My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [103]
IN NOVEMBER, GAB and I travel to Denver for a friend’s wedding—our first real trip together since the deli opened. And our first night in a hotel. I’m as happy to be in a room drenched in disinfectant and featuring a highway beneath our window as I was as a child. But the best part is that Gab’s fertility cycle, which she’s graphed onto her weekly planner with minute-by-minute precision, is due to hit its peak the day after the wedding ends. So I’ve delayed our trip home by twenty-four hours and secured a rental car for the purpose of making a romantic getaway to the Rocky Mountain resort town of Steamboat Springs.
In a way, just being in Colorado might help along our efforts. I spent a few years of my life here, and this is my territory, so to speak. The land is sensual and rugged, and this journey up the mountains feels like a chance to conquer this whole issue of overthinkers versus overachievers. There’s something virile about it, a hint of danger and recklessness, or more than a hint if you consider that snow season has just started and some of the notoriously avalanche-prone mountain passes leading to places like Steamboat will soon have to be closed, if they haven’t been already. As we drive up into the clouds and the first of several snowstorms, I feel like I could catch a few wolverines on my own, while Gab looks smaller and smaller, hunching nervously in the passenger seat. This is even better than I planned, I think.
We arrive at our hotel with six hours to kill until the Magic Moment. Since ski season has yet to start, Steamboat is devoid of interesting activities other than afternoon drinking at one of the many local bars offering green-chile enchiladas and endless reruns of Jimmy Buffett’s greatest hits. So on the advice of the concierge, we end up making a mad dash before sunset for some irresistible-sounding natural hot springs half an hour outside town.
And that’s where the trouble starts. The hot springs are located at the end of a county road that would have been eminently drivable if snow hadn’t once again started to fall—heavy snow, with flakes so big they seem to have their own gravitational orbits. And now the sun is disappearing behind the steeply bowled wall of the Yampa Valley. At around six o’clock, in conditions that could be described as either whiteout or blackout, we arrive at the hot springs’ driveway, a series of muddy, unpaved switchbacks proceeding more or less straight up a steep ridge.
“Do you see that sign?” Gab says, pointing to a sharply worded warning to not attempt to reach the hot springs under any conditions without four-wheel drive, which our rental does not have. She also points out that the car’s insurance will be invalidated the moment our tires leave the pavement.
“I don’t like this,” she says. “We should go back.”
She’s right. After checking my cell phone, I see that we’re out of range. And there hasn’t been another car or house along the county road for miles. We could walk the rest of the way, but even if we could get to the top of the switchbacks in our sneakers and light coats, the springs could be closed. All in all, it seems like an extremely bad idea to proceed.
However, when you’re trying to psych yourself up to consummate an act of passion, to create life, after flying across the country and driving up into a black and stormy sky, what choice do you have?
So we start traversing up the switchbacks, and as we do I wonder if I’ve already made that other choice between the values of the immigrant entrepreneur and those of the Puritan. I’m tired of thinking, and thinking about thinking, and being “hung up on the eternal,” as one of my coworkers at the Paris Review recently called this ultimately self-defeating point of view. Inwardness can be a good thing, until it becomes involuted and can’t turn itself around. The Puritans were inward, but they were also exemplary when it came