The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [108]
At the junction of US 24, I turned left and headed west. Here the weather was superb. The sun shone, the sky was blue. Out of the west, a flotilla of clouds sailed in, fluffy and benign, skimming the peaks. The highway was of pink asphalt; it was like driving along a strip of bubble gum. The road led up and over the Wilkerson Pass and then down into a long valley of rolling meadows with glittering streams and log cabins set against a backdrop of muscular mountains. It looked like a scene out of a deodorant commercial. It was glorious, and I had it almost all to myself. Near Buena Vista the land dramatically dropped away to reveal a plain and beyond it the majestic Collegiate Peaks, the highest range in the United States, with sixteen peaks of over 14,000 feet along a thirty-mile stretch. I fell with the highway down the mountainside and crossed the plain towards the Collegiate range, tall and blue and snow-peaked. It was like driving into the opening credits of a Paramount movie.
I had intended to make for Aspen, but at the turning at Twin Lakes I found a white barrier barring the way and a sign saying that the highway to Aspen over Independence Pass was closed because of snow. Aspen was just twenty miles down the closed road, but to reach it by the alternative northern route would have required a detour of 150 miles. Disappointed, I looked for some place else to go for the night and drove on to Leadville, a place about which I knew nothing and indeed had never even heard.
Leadville was outstanding. The outskirts of the town were ragged and shabby – there’s a surprising amount of poverty in Colorado – but the main street was broad and lined with sturdy Victorian buildings, many of them with turrets and towers. Leadville was another gold and silver mining town; it was here that the Unsinkable Molly Brown got her start, as did Meyer Guggenheim. Like Cripple Creek and Victor, it now catered to tourists – every place in the Rockies caters to tourists – but it had a much more genuine feel to it. Its population was 4,000, enough to give it an independent life apart from what the tourists brought it.
I got a room in the Timberline Motel, had a stroll around the town and a creditable meal at the Golden Burro Café – not the greatest food in the world, or even possibly in Leadville, but at $6 for soup, salad, chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, coffee and pie, who’s bitching? – followed by a moonlight stroll back to the motel, a hot shower and a little TV. If only life could always be so simple and serene. I was asleep by ten, dreaming happy dreams in which I manfully dealt with pouncing bobcats, swaying wooden bridges and windscreens full of sticky insects. The heroine even let me see her with her clothes off. It was a night to remember.
Chapter twenty-two
IN THE MORNING, the weatherman on the TV said that a ‘frunnal system’ was about to dump many inches of snow on the Rockies. This seemed to please him a lot. You could see it in his twinkling eyes. His map showed a band of unpleasantness sitting like a curse over almost the whole of the West. Roads would be shut, he said, a hint of a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth, and travel advisories would be issued. Why are television weathermen always so malicious? Even when they are trying to be sincere, you can see that it’s a front – that just under the surface there lurks a person who spent his childhood pulling the wings off insects and snickering whenever another child fell under the wheels of a passing vehicle.
Abruptly, I decided to head south for the arid mountains of New Mexico, over which the weather-map showed nothing much in