How can you put six years of a life into a single blog post? Well, you can’t really. On the other hand, you can bring up the peaks and valleys, the obvious connections, the highlights and a brief selection of details to round out an emotion.
The fact is, as much as I struggled against it all these years, the Texan Resort is now a part of me. My friend the pine tree stays with me even when I am far away. I see through his/her eyes the ridge across the highway up to Slumgullion Pass and Lake San Cristobal and down towards Alamosa and the San Luis Valley. I see it all at once like he/she sees it. I am grateful for the perspective.
I trace the tracks of the junior bear, who never really bothered me. As much as I would have liked for him to just a little, he was respectful of my fear and I never drew him to me. But, oh, how I admired all of the handywork of the teenage bore and the mama and her cubs and the big granddaddy brown bear that we all swore was a grizzly. He was there long before I arrived. This was his territory.
I admired indeed how they gently tore a door off its hinge, how they gingerly opened a car without scratching an inch of paint, how they bolted out of an open window three times smaller than they were.
I admired most of all how they left their tracks one by one in a straight line through the fresh-fallen snow for me to admire in the red glow of the VACANCY sign. I tell you right now, there is no sight that will ever be as eerie and as beautiful as that.
December 21, 2012. You and I were completing a whirlwind marathon mole and tamale-making session. It had started the month before with the gathering of dozens of ingredients needed to make the sauce. We chose a chocolate peanut one in the old tradition, from Oaxaca, yet we added the plantain which is from Yucatan for a multicultural sweetness. Mostly we went through this obsession because for some reason we decided to stay in cabin 27 that first winter we were in Lake City together.
Cabin 27, where the Hunters stay for a whole month year after year, even in the midst of surgeries, babies being born and weddings. For the last thirty years, they came to The Texan. When their children were babies, they came. And now their children have children and their grandkids come along too with their old dog Leroy tied up to the porch. Three generations sit on an old couch happy as clams. They enjoy getting out of the heat of Oklahoma. They enjoy being able to sit amongst the pines for a change.
They don’t see the grime inside the cabins. Nor the potholes in the road. Nor the list of cabins to clean a mile long. They don’t feel the fatigue that comes from the day-after- day. Truth be told, I didn’t either that first year. I was all puffed up on love and new purpose and enamored by the mighty mountains hovering all around me.
The Hunters had long gone when Christmas 2012 came around. And cabin 27 turned out to be one of the coldest cabins of them all that winter. We had the oven perpetually on, yet at night it hovered around refrigerator temperature in the open plan kitchen. We wore three layers and parkas and I wore a colorful Mexican poncho for the affair. We still stayed up late drinking cinnamon schnapps and smoking pot and mixing and chopping and baking and mixing again. And eating… all the samples of our ingredients, including butter cookies! And chillis….so many varieties of chillis bought in San Diego where you can get these kinds of things from three different stores in three different locations in the city. And then we hauled all that loot to Lake City in the back of your truck along with the luggage.
In the middle of it all, the Mayan Calendar stopped and restarted itself. And it did so in a most significant yet utterly silent way. Most did not notice what happened, the shift was so subtle. For me, however, I felt the light get a little dimmer and then spike up significantly. Shadows were different. Time was different. Silence surrounded by so much snow was more profound.
I walked that day with you to the edge of the river at noontime. While tamales were steaming in a big pot on the stove and things had to settle with the mole for a spell, we stole away with Keidi in toe. Her jet-black dog body hopped through the snow and her nose went wild with sniffing. She wore a sweater that day. We all wore sweaters out in the cold because the snow was thick. It was up to our knees, in some places up to our thighs by cabin 37 and the lamp post that did not work (but now it does). The sound of water trickling tickled our ears but it could not be seen. All was underground now, packed yet moving under a few inches of ice. The ice was not strong enough to stand on, yet solid enough to encapsulate a river.
By the water’s edge, there was a hops bush. We gathered around, you especially in awe of the pungent odor. Here it was…that holy grail of all microbrew aficionados. Growing wild and free and of its own accord, and in winter no less! Most of the bush was dried a deep orangish brown, but the smell was still pungent. It spoke of greenness and spring and what it may become in the right persons hands. We talked of a garden where we would grow more of it. And laughed at our find. We practically got drunk right then and there on the aroma alone.
Then I took out a candle and lit it. I put it in a little jar. We said a prayer and lit a smudgicle. Even Keidi stayed still for a moment, nose quivering, to witness the tiny flame in the snow and the smoke from the sage rising up into the dim light of the San Juans. The candle was red like the nighttime resort sign. Or like blood, for now the wax was dripping on to the snow and melting a hole right through it.
For me back then and even now, this was not indicative of bad omens. It was and is simply a fact. Blood runs through our veins. Blood of the people. A new hour dawned for us all then, all of us humans who still have red blood running through our veins.