It’s crazy beautiful here and I’m being blasted wide open. Between the color therapy of the great red canyons and changing golden aspens, the Reverend Al Green’s high-pitched, leg-shaking, hair-raising Amazing Grace, and delightful and constant Colorado companionship, I may never be the same again. Amen!

I have not stopped being surprised since leaving Christina Lake ten days ago. The way down is going to hurt.


I’m plugged in to the lighter in Brett’s Ford F250 Lariat heading toward Aspen to pick up his dog Ling Ling who’s been babysat for the weekend while we did the Blues and Brews Festival in Telluride. We’re towing Henk and his new girlfriend, Fazer, a rare and sexy 1986 Yamaha whom Brett sprung on us when we arrived last week. We just did possibly the most spectacular motorbike ride this side of Heaven. I rode Fazer, Brett rode Henk. They fell in love. It took awhile for Brett to warm up to Henk, but somewhere around Ouray at eight or nine thousand feet and 140 kilometers per hour, they bonded.


I’ve entirely lost track of time and it feels like free-falling. This must be how an addict feels on day 3 of detox. She’d give anything to have that old habit back because diving into the void is scary as hell—but at the same time, there’s no turning back. The only thing to do is let go.

Last Tuesday, Highway 128 from Moab to Sisco blew my mind.
The Utah sun was hot by noon, and after breakfast at the Jailhouse Café, Henk and I took to the scenic by-way. The pavement was smooth and curvy, winding alongside the Colorado River, etched deeply into the red canyons and running fast, lined on both sides by towering walls of red rock.
I stopped countless times to breathe it all in and sing opera at the top of my lungs.
For the first time since I was three years old I felt like myself.

I crossed into Colorado, arriving in Glenwood Springs sometime around 5, and called my friend Brett, whom I met at Liard Hotsprings. Within twenty minutes I was lying face down on a massage table at his friend’s house, getting some major kinks in my neck and hips worked out by her elbows. He must have read my mind because since crossing the border I’d been fantasizing of massage, hotsprings, and yoga to stretch my road-weary bones and brains back to their flexible old selves.

At dinner that night, Brett, who sometimes calls himself “Sid,” but who now would like to be referred to as “Dirk,” revealed to me that he has a beautiful old street bike in a storage room somewhere and that he was taking me to his favorite campsite in the San Juan mountains far above Telluride with warm camper and bikes in tow.




“Dirk” is a New Jersey entrepreneur who moved to Colorado six years ago, exchanged his suit and tie for fleece, and fell comfortably in love. I knew when we met at the hotsprings that he was a sensitive new age guy and not an axe murderer when he showed me beautiful close-ups of flowers in the tundra in the shadow of brilliant blue glaciers in high-alpine Alaska. No axe-murderer could pull off such reverence.

“Dirk” grew up in Massachusetts and had his first business at ten years old when gas was rationed during the crunch of ‘73/’74. Cars in Edison, New Jersey were lined up for miles bumper to bumper crawling at snails’ pace to the pumps. He “temporarily borrowed” a shopping cart and loaded it up with coffee and newspapers for the morning commuters. After spending a week in his company, I have a clear visual of this confident curly-red-haired, freckle-faced Jewish boy with a gift of the gab I’ve rarely seen the likes of, chatting up the drivers, telling a joke, bringing a little lightheartedness to an otherwise miserable situation. He’s been in business ever since. When he left the high-rises of Chicago for Colorado, he started a handyman service called “Rent-a-Man” in Glenwood Springs, grew it to a success, then gave it to his friend when he sold his house and hit the road with Ling. He now trades stocks, and is jokingly referred to by his friends as “I.W.” for “independently wealthy.”

As we both suspected, we’ve hit it off like a kid with A.D.D. (him) and sugar (I'm not nearly that sweet, but the analogy works).
It’s been almost too much fun. I honestly don’t know how much more beauty my eyes can take in and how much more levity my heart can absorb. On Sunday morning in Telluride, day 3 of the Blues and Brews Festival, we attended the church of Hazel Miller, a big, black, beautiful gospel singer who had the crowd praisin’ Jesus with her huge voice and the harmonies of a choir of angels. Just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any better, three local women in their late forties sitting next to us gleefully gobbled handfuls of magic mushrooms and began dancing up a braless and unbridled storm.

I saw the woman I want to be when I’m eighty. She was dressed in a white party dress with a knee-length chiffon skirt, accessorized with a silver belt and purple and pink feather armbands. Her long gray hair was pulled into a ponytail with a sparkly clip and her gorgeous tanned legs and feet were bare. She shimmied and swayed to the music, beaming a fluorescent smile at everyone as she passed through the crowd. Whenever a particularly energetic blues riff would explode, she would throw up her arms, whirl her hips, and wildly swing her ponytail in circles, spinning a vortex of mirth and merriness around herself.

Eight thousand people in Telluride gathered together in what I found to be as civilized a crowd I’ve ever been in, sampling local microbrews, passing peace pipes, listening to blues, dancing their fit Colorado butts off, and grinning stupid grins from ear to ear.
This is not the Bush’s America I expected to see.

Telluride is perhaps the most beautiful resort town I have ever been to, tucked movie-set perfect into its own box canyon at 8750 feet at the foot of its own perfectly dramatic falls. The weather forecast in the local paper made the prediction that it would be “slightly breezy” but “delightful” for the days of the festival. The sun, indeed, shone bright and hot in a perfect blue Colorado sky for three days solid.

I loved Henry Butler, who followed the worship session with some classic rockin’ blues, and Joan Osborne put on a great show with her sultry voice second from the end on Sunday night; but it was the Reverend Al Green who sent tingles down my spine with his thirteen band members wailing under the Telluride stars, dancing with the full moon and the big dipper and eight thousand happy Americans. I was healed.

We rode part of the “Million Dollar Highway” from Telluride to Silverton and back to our campsite high above the airport on Last Dollar Road with a view of priceless rolling ranchland and mountain valleys. The colors were changing before our eyes. Patches of reds and brilliant yellows burst forth spontaneously from the high altitude quaking aspen and pine forests. Radiant blue mountain jays bounced by on the breeze and red tailed hawks soared on the warm thermals. When we pulled up the first night after dark, our headlights caught the shadow of a male elk with a magnificent rack. He let out a powerful bugle into the night air, then herded his harem of thirty females toward the woods.

The only negative experience we had in Telluride was at the top of the gondola on Sunday night when we went to Allred’s for a glass of Cabernet and a light bite. While taking a long, critical head-to-toe look at the two of us, the well-groomed hostess caught a glimpse of my duct-taped left boot. “I’ll have to see if we have any tables,” she derided, turning away with a disdainful wave of her knee-length brushed leather jacket. We snickered into our leather and metal-bound menus when she sat us at one of many available window tables overlooking the lights of Telluride.

“Dirk” is now bouncing off the walls watching CNBC at his friend Ross’s place in the sage hills above Glenwood Springs. He owns oil and gas stocks, which, with the present news of Hurricane Rita approaching Texas, are going through the roof.

Henk’s got a slight electrical problem, probably from bouncing around in the hills above Telluride, and needs to be looked at carefully before we move on. I’ve given up trying to control anything these days, including my desires, and the ride is delightful. I'm feeling like a golden aspen leaf set alight on a warm Telluride breeze, unattached and free, awaiting the transformational hand of divinity.