The house was a Bumpus House. (If you’ve read Jean Shepherd, or seen some of the TV specials or the movie based on his work, you’ll know what I mean.) Weathered, no paint, yard filled with junked vehicles, at least two outhouses out back, a side porch that had been ripped off—probably by one of the Bumpuses in a fit of rage—with weeds growing six feet high and glimpses of gray animals, looking like possums only with larger teeth, wandering through the junked cars and weeds. Your basic Bumpus House.
Still, there was a faint light glowing from the closed front door and through the torn shades, so I thought I’d ask directions. I almost changed my mind when I realized that the light was green and pulsing—not the universal blue pulse of a television in a darkened room, but a sick, viscous green, and pulsing, throbbing, not to the ADD editing speed of a flickering TV, but pulsing, like something from a 1930s Universal horror movie. I still kept going, climbing cinderblocks where the porch had been and raising my hand to knock, when the most ferocious and unearthly growling I’ve ever heard in my life erupted…exploded. Not just from inside the house but from outside—from the backyard and the side yard and the black lodgepole pine forest beyond. Perhaps…just perhaps…if someone in the house was raising wolf-dogs ( a not unusual circumstance in rural Colorado) and had ten of them inside the house and twenty in the backyard and another twenty in the side yard and fifty staked down in the woods above, the growling might be reasonably explained.
Perhaps.
Anyway, I decided to forego directions and just keep walking—well, jogging for a bit—up the black access road in the starlight. And there, after another forty minutes of walking and guessing that I had to turn south at the Peak to Peak Highway, was Kelly Dahl Campground with its scattering of dome tents and campfires and campers along the high ridgeline. I’m not sure if any sight has been more welcome.
ALL of this has precious little to do with the story, of course.
One of the love stories imbedded in “Kelly Dahl” is about the love of teaching. Another is the love of the Colorado high country.
For a dozen years after moving to Colorado in 1974, I was able to combine these two loves in our annual “Eco-Week Experience” where we sixth-grade teachers brought kids to the mountains for three days and two nights. (The other two days of the “Eco-Week” were separate field trips to our town’s water supply reservoir in the mountains, water purification plant, and then the sewage-treatment plant—a place of “great de-stinktion.”)
But the heart of Eco-Week was the three days and two nights at Camp St. Malo, an aging Catholic summer camp some twenty-five or thirty miles north of Kelly Dahl Campground along the same Peak to Peak Highway. Most of the schools went in the autumn, when the aspen leaves were at their height. Some of the unluckier schools in the district had to go up in May, when there might be three feet of snow at the camp. It didn’t matter too much to the sixth-graders; they—and some of us teachers—looked forward to Eco-Week year round. And we didn’t just dump the kids at camp and hope they had a good time. Our science preparation went on for many months and there were experiments to do during our stay there—testing the pH of the water and soil, doing increment bores of the trees, identifying trees by smell and touch during blind walks, compass reading and orienteering, studying the glacially formed landscape, finding squirrel kitchens and studying insect behavior with magnifying glasses, mapping the evolution from Pikes Peak granite to pebbles to soil to humus, observing animal and bird behavior…you get the idea.
God, I loved Eco-Week. (The year after I left teaching, the new triple-knit district superintendent, a mouth-breather from some podunk district in Wyoming, killed Eco-Week, which had been the high point for thousands of sixth-graders for sixteen years, as “too expensive”—even though it paid its own way—and then he left in the midst of a sexual scandal, the district having to buy up his contract to the tune of more than $200,000 just to get rid of him. But Eco-Week stayed dead.)
You’ll find some of my love of teaching in the pages of “Looking for Kelly Dahl,” even some of the love of teaching ecology, but more important than my love of teaching is the love of learning—perhaps learning science—that was quickened, if not conceived, in the hearts of some of the kids. The scene where Kelly Dahl gets the class to shut up and listen to nature occurred—in one variation or another—in every one of our Eco-Week experiences.
