Story 2: Deirdre, in Xeriscape: Tundra Trail

Three CU freshwomen got into a car one Saturday in October because of Josh.

Becky and Natalie and I were making our way out of government class yesterday, having survived another slurred discussion of the Articles of Confederation by our lush of a teacher, when we bumped into Josh. That is, I bumped into him, chest first. Then we stopped in the hall and talked while hungry students flowed around us on their way to lunch.

“Do you want to come to lunch?” I asked him, feeling hungry too.

“Can’t,” he said, in that abbreviated way of his. “I’m taking my Mom up to Rocky Mountain National Park to hear the elks bugle.”

“I haven’t done that for years,” I told him.

“Well, come along then,” he said. Josh is a human magnet. He collects people as he saunters through life. He met Natalie while they were standing in line near the University Memorial Center on the first day of orientation and invited her to a BBQ at his house in Lafayette. While they were talking, my best friend Jodi walked by, and Josh had to meet her too. (I know why: in profile, her face is perfect, set off by thick black hair.) Jodi, of course, invited me to the BBQ. Now it was a month later, and I thought I might, for once in my life, be one of a group of friends.

“I have two more classes today,” I said, feeling deeply disappointed. I would love to spend an afternoon with Josh. And his Mom, though maybe we could lose her in the woods and find a nice flat make-out rock to lie on.

“Well, I have to go,” he said. I watched him walk down the hall.

Becky, whom I had forgotten was even there, mentioned how dark blue his eyes were, and then Natalie added, “Yes, we’re all a little bit in love with Josh.” Becky just smiled at me. She doesn’t miss much.

“Why don’t we go up to the park tomorrow?” she asked. “I can drive.”

So there we were at 11 a.m. on Saturday, all ready for an afternoon of wildlife and driving—to the park, around the park, and home. I was sitting in the passenger seat, and Natalie was asleep in the back seat. She said she had stayed out until 3 this morning. She even brought a pillow, but I worried that when she saw all the stuff I brought, she’d make fun of me for being so prepared. I overpacked, as usual: my backpack was full of apples and a guide or two and binoculars and cheese and crackers. Mountains and gouda—they go together.

Becky was driving an older dark blue Honda, which chugged up the red hills between Lyons and Estes Park at 48 miles per hour. I checked without her noticing. Trucks passed us when the road widened and then fell in just behind when it narrowed. I asked her what classes she was taking.

“Government, intro to journalism, political theory, Spanish, and biology.”

“So you’re going to major in government?”

“Probably, or maybe journalism,” Becky said. “I haven’t decided.”

“You could major in government and then go to the journalism school at CU,” I suggested.

“Yes, but I’d rather be writing, even at some small-town paper, than spend more time studying it,” she said. “I want to finish school and get a job as soon as possible.”

That’s an attitude you don’t hear much from college freshwomen. I admired it, but I didn’t share it. I asked her, “What do you want to write about?”

“Black people in the West,” she said, so quickly I thought she’d rehearsed it. She kept her eyes on the road. “There are so few of us, we’re practically invisible.”

“Are you going to write about the buffalo soldiers?” Natalie piped up from the back seat.

Becky smiled briefly. She was wearing eye shadow, blush, and lip gloss, and her hair looked styled, which struck me as a bit much for hiking in the mountains. My hair was in a ponytail, and I wasn’t wearing any makeup. Natalie wasn’t either, and from the way her reddish hair stuck out on one side, she must not have washed it. I wondered how bad she’d smell at the end of the day.

Becky said, “Yes, for my journalism class portfolio. There was one woman, Cathay Williams, who posed as a man and joined the 38th U.S. Infantry. My family is distantly related to her.”

“Cool,” Natalie said. “They never found out?”

“Found out what?” Becky asked.

“That she was a woman.”

“Not until after she left the army,” Becky said. “Where did you hear about buffalo soldiers?”

“From my Dad,” Natalie said, leaning her head against my headrest, if you please. She smelled a little dusty, but not bad. “He teaches politics at CU.”

“Professor Fisher is your father?” Becky asked, sounding surprised.

“Yeah. Why? Did you meet him?”

“No, but somebody told me to take his class.”

