Part Two
[see Part One, below]
In Summit County is where this story takes place. Just north of Silverthorne, which - let me just say - ain’t no Breckenridge, is where my best friend Shawn lived. I learned later that some jackass or another called it “Trailerthorne” at one point, although that was never, ever part of my vocabulary. Some folks just have to look down on somebody. The Woodfords’ house is square, with a big steep gable roof facing east-to-west. The first floor is a concrete garage in front, two-cars wide, although I’ve never even seen one car in it (there was this raft for white water rafting, and camping supplies, and a work bench, and a couple of freezers, and a bunch of useful junk). Behind the garage is the stairs, and behind the stairs is the basement. The stairs divide the house in two. Above the garage is the living room, at the top of the stairs is the kitchen, and behind the stairs there’s a bedroom and bathroom. On the third floor there’s two bedrooms and a bathroom, but I’ve only been up there once, and can’t really remember it. A big wood deck wraps around the front and kitchen side of the house, with a wood staircase along the side. That’s the way you come into the house if you don’t live there, up the stairs, onto the deck, and in through the kitchen.
The dirt driveway, always with three, four, or five cars is on the west side of the house. It empties onto Rainbow Drive, which is a perennially pitted and a pot-holed dirt road that goes straight straight straight back to Silverthorne. On the other side of the road (still going west, mind you) is another house, a new one now. Behind that are the man-made ponds that give the subdivision its name (Rainbow Lakes, now there’s a laugh). Behind the ponds, there’s the line of aspens and cottonwoods that give away the location of the Blue River, headed north. After that, things start to get interesting. The mountains sit on the other side of the valley, as many mountains do, about a half a mile as the crow flies. As you might imagine, there’s mountains on this side of the valley, too, behind the Woodfords’, but they’re not of interest right now. The lower parts are covered in pine trees, up and up to the crevices and gorges and the really interesting geology around tree line. Tree line is where it’s too high for trees to grow any more, so the tops of the mountains are bare rock. Buffalo Mountain, the southern end of the Gore Range, is 12,777 feet. Red Peak is 13,189.
---
When we first moved up to Summit County (still early enough to get a ZL plate, although our second car had to make do with a ZR), my Dad bought a bunch of U.S. Geological Survey Maps. I think we left them when we sold the house - after all, what did we need with them now? They were fantastic hospital green things: little squiggly pale blue creek lines connecting to the pale blue lake blobs, the straight black boundary lines, demarcating this part as national forest, this part as state park, and this part town. I knew even then what the important lines were: the thin red concentric scribbles, with faint italicized numbers - 9300, 10700, 13100. I learned later they had a name, topographic lines, but I understood what they meant before I had a fancy Greek for them. I knew Buffalo Mountain by sight (actually that’s not such a big deal; you’d know it too if you ever drove on I-70 from Denver through Eisenhower tunnel, it’s hard to mistake). I tried to imagine what the other mountains would look like, based on my knowledge of Buffalo and the red lines, but I never could. I could never make the leap from the vague scribble to the vast dome that reminded me of my dad’s balding head.
One year, when I was off at school, they had a big snow year, and two avalanches scraped down the side of Buffalo, on the south side towards Frisco. They didn’t reach Frisco (which was too bad, in my view, Frisco was where the high school was), but they left two large bird-tail shapes in forest. When I came back that summer, I couldn’t believe it. Mountains don’t change, do they? Anyways, I knew, from those maps, that there was a guitar-shaped lake up there (named, of course, Guitar Lake) on the side of the mountain. You can’t see it from below. I was thirty-five before I finally climbed to the top of Buffalo Mountain (what would Freud say about climbing a mountain that reminded you of your dad’s head?), yet I was nevertheless amazed to see, looking down from the summit, a little shimmering guitar-shaped lake.
---
Anyways, I’m getting a little distracted from the point of my story. The Woodfords’ house had this great yard that ran the length of the lot, from Rainbow Drive in the front to the fence that kept the neighbors’ horses out at the back. Occasionally, you’d see a deer, or elk, or coyote. You never saw the wolves, although you could hear them deep into the night. But back to the yard. If you don’t think that yard was perfect for football, well, you just didn’t grow up an American boy. Shawn was quarterback (he always wanted to be quarterback) and his brother Scott was scatback (I don’t think we knew what a scatback was, but it seemed to fit Snotty’s personality and status as Shawn’s younger and skinnier brother). Then there were various neighbor kids: Jim Pearson (fullback), Vince Stewart (wide receiver), Clark Robinson, myself. You only really needed four, but sometimes we’d get some good games going. And we had that regulation field: longer than it was wide, tilted somewhat down to the street, with the large patch of too-lush grass growing over the septic tank (Erma Bombeck was right, the grass is always greener there) and the power lines that were high enough that it counted as a point-after-touchdown if you punted over them. Much, much later, we’d find out that that yard was pretty good for cricket, too, if you had a couple of Australians (like Fiona and Guy) and their kids there to teach you.
