Continental Divide

Our faithful bus will never die. It can smoke and choke and boil over, but it gets us around all the same. The mountain roads we faced yesterday were a trying experience for out little yellow home on wheels, and not just one steep mountain grade left us powering up the shoulder at 15 mph, flashers on, exhaust pipe billowing white smoke, as the engine carried three tons of steel and her resident tribe up into the lesser-touched regions of the atmosphere.

Summer snow melt transforms the alpine slopes and valleys of the Rocky Mountains into a cold and rocky marsh, sending a fury of clear and frigid water raging with such elogant aggression over polished boulders and logs, between Birch and Pine and accoasionally across the road. The entire air is filled with the raging whisper of snow melt on the move.

We stopped along side a white and rapid river to wash our clothes and ourselves, although only the clothes were ever clean after the water temperature proved to be prohibitively awful for human contact.

Coming off the interstate, we hit the Byway at the Top of the Rockies, a road that would lead us to Independence Pass, the highest point in the mountains passable by anything less that a tank. We ate lunch parked near an expansive tangled of mountain streams that rushedly snaked through and across one another as they rolled over their bulky boulder bedding.

America has always seemed so tame. It's two well known - too well documented. People have made if as far as they can, and then they built houses and schools and Walmarts and Starbucks and McDonalds, and it doesn't seem like there's anything left to discover. That's the view from the interstate, the glimpse that most of my countrymen have chosen to make their own out of interests of speed and simplicty. We drive solo, our surroundings completely void of any other human presence, and we wonder, were these roads just built for us? Up the mountains we see alpine towns built of rocks and logs, and Birch tree thickets about the rushing water that overload your sensory perception with such an unbelievely complex construction of the roar of the water and the bright and saturated green leaves sprouting from the straight white trunks of a million trees packed like a sardine forest. The beauty is endless, and I feel like I coluld sit and stare out the window for days, just as long as the bus keeps trucking.

Then again, there are other ways of exploring. Even in the places where vehicles pass, we can twist the situation and really be there.

Near the top on Independence Pass, we found a spot on the edge of a sheer and rocky cliff, along side a grade cut straight into the side of the mountain, where the road clung desperately to the rocky slope. From our lookout, we saw straight out and above a glacial valley at 12,000 feet - the source of the mountain streams where 15-foot-tall blocks of snow, compressed into miniature glaciers, creeped out from the mountain to face the road.

We pulled out our chairs, paints and sketchpads (I ground some mineral-laced rocks into nice little pendants), and sat from what we can only assume to be mid afternoon, until the black sky did well to expose the celestial drape of stars, hung over the mountains, that the daytime blue hides always from view. We felt close to the stars, like all it took was 12,000 vertical feet to get just close enough that we could see all of them, each and every one.

We built a fire in a pit we dug by the side of the road, and feasted on some delisciously steamy hot grilled corn and Chicago-style hotdogs (per the requirements of our own culinary construction techniques). Then we sat, boiling pot after pot of chai tea over our fire, and keeping warm as the night-time cold took hold on our valley for the night.

So maybe we're learning well how to be. There's adventure out there to be found, if not in where we go then in how we get there, and in how we make our way and keep warm and full in the places we discover.

We caught many a grinning glance from passing motorists catching view of a school bus on the side of an alpine cliff and three dirty kids crouched around a fire for warmth.