Into the Beautiful North(80)

But they hadn’t seen anything yet. Ravens, hawks, eagles. Deer beside the road. Evergreens took over from cottonwoods and aspens: great lodgepole pines stood straight as spears. They topped off one of the many rises and beheld before them huge saffron valleys and ranges of mountains with vivid snowcaps on their points marching to infinity. The sky was fractured in great blocks of cloud—chunks of white, blue, orange, violet. Nayeli gasped. She began to cry upon sight of it.

“Is it always like this?” she asked no one in particular.

Suddenly, Tacho shrieked: “Oh, my God! Mountain goats!”

There they were, three cranky little mountain goats, off-white and dirty, their beards bobbing as they munched roadside flowers and pondered the passing cars.

At the Frisco rest area, they peed madly and were ambushed by marmots. Nayeli thought they were beavers. She opened a packet of Twinkies and was about to eat one when a camp robber bird dive-bombed her and stole the treat and flew away. The thief was immediately chased by two immense magpies, looking like black-and-white cows in the sky.

“What is this,” Tacho said, “the garden of Eden?”



The Eisenhower Tunnel waited for them at 11,015 feet. The Continental Divide. TURN LIGHTS ON IN TUNNEL.

“?Un túnel?” Nayeli asked.

Tacho pulled on the lights, and they plunged in. But it was well-lit, tiled as handsomely as a restroom.

“Ooh,” he said. “Scary.”

Idiots in front of them and behind them started honking their horns to hear the echo. So did Tacho. Nayeli powered down her window and hollered. “?Ajúa!” she cried.

They burst out and were hit by sun as heavy as a bomb.

“Holy crap,” Tacho noted.

Watered vales of cottonwoods and aspens and houses with colorful wooden trim. Down, down; Tacho had to put it in low so he didn’t fry the brakes.

BUFFALO OVERLOOK.

“Look at that sign!” Nayeli cried.

BUFFALO BILL’S GRAVE.

“?Quién?” Tacho asked.

Nayeli shrugged.

“Buffalo! Buffalo!” she shouted.

Tacho sighed—dad had to keep the kids happy—and pulled over. They parked and got out, and there it was—the Buffalo Bill Buffalo Herd. Monsters, all. Wise looking with their great beards and foul, stinking humps. Nayeli hung on the chain link. The beasts ignored Tacho’s kissy noises and moved along the grassy hillside like languid tugboats in a harbor.

A blue jay scolded Nayeli as she collected pinecones from the gravel.

Tacho noted: “Here, even the birds hate Mexicans.”



It was dusk before they knew it, and cold. Indeed, Nayeli could not believe how cold it was. “I’m shivering!” she said. It was a first. Tacho fiddled with the knobs until hot air jetted out of the dashboard. “Look!” Her arms were covered with goose bumps. Frankly, Tacho could not see what Nayeli found so charming about freezing your ass off.

They found a motel on a dark purple defile in the mountain foothills near Golden, and they booked themselves as “Mr. and Mrs. Vicente Fox.” The friendly woman at the desk offered them each an orange. The office was in the living room of her unit. Behind her, they could see an old man with an oxygen tank, staring at the flickering light of a television set. The office smelled like tuna casserole. A small hand-lettered sign on the wall said: IF YOU DIED TONIGHT, DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU’D GO?

“Where you kids headed?” the woman asked.

“Estes,” said Nayeli. “Is right? Estes?”

The woman smiled.

“I bet you never saw nothin’ like Estes Park in Iraq!” she bellowed. “Paw Paw,” she called to her old man. “These Iraqi kids is going up to Estes Park!”

“That right,” he muttered.

He waved one white hand.

“Bless your hearts,” he said.

“He’s real sweet,” the lady confided.

They went down the road and filled the tank at a BP station. Nayeli bought sandwiches, cookies, Fritos, and Cokes in the food-mart. Tacho was miserable and freezing and tired. He drove back to the motel in a sulk and rushed into room 113 and ran himself a hot bath. Nayeli ate her sub and watched Captain Jack Sparrow on HBO.

Her father was still a million miles away.



Thank you for driving me,” Nayeli said.

“Don’t mention it,” Tacho replied.

They followed Matt’s directions. They skirted the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains without knowing the name of what they were seeing. Nayeli thought of it as the Sierra Madre. Tacho thought of it as the Mountains. They didn’t care for Boulder—too much traffic, too many skinny people jogging in ridiculous clothes. At Lyons, they turned up the mountains and again found themselves climbing, among vast spikes of pines, dark, nearly black. Bright pale granite upthrusts. Butterflies burst from the weeds beside the precipitous highway like little scraps of paper. Everywhere, relentlessly, crows. Nayeli had never seen glaciers. Again, her head ached, and she had trouble breathing, as if she had just run up a staircase. “Waterfall!” she cried over and over. The Rockies, apparently, never ran out of little waterfalls.

Just when they thought they would never get there, they swooped down a great curve to the left: before and below them, a valley rimmed by brilliantly snowy peaks. In the heart of the valley, a turquoise lake. Nayeli caught what breath she had left. Yolo had once made her read a translation of Heidi, and this big valley in the mountains looked like the paintings in that tattered old book. Just for a moment, she thought what almost all travelers on that road think when they break through the pines and behold the great vista before them: I will live here.