“I don’t need to,” Natalie sighed. “I hear it every day.”

We laughed at that. Maybe Natalie was more aware than I had thought. We’re still in that introductory stage, talking about classes and parents and what we wanted in life, as if we knew at age eighteen. I knew what I didn’t want—to be a doctor like both my parents and never have any time. If I could be a doctor and have a forty-hour workweek, I might consider it. But that was impossible. And think of all those people complaining and racing into the emergency room or being wheeled from ICU to a private room on a gurney! I’d much rather plant a garden. Most plants stay put, unless moles dig them up, and they don't communicate in words.

“A deer,” Natalie said, pointing between us at the right side of the road. It was grazing, half-hidden among reddish bushes.

“There’s a herd of deer that comes down by my parents’ house to graze every morning in the winter,” I said. “I can see them from my window.”

“Where do your parents live?” Becky asked.

“In Evergreen.”

“Yeah, we get deer sometimes near our house,” Natalie added. “They like to eat our neighbor’s plants.”

“Do you ever see fawns?” I asked her.

“I’ve seen one once.”

“I love them. I give them names, but then when they get older I can’t tell them apart. And just outside our fence, I planted a big patch of side-oats grama and blue grama—”

“Grama?” Natalie interrupted. “Like your grandmother?”

“It means grass,” I explained, blushing at how much xeriscape excited me. Then I finished what I had been saying: “I’ve seen deer over there eating, but my neighbor hasn’t said anything yet.”

“Wow,” Natalie said softly near my ear, “isn’t that plant vandalism?”

I twisted around and looked at her. She was smiling sleepily, her green eyes half-closed. I’ve always loved that color of eyes, like cottonwood leaves. The one time I met her parents, for about five seconds, I noticed her mother’s eyes were the same color.

“The deer are there anyway,” I said. “If they eat the plants I put out, then they won’t eat other ones. I don’t see that it hurts anyone.”

“I guess not,” Natalie said. We were silent for a while, and then Becky’s overtaxed car picked up speed on the long hill down to Estes Lake. We went sailing by the water, hooting and hanging out the window. At least, Natalie hung out the window, and I hooted a little. Becky said she was too busy driving. The traffic through downtown Estes Park moved sluggishly, as usual, and Natalie suggested that one of us could jump out, race into the nearest ice cream store and pick up a pint, and get back before it was our turn to go through the light. When we reached the visitors center at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, we remembered that the cafeteria was at the Alpine Visitors Center, not this one. We stood outside the entrance and debated whether to drive up Trail Ridge Road. It was almost one o’clock, and I was already feeling hungry.

“I wouldn’t mind going up there because I like to look at the wildflowers,” I said, pulling Alpine Wildflowers of the Rocky Mountains from my pocket. Natalie gently took it from my hands and looked at the pictures.

“Pretty flowers,” she said.

“They bloom in the summer,” I told her quickly. “But I like to see if I can identify them by their leaves.”

“You know a lot about plants,” she said. “Will you show me some?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling pleased. Very few people care about alpine plants—they look like a weird kind of lawn, so people walk right over them. Even Jodi only humored me when I talked about tundra. Natalie returned the book, and we joined Becky in front of a sign. She had her arms folded and looked cold in her denim shirt.

“Let’s drive up Trail Ridge and get some lunch,” I said. “The elk are probably all down in Moraine Park, but we can go there later.” We got back in the car again, and I cut off chunks of gouda with a pocketknife and arranged them on the back of my book. Even Becky seemed impressed. The car drove even more slowly here than on the highway to Estes Park, and soon we were leading a line of cars and RVs. I had forgotten the crowds the park attracts, especially people who want to snag a site at Moraine Park campground before it fills up. You’d think people would have other things to do in October than go out in the woods and shiver all night in a tent, but still they come.

“Pull off up here, Becky, and let these cars pass,” I told her, and she did, skidding a little on the gravel pullout but managing to stop in time. She didn’t seem to mind being told what to do.

“My trusty Honda,” she said, patting the dashboard. “It’s just not made for mountain driving.”

