt my knee immediately. I laughed and said, "I guess I'm just too busted up." She laughed, too.
She told me her incredible life story of being a ranger, working for parks and wildlife here in the Valley and other places in the San Juans. The San Juans are the largest chain/group of mountains in the Rockies; they are on the west side of the Valley. "I know the San Juans," she said, "I've probably been everywhere." She told me about being transferred to Alaska. "I was so happy about that!," she said, "but I ended up hating it. There were so many rules and enforcement things. It was a desk job. I didn't go into this to sit behind a desk. I wanted," and she finished by gesturing around the blessed Big Empty. "It was hard to get around, too. Marshes, swamps, all that everywhere." There are people who like the desert, and she is from Albuquerque.
I told her a couple of stories about my mountains in California, and she didn't shoot that down. "It must have been nice. I've thought California would be great without the people." I mentioned that usually I was alone in all the hills and mountains, something which surprises people here who know California as tourists know it. I wouldn't have imagined that either before I lived there.
I explained that's where I learned what mountains really are. "I lived at 3000 feet," I explained. "The mountains where I ran with the dogs were 7000 feet and on the east side dropped straight down to the desert."
"I get it. Mt. Blanca is only 5000 feet above this valley." I told her about standing on the rain shadow in the Lagunas, about how it was to get my first hip prosthesis and how it felt to realize that it WASN'T a "real" hip and I couldn't run anymore. She understood. "Oh yeah, our bones, everything, it's all part of our mind." Wow. My implants are GREAT and I love them and owe them a LOT, but they aren't "me." "People get that stuff and think they've been repaired, like a car, but we aren't cars." We had a moment of silence for busted up body parts then...
I asked her if she ever thought of the Ice Age people when she was out here, how yesterday it hit me how different elk tracks would be to an Ice Age person than they were to me. She just listened, clearly didn't think it was insane or weird. Then she said she does. "One night I was watching Orion come up behind Mt. Blanca and I wondered how that must have been for those people; it must have been incredible."
Then she told me about how she also thinks about the dinosaurs and how the cranes had to evade them. I just said, "Wow, you know I've only gone there factually. I haven't gone there with my imagination." She nodded. Now I will always think about that whenever I see the cranes.
"They're great teachers," I said, "I watch them. They fly two miles across this valley, land by that little pond and dance like they haven't seen each other in years. It's wonderful." She nodded.
"It is. There's something there."
Then, somehow our conversation turned to our time in life and she spoke the words that are always in my mind about it, that I'm out there, seeing, thinking, savoring. "It's our time just to BE. We've done and done and done. That's how I see it," she said, "We don't have to do anything. We can just be here."
We were in the same place with the same hearts sharing a conversation like none I've shared with anyone. I asked for her phone number, and she got embarrassed. She wanted to say "no" but didn't want to hurt me. I got that, too. I could have said, and it would have been true, "Don't worry. I won't call you." I was surprised that I even asked. I don't do that and, in a way, I think it was a kind of offering across that immense space, simply in its rarity.
"I'm kind of a recluse," she said.
"Me too," I said. My asking broke the spell, but it's all good.
"I should go. I'm all sweaty."
"OK. I don't know what I'd do if you went down with hypothermia here because of your own sweat!" That was funny to her and to me.
This time of year strange things happen, and I don't always know if they're real. Well, they're a KIND of real, but... My type of Christmas celebration centers on letting things happen, just being open to the miraculous. There have been times in my life where a random encounter felt other-worldly and, I think, it's possible that they are. As I walked with Teddy -- and his new halter which was AWESOME -- I thought about that.
Many years ago my Aunt Jo and my Uncle Hank were in a bad car accident, kind of halfway between a head-on and a T-bone. My aunt was driving, my uncle was in the passenger seat. My aunt was knocked unconscious and my uncle was injured. While my aunt was out, the police were called. She woke up to find Hank in the back seat with a woman who was taking care of the some of the abrasions on his head and keeping him still. How he got in the back seat was a mystery, but there he was. The paramedics and police came, talked to my aunt, and when she turned around the woman was gone. She advertised in the paper and put up signs trying to find her, but never did. The paramedics said no one was there when they got there, BUT my uncle WAS in the back seat and some of his injuries had been cleaned and bandaged. My aunt decided the woman was an angel. "What do you think, Martha Ann?"
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Jo."
"That's what I think, too."
Whatever the woman I met today was, THAT was a conversation I never expected to have in my life and I've truly done a poor job sharing it here. You'll have to take my word for it. This song says everything. ❤️
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