South of the border at cloud level

The first time I met John and Cayce, I was wearing green body paint that covered my face and limbs, with a hideous long, black wig that hung in scraggly strands down my tight, white T-shirt and shorts so tiny that to get into them I had to have my friend, Genevieve, pull them on for me, cutting them with scissors, then pulling them up, then cutting a little more, then pulling them up again, until they had finally cleared my hips and I could just barely button them. It was Halloween 2008 and I was dressed as the Incredible Hulkette at a party hosted by my friend, Steve, in Mexico, and John and Cayce were there, too, dressed, I believe, as pirate and maiden. After that, we would run into each other whenever they came down on vacation but it was not until I visited them in their Colorado mountain home a few days ago that I actually got to know them. We laughed about this after we had been hanging out for a little while— that before I had arrived with Rennie to stay for two nights, we had all separately been aware of the fact that we really did not know each other very well at all.

I got there on a drizzly, cool afternoon, almost evening, and driving up the dirt road to their house, I could only think of how grateful I was to have Marco and not Roxanne for this part of the trip. I had worn jeans, knowing that I would be leaving the heat of Denver and climbing to 9,000 feet, where the air would thin out a little and shorts would feel strange. John and Cayce had just returned from a weekend with friends at a wine and jazz festival, and I had stayed up late the night before playing games and drinking one too many, so all three of us were nursing hangovers but we managed to rally and stay up just late enough to sit around after dinner and talk. It was lovely— one of the nicest evenings I can remember in a long time.

Their house is a solid, comfortable, sort of timeless construction that they built with the help of an architect back in the late ‘90s. It sits on its perch overlooking the valley below and from their back porch, there is a nice view of Mt. Evans, one of the local “14ers” that you can drive up, if you’re not up for the hike.

Neither of them is from Colorado. He’s Pennsylvania; she’s Ohio. But they moved there together from where they had met in Florida about 30 years ago, just because they wanted to give it a go. They have been there ever since. You could say he stole her from her high school sweetheart— rode right in on his motorcycle and swept her off her feet. And to be around them now is to feel that they are no less in love today than they must have been back then.

Having raised two kids who are now in their early 20s and living on their own, they are empty-nesters and loving it. Winter in the mountains can be a little drab, so they have been managing to get out of it for a few months, taking trips down to Mexico, as they did this year for two months. One day, John said, this house will be too much to maintain and they will have to downsize but in the meantime, they have no plans to leave and neither would I, after having spent some time there.

The first morning I woke up to the sun blazing into my room and I thought I had slept in. It was 6:30. After a lumberjack breakfast, we hopped into Marco and took Rennie down the road a ways to find a trailhead, where we could tromp through the woods for a few hours. Then the afternoon storms were moving in, right on cue, and we sought cover in the small mountain town of Evergreen, holing up in a saloon for a pint and some nachos.

The sun was trying to come out again when moved on to the grocery store to get ingredients for chile rellenos, a recipe that none of us had ever made but were in the mood to learn how. By the time we got home again, the clouds were back and the rain settled in for the rest of the night, but it didn’t matter, because we had already planned to stay put, sitting in the hot tub, before cooking and drinking John’s famously strong margaritas. We tried to end the night on a more intellectual note with a game of Scrabble but that plan that was almost immediately vetoed, when we starting playing words like “run” and “fed,” and so we took the hint and all toddled off to bed, waking up the next day to a foggy mist, much like my head.

By the time I hit the road, though, the sky was clear and blue and perfect for another hike, this time around a canyon, before I drove on to Boulder to meet up with another friend, Kristina, who I had also met while in Mexico, also at my friend Steve’s place, and who I also barely knew. She has just moved there from Oakland, Calif., to be near her boyfriend, Scott, and so I caught her at a time of great transition, only three weeks into a new job, a new home and a new landscape. Something of a seaside girl, all these mountains are pretty, she said, but it’s going to take some getting used to. We found a perch by the window in a restaurant on Pearl Street and talked about it all: relationships, careers, changes, family. Then it was time to turn in for the evening because lightning was cresting over the mountains behind the city, getting ever closer with each electric blue flash, and besides, she had a 12-hour workday ahead of her, as did I, behind the wheel.

It was finally time to leave Colorado.