Not that we - any of us - were big jocks or anything. I mean, we would’ve gone out for football if our high school were big enough to have a team (instead, we had what can only be described as a mortifying homecoming soccer game). We played trombone. Well, it turns out Shawn, Jim Pearson and I did. Eric Teize was always first chair - he must’ve padded his practice reports - then, usually me, then Shawn, and Jim Pearson always last. For our fifth grade recital, we must have been a real treat blasting out “Home, Home On the Range” on the skirt of the high school auditorium stage. So no, we weren’t jocks. Geeks, more like. The Woodfords’ basement was where we came into our full geek-hood, if you will. In advance of Atari or Intellivision, that’s where we’d play Ace of Aces, a turn-based World War i dogfight game played with books of aerobatic manœuvers (“You can’t do two Immelmanns in a row!”). In that basement is where we’d set up Squad Leader, or Panzer Leader, or any number of hugely elaborate war games that Shawn would inevitably win; that’s also where we tried our hand at Dungeons & Dragons. So no, not jocks, per se.
Upstairs was the smell of the wood stove that Shawn’s dad Wes always had at a million degrees. That stove sat out from one of the corners of the living room, on a little dais opposite the grandfather clock, black like only a wood stove can be black. There are some people that know how to get every last bit of heat out of a log, about how you close down the inlets to burn wood super-efficiently, about how aspen burns hotter than pine. Wes was like that. He was aloof, serious, a mine engineer when you could be a self-taught engineer. Van, Shawn’s mother, was the librarian (and, for many years, there was only one), and den mother. Scott you’ve already met. They had a big black sloppy mutt of a dog (everyone had a dog) named Josie, and a series of cats. Plus, there was always some foster kid (like Vince) or exchange student (like Fiona) living with them - the Woodfords were that kind of people (as Lyndon Johnson would say, “People! p-e-e-p-u-l. I’m talking folks.”). I don’t know if they were happy. What did I know, I was a kid. Happiness is essentially inscrutable. They didn’t fight, like my parents did, but maybe they had their own private demons. I don’t want to give them too much credit, you know, they were human, after all. I’m sure Shawn or Scott doesn’t see the house as some kind of paragon. It was their house. And, in a different way, it was mine, too.
The other thing you ought to know about the Woodfords is that they were, for as long as I knew them, fixing to move. First to Kansas City. Then to some land on a river somewhere in Missouri. The winters in Summit County are too long, the summers too short, and for most of the spring, the county turns into a giant mud hole with all the runoff. Who needs that? Next year, always, they’d leave Summit County for good.
And there were Christmases, of course. They had this exceptionally gaudy star: it flashed violet and red and yellow and green, and they put it in the kitchen window so you could see it as you drove down from Silverthorne. The Gucci light, Van liked to call it. God, it was hideous. Yet every year, reflected by the inevitable snow: violet, red, yellow, green, violet, red, yellow green, like a runway light for visitors from the planet Xenon Prime. And there were sleepovers, there in the living room. I was occasionally envious of the friendship that developed between Shawn and Vince, of their private games (given the plot of some music video, could you guess the song name and artist? Query: “Boy denies fathering a child.” Answer: “Michael Jackson, Billy Jean.”). Some confidences, spoken at one in the morning under the soft persistent ticking of a grandfather clock should not, perhaps, be shared.
You see, the Woodfords’ house faced west, every night the sun set magnifi-cently behind the Gore Range. We lived on Buffalo Mountain, but faced east, toward the Continental Divide. It was a great view, my Dad always said from his spot on the couch, and every day different, but who wakes up early enough to see the sun rise? Besides, we lived in a condo (Dad would call it a townhouse, but the fact is that it was one of five identical buildings with four units each, eighteen of which were vacation homes). Our neighbors came up for the skiing, or the hiking, or the sailing, yes, sailing. They were Venezuelan oilmen or Denver accountants or Colorado Springs businessmen or (worst of all) Texans. In the long tradition of biting the hand that feeds you, we didn’t care much for tourists of any stripe, but Texans were the worst. I’m told Oregonians hate Californians, and people from Wisconsin hate people from Illinois the same way. Down on Rainbow Drive, they didn’t have to deal with tourists living next door. Shawn’s house was a real house. His neighbors didn’t live some place else.
