Grief's Country Page 3

  Alternately, you can reach Gold Hill from Left Hand Canyon, to the north, named for the Arapaho leader memorialized in various ways around Boulder County, whose name in his own language was Niwot. This is not a popular route for a variety of reasons, one of which is that to go from the canyon up to the town requires you to use a road called Lickskillet, which holds the honor of being the steepest charted road in the United States, closer to perpendicular to the earth than any road has a right to be. Legend has it that the name comes from the greasy skillet dangled before the pack mules to entice them up the hill in the mining days. This road is completely closed by November. I was constitutionally unable to drive up or down it at any time.

  Naturally, the two busiest routes come from Boulder. One via Four-Mile Canyon runs flat out of town and then leaps up into the mountains, winding wildly. One hairpin turn deep in a canyon takes you through the town of Salina, a handful of little houses wedged against the rocks, buried in shadow. At the turn leaving town stands a cabin with the unfinished, jury-rigged Rube Goldberg quality I would see repeatedly in the hills above Boulder. A striped blanket serves as a curtain over the front window. The road then rises sharply, swings through another tight hairpin, flattens out, and heads into town.

  The other popular route, from the east, takes Sunshine Canyon past homes that run from substantial to weird to palatial, and then finally up a series of hairpins around Horsfal Mountain. For months I only heard that name, never read it, so I thought it commemorated a tragic equine accident. After climbing sharply, you level out onto the Lower and then Upper Shelf Roads, which look and feel exactly like their names. They are (barely) two lanes wide: mountainside on the left and on the right a sheer drop of about a thousand feet into the canyon. No railing, no berm, nothing but nothing. If you’re ever going to make friends with this route—which is by far the prettiest and possibly the most expeditious—you simply have to keep your eyes focused straight ahead and trust that there is not a monstrous propane truck coming around the next bend. When you can drive it at night, or in snow, you’re a local. Your reward comes as the Upper Shelf curves to the left and the town is spread out beneath you in a hollow. At the edge of town, you see the sign:

  GOLD HILL

  Est. ——————————————— 1859

  Elev. —————————————— 8463

  Pop. ——————————————— 118

  ————————————————

  Total —————————————— 10440

  *

  My route to Gold Hill was longer. It took a sharp turn just before I turned forty, when I led Bob up the stairs to my bedroom for the first time in the early hours of 1990. Ten years later it merged onto I-94 west and then, past the snarl of Chicago, settled onto I-80.

  I still feel the beats and rhythms of that first drive, which seemed like some mythic pilgrimage. I remember crossing the Mississippi at midday and then, at the end of the afternoon, the Missouri, thinking about the potency of rivers, both as historical forces and as symbols of transition, as passages and boundaries. I remember spotting the Comfort Inn just beyond Omaha where I would unfold myself, crank up the air-conditioning, and call Bob.

  Day 2 was a state of mind called Nebraska, bright and hot and endless. Green Midwest morphing slowly into dun-colored West; cottonwoods crowding around a river; signs about pioneers and Buffalo Bill churning up all the mythology of the American West in which I marinated as a kid. My car became a little silver boat pulling across the great archipelago, Grand Island to Kearney to North Platte to Ogallala, and finally, at midafternoon, Julesberg, turning onto I-75, which cuts southwest into the hard brown landscape of eastern Colorado.

  There was a moment somewhere in those dazed late afternoon hours. On subsequent trips I tried unsuccessfully to find it again. A long bank of blue clouds has lined the western horizon, for how long I don’t know. Suddenly I understand these are not clouds but mountains, rising up in front of me. It feels like revelation. I think of the western migrants of the nineteenth century, how they saw the Rockies reveal themselves: for some, a monumental barricade they must gird themselves to surmount; for others, as for me, the blessed end of the road.

  *

  In the eighteen years of our peculiar togetherness, the longest period Bob and I actually inhabited the same space was a little under two years. This period followed the first four years of our relationship, when he was the vice president for student affairs at a small college in western Massachusetts. At the point where I was applying for sabbatical research positions in that region, his misery on the job had been steadily increasing. In one of our nightly phone calls he stunned me by announcing that he was resigning and applying for admission to the graduate education program at UMass in Amherst. We hadn’t spoken about living together, but suddenly there we were, in a modified A-frame on a pristine lake north of Amherst, for ten months.

