A mile high

Over the weekend, I stayed with my friend, Ian, who I first met in the 5th grade, when his dad got transferred to Conyers, Ga., a suburb outside of Atlanta to where my dad had also been transferred a few years beforehand. We worked on a class project together, building some sort of scale model of a Native American village or something, and then we were buddies and I was playing football with him and some other guys at recess, and I clearly remember one of the fellas holding back the others to let me run up the field for a few yards. Now Ian lives in Denver, Colo., where he has bought a house from the mid-50s and is fixing it up himself, changing out the kitchen cabinets, ripping up the carpet to expose the hardwood underneath and updating the colors to thirst-quenching blues, greens and browns.

Before I got there, he had told me to arrive with an appetite and so I did, nearly starving myself all day on that four-hour drive from Poncha Springs, which took me all around in back country, right over rivers, down switchbacks, past signs that warned of finding high ground during flash floods and not getting caught under falling rocks. Charred, leafless trees and new grass growth signaled that a forest fire had ripped through there not too long ago, taking out a few peaks in a single swipe, and at one point, I was even on a dirt road. Then, just as quickly, I was at a crossroads of highway and railroad tracks, turning left from small-town Sedalia and finding that I was on the home stretch to the capital city, taking the last few miles through suburban Littleton and then Englewood, before reaching the interstate and merging into the pack of cars out doing Saturday errands. When I did get to Ian’s, both he and I were almost fainting from hunger, so we made a beeline to The Ale House, just making it inside before the heavens opened up, dumping out rain and thunder and lightning. After ordering tall pints of microbrew and big burgers of bison, we were full and ready to go find some of his friends on a rooftop overlooking Broadway and the buildings of downtown, and underneath the orange glow of a stunning post-storm sunset, we celebrated his friend Liz’s arrival at 30.

Did I recall the name of the video game that we used to play that was like SimCity but not quite? And I could not remember it at all, only Prince of Persia, but I did have a fresh account of how we shot the air rifle off his back porch and how one night, I was trying to hit a leaf and so I shot and I think I got it. That part is a little fuzzy but then all of a sudden this spider in the foreground just starting spilling all of his guts in one, snot green gush of liquid. I had shot his butt off.

“Did you feel bad about killing the spider?”

“Yeah, I did,” I said.

The next morning over coffee, talk somehow turned to these television shows about natural disasters and how his younger brother in Montana talks about them a lot, informing Ian what can kill you when you perhaps least expect it— you know, your standard tsunami-earthquake-tornado scenario.

“So whaddah we got?” Ian asked of Denver. “We live under the world’s largest super volcano.”

Maybe not right under it but it’s true that Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming sits right on this great, big caldera under which flows a big, hot vat of molten lava. According to scientists, three times in the past 2.1 million years the volcano has blown up something big (a thousand times more powerful than Mount St. Helen in 1980) and if it were to blow like that again sometime soon, a lot of us would be toast. But what are the chances of that happening? Well, no one knows for sure but according to both those articles to which I just linked, the ground in the park has been steadily rising since 2004, signalling a surge of magma. Because it is still about six miles underground, though, and not, say, a quarter of a mile, no one is too concerned yet.

“I’m more nervous about the California earthquake thing, the 100-year earthquake thing,” Ian said. “They say we’re on borrowed time.”

“And I’m going there next,” I said. “I’m going to be spending quite a bit of time there.”

“You gotta be prepared,” he said, laughing. “Plan your evacuation route.”

In the meantime, I was more concerned about lightning. The storms have been rolling in every afternoon since I got to Colorado late last week and they come in fast, gliding over the mountain ranges so that you can see the rain about 10 minutes before it reaches you, and from these great, swelling, churning masses of steel gray clouds also shoots lightning— thick bolts that zap down to the earth in quick, jagged lines.

We stood there watching one come in as we waited in line to tour the Coors beer plant and we debated if it was worth sticking around. Thankfully, we had already completed a hike near Red Rocks Amphitheater that morning, which is how you have to do it in the summer out West, because you are either avoiding the heat or the storms, which are apparently more rampant now than ever. Ian said that he had never seen as much rain as they were getting so far this year.

In the end, we made it into the factory just fine and by the time we left an hour and a half (and six samples) later, everything was more than fine. Then we proceeded on to find another set of friends and the four of us went to a steakhouse, where we ordered more drinks and filled our bellies with food and got into a cut-throat round of Sorry, eventually taking the party home, where we could include Rennie and Ian’s dog, Dudley, and also go through a few more bottles of wine and more boardgames, until it was time to say Goodnight and the biggest danger facing us all at that moment was the hangover we were about to wake up to the next day, a state that could only be amended by large doses of coffee and grease.