We drove that way for the next hour. The higher the altitude on this road, the more scenic views there are for tourists. As Becky guided the car around hairpin turns toward the visitor’s center, we had plenty of opportunities to pull off and listen to the pica shriek. Toward the top, there were places where the land sloped down sharply from the road, and in those places the tourists slowed way down. Maybe they were afraid they were going to roll right down to the bottom of the valley. I asked Becky to stop twice near the top. A view of a river shining far below is a sight I can't resist. My heart expands to fill all that space.

The Alpine Visitors Center was a zoo. Today, everyone in Colorado must have woken up and panicked, “Trail Ridge Road is about to close for the winter!” Then they fixed their hair and converged on the park. I had never seen so much big hair in my life. This time of year, the parking lot was always in slow motion: people went in and out doors, hung over the concrete walls around the center to look for elk in the valley, and climbed up the Alpine Ridge Trail. We went inside to eat first, weaving through the clothes and jewelry and veering left to the cafeteria. Becky and Natalie had half-sandwiches and salads, but I had a hot open-faced turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes. They laughed at me for eating so much after we’d just had cheese and crackers, so I said that I must have Thanksgiving on the brain.

Natalie perked up then. “My boyfriend will be back in town then!” After such a display of excitement, of course we had to discuss him. Natalie began to list his high points.

“Wavy brown hair, brown eyes, a little thin…” She paused.

“Thin is good,” Becky said. I looked down at my sandwich, which couldn’t be described as “thin food.” Thank god for baggy jeans.

Natalie grinned. “He loves the modernists. I can’t wait to take that course on Joyce so we can talk about it.”

Obviously she had big plans for their relationship, or she wanted us to think so. The course on Joyce, Eliot, and Pound was an upper-level course. I always feel that girls describing their boyfriends are hamming it up, but maybe I am spiteful. I’d never had a boyfriend, not that I admitted it when she asked. I muttered, “No one special right now,” and mopped up the turkey gravy with the corners of the bread. Just in case there was any self-pity in my tone, I asked Becky about the guy who met her outside government class one day.

“That’s Mike,” she said, beaming almost as much as Natalie. “I met him at church. We’ve been together for a year.”

After a few minutes of silence, I ask Natalie if she wanted to walk up the trail and look at some plants. If I were alone here, I would sit down on the side of the trail, careful to keep my feet on the steps and off the tundra, and look at the leaves of alpine plants until I could identify them. But I didn’t suppose Natalie and Becky wanted to watch me stare at leaves. For these two, I found a patch of alpine forget-me-not. According to my book, it bloomed in June and July, so we were well past flower season, but it was my favorite because of its woolly leaves.

I told them its name and then said, “Feel it.” They ran their hands over its leaves.

“It’s hairy,” Becky said. “It feels nice.”

“That’s its winter coat,” I told them. Natalie was watching me and smiling a little. I looked around. There was no one nearby; must have been a lull in the human traffic after lunch. Quickly I pulled off a couple of leaves and handed them to them.

“Taste these,” I said, trying not to grin.

Natalie spat hers out after a second. “That’s nasty!”

Becky actually chewed a few times and swallowed hers. Pretty tough. Even I wouldn’t eat an entire leaf from that plant. “Alpine forget-me-nots are in the borage family,” I told them. “Borage is an herb with the prettiest blue flowers, like dangling stars. You can put it in your garden, and it will reseed itself and attract bees all summer long. But it tastes bitter because it has alkaloids in it, like morphine.”

“Maybe after you graduate you can open a plant store and pharmacy,” Natalie said, laughing. She took a drink of her apple juice to wash away the taste. “You know more about plants than some of the professors at CU.”

I laughed with her then, but later that afternoon, I had a silent anxiety attack. We were parked by the side of the road, listening to the male elks, which sound like your next-door neighbor learning to play the trumpet. Once again, I thought suddenly, I’ve been labeled a “brain.” Natalie didn’t dislike me for it—yet. But other people had been impressed by what I knew and then had come to resent it. If that happened, I wouldn’t be able to show all of myself to her. And Becky had her own life—she didn’t live in the dorm—so how much of a friend could she become? I hate these moments of panic; they're just like noticing a mosquito after it bites me. To calm myself, I pretended we were old friends from college who’d met again after many years.