St. Mary’s Glacier, Colorado
Stories you don’t tell the kids
Got home to a gorgeous dusk tonight, after watching a disappointing 2-2 tie by the US Women’s Soccer Olympic team in a game with Columbia.
Had to take my buddy Boie for a walk a few hours later than usual, but walking in the warm moonlight brought back memories.
As a young man, I regularly walked at exactly this time of night – heading to friends’ houses, parties, bars, Crest Pool – and used to be a fairly hard core fellow.
As I walked in the moonlit woods, I recalled an adventure back in the summer/fall of 1976.
My 1975-76 freshman year at college in an engineering program was sort of a disaster, so, knowing I wasn’t going back in the fall for my sophomore year, when I got home in May I took a job as a landscape laborer.
That intense work got old real fast and one night, at 3 am, after a night of hard drinking, a High School friend announced he was heading west tomorrow to live with his brother in Denver. I asked to tag along, he agreed.
With no sleep, I gathered a sleeping bag, a bag of clothes, and a few hundred bucks I had in cash and we left at dawn, still drunk as skunks.
The Denver scene was incredible – rocky mountain high and all that jive. But my friend’s brother and his housemates were major cocaine dealers and the house was a regional distribution center.
Routine after work party began every night with an ounce baggie of coke on the table for the 5 of us – and that was just before the party started!
The 3 guys who lived there (coke dealers) and my friend had day jobs, and I was the only one not working or contributing. One of the guys would lend me his car and I would drive to the mountains in an old Triumph TR 5 and see the sights. But after a few months, that got old and I sensed folks were not OK with my freeloading.
So, I decided to get a job. I spent my last $20 on a uniform (black pants and shoes) for a McDonalds job. I lasted less than 4 hours there on my first day – I quit after a few hours of the “training” videos.
The next day, I decided to leave and head west coast – good thing I did, because I later learned that the house was robbed by competing coke dealers with shotguns!
I had $5 bucks in my pocket, a bottle of peanut butter, and a loaf a bread in a backpack with my sleeping bag as I set out on I-70 west hitchhiking to the west coast.
I managed a ride later in the day from a bunch of hippies, headed to trip at a place called St. Mary’s Glacier.
I asked to tag along and was welcomed by the group. We dropped either blotter or mescaline (I forget) in the car and I was seeing bended light by the time we got to the trailhead.
We hiked in and up to the glacier. After partying around a campfire, it got cold as hell and we crashed. I had short pants and a tee shirt on. All I remember is that is snowed several inches and I awoke with my cotton sleeping bag on fire because I got too close to the fire.
I set out west the next morning and managed to make it as far as Grand Junction. Burnt out and with just $5 bucks and a loaf of bread, I decided to bag the west coast dream and head back east.
It took me a week to make New York, where I crashed for a few weeks at a College house of 2 good friends attending Fredonia College in upstate NY.
Amazing what a warm summer night and lovely moon can do to a guy!
(and all this was before I met my friend Karen Bacal, who would later attend Boulder U. –
[Update: I sometimes called Karen “Margaret”. Her favorite song was Angel From Montgomery (Bonnie Raitt version)