Track Meet in Purgatory Ch. 01

"Well," I said, "it was worth a try." And we put the phones back in our packs.

We returned to the alcove and sat again in each other's arms. It hadn't warmed up out there after the storm, so it was chillier than would be comfortable for long, even with our warm-ups on. I wished we had brought some matches—until I realized that there wasn't enough wood for a fire within miles. But with her against my chest and the warm rock against my back, I was actually beginning to feel toasty. "Are you still cold?" I asked.

"No," she answered. "I'm feeling pretty good now. How about you?"

"I'm doing pretty good." I said. "You and the rock behind me are doing a pretty good job right now." I happened to think, then, that she wasn't getting the benefit of the warm rock directly, as I was. "Do you want to trade places for a while? Or just sit back against the boulder?"

"No," she said. "I'm fine here." She paused. Then she went on. "Jase, don't take this wrong, but I'm glad that that you're here with me."

"How could I take that wrong?" I asked. "I'm glad you're here with me, too."

"I was afraid you'd think I was glad I'd gotten you in trouble!"

"Well, it's my own fault I'm in trouble! This is what I get for being too respectful of my elders," I remarked, pleased with myself for finally turning that one around on her. Before I could go on, she pinched my gut. I yelped before I continued. "Technically, I guess you did get us into this, because you're the one who suggested coming here," I said. "But we planned it together. Or, more to the point, we planned it poorly, and we did it together. It's a good thing we found this boulder when we did!"

I felt her arm tighten around me as she said, "I'm glad you're my friend, Jase!"

"I'm glad you're mine," I answered. And then a thought struck me. "Are you hungry?"

"Yeah!" she replied. "Lunch was a long time ago! But we still have those power bars in our packs. Should we eat one?"

"Might as well!" I said. "Maybe just one each. That'll leave a couple for breakfast before we walk back out of the canyon."

"What about the river?" she asked. "Will we be able to get back over to the other side in the morning?"

"I hope so!" I said. "We'll be in real trouble if we can't. But I think that was a flash flood, from a storm upstream. It'll probably go away almost as quickly as it started. I'll bet we could cross it now, down there by the dinosaur tracks. But it's too late to try tonight. It'll be too dark to travel soon, and we have a pretty decent shelter here. We'll just have to hope that it doesn't rain any more tonight!"

"Sounds good," she said, as she dug into her pack. "We'll hope for the best with the river." She found what she was looking for in her pack. "Here. One for you and one for me. There're two more in your pack, right?"

"Two more," I said. "Not the best dinner I've ever had, but, given the circumstances…" I let it trail off and smiled at her. She smiled back as she tore at her wrapper. I tore at mine, too.

"How are we fixed for water?" I asked when we'd finished our meager supper and each had a few swallows from a bottle of water.

"I've got about two quarts," she answered. "What about you?"

"About the same!"

"I think that'll get us through the night and part way back to the car in the morning. We might be pretty thirsty by the time we get there, but we can start walking when it starts getting light—even before sunup. It'll be cooler than it was during the afternoon today, and I think we'll be okay. There are a couple of bottles of water in the car, just waiting for us," she said.

"We'll be glad to see them!" I added.

"Yeah," she said, ruefully. "We'll be hungry, too. But La Junta's only about an hour's drive. We can get some real food there."

"We should try to get some sleep," I suggested. "The more we can sleep, the shorter the night will seem."

"Do you need to pee?" she asked. "While there's still some light?" It was getting dark, but there was still enough light to walk around in the open without fear of walking right into a cholla. It's one of the nastiest of cactus: People sometimes need surgery to remove cholla spines.

"Yeah," I said, "I do."

"Okay, you go first, and then I'll go. I'll wait for you so you can follow the sound of my voice if you get turned around."

That irritated me. I frowned at her. In a surly tone I began, "Do you really think that I would—"

She interrupted me. "No! Not really! But I think we can't afford to make any more silly mistakes. If one or both of us were to get lost as it's getting dark, that would be a disaster!"

Chastened, I looked into her eyes again and said, contritely, "I'm sorry. You're right. We shouldn't take any chances we don't have to!"

"It's okay," she said. "I understand. I probably sounded like a parent!"

