My father and I took a turn onto Rist Canyon Road, just outside Bellvue, CO. The sea of plains northwest of Denver was interrupted by tremendous waves of rock. We weaved through these static breakers on a two-lane road, with the only visible sky directly above us. Our destination - a campsite in Poudre Canyon - was supposed to be along this road, but I couldn’t fathom how anything could be built against such an incline.
This was the point in the journey, as most Coloradoans know, when the radio signal disappeared. The mountains thoroughly and passively repel any signal from the Denver stations. We changed our audio from the remnant static to a podcast about Indiana Jones. The 40-year anniversary of the original release passed earlier that year. As we traveled further into the hills, our map course reminded me of the film’s famous travel montages.
Soon after, it began to rain. It was one of those storms caused by air rushing up the mountain slope. As the air cools and condenses, it has nowhere to go but down, and down hard. This storm, this eruption of water, seemed to pounce on us. It felt like a glitch in continuous time occurred; we must have skipped forward past “drizzle” and landed right in “downpour”.
As the rain intensified, we encountered the traffic ahead of us. Everyone slowed to a crawl. Two motorcyclists led the procession like a police escort. I remembered reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Robert Pirsig, the author, made it obvious that riding in the rain was awful – though anyone could have reached that conclusion if they saw the scene in front of us. Our procession gave these bikers distance. Fortunately, the bikers found a stretch of trees that offered shelter, and they pulled off the road.
The storm carried on, and the road kept collecting water. It resembled the skin of some demented underwater serpent, and I felt like we were drifting towards its gaping maw. The wipers didn’t “wipe” so much as shove water away like a sailor bailing out their doomed vessel. Even the droplets on the rear window made the car look like it was sweating.
Then, as if Mother Earth found the pipe that burst, the storm began to lighten. These storms never did last that long. We were able to move ahead with some recovered confidence. As we meandered on, we found ourselves amazed with the scenery, mostly because we were certain that we wouldn’t crash there.
We pulled off briefly to stretch our legs, and I remember being amazed with how quickly the road dried.
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Cheers,
NS