  Then we moved back to Michigan. The plan was that Bob would live with me, finish his degree, and look for jobs. I went back to work in September and he took over the house. For the first time in living memory, it was cleaned regularly, the refrigerator was stocked, repairs got done, and when I got home at night I was greeted with the smell of dinner cooking. The cats were fed and let in or out as they demanded, the house was filled with music or All Things Considered, and, as the weather cooled, the fire was lit. It goes without saying that logs were ordered and split as needed.

  But this domestic idyll was more complicated for Bob than for me. Never belligerently masculine, he was basically a conservative man and still took a lot of his cues from a very conventional 1950s gender template. It took me a while to understand that being unemployed and broke and looking after a house might unsettle him.

  “I just need to feel I’m making a contribution.”

  “Are you kidding? My house is clean! Someone makes me dinner! The laundry gets done and my underpants are folded!”

  “I know, hon, I just have to get used to this. This isn’t something Bud would understand.”

  Bud, his father, was a driven, self-made man of very conventional and unexamined values. How a man should live his life was written in stone for him. A businessman himself, he never got over the fact that Bob got a law degree but never practiced law. A college vice presidency somehow didn’t measure up; in Bud’s world, there was business, law, or medicine. I was coming to understand that Bob’s leap off the career track in Massachusetts was a remarkable and brave departure from the script. And it also involved an economic risk; he had drawn down his retirement funds twice now after leaving jobs, and he had debts. Nasty hired guns started calling on behalf of his creditors.

  So when Ron’s offer came, there wasn’t really any question of what Bob should do. Ron, his old buddy from Northern Michigan University, where they’d begun their careers together, was now vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder. And he had a problem: a five-year grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to support a public-health approach to alcohol abuse needed a principal investigator quickly. Would Bob take the job? Could he come right away?

  Irony abounded: no one loved a martini more than Bob. He was famous for it; it was his trademark. He was an absolute purist; the martini culture that broke toward the end of the century, with its colors and flavors and flourishes, made him sniff and grimace. After he asked the waiter or bartender, “May we know your name?” his next utterance and accompanying hand gestures would be unvarying: “Bombay martini, very dry” (hands flat, parallel to the floor), “up” (hand fisted, thumb extended upward), “with a twist” (thumbs and forefingers of each hand twisting an imaginary lemon peel in opposite directions). No one was more particular as to his gin, his vermouth, the temperature of the glass and the liquor, or the way the lemon rind should be twisted—or loosely knotted, a later touch. The pristine, almost feminine delicacy I sometimes saw in him emerged when he poured a martini. No one honored
cocktail hour with greater devotion. And now he was going to take on the legendary alcohol culture of CU Boulder.

  “Remember how we said maybe the next job would bring you closer?” I said. “Colorado is not closer.”

  So I was going to lose him again. And it would be for ten years, not the promised five. And then forever.

  *

  I had been to the Northwest, but that’s not the West. I was shocked by how suddenly the mountains rise from the plains, as if shoved by some titanic force—as of course they were, in a great mashing and collapsing of tectonic plates. The Flatirons, the striated trinity of rock formations directly above and behind Boulder, suggested to me monumental hands pushing west. No foothills, just the plains and then the mountains, city roads S-curving quickly up canyons and around hills. It’s a violent landscape, and to me a very masculine one, hard and brown and so dry you quickly understand the suddenness and virulence of deadly fires. You feel the dryness immediately in your mouth and your skin, and you notice how carefully people conserve water. Coming from a blue-and-green landscape, a state surrounded on three sides of two peninsulas by huge freshwater seas, I felt far from home, landlocked, and, of course, breathless. Colorado was another realm altogether.

  When I first visited Bob the summer after he took the job, he was living in college housing, which is to say a concrete-block one-bedroom apartment floored in old brown linoleum with a refrigerator whose little freezer had to be defrosted by hand every week. It came furnished with black vinyl sofa and chairs, a decent double bed, and a dinette set. To Bob, this was perfectly fine—cheap but utterly satisfactory. To me it felt like a cell at a minimum-security facility.

