Echoes of the Second Bridge Blues

Greetings from Pinecliffe, where every day is a good hair day, or at least a good hair-raising day.

I dally on the deck, ozone high, as I have countless times overlooking the quiet dell that separates me from the fir-infested Rollins Peak and the muffled whistles of trains boring through the Continental Divide. Thirsty winds, slow-bleaching sun, and the Orion-guarded Milky Way go with coffee anywhere and anytime, if I simply close my eyes and will myself here.

This is Echoes, Patty’s home, though she tells me it’s my home, too. Don’t need a  key or a map, even though it’s a mile and three bridges from the state highway in the scrublands of Gilpin County at the end of an unmarked dirt road.

Calling it a road back in the 70s when I first traversed it, however, would confer on it a destiny that it has now grown into—maybe. In the brief Colorado Rockies summer, with the air sweet and dry even after an afternoon shower, the dusty trail etched its way through mountain flower meadows, crisscrossing a willow-clogged creek that millennia ago had carved out Burns Gulch. The byway was just wide enough to give you a false sense of security.

For in winter, it was a portal to the brink. After sensing the turnoff on the roadway —just past the broken pavement but before the dip—you’d take a deep breath and aim your car blindly down a 30-degree embankment, hoping not to bottom out or skid off the culvert, which was in fact the first bridge. Past the lopsided A-frame, you picked up enough speed to make it up through the narrows, where cougars and bears allegedly hunted. Then, with all the momentum you could muster behind and beneath you, you veered 90 degree to the right across the second bridge. If you could manage that maneuver, then you were home free, with only a bounce over the third bridge before climbing the final 30-degree ascent. If not, you were really up shit creek, singing “The Second Bridge Blues,” because your car was either in the creek or stuck in the snow, ready to be slammed by the next vehicle charging upward. Mud season was worse.

I often parked on the road and walked in.

Everything has changed since the first time I sat here on the deck. Yet nothing is different. That sums up my relationship with Patty, one that began, quite simply enough when a freckled and bespeckled strawberry blonde sidled up to me during our college orientation. “Hi Patti. I’m Patty.” Her greeting resounded through the scary canyons of yet-unlearned truths. “I’m on my way to meet my boyfriend Ron for coffee. Want to come?”

When she twinkles up, bats her eyes, and does this little thing with her shoulders, it’s hard to say no. “Come on,” the gesture commands. Mischief is promised; no refusal allowed. Sometimes it was girl talk. Or a double-date with one of Ron’s friends. Or as a prelude to dying my hair. Or when she nursed her babies. We learned about life that way—over cups of coffee.

And just as I couldn’t refuse her, she couldn’t deny Ron. Nor could investors. But handshakes got loose and deals went sour. One night, he packed up the family and moved to the mountains.

They settled into a double-wide trailer at the end of that unmarked road. Tucked into the side of a mountain, it howled with wind and coyotes. Echoes, they called it. She told me to come, so I obeyed, playing a hippie Miss Jane Hathaway to three children by day and dating truck-driving cowboys by night.

After a bit, I took a graveyard shift on a newspaper in the city. Arriving home at dawn, I brewed the coffee that got the family through another hair-raising day. Sometimes a dog got loose, sometimes the water ran out. Sometimes the temperatures plunged, sometimes the toilet clogged up. Sometimes a car broke down, sometimes the sheriff came out.

Then I left. They stayed. I returned. To visit. Again and again. The trailer became a house. Ron the boyfriend became Ron the ex. Children married. Horses died. Still Patty and I would have coffee before shopping or after hiking. Over a most bitter cup, we mourned the death of her middle child, my god-daughter.

College orientation, it turned out, prepared us for life. It established a time warp where love is boundless, geography irrelevant, and age continuous. Although the old road is still there, time has graded the first bridge and smoothed the edges of the second; inner peace mellowed the ascent beyond the third. There—here—I sit with Patty. We have aged with Echoes, youth intact, always ending up where we started, consuming common lessons from uncommon edges of a gulp. Or a gulch.

The clouds break across the spine of the Divide, trailing blue, as I reluctantly drain my coffee and return from my reverie. Goodnight from Pinecliffe, the mountains, the Milky Way, and Echoes of Patty giving everyone a kiss good night and a prayer to dream on. As it was in the beginning, she says, is now and ever shall be. World without end.

Amen.