Rocky Mountain Meltdown

True adventure story documenting my crippling cowardice!

 

Rocky Mountain Meltdown

Written by: Burke A. Beyer

 

         I grew up listening to John Denver and Frank Sinatra.  The former was one of my mom’s favorite artists while the latter was close to a deity in my father’s world.  Old Blue Eyes sang the praises of the city life while Denver mused of “Country Roads” and “Rocky Mountain High” (Colorado).  My parents’ musical tastes echoed their tastes in environment.  Dad was at home in bustling music clubs while mom ached for open spaces and pinecone crafts.  When I entered the world, it was with “vagabond shoes” and “sunshine on my shoulders”.  I always thought I had gotten both of these traits, and hence would be as comfortable in a metropolis as in Manitoba.  Living in Louisiana had allowed me these dual interests, albeit in a fishbowl.  Just one hour outside of New Orleans and it’s legendary nightlife lay swamps, forests and even a beach.  I would commune with Mother Nature, feed a duck or two, and be back in time for karaoke happy hour! 

         When I was in my mid-twenties, my mom called to tell me that my aunt and uncle had retired and bought a house in Breckenridge, Colorado.  They had decided that they would host a family reunion that summer.  I was thrilled at the chance to investigate, as an adult, what John Denver had felt so strongly about.  As it turned out, I also had strong feelings for Colorado.  However, if I were to put my feelings into song, the radio censors would put a bounty on my head.  John Denver failed to mention a few things.

         I arrived in the Denver airport with my mom, an aunt, my boyfriend and about nine hundred forty-two rolls of film.  What I had forgotten to pack was my lungs.  Apparently in the few hours it had taken to fly from New Orleans to Denver I had developed end-stage emphysema.  Having arrived from a city several feet below sea level to one that was a “mile high”, I felt like a fish out of water.  Literally.  I was gasping and flopping around on the floor until my mom threatened to leave me.  I bravely told them to go on without me but they wouldn’t hear of it.  Every wall in that airport was covered in posters bragging about being the “mile high” city.  Who brags about oxygen deprivation?  Never mind, I just answered my own question.  We rented a car and began our journey to Breckenridge, which happens to be more than a mile high (in your face Denver!).  We arrived a few hours later and met up with the rest of the clan.  My aunt’s house was gorgeous and the view was breathtaking (or was that my emphysema?).  The family sat down to dinner and uncorked some wine.  Turns out that alcohol has an enhanced effect sans oxygen, one glass in and I was singing drinking songs and punching people in the arm.  My boyfriend joked that I was a “cheap date.”  I slurred something about being ”cheap but not easy” then face planted into my vermicelli.

         It took me seventeen minutes to walk up fourteen stairs the following day.  Once I arrived at the second floor summit, flushed and sweating, my aunt informed me that we were going for a “wildflower hike” on Copper Mountain (when I finally caught my breath, I sighed.) Wildflowers sounded lovely but I was less keen on the hiking bit.  I grabbed thirty rolls of film and my hiking boots and reminded myself that it was time to document this adventure.  After white-knuckling a ride up a ski lift, we were greeted with a cornucopia of color.  Flowers were exploding out of every nook and cranny.  I took four rolls of film of blossoms alone.  I then turned paparazza on my family.  When kin resorted to giving me the finger in each shot, I asked the other family on the tour if I could photograph their cherub-like children gliding through the floral festival of summertime in Breckenridge.  Our lovely tour guide was pointing out all sorts of interesting things while explaining growing seasons and elevation.  I snapped her picture as well.  We walked deeper into the forest.  Everywhere you looked were flowers and furry little creatures.  A marmot listlessly raised his head and was rewarded with a cracker one of the kids had brought.  After some time, we came to a clearing with a slight pitch to it.  It was an “overlook”.  What we were looking over, I still don’t know, for what I saw was nothing.  There was absolutely nothing but air with very little oxygen in it.  What seemed like an ocean away and barely visible to the naked eye lay a mountain pass.  The guide pointed out into infinity saying, “over there is Vail Pass.”  That is the last thing I heard properly because all of a sudden everyone sounded like the adults in the Charlie Brown movies.  My legs began to violently tremble while my arms flailed blindly for an anchor.  I was certain that any second the laws of gravity would reverse and I would be flung from the mountain with great force.  By some Herculean effort, I was able to back into a tree, which I clutched onto like a barnacle.  Those dumb kids were zipping around me like a swarm of wasps.  I began swatting at them.  My family noticed the absence of my camera’s tic-tic-tic that had plagued them on this outing.  They all turned to see me retreating, wild-eyed and blubbering, into the forest while I simultaneously knocked minors to the ground.  It was then that I noticed that marmot lustily ogling my calf muscle.  I just knew that the cracker hadn’t satiated him and he was about to turn carnivore on me.  Even the sky was snarling at me, it’s furrowed clouds rolling together menacingly.  I may have cried out for mommy but when she got too close, I swatted her too.  The snotty tour guide asked why a “person with acrophobia would take a mountain hike?” 

“Very good question,” I muttered.  “I’ll tell you when you air lift me to safety.”

         When your only reference of height is a mound of dirt in a zoo, it’s hard to say how you might react to the vast and terrible space that assaults you in a mountainous region.  It makes you feel insignificant.  I’m not even sure it was the height, per se, that was my undoing.  I need boundaries.  A seatbelt might have helped.  In retrospect, I remember some instances of irrational fear.  As a child on vacation in Colorado, I had wigged out on a mountain while on horseback.  My parents and I had reasonably assumed that the reaction was from the close encounter of the equestrian kind.  There were also a few occasions at the Superdome in the nosebleed section.  These milder freak-outs were usually attributed to excitement, rage or draft beer.  I now know that I am more of a city girl.  It’s not that I dislike nature; I just prefer it at sea level or lower.  As Frank Sinatra once crooned, “I want to wake up in a city that never sleeps,” and I do (amen, New Orleans).   But Francis, you can keep that “king of the hill” hooey.