  While he was at work I read and wrote and hiked around town. Sometimes I drove up Boulder Canyon to one of the outlook spots with picnic tables. I loved the wide silence, the air smelling of white sage, but I could never quite relax. Big signs announced, “YOU HAVE ENTERED A MOUNTAIN LION’S HOME” and offered instructions about how to behave if confronted by the resident. So you’re not only terrified but abashed by your rudeness in barging into someone else’s abode. I was nearly always the only human around and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched. One day I decided to hike at the Boulder Reservoir, but a man returning to the parking lot as I was leaving it said, “Be careful, some guy thinks he heard a rattler in there.” I tried to keep walking, but approximately eight feet down the path I gave in and swiveled back toward the car.

  On weekends Bob and I hit the laundromat, defrosted the freezer, and shopped for food. On Saturdays at the lush Boulder Farmers’ Market, a brief walk away from the apartment, I always felt like we were playing in different musical keys or time signatures. For me the whole point was to luxuriate in the flowers and produce, consider the jewelry, and hit at least two food carts, probably Asian and Latin. Somehow the market brought something different out in Bob. He became Sherman marching to the sea, treating the ravishing corridor of market stalls as the local Safeway: grab what’s on your list and get out. It all came to a head very quickly one Saturday.

  Me, stopping his forward momentum: “Look at those green beans! Let’s get some.”

  Him, impatiently and loudly: “You got a plan for those beans?”

  I believe we went home separately. I later treated him to a detailed discourse on the point of farmers’ markets, the value of experiencing things in common, and the relative unimportance of knowing exactly what you will do with green beans when you buy them. Within a short space of time we were both laughing. Bud had made an appearance once again. “You got a plan for those beans?” became a watchword whenever this Patton-like approach threatened to swamp something small and lovely.

  Sometimes we took exploratory trips in Bob’s 1980s maroon Oldsmobile—an ugly beast, long and low, the size of a boat, with maroon velour seats. He had been reading Colorado history since his arrival, telling me about the young women called Bluebirds who spent their summers on the Front Range. One Saturday he said, “I want to find this place Gold Hill.”

  We drove up Four-Mile Canyon for about a half hour, creeping around hairpins and up sharp grades, veering toward rocks. Ragged deer paused in their grazing to watch us. Finally we emerged onto a wide, graded dirt road that took us into what appeared to be a kind of camp, a collection of ramshackle cabins and other structures lining a small grid of rocky dirt lanes on a flat surrounded on three sides by high hills.

  I was lost, utterly disoriented. I didn’t understand what it was. “Town” truly did not suggest itself. The place was inscrutable. My mind had no frame for this picture. Bob maneuvered the SS Olds around impossibly tight corners, up and down ruts and mounds, over boulders, past an inn that apparently served dinners and a tiny general store. “What’s—what is this?” I kept asking.

  “It’s Gold Hill,” he said helpfully.

  I thought a big A-frame up on the flank of the biggest hill, looking down over the grid, might be some kind of headquarters, some central camp lodge. Otherwise, I might have believed we’d entered a time warp. A western could be filmed here, I thought, without much set dressing.

  *

  In November 1858, far away from bloody Kansas and the rumbles of war back east, a gaggle of prospectors from the Midwest made a base camp at the edge of what would be the city of Boulder. In January, of all months, they headed up the old Arapaho path into the mountains. Three thousand feet up, in a stream at the base of a hill, they found gold. The road they subsequently made from the footpath in order to transport their treasure would be called Gold Run. In March 1859 the site was established as Mountain District #1 in Nebraska—Colorado would not be established as a distinct territory for another two years. In May, up on top of the hill, they struck a gold-bearing vein, and in June a group including David Horsfal hit the mother lode nearby, and the Colorado gold rush was on. The site reputedly produced $100,000 worth of gold the first year, drawing a minor flood of hungry hopefuls. On the flats atop what became known as Horsfal they planted something like a town and christened it—what else?—Gold Hill.

