2005-01-06 - 9:27 p.m.
When did it all begin? It began with a screaming newborn baby in a dream. This child was my sibling and despite my mature twenty-three (nearly twenty-four) years, this child roused in me all the natural jealousies of a first born. I woke praying for forgiveness between the waves of jealous rage: "Why didn't I get that?"
I woke with just enough time to leave for work without breakfast, a mistake even on the best days; but this day was not the best day and I needed breakfast.
Still stewing on the implausible dream my manager turned to me and asked whether I would mind going to work in Avon that day. (Avon is part of a string of ski resort towns nestled just below Vail Pass.) The Assistant Manager had to fly out that morning to pay a last visit to his grandfather; the Manager who would normally fill his place was on vacation; and "Sean"--whoever that was--was managing the office when he should have been sipping chicken broth in bed.
When your manager asks you this after contemplating a conversation he had with his boss you know the question does not allow room for options. He had selected me for some reason. I swallowed my million objections and slowly prepared to go.
I sat in three trucks before I found the one assigned to me--the dirtiest one, and the one with only a quarter tank to take me on a two and one half hour trek up the mountains. In the twenty minute drive across the valley I considered and reconsidered my options for fuel and breakfast--breakfast!--and time.
The radio was not playing well. Each station it seemed was not timed correctly. Turning that off, the stop lights flickered and I thought, "First I am hearing things; now I am seeing things." A quick jog into the grocery store to grab something cheap, I discovered I was not crazy.
People were crowded at the one open register in a hopeless ambiance. The customer, an elderly lady, leaned on the counter as if waiting. The cashier had her palms up, "I can't do anything," she explained to her manager. "I can't do price checks, or get into my cash drawer, and it will take five minutes to reboot the register." "I am sorry," she turned to me, "Lightening struck our building and it will be at least five minutes before we can operate." I took off still without any breakfast.
Out the door and up the mountain I drove. In Rifle I had to laugh as I drove through the McDonald's drive-thru, the very one where Stephanie and I had met David 19 months earlier. (I never thought I would stop there again.) The coffee and quiet of two plus hours refreshed me.
Once at Avon, I was useless. Sean was slumped over the desk managing two phone lines at a time for nearly fifteen minutes while I hopped around introducing myself to the resort lobby staff, waving or smiling encouragement to him, and doing very little to earn my paycheck. For the first couple minutes I looked more like an anxious customer than an employee because the desk, or "office", had hardly room enough for one. When Sean finally uncovered the second phone for me beneath a pile of contracts I was greeted by an irate customer, "Sean was supposed to be here an hour ago; it takes twenty minutes to get up to ------- where I am." What am I to say?
I hardly knew where I was, let alone where he was, and I knew, somehow, that giving me directions was not going to help. I reassured him we would be down as soon as Sean could describe the nutty turn-arounds to me. "No, not down, up," he yelled, "we're up at ----." It was then that I realized I didn't even know where this branch parked their cars. It was going to be a long day.
Amadu, it turned out, was picking up the customer. The West African Car Prep was so dark I had to look twice to see that he was not wearing black mittens. For the most part I smiled and agreed when he spoke, relying upon Sean for translation of the heavily accented English. "You don't understand what I said," as he read my face. "Nope," I had to confess one time.
Clearly attracted, one customer would not leave, so I just sold to him until he ran out of conversational topics. He was the second to describe the awful weather that came in behind me, causing a semi-truck to jack-knife in Glenwood Canyon and then be hit by the car behind it. To remove the truck dangling over the cliff caused a six-hour delay for East -bound traffic. In Eagle they closed down the highway due to weather. I was stuck.
The day was full of one weird episode after another. It flew by until Amadu and I drove to Frisco, another hour East into the mountains over Vail Pass. On our return we hit the the bad weather as night fell.
Two last deliveries to Vail and then I was without a car to drive home in. Amadu drove me to the Eagle airport to pick up a truck from the unwilling branch. I departed without ceremony from the Eagle airport at 7:10 pm.
This truck was also dirty and totally covered in snow. At the first stop light my windshield filled with snow that slid from the roof. I jumped out and brushed it off staring momentarily in horror at the remaining snow on the roof. The truck was too high for me to do anything about the hazard except wait. To get to the highway I had to drive through Gypsum where the same thing happened. It all came down this time, but I was hopping mad as I fish-tailed into the intersection that they were making me drive a pick-up on a sheet of ice in the dead of night.
Like on Rabbit Ears pass, the vehicles formed a line going at 30 mph. We crept together over the rough, unforgiving road for miles. It took me four hours to drive back home. Exhaustion curled around the edges of my mind, the music on the radio melted into monotonous sound, and my phone would not receive calls.
At last I was back in the parking lot crawling into my car. Ten more minutes, I repeated to myself, ten more minutes. The night was not over. Yellow ABS and Traction Control lights stared at me all the way back home. There I left everything in the car except my owner's manual and fell exhausted into bed. The first thing I would have to do in the morning was get my brakes fixed. If it snowed again I would not be able to get out of the driveway.
If Hell is a frozen point in Satan's ass, then Hell was somewhere in the Western Rockies last night and I was driving in it.