In Summit County is where this story takes place. Just north of Silverthorne, which - let me just say - ain’t no Breckenridge, is where my best friend Shawn lived. I learned later that some jackass or another called it “Trailerthorne” at one point, although that was never, ever part of my vocabulary. Some folks just have to look down on somebody. The Woodfords’ house is square, with a big steep gable roof facing east-to-west. The first floor is a concrete garage in front, two-cars wide, although I’ve never even seen one car in it (there was this raft for white water rafting, and camping supplies, and a work bench, and a couple of freezers, and a bunch of useful junk). Behind the garage is the stairs, and behind the stairs is the basement. The stairs divide the house in two. Above the garage is the living room, at the top of the stairs is the kitchen, and behind the stairs there’s a bedroom and bathroom. On the third floor there’s two bedrooms and a bathroom, but I’ve only been up there once, and can’t really remember it. A big wood deck wraps around the front and kitchen side of the house, with a wood staircase along the side. That’s the way you come into the house if you don’t live there, up the stairs, onto the deck, and in through the kitchen.
The dirt driveway, always with three, four, or five cars is on the west side of the house. It empties onto Rainbow Drive, which is a perennially pitted and a pot-holed dirt road that goes straight straight straight back to Silverthorne. On the other side of the road (still going west, mind you) is another house, a new one now. Behind that are the man-made ponds that give the subdivision its name (Rainbow Lakes, now there’s a laugh). Behind the ponds, there’s the line of aspens and cottonwoods that give away the location of the Blue River, headed north. After that, things start to get interesting. The mountains sit on the other side of the valley, as many mountains do, about a half a mile as the crow flies. As you might imagine, there’s mountains on this side of the valley, too, behind the Woodfords’, but they’re not of interest right now. The lower parts are covered in pine trees, up and up to the crevices and gorges and the really interesting geology around tree line. Tree line is where it’s too high for trees to grow any more, so the tops of the mountains are bare rock. Buffalo Mountain, the southern end of the Gore Range, is 12,777 feet. Red Peak is 13,189.
---
When we first moved up to Summit County (still early enough to get a ZL plate, although our second car had to make do with a ZR), my Dad bought a bunch of U.S. Geological Survey Maps. I think we left them when we sold the house - after all, what did we need with them now? They were fantastic hospital green things: little squiggly pale blue creek lines connecting to the pale blue lake blobs, the straight black boundary lines, demarcating this part as national forest, this part as state park, and this part town. I knew even then what the important lines were: the thin red concentric scribbles, with faint italicized numbers - 9300, 10700, 13100. I learned later they had a name, topographic lines, but I understood what they meant before I had a fancy Greek for them. I knew Buffalo Mountain by sight (actually that’s not such a big deal; you’d know it too if you ever drove on I-70 from Denver through Eisenhower tunnel, it’s hard to mistake). I tried to imagine what the other mountains would look like, based on my knowledge of Buffalo and the red lines, but I never could. I could never make the leap from the vague scribble to the vast dome that reminded me of my dad’s balding head.
One year, when I was off at school, they had a big snow year, and two avalanches scraped down the side of Buffalo, on the south side towards Frisco. They didn’t reach Frisco (which was too bad, in my view, Frisco was where the high school was), but they left two large bird-tail shapes in forest. When I came back that summer, I couldn’t believe it. Mountains don’t change, do they? Anyways, I knew, from those maps, that there was a guitar-shaped lake up there (named, of course, Guitar Lake) on the side of the mountain. You can’t see it from below. I was thirty-five before I finally climbed to the top of Buffalo Mountain (what would Freud say about climbing a mountain that reminded you of your dad’s head?), yet I was nevertheless amazed to see, looking down from the summit, a little shimmering guitar-shaped lake.
---
Anyways, I’m getting a little distracted from the point of my story. The Woodfords’ house had this great yard that ran the length of the lot, from Rainbow Drive in the front to the fence that kept the neighbors’ horses out at the back. Occasionally, you’d see a deer, or elk, or coyote. You never saw the wolves, although you could hear them deep into the night. But back to the yard. If you don’t think that yard was perfect for football, well, you just didn’t grow up an American boy. Shawn was quarterback (he always wanted to be quarterback) and his brother Scott was scatback (I don’t think we knew what a scatback was, but it seemed to fit Snotty’s personality and status as Shawn’s younger and skinnier brother). Then there were various neighbor kids: Jim Pearson (fullback), Vince Stewart (wide receiver), Clark Robinson, myself. You only really needed four, but sometimes we’d get some good games going. And we had that regulation field: longer than it was wide, tilted somewhat down to the street, with the large patch of too-lush grass growing over the septic tank (Erma Bombeck was right, the grass is always greener there) and the power lines that were high enough that it counted as a point-after-touchdown if you punted over them. Much, much later, we’d find out that that yard was pretty good for cricket, too, if you had a couple of Australians (like Fiona and Guy) and their kids there to teach you.
