Love and First Sight(60)

As we get closer to downtown, the road becomes more crowded with cars. Eventually the buildings are so tall I have to roll down my window and stick my head out to be able to see the tops.

“The Rockies are bigger than these buildings?” I ask. “It sure doesn’t look that way right now.”

“Just wait. They’re crazy big. You’ll see,” says Nick.

After we pass through Denver, I hear the engine downshift to a lower gear and feel us angle back in a slight uphill climb. And sure enough, the mountains rise up from the horizon until they loom imposingly above the dashboard. I ask Ion to switch seats with me so I can watch them more carefully. We pull over, and I hop in front. The mountains are still only the size of my hand if I hold it close to my face, but they now take up all the background space visible beyond the front windshield, so I know they are massive. Their color is fascinating. Green along the bottom, then gray, and eventually they all turn white before tapering off into the sky.

Soon the ground around us becomes white, too.

“Is that snow?” I exclaim.

“Yep,” says Whitford.

“When will we get to the top?” I ask.

“I’m not sure I-70 goes to the top of anything,” says Whitford. “Roads are built on the path of least resistance, which means going in between mountains whenever possible, rather than directly over them.”

“I’ll look into it,” says Nick, pulling out his phone.

A few minutes later, he reports, “We won’t reach any summits on I-70. But we go right by Highway 40, which would take us to the top of Berthoud Pass. Elevation: eleven thousand three hundred feet.”

“So it would be a detour,” says Whitford, more as a statement than a question.

I share his concern. I mean, the faster we go, the sooner we find Cecily.

“How long will it take?”

“Like, an hour, tops,” says Nick. “But how often do you get to be on top of the Continental Divide? If you stand there and pee in one direction, it ends up in the Atlantic Ocean, but if you turn around and pee in the other, it goes to the Pacific. How many people can say they’ve peed into two oceans with a single stream of urine?”

“How many people want to?” says Ion, clearly not convinced this would be an accomplishment.

“Will?” asks Whitford.

“Let’s do it,” I say. It will delay us, but I remember what my mom said about seeing everything while I still can.

“At this rate we’re never going to make it to California,” laments Whitford.

“Hey, it’s only twenty-four hours of total driving time, and we’ve got two weeks off school. We’re fine,” says Nick.

I don’t say it aloud, but the goal here is not to kill two weeks of vacation time. The goal is to find Cecily.

It’s a good thing they don’t give driver’s licenses to people like me, because I would never be able to make sense of Highway 40. Back in Kansas, the interstate was straight and gradually tapered off into the horizon in a little point, like the street in the van Gogh painting at the museum. But Highway 40 is constantly disappearing and then reappearing after we pivot around a curve. I’m impressed with Whitford’s ability to keep track of all these corners despite the many distractions—other cars whizzing by in both directions, the gigantic mountains out the windows, snow everywhere, and the fascinatingly complex dashboard in front of him.

I feel us slide a few times as we climb the road to Berthoud Pass. Whitford curses, reminding us how dangerous this is, wondering why they don’t plow this more often, and suggesting we turn back. Honestly, it does seem dangerous. I don’t know how Whitford and the other drivers can tell where the road ends and the mountain terrain begins. To me, it all just looks like one continuous plane of snow. But eventually we reach the pass and stop in a snow-covered parking lot.

The effort to step out of the car and shut the doors gets all four of us out of breath.

“The air is so thin here!” says Ion.

Every time I exhale, the mountains go dim and blurry for a second. I breathe in and out, watching the phenomenon. This, I decide, must be what people mean when they say they can “see their breath.”

My friends are impressed by the view. I can tell because, well, they all shut up and just stand there for a while in the cold, no sarcastic statements or quips. And I’ll admit, it is pretty cool. But to me, all views are pretty cool. To me, seeing mountains in every direction is no more and no less interesting than the circular brown hay bales that dot the endless farmlands of Kansas or the skyscraping glass towers of downtown Denver or the glowing dials of a Volvo’s dashboard. But I know Cecily would appreciate this view. She’d want to see what a sunset looks like at this altitude, with this landscape.

We eventually return to I-70 and continue west. We pass three ski resorts—Copper Mountain, Vail, and Beaver Creek. From the car, the trails look like crisscrossing white lines cutting through the dark green alpine forests.

Night has fallen by the time we stop at a hotel in Grand Junction, Colorado, near the Utah border, and when I wake up in the morning, I look outside to find that I can no longer see the mountains. Have I gone nearsighted? Is this the first sign that I’m reverting to blindness?

“It’s a blizzard out there,” says Nick, joining me at the window. “A complete whiteout.”