I stepped out of our alcove and walked about thirty yards to the right among the boulders. As I peed, I realized that it was getting even chillier. That made me even happier about the warm refuge we'd found by lucky chance. I finished and found my way back to our boulder. On the way, I paid attention; there wasn't a single cholla anywhere near the path I was retracing. That might be nice to know in the darkness that was coming.

When I returned, she left for her turn, saying, "I'll be right back." The sound of her footsteps diminished as she moved off to the left among the boulders.

It wasn't long before she was back. As we returned to our places against the rock, she remarked, "It's cold out there! Being close to you feels really good!" She settled in beside me and leaned against me, returning her head and her arm to my chest. I put my arms around her and held her soft warmth. She wiggled a bit against me, turned until her weight rested on her hip, and threw her upper leg across my legs.

In the dim, thickening twilight, I could just make out the face of my watch if I twisted my arm a bit. It was about half past eight. Sunrise, I knew, would be a little after five-thirty; first light, a bit earlier—maybe even as much as an hour earlier. We had seven or eight hours of darkness to get through. Fortunately, the moon was just three days or so past full and would be rising in a few hours—some time around eleven. Having moonlight should help, I thought; if we could see, even a little, the night might not seem so long.

Her body softened as she relaxed against me. I relaxed, too, and I closed my eyes and leaned my head back to see if I could sleep a bit. My thoughts drifted back to earlier that day.

==||<>||==

We had gotten some breakfast and left home, as planned, at around eight that morning. The drive from Denver to La Junta took us until nearly noon. We stopped there to buy a dozen quarts of bottled water at a supermarket. We also got some lunch: A one-third pound bacon cheeseburger, a large Coke, and a large order of fries for each of us. (Teenage long-distance runners don't worry very much about calories!)

It was a pretty spring day, with plenty of sunlight; the temperature was in the low eighties. We spent most of the drive chatting and wondering what college was going to be like in the coming fall. We'd been careful, early in the school year, to apply to the same colleges. And, this spring, we'd been even more careful to choose the same one to go to. We weren't going to let a little thing like Life separate two best friends.

We were going to go to Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, together. Fort Collins was close enough to Denver that our parents would be pleased by our proximity. But we thought that it was far enough away that we would feel as though we'd escaped their supervision. One of the things near the top of our summer agenda was to figure out what kind of living arrangements we were going to make.

We'd talked about that some during the last few months. We wanted to share an apartment. But we knew that Lynne's dad and my mom would each object strongly to having their child share living quarters with a member of the opposite sex. Thus, even though neither of us had the 'evil' intent that our over-protective parents credited us with, we knew that it was out of the question. Maybe, we hoped, we could find apartments that weren't too far from each other.

The first indication that we might be getting into something we weren't quite ready for came shortly after we'd passed through La Junta. But we didn't understand, then, what that signal meant. We turned off the main highway onto the first of several Forest Service roads. It was a well-graded gravel road that would take us southwest for about eight miles across the Grassland.

It wasn't anything like what we'd expected. Yes, there was grass. There was a lot of grass. It came about halfway up to our knees. (Okay, we'd expected that! Even though we were city folk, we hadn't supposed that anybody mowed it!) But it was brown. And it grew in clumps that were less than a foot across, leaving the sandy earth uncovered between clumps. In fact, there seemed to be less grass than bare ground.

Even in the spring, just two-thirds of the way through May, the grass was a dirty, dry, brown! It looked as though it had died a hundred years earlier and been preserved for our inspection. There were some trees. Not big ones, and not many—piñon and juniper, isolated, shrub-like, maybe as many as a dozen per acre. Though dark green, they looked black against the brown grass in the unforgiving light.

And, south of the road, the land was featureless. And flat! God, it was flat! As we came to a second road, which we were to follow due south from the oblique T-junction where our first road ended, Lynne pointed to a ridge. It was maybe all of fifty feet high, several hundred yards north of the junction. "Wait, Jase," she said. "Let's get up on that ridge and see what we can see.

I turned that way and, after getting to the top of the ridge, I pulled over. We got out and looked south. We saw flat, brown, desolate, seemingly unending country to which a few piñons and junipers, black and lonely, seemed glued randomly. The road led south, showing a barely noticeable curve to the right. Distance swallowed it where a shadowy low ridge obscured the horizon.

