Into the Beautiful North(81)

In the valley, the lawns along the edges of the lake were crowded with great shaggy animals that looked like horses with antlers.

“Can we pull over?” Nayeli the Nature Girl asked. “What are they?” she wondered.

Tacho’s butt hurt. He was bored. Mountains, he thought. Motels. Big ugly deer. Gringos. He wondered who was running his restaurant, now that Irma was in San Diego. He wondered if the giant iguana was lurking inside his shelves.

“They’re robots,” he said. “Put there to lure suckers into town.”

He was delighted to say to himself: Bitch!

Nayeli jumped out and instantly regretted it. She was freezing. The icy wind dropped off the snowy peaks and raced over the choppy water of the lake. The big animals ate grass—she could hear their teeth working. They were magnificent.

A sole fisherman stood on the edge of the water, ignoring her and the beasts. He wore a big army coat and had a gnarly beard and a nose burned a few thousand times by the sun. He turned his head.

“Hello,” she called.

He eyed her.

“How do,” he grunted.

Reeled in some line and cast again.

“Please?” she called. “What is? What… are?”

She pointed at the beasties.

“Ain’t you cold, sweetheart?” the man replied. He pantomimed a shiver.

“Yes.”

There went that smile. She pulled it down, but it sprang back up. He smiled. That was some cute se?orita, he told himself. He set his pole against rocks, walked to his truck, and fished out a hoodie sweatshirt.

“C’mere,” he said. “I won’t bite ya.”

She glanced at the minivan. Tacho seemed to be asleep. She cautiously came to the big man.

“Here,” he said. “Put that on ’fore you die of cold.”

He tossed it to her.

She pulled it on. It said STEAMBOAT SPRINGS on the chest. SEARCH AND RESCUE. There was a picture of a Saint Bernard on the front of it. The hoodie’s hem fell to her knees. She had to bunch up the cuffs. To the fisherman, she looked like some kind of elf.

“Gracias,” she said.

“De nada,” he surprised her by saying. “And don’t say I never gave ya nothin’.”

This seemed to amuse him.

She pointed at the animals.

“Please?”

“Them’s elk.”

“Elk?”

“Uh-huh.”

She rushed to the van and checked her book: alce. She had never heard of an alce, even in Spanish.

“Son magníficos,” she said to the fisherman when she came back.

“Good eatin’,” he said. “Marinate you an elk steak in wild blueberries for a night, then grill it. Oh, yes.”

In less than ten minutes, he was teaching her how to fish. He showed her where the eagles came down to the water from the cliffs. He told her that condors had been seen there, too—that they’d probably sneaked through the Rockies all the way from California. Somehow, she understood what he was saying. When it was time to go, he gave her a hug and she kissed his cheek and realized halfway across the big valley that she didn’t even know his name.



They drove to the main gate of Rocky Mountain National Park. The female ranger in the booth took Tacho’s money. He just held out a sheaf of bills and said, “Please?” She counted out the proper amount and handed him his change and a nifty map. Neither of them was ready for what they found inside the park. Insane peaks, more glaciers, more elk, eagles, deer. Tacho, nature hater that he was, shrieked when he saw a bobcat sitting primly on top of a tall rock beside rushing water.

“It’s a robot,” Nayeli reminded him.

Rivers. Waterfalls. They walked around Bear Lake. It was cold—there was nobody there. On the far side, under the peak of a bizarre boxy mountain, white flakes began to wobble out of the clouds.

“Where did these feathers come from?” Tacho asked.

Nayeli let out a cry: “Tacho! It’s snow!”

He said, “No, it isn’t.”

But it was.

They licked it out of the air, ran and screamed and jumped.

Nayeli had never heard the world go so silent. Jays and magpies and camp robber birds muttered fretfully. She could hear the soft swish as the snow landed on the ground. Tacho had flakes on his long eyelashes. Nayeli took them off his eyes with her lips. They held hands as they walked back to the minivan.

As they drove down the mountains, she pulled the fisherman’s hood up over her face and pretended to nap so Tacho wouldn’t see her crying again.



They plunged. They hit the flats. Denver—scary and confused: they didn’t know if they were seeing roller coasters or factories. The minivan’s engine started to make a faint clacking sound. Out into yellow and brown lands. Into the lonely wind. Across the emptiness of the high plains. To a courtyard motel on the Kansas border. The men in the next room pounded on the wall if they talked too loud or laughed. Nayeli found a praying mantis outside their door, studying the moths coming to the light. They were afraid of the neighbors, so they whispered and decided not to turn on the television.

In the morning, they were blinded by wind. Grit stung their eyes. They swerved and rocked as Tacho tried to navigate the buffeting gusts. A semi trailer rig had blown over on a cloverleaf onto I-70. It lay on its side. No one was visible for miles.