Not that we - any of us - were big jocks or anything. I mean, we would’ve gone out for football if our high school were big enough to have a team (instead, we had what can only be described as a mortifying homecoming soccer game). We played trombone. Well, it turns out Shawn, Jim Pearson and I did. Eric Teize was always first chair - he must’ve padded his practice reports - then, usually me, then Shawn, and Jim Pearson always last. For our fifth grade recital, we must have been a real treat blasting out “Home, Home On the Range” on the skirt of the high school auditorium stage. So no, we weren’t jocks. Geeks, more like. The Woodfords’ basement was where we came into our full geek-hood, if you will. In advance of Atari or Intellivision, that’s where we’d play Ace of Aces, a turn-based World War i dogfight game played with books of aerobatic manœuvers (“You can’t do two Immelmanns in a row!”). In that basement is where we’d set up Squad Leader, or Panzer Leader, or any number of hugely elaborate war games that Shawn would inevitably win; that’s also where we tried our hand at Dungeons & Dragons. So no, not jocks, per se.
Upstairs was the smell of the wood stove that Shawn’s dad Wes always had at a million degrees. That stove sat out from one of the corners of the living room, on a little dais opposite the grandfather clock, black like only a wood stove can be black. There are some people that know how to get every last bit of heat out of a log, about how you close down the inlets to burn wood super-efficiently, about how aspen burns hotter than pine. Wes was like that. He was aloof, serious, a mine engineer when you could be a self-taught engineer. Van, Shawn’s mother, was the librarian (and, for many years, there was only one), and den mother. Scott you’ve already met. They had a big black sloppy mutt of a dog (everyone had a dog) named Josie, and a series of cats. Plus, there was always some foster kid (like Vince) or exchange student (like Fiona) living with them - the Woodfords were that kind of people (as Lyndon Johnson would say, “People! p-e-e-p-u-l. I’m talking folks.”). I don’t know if they were happy. What did I know, I was a kid. Happiness is essentially inscrutable. They didn’t fight, like my parents did, but maybe they had their own private demons. I don’t want to give them too much credit, you know, they were human, after all. I’m sure Shawn or Scott doesn’t see the house as some kind of paragon. It was their house. And, in a different way, it was mine, too.
The other thing you ought to know about the Woodfords is that they were, for as long as I knew them, fixing to move. First to Kansas City. Then to some land on a river somewhere in Missouri. The winters in Summit County are too long, the summers too short, and for most of the spring, the county turns into a giant mud hole with all the runoff. Who needs that? Next year, always, they’d leave Summit County for good.
And there were Christmases, of course. They had this exceptionally gaudy star: it flashed violet and red and yellow and green, and they put it in the kitchen window so you could see it as you drove down from Silverthorne. The Gucci light, Van liked to call it. God, it was hideous. Yet every year, reflected by the inevitable snow: violet, red, yellow, green, violet, red, yellow green, like a runway light for visitors from the planet Xenon Prime. And there were sleepovers, there in the living room. I was occasionally envious of the friendship that developed between Shawn and Vince, of their private games (given the plot of some music video, could you guess the song name and artist? Query: “Boy denies fathering a child.” Answer: “Michael Jackson, Billy Jean.”). Some confidences, spoken at one in the morning under the soft persistent ticking of a grandfather clock should not, perhaps, be shared.
You see, the Woodfords’ house faced west, every night the sun set magnifi-cently behind the Gore Range. We lived on Buffalo Mountain, but faced east, toward the Continental Divide. It was a great view, my Dad always said from his spot on the couch, and every day different, but who wakes up early enough to see the sun rise? Besides, we lived in a condo (Dad would call it a townhouse, but the fact is that it was one of five identical buildings with four units each, eighteen of which were vacation homes). Our neighbors came up for the skiing, or the hiking, or the sailing, yes, sailing. They were Venezuelan oilmen or Denver accountants or Colorado Springs businessmen or (worst of all) Texans. In the long tradition of biting the hand that feeds you, we didn’t care much for tourists of any stripe, but Texans were the worst. I’m told Oregonians hate Californians, and people from Wisconsin hate people from Illinois the same way. Down on Rainbow Drive, they didn’t have to deal with tourists living next door. Shawn’s house was a real house. His neighbors didn’t live some place else.