The Most Spectacular Drive So Far

Linda is having her dialysis in Grand Junction, CO, as I write this, at a very fine DaVita center. As I walked in to visit her, wearing one of those white paper coats they give you to protect patients from infection, a grizzled man two chairs down barked at me, "Hey! Come here!" I did. "You a doctor?" he asked. "I wish," I replied. (Linda said I missed a great opportunity to say yes and see how far I could go with it.) He grilled me with questions for a couple of minutes before chirping, "My name is O'Flaherty--I'm a German Jew!" I said, "I can call that bluff and raise--I'm a Russian Jew who married an Irish woman!" That passed muster with him. "Oh, you're all right then," he growled, reminding me of Walter Brennan in "To Have and Have Not" telling Lauren Bacall she's all right when she beats him to the punch answering his favorite line: "Was you ever bit by a dead bee?" Having passed his test, I went over to Linda's chair, and a moment later a Native American, also a stranger to the unit, entered for his dialysis treatment. "Hey!" the grizzled man yelled at him "Are you in Indian?" That was a rhetorical question, since the young man had brought with him several feather headdresses. Linda and I talked with him; he's an Ogallala Sioux who makes those prayer feathers. Two were made from owl feathers and the other, spectacularly colored, was made of macaw feathers from Brazil.  I wonder how many prayer feathers we'll see at Linda's next two dialysis treatments, which will be at Tuba City, AZ, on the Navajo reservation.

This has been a great day already. We left Steamboat Springs around 8am for a 200-mile drive, taking Highway 131 south through Yampa and down to I-70. The two-lane road wound through valleys, ranches, and red rocks, but the high point was seeing about 100 vintage cars heading north for a rally that our friend Terry is also attending somewhere in eastern Colorado. It was a fantastic array of cars, including the little red one going uphill whose driver saw us just a couple of hundred yards ahead of him but went ahead and zipped past a slower vehicle anyway, darting into his own lane with twenty yards to spare. Welcome to the Wild West, folks!

I was eager to take Linda through Glenwood Canyon, arguably the most scenic drive on any interstate highway. The canyon runs for about twenty miles, mostly east of Glenwood Springs, and was especially magnificent today with sprays of yellow aspen in the hills. The road seems tiny at the base of the high, red-rock canyon walls that tower over the Colorado River, which runs alongside the road. It's a spellbinding road, and Linda was appropriately blown away by it. The only negative is that there's only one rest area along that stretch of road--that is, no safe spots along the shoulder where you can pull over and gawk at leisure--but I did take five photos at that rest area.

We got to Grand Junction a little before noon, about 40 minutes before Linda's starting time, and found a picnic table in the shade where we had a bite to eat before going to the dialysis center. Soon after she began her treatment, a thunderstorm passed through, with lightning and heavy rain. It has been raining lightly on and off ever since, and that's the forecast for Moab, UT, where we're heading as soon as she gets out of here. I wanted her see the day's last light tonight  in Arches National Park just outside of Moab, but you need sunshine to get the full effect, and it's iffy whether we'll catch good light. She'll be out of here by 5pm, it's a two-hour drive to Moab, and the sunset is at 7:32, so we at least have a chance at that spectacular view if the sky cooperates. Maybe we should have our new Ogallala-Sioux friend say a prayer for our rain-free travels. But this is already a great day thanks to that morning drive and everything else going smoothly.