A pair of dust devils danced across the emptiness. In the strong warm wind that blew from the west, the whirling columns moved smartly to our left. Off to the southeast, tiny, almost indiscernable in the distance, stood a ruined old windmill, motionless in spite of the wind, evidently long abandoned. Entranced, we both stared.

When we'd had our fill of the view, we walked back to the car. We were about to get back in, when she stopped me. "Look!" she cried, pointing across the road. There was a spot of bright yellow against the dreary brown background. Wondering, we walked over to look at it. It turned out to be a prickly pear blossom peeking out from a cactus amid the clumps of grass. We looked around and saw a few more.

Thirty yards down the road, I saw a droplet of scarlet glowing against the brown background. I pointed it out, and we went to examine it. When we got closer, we saw that it, too, was a flower, growing out of a small, barrel-shaped cactus. She breathed, "A claret cup! It's lovely!"

We admired the claret cup for a bit before heading back to the car and getting in. As we descended from the ridge, she declared, "It's so bleak! I've never seen anything like this before. I thought a grassland would be lush and green. Especially now, in the spring!"

"I thought so, too," I agreed. "But even though it's so desolate… so God-forsaken… I like it!"

She paused, looked again over the stark, forbidding landscape. After a moment, she spoke again: "Me too! I can't explain it, but there's something about it… something fascinating about it! It draws me, somehow!"

"It's hypnotizing." I remarked. As I spoke, it dawned on me that I should pull my eyes back where they belonged in order to stay out of the ditch at the side of the road. "But I'd better pay attention to where we're going!"

"Yes!" she squealed as the right front tire crunched through loose gravel at the edge of the road. "You'd so better!"

==||<>||==

She stirred against me as I slept, and I woke to find that it was pitch dark. There was, as yet, no moonlight, so I couldn't have been asleep for long.

"Jase!" came her hissed whisper. "Are you awake?"

"Just barely," I answered her. "I slept for a little while; I woke up a bit before you asked."

"Me, too," she said. "Are you warm enough?"

"I'm not as warm as I'd like to be," I admitted. "But I'm warm enough. How are you doing?"

"About the same. What time is it?" she asked.

"I can't see my watch, but the moon hasn't risen, so it can't be eleven yet."

"Would we see the moon through all the clouds?"

"The moon's close to full tonight and enough light would filter through that we could tell where it was and see things around us."

"How do you know that the moon's almost full, Nerd?" she teased.

"The same way you know about claret cups, Nerdette!" I teased back.

We exchanged squeezes and sat there in the dark for a while, enjoying our shared warmth. And then she jerked upright. "Jase!" she bubbled. "I'm so dumb! I just thought of something. I need to find my pack!" We separated and felt around in the dark. In our confined space, it didn't her take very long. "I found it!" she informed me, with a note of excitement in her voice. I heard her open a zipper. There was a jingle of metal and, suddenly, a cold white light pierced the darkness. It couldn't have been very bright, though it seemed so to our dark-adapted eyes! "I forgot that my keys were in the back pocket of my pack, and there's an LED light on the keyring!"

"That's great!" I said, enthusiastically. "We don't have to worry, now, about not being able to see until the moon comes up. We can see whenever we need to!" It was a small victory, and it would make no difference in the long run. But it was a victory at a moment when we needed, desperately, to win something.

The light went out, and she returned to me. "I think it's getting cooler, Jase," she said. "Do you think we'll be okay?"

"I'm still warm enough," I reported. "And the boulder still feels pretty warm. I think it's going to stay warm all night. How about you?"

"I'm okay, too. But I'm going to move to your other side for a while if that's okay. A couple of hours in one position is plenty!"

"Yeah, I'm getting a little sore where you've been leaning against me. The other side will be good." She shined the light, so that she could see to rearrange herself at my right. In its glow, I looked at my watch; it was ten-fifteen. "It's a quarter past ten," I remarked. "It should start getting a little lighter out there before long."

"Do you need more light? Or should I turn it off?" she asked.

"I don't need to see anything right now," I said. "Turn it off and save the battery."