Overcoming the fears of administrators, parents, the students, and many of the teachers, I instigated night hikes while up there (on the night before I told the “Gronker Story” to a hundred kids by the fireplace to scare the wits out of them—no one wanted to go outside after the “Gronker Story.”) During the night hikes, we walked silently through the moonlight or starlight-dappled woods, found safe but silent places to be alone, and just sat for thirty minutes. For most of our kids, who had grown up in a town of some 60,000 people, it was probably the only time they had ever been alone in the woods, in the dark, listening to the stir of small mammals and the flap of owl wings and the rustle of ponderosa-pine branches in the night breeze. They loved it.
I’m not sure it’s just an accident that when I finally bought mountain property and a cabin—the 115 acres called Windwalker—it was just down the road from Camp St. Malo (now gussied up into a Catholic “Executive Conference Center”—Pope John Paul II stayed there, going hiking in Gronker territory in his white sneakers with gold laces). Nor was it necessarily an accident that some of these former Eco-Week sixth-graders chose careers in science, some in environmental sciences. One of those students should be finishing up her Ph.D. thesis this year on the reproductive strategies of alpine plants; every day she hikes to her study fields of marsh marigolds at a chilly 12,000 feet on Niwot Ridge along the Divide, above treeline, situated about mid-distance between Camp St. Malo and Kelly Dahl Campground. I know that neither Eco-Week nor I created this love of science and the out of doors in her—her parents and she herself formed that before she was a sixth-grader—but I was privileged to see her do her first eco-science in the field.
Perhaps my favorite scene in “Kelly Dahl” is set in tundra above treeline like that, where Kelly Dahl—if there is a Kelly Dahl—seems to have the narrator in her gunsights and is communicating telepathically with him and sharing her love of the sheer poetry of tundra terms—“Fellfield, meadow vole, boreal chorus frog, snowball saxifrage, solifluction terraces, avens and sedges, yellow-bellied marmots, permafrost, nivation depressions, saffron ragworts, green-leaf chiming bells, man-hater sedge…”
There’s a chance that this “man-hater sedge” serves more than one function in that passage.
I should point out that nowhere are the wabi and sabi palettes of time acting on nature more visible than in the krummholz—the “elfin timber,” gnarled and twisted little trees at treeline that might be a thousand years old—and in the glacial moraines and fallen trees and lichened rocks and runic eskers of the alpine.
* * *
Finally, a definition of the following terms might be useful—
Chiaroscuro—the use and distribution of light and dark in a painting.
Pentimento—the reemergence in a painting of an image that’s been painted over.
Palimpsest—a parchment from which writing has been erased (at least partially) to make room for another text.
Palinode—a poem in which the poet retracts something said in an earlier poem.
LOOKING FOR KELLY DAHL
I
Chiaroscuro
I awoke in camp that morning to find the highway to Boulder gone, the sky empty of contrails, and the aspen leaves a bright autumn gold despite what should have been a midsummer day, but after bouncing the Jeep across four miles of forest and rocky ridgeline to the back of the Flatirons, it was the sight of the Inland Sea that stopped me cold.
“Damn,” I muttered, getting out of the Jeep and walking to the edge of the cliff.
Where the foothills and plains should have been, the great sea stretched away east to the horizon and
beyond. Torpid waves lapped up against the muddy shores below. Where the stone-box towers of NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, had risen below the sandstone slabs of the Flatirons, now there were only shrub-stippled swamps and muddy inlets. Of Boulder, there was no sign—neither of its oasis of trees nor of its low buildings. Highway 36 did not cut its accustomed swath over the hillside southeast to Denver. No roads were visible. The high rises of Denver were gone. All of Denver was gone. Only the Inland Sea stretched east and north and south as far as I could see, its color the gray-blue I remembered from Lake Michigan in my youth, its wave action desultory, its sound more the halfhearted lapping of a large lake than the surf crash of a real ocean.
“Damn,” I said again and pulled the Remington from its scabbard behind the driver’s seat of the Jeep. Using the twenty-power sight, I scanned the gulleys leading down between the Flatirons to the swamps and shoreline. There were no roads, no paths, not even visible animal trails. I planted my foot on a low boulder, braced my arm on my knee, and tried to keep the scope steady as I panned right to left along the long strip of dark shoreline.