  The town grew to the point where the official census registered 423 males and 65 females. But the settlement’s existence was always precarious. Exposure to wind and weather took its toll, and fire swept through in 1860, destroying most of the town. The following year the surface deposits of gold began to dry up, and remaining residents headed for the plains or other shiny dreams. The census of 1870 recorded only seven citizens, and Gold Hill became a specter of itself. Then, in 1872, the second chapter in Colorado mining history opened with the discovery of tellurium—only the second known source of the ore in the world. The population of the town boomed to close to a thousand. A newspaper was founded, as well as a school under the supervision of one Hannah Spaulding. The Grand Mountain Hotel was built, later renamed the Wentworth for its owner. Eugene Field, so-called poet of childhood, author of “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” and “Little Boy Blue,” immortalized the place in “Casey’s Table d’Hote,” a long poem in unbearable “western” dialect. The telegraph arrived in 1875, statehood for Colorado the next year, and electricity a decade later. Ghostliness threatened in the form of a disastrous fire in November 1894 that came close to destroying the town once again. But the wind shifted and snow blessedly fell, and Gold Hill staggered into the new century.

  With the establishment of the national parks and also the notion of the salience of evacuating the physically and morally grimy eastern cities in the summer, western tourism bloomed. Clarence Darrow came through town and stayed at the hotel. In 1920, thanks to a brainstorm on the part of one of Jane Addams’s protégés at Hull House, the hotel was bought by the Holiday House Association of Chicago as a resort for young professional women—nurses, teachers, social workers—on western tours. Bluebirds, they were called, and the hotel became the Bluebird Lodge. As the mining industry dwindled and the national economy slowed and then crashed, Gold Hill began to vanish yet again. But the two-room school stayed open and today is the oldest continu
ously operating school in Colorado. The locals have fought its closure on numerous occasions. Somewhere near the point where matter becomes myth and history grows haunted, Gold Hill lives.

  *

  I don’t know when I grasped that Gold Hill was real, a functioning community with families and that historic school. But it got realer when Bob was asked to house- and dog-sit up there by a CU colleague, a guy he’d met on the handball court. This friend’s name was Larry, but in Gold Hill he was known exclusively as Bear. His wife was Poppy. Their children were grown; the central object of Poppy’s life was a lovely auburn border collie improbably named Morgaine (there was a theme: a predecessor had been named Ygraine, and there was a cat called Merlin), with whom I fell instantly in love when I visited over a long Memorial Day weekend.

  Bear and Poppy’s house sat on a small rise above Gold Hill Road on the easternmost side of the little grid. It was long and low, with a shallow front porch offering an overview of what was going on in most of the town. The porch opened into a big living room with barn wood walls and a nice fireplace. Behind it was a large kitchen; to the right were the original two bedrooms, now filled with clothes and boxes. Off to the left, a master bedroom had been added as well as a greenhouse, tiled and glass-walled, that doubled as a dining room and looked out into the backyard. The décor was eclectic cabin-shabby with Asian touches—stone Buddhas, carved screens, woven hangings and rugs. I learned that Poppy and Bear had a daughter living in Thailand whom they visited often.

  Over the weekend we had dinner at the Gold Hill Inn, a single-story log structure built in 1924 as a dining hall for the westering Bluebirds. Locals Barbara and Frank Finn bought both the inn and the former hotel in 1962 and turned the inn into an upscale restaurant in a happily downscale site; their sons now owned and operated it. We walked into the lobby—a long, dim room featuring stone fireplaces at each end, ancient, unreliable- and inhospitable-looking bentwood furniture, and a bar in the southwest corner. Only a honky-tonk piano playing “Camptown Races” was missing to convince me that I was in Silverado. We sidled up to the bar and ordered something to sip while waiting to be called to our table inside. A couple locals were congregated there (as I would learn they habitually were), not planning on dinner, and they checked us out carefully. The dining room was more like a big dining hall: a scattering of tables with checkered cloths, wildflowers in small vases, and a heterogeneous assortment of chairs. We had already placed our order, selecting from a reassuringly limited six-course menu that ran for the whole summer season and a decent wine list. The place was open only a few nights per week, and only through the early fall, when the potbelly stove would be lit. Even locals called for reservations, as the inn was usually packed with people flocking up from Boulder or elsewhere across the Front Range, as I quickly learned to call the eastern side of the Rockies.