The light went out and I heard her put it back in her pack. The zipper closed, and she leaned into me again. Soon we were in a mirror image of the position we'd been in a few minutes earlier, her body propped against my right side, her right leg thrown across my legs. Thinking to try to sleep some more, I leaned back and closed my eyes. My mind returned to the drive down here.

==||<>||==

We drove south from the ridge. Fifteen minutes and six miles later, we reached a crossroads marked by corrals, a brown and yellow Forest Service sign that labeled them the "Picket Wire Corrals", and a small new-looking building that turned out to be a restroom. We both took advantage of the last toilet facilities we expected to see before we returned to this crossroads.

Our trailhead was about four miles east of that crossroads. We made the turn and found ourselves traveling on what the Forest Service calls an "unimproved dirt road". Short green grass carpeted the roadside; and the piñons and junipers, interspersed with cholla cactus, grew almost densely enough to be called chaparral. After a half-hour or so, we reached the road's end, where it looped through the old Withers Campground, now abandoned and closed to camping. A sign marked our trailhead, and there was plenty of parking space, all of it empty.

We tried to call home to report our arrival, but neither of our phones could find a connection. That was another notice that things might not go quite as we expected, but we didn't catch on. We just shrugged our shoulders and went about our business.

It was about half past one in the afternoon. Sunset, we knew, would be at roughly eight that evening, so we should have no trouble walking five miles or so, looking at the dinosaur tracks, returning to the car, and getting back to the crossroads before dark.

In a matter of minutes, we were on that trail, each of us wearing a small backpack containing the items we'd promised our parents we would bring: five (surprisingly heavy!) quarts of bottled water, a bottle of sunscreen, and our warm-ups. We were wearing, according to The Approved Plan, jeans and durable cotton work shirts. We'd slathered our exposed skin with some of that 30 SPF sunscreen, and we each wore a baseball cap. The sunlight was bright, and there were no adults around we could irritate, so we wore the hats with the bills facing forward.

Soon, we had descended three hundred feet or so into Withers Canyon, a side canyon of Picket Wire Canyon. From there, our walk would be nearly level. The trail curved around to the right, and emptied into the main canyon almost immediately. There it joined an old wagon road, now a four-wheel drive road, which we guessed was used by the guided tours permitted by the Forest Service on weekends. It ran along the near, north, side of the river, roughly parallel to it. We turned right, toward the southwest, to head up the canyon.

The first thing we noticed was the wind. It blew down canyon, from the direction in which we needed to go; it was a lot stronger than the wind had been on the plain above.

Then we noticed the heat. Except for three-hundred-foot buttes here and there, the floor of Picket Wire Canyon is flat and about a mile wide. But the sun shines on the northwest canyon wall, which then reradiates and turns that side of the canyon, where the trail is, into a pretty good reflector oven. And there is very little shade. Although it was in the low eighties up where we had left the car, we estimated that it was about 95° Fahrenheit down where we were. I'd thought we might be packing too much water; now I began to think otherwise.

Maybe, we guessed, the heat was the reason for the names of river and canyon. The Spaniards who had been the first Europeans in the canyon had named the river El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio, or The River of the Lost Souls in Purgatory. French trappers had later shortened the name and translated it into French; for them the river was La Purgatoire. Later American homesteaders and their successors had corrupted that into "Picket Wire" for the canyon. They simply called the river "the Purgatory". At that moment, in that heat, Lynne and I could see good reason for the name.

The walls of the canyon were mostly very soft sandstone, consisting of large grains that were barely cemented together. Capping that soft stone, at the top of the walls, was a twenty- or thirty-foot layer of harder sandstone, more finely grained. Over that harder stone lay a foot or two of topsoil that was mostly sand. Once we were down there, we could see that the river had formed the canyon by first wearing a channel in the uppermost layer of harder sandstone. Then, as it varied its course over the millennia, the river had eroded the softer underlying rock away. When the softer rock was gone, the upper layer, no longer supported from below, had collapsed, a bit at a time, into the void underneath. The canyon floor was littered with boulders from that upper layer, especially near the walls, but also around the scattered buttes that the ever-changing river had left unaltered for eons.