Footprints in the mud: one set, leading from the gully just below where I stood on what someday would be named Flagstaff Mountain and crossing to a small rowboat pulled up on the sand just beyond the curl of waves. No one was in the rowboat. No tracks led away from it.
A bit of color and motion caught my eye a few hundred meters out from the shore and I raised the rifle, trying to steady the scope on a bobbing bit of yellow. There was a float out there, just beyond the shallows.
I lowered the Remington and took a step closer to the drop-off. There was no way that I could get the Jeep down there—at least not without spending hours or days cutting a path through the thick growth of ponderosa and lodgepole pine that grew in the gully. And even then I would have to use the winch to lower the Jeep over boulders and near-vertical patches. It would not be worth the effort to take the vehicle. But it would require an hour or more to hike down from here.
For what? I thought. The rowboat and buoy would be another red herring, another Kelly Dahl joke. Or she’s trying to lure me out there on the water so that she can get a clean shot.
“Damn,” I said for the third and final time. Then I returned the rifle to its case, pulled out the blue daypack, checked to make sure that the rations, water bottles, and .38 were in place, tugged on the pack, shifted the Ka-bar knife in its sheath along my belt so that I could get to it in one movement, set the rifle scabbard in the crook of my arm, took one last look at the Jeep and its contents, and began the long descent.
Kelly, you’re sloppy, I thought as I slid down the muddy slope, using aspens as handholds. Nothing’s consistent. You’ve screwed this up just like you did the Triassic yesterday.
This particular Inland Sea could be from one of several eras—the late Cretaceous for one, the late Jurassic for another—but in the former era, some seventy-five million years ago, the great interior sea would have pushed much further west than here, into Utah and beyond, and the Rocky Mountains I could see twenty miles to the west would have been in the process of being born from the remnants of Pacific islands that had dotted an ocean covering California. The slabs of Flatirons now rising above me would exist only as a layer of soft substrata. Conversely, if it were the mid-Jurassic, almost a hundred million years earlier than the Cretaceous, this would all be part of a warm, shallow sea stretching down from Canada, ending in a shore winding along northern New Mexico. There would be a huge saline lake south of there, the mudflats of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico stretching as a narrow isthmus for almost two hundred miles between the two bodies of water. This area of central Colorado would be an island, but still without mountains and Flatirons.
You got it all wrong, Kelly. I’d give this a D-. There was no answer. Shit, this isn’t even that good. An F. Still silence.
Nor were the flora and fauna correct. Instead of the aspen and pine trees through which I now descended, this area should have been forested during the Jurassic by tall, slender, cycadlike trees, festooned with petals and cones; the undergrowth would not be the juniper bushes I was picking my way around but exotic scouring rushes displaying leaves like banana plants. The late-Cretaceous flora would have been more familiar to the eye—low, broad-leaved trees, towering conifers—but the blossoms would be profuse, tropical, and exotic—with the scent of huge, magnolialike blossoms perfuming the humid air.
The air was neither hot nor humid. It was a midautumn Colorado day. The only blossoms I saw were the faded flowers on small cacti underfoot.
The fauna were wrong. And dull. Dinosaurs existed in both the Cretaceous and Jurassic, but the only animals I had seen this fine morning were some ravens, three white-tailed deer hustling for cover a mile before I reached the cliffs, and some golden-mantled ground squirrels near the top of the Flatirons. Unless a plesiosaur raised its scrawny neck out of the water below, my guess was that the Inland Sea had been transplanted to our era. I had been mildly disappointed the last couple of times the chase had taken me through ancient eras. I would like to have seen a dinosaur, if only to see if Spielberg and his computer animators had been correct as to how the creatures moved.
Kelly, you’re sloppy, I thought again. Lazy. Or you make your choices from sentiment and a sense of aesthetics rather than from any care for accuracy. I was not surprised that there was no answer.
