Cookies were a bad idea
Gravel fractures under the weight of rubber-soled feet. The path winds upwards. It hugs the side of a cliff-face. Like skin, it wears the mountain’s undulations.
The valley floor spills out beneath us. Streams of melted snow merge into a shimmering emerald river that runs through the basin gorge. Children play in the shallows of the river beside parents who stand ankle-deep assessing the current and responding to work emails on their mobile phones marked ‘high importance.’
I pause on the outside edge of the walking trail to let a group of health-conscious, cargo-shorted seniors pass. One of their group exhibits a mobile-phone holder on his leather belt. They all nod and say hello. I steal a look over the path’s edge. A heaped pile of broken boulders at the base of the mountain hints that things are not as permanent as they first seemed.
“Hold up... Slow down… Can we take a breather,” Chris pants.
The previously separate sweat-stains underneath his man-boobs join to make a smiley face on his t-shirt. Chris gulps down huge mouthfuls of air.
“Fuck me that air is clean,” Chris blurts. “Each breath is like inhaling an angel’s fart.”
A hang-glider tries to outrun its shadow. It twists, turns and dives from the sky attempting to outrun, outsmart the sun above. We track the glider as it crosses the valley, an effortless nomad in the air.
“I think we made a mistake. Those hash-cookies were a bad idea,” Jamie says. “My feet are so heavy. It feels like they’re being weighed down.”
We turn, take the path downwards in silence. At the base of the hiking trail the healthy seniors sit eating homemade salads from Tupperware. They clean their boots in the river before driving away in their Toyota SUV.
“The Rocky Mountains are bullshit. I just want to lie down on a couch and watch TV,” Chris whines.
On the outskirts of Telluride village, we pass the grounds to a music festival. Canvas tents populate the roadside, dirty clothes hang on thin ropes and tree branches. Over a loudspeaker, Ryan Adams sings about heartache to a lonely banjo, as middle-aged men huddle and discuss their favourite craft beer.
We wait for a gondola to take us up and out of the valley. Behind us is a family eating ice-creams. A little boy drops his and begins to cry.
“I’d have a sook as well little man,” Jamie sympathises. “The thing looked bloody delicious.”
<Page 190>
The ground quickly falls beneath us. Hanging by metal wire, our gondola drifts up the face of the mountain as if powered by an unseen tide. We skim the tops of pine trees and bear trails. The village grows smaller below. Main-street is a carpark of pick-up trucks and people carrying American flags that wave limply in a weak breeze.
At the top of the mountain, we exit the moving gondola and take a large, cream van with tan leather seats and a powerful air-conditioner back to our house.
The kitchen is a wasteland of midnight snacking. Open packets of tortilla chips spill across a stone bench, chocolate Oreos stand erect in a tub of garlic-hummus. Chris channel-surfs from the vantage of a soft, brown sofa and James stands at the fridge asking who wants a beer.
My eyes close to the low hum of background conversation, something about making connecting flights out of Denver later in the week. A pillow hits my face with a softened violence.
I swear.
Chris says, “Shut up, you should be watching this!”
A documentary plays out on the television screen detailing life in Siberia. Images of thick, foreboding forests, bulging hills and frost-covered villages draw our attention.
Chris sighs. He says, “the world really is an amazing place.”
We bathe in the artificial light of a television screen as outside a swollen, tired sun falls beneath horizon. The summit of a towering, snow-capped mountain illuminates for an instant against the end of days light; a pure white peak painted onto a rapidly darkening canvas.
