Because I could not stop for death/She kindly stopped...

Okay--truthfully?

Maybe the best part about almost dying is not getting a new car, last post aside.

It's the coming back to life part.

This is a slow process that I'm speaking of, gradual, like falling in love with someone shy. It may take years, even. I tangle with death as I sleep through yet another day, in bed with no visitors. I sigh, forlorn, looking out the window at the sun as it falls across the spruce trees. I wrestle with the shell of my former life, now empty of all of the places I used to go, people I used to see, things I used to fill it up with in the name of keeping busy.

What is left?

Freedom. Like making it onto the plane just before they close the cabin doors. Like getting the heck out of dodge.

Maybe I exaggerate a little about the almost dying part; some would say no, but who could tell really? Maybe I wasn't actually that close to what Mary Oliver calls "the cloud-boat" in that moment when my car was hit. No doubt, though--I was living, before the accident, under death's thumb day by day, wasting away.

If something good comes from tragedy

I get a shiny new car. Not brand new, but new to me.

My head is still spinning, I am extremely exhausted, and I feel like I’m going to puke or pass out, maybe both. But still, there is this Subaru Impreza before me, pulsing and gleaming in the July heat the way no car has ever done before. I imagine I know what a 16-year-old boy with a new sports car must feel like. Here she is, perfect and dentless and royal blue, only very gently worn. My body fits her seats like favorite clothes. Her engine doesn’t rev, it laughs.

Rose. I shall call her Rose, The Blue Flame.

Rose and I shall venture now, off into a new life.

Approaching

Now we have come to the stars.

Beside me, Jenarden speaks of a solar electric system in Hooper that runs on 800 million watts.

Huh?

But I make no effort to ask him.

Instead, my mind is drifting out. Past the solar electricity, past the solar system. I am hushed and dazzled by dark, where stars surface around us the way divers rise. I'm in a jar of night stirred through with diamonds. I am plugged in to eternity.

Scorpio climbs on the right.

Everyone says this when they come to Crestone: "I never knew there were so many stars." I would add, "or so much beauty in this world."

Riding

Curves of empty highway wend through the silk of dusk. We pass an antelope grazing on the right, and I think of the elk we saw earlier. With the next curve, the silver of water lays across the basin below us the way ribbons blow across a woman's hair. The Rockies, the San Juans, the Sangre de Cristos--peak follows peak on every side. We are wrapped in mountains.

In the front seat, Shivdhun is eating popcorn. He bought a 24" bag where a tall, skinny cowboy blasts his pistol at the zigzag opening of the paper. Just inside the cowboy's lasso, the words: "Texas-sized popcorn." Barbara asks Shivdhun, "Is your arm long enough to make it to the bottom of that bag?"

We passed the Dinky Dairy just a few miles back.

In a few hours, we'll be in Crestone.