Kelly had always been quirky, although I remembered little sentimentality from either of the times I had been her teacher.
I thought, She hadn’t cried the time I left the sixth-grade class to take the high school job. Most of the other girls did. Kelly Dahl was eleven then. She had not shown much emotion when I’d had her in English class when she was…what?…seventeen.
And now she was trying to kill me. Not much sentiment there, either.
I came out of the woods at the edge of the gully and began following human footprints in the mud across the flats. Whether the Inland Sea was from the Jurassic or the Cretaceous, the person who had crossed these tidal flats before me had worn sneakers—cross-trainers from the look of the sole patterns. Are these tidal flats? I think so…the Kansas Sea was large enough to respond to tides.
There was nothing in the rowboat but two oars, shipped properly. I glanced around, took the rifle out to scope the cliffsides, saw nothing there, tossed the pack in the boat, set the Remington across my lap, shoved off through low waves, and began to row toward the yellow buoy.
I half expected a rifle shot, but suspected that I would not hear it. Despite her missed chances a few days earlier, Kelly Dahl was obviously a good shot. When she decided to kill me, if she had a shot as clear as this one must be—she could fire from any spot along the cliff face of the Flatirons—I would almost certainly be hit on her first try. My only chance was that it would not be a fatal shot and that I could still handle the Remington.
Sweating, the rifle now on the thwart behind me, my shirt soaked from the exertion despite the cool autumn air, I thought of how vulnerable I was out here on the chalky sea, how stupid this action was. I managed to grunt a laugh.
Do your worst, kid. Sunlight glinted on something behind the rocks on Flagstaff Mountain. A telescopic sight? My Jeep’s windshield? I did not break the rhythm of my rowing to check it out. Do your worst, kid. It can’t be worse than what I had planned for myself.
The yellow “buoy” was actually a plastic bleach jar. There was a line tied to it. I pulled it up. The wine bottle on the end of it was weighted with pebbles and sealed with a cork. There was a note inside.
BANG, it read. YOU’RE IT.
ON the day I decided to kill myself, I planned it, prepared it, and carried it out. Why wait?
The irony was that I had always detested suicide and the suicides themselves. Papa Hemingway and his ilk, someone who will put a Boss shotgun in his mouth and pull the trigger, leaving the remains at the bottom of the stairs for his wife to find and a ceiling full of skull splinters for the
hired help to remove…well, I find them disgusting. And self-indulgent. I have been a failure and a drunk and a fuck-up, but I have never left my messes for others to clean up, not even in the worst depths of my drinking days.
Still, it is hard to think of a way to kill yourself without leaving a mess behind. Walking into the ocean like James Mason at the end of the 1954 A Star Is Born would have been nice, assuming a strong current going out or sharks to finish off the waterlogged remains, but I live in Colorado. Drowning oneself in one of the puny reservoirs around here seems pathetic at best.
All of the domestic remedies—gas, poison, hanging, an overdose of sleeping pills, the shotgun from the closet—leave someone with the Hemingway problem. Besides, I despise melodrama. The way I figure it, it’s no one’s business but my own how or why I go out. Of course, my ex-wife wouldn’t give a shit and my only child is dead and beyond embarrassment, but there are still a few friends out there from the good days who might feel betrayed if news of my death came in the black-wrapped package of suicide. Or so I like to think.
It took me not quite three beers in the Bennigan’s on Canyon Boulevard to arrive at the answer; it took even less time to make the preparations and to carry them out.
Some of the few things left me after the settlement with Maria were my Jeep and camping gear. Even while I was drinking, I would occasionally take off for the hills without notice, camping somewhere along the Peak to Peak Highway or in the National Forest up Left Hand Canyon. While not a real off-road type—I hate 4-wheel-drive assholes who pride themselves on tearing up the landscape, and all snowmobilers, and those idiots on motorcycles who befoul the wilderness with noise and fumes—I have been known to push the Jeep pretty hard to get to a campsite far enough back to where I wouldn’t have to listen to anyone’s radio or hear traffic or have to look at the rump end of some fat-assed Winnebago.