I drove straight over a Colorado Mountain

Have you ever been in a place, fully figuring you'll never return to it again - and then, later in your life, found yourself back there again for a reason you could never have foreseen, or with a person you hadn't even met, the first time around? This is a story kind of about that...

Spring of 1994. I had PLENTY-O-TIME to reach my lecture engagement, which started at 4 PM in Alamosa, Colorado. And it was the easiest navigating in the world. Leave Denver at noon. Drive straight down I25, turn right at Walsenburg, and drive straight into Alamosa on 160. Estimated time of arrival: Two hours early.

I'm cruising along I25 at a pretty good pace in a sporty rent-a-car, immensely enjoying some blaring music, when suddenly all that is good about life collapsed instantly at the sight of red and blue flashing lights in my rear view. The officer responded to my pleading with a $185 speeding ticket that I really couldn't afford. I was so depressed.

In a matter of minutes, I was in Walsenburg where I needed to turn right. But I also needed to fill up the car, so I pulled into the gas station/convenience store. Because I'd just gotten the ticket, the price of the gas, which rolled higher and higher as I filled my tank, was killing me. I went in to pay my fifteen dollars owed, and saw no one in the store. I grabbed an orange juice while I waited. Still, no one was in the store. They must have been in the back. I continued to wait for about five minutes, repeatedly calling out, "Hello!" "Hello!" And then I got a bad idea... "Walk out without paying. After all, you could use the savings since you just got a $185 ticket." It felt wrong, and I hesitated to do it, but my thoughts continued to convince me, "Whoever works here doesn't even deserve your money. They are not even doing their job of being in the store."

I walked quickly and nervously to my car, and hit the gas. I turned right and zoomed down the road. I was completely and totally flustered. For the next half hour, I just kept flying over ups and downs, and twists and turns, fleeing from an imagined pursuer. Then I settled down and tried to put the bad deed behind me.

I was driving through gorgeous country. Central-Western Colorado is a magnificent display of towering mountains, golden meadows, and green valleys, and it is almost uninhabited. Maybe once every twenty minutes I would pass a farmhouse set far back from the road. Maybe. After a while, I was mesmerized and soothed by the beauty around me and I lost track of time. When I started keeping track of time again, I noticed that I'd been driving for well over an hour, but hadn't seen a single sign mentioning Alamosa. Come to think of it, according to the sun, I was heading not west, as I should be, but north. I had a very bad feeling about the right turn I had made while fleeing the scene of my crime.

I checked the time; it was 2:30 p.m. With my lecture beginning in an hour and a half, I didn't have much time to work with. And I didn't have a map. I had said no to the map they offered me at the rent-a-car company because the driving instructions were so simple, but now I really needed a map. I hadn't passed a house OR CAR for twenty minutes. Then I rounded a corner and saw it ahead in the distance: an RV. I crushed the gas pedal to the floor and raced the car up to 120 MPH. I caught up fast. I began flashing my headlights - but it was daytime. I honked my horn - but what would that mean to the driver? So I pulled up beside the driver, completely over the yellow line, and tried signaling him to pull over. He was frightened by my mad gestures and waved me off. His wife looked frightened also. They would not pull over on their own accord, so I exercised my last resort. I raced my car far ahead of them, and then brought it to a screeching halt and a road block position. I jumped out and put my body between my auto and theirs. They were bombing down on me at sixty miles per hour. I knew they'd stop, and they did. I approached them with my hands in sort of a surrender position.

I was horrified when I saw their map. I had taken a wrong right turn in Walsenburg and there was not enough time to go back and correct my course. Worse yet, there were no roads that would provide the short cut I desperately needed, except for a brown-dashed line that started at Gardner CO, went thru Red Wing and intersected with 160. We looked at the map's index and confirmed that a brown-dashed line on the map indicated a service road. I tried to buy the map off of my RV helpers, but they needed it too much. Before parting ways, I did my best to memorize the route.

It was no simple task to find the brown-dashed line in real life. There were no road signs or landmarks - just fields and streams. After back-tracking for 15 minutes, I came to the dirt road, just before Gardner, that I guessed to be the brown-dashed line. I proceeded down a long and bumpy road that was lined with a barbed wire fence. At the end of the road was one of those small aluminum pull trailers from the nineteen fifties that looks like a can of Spam on wheels. It had markings on it that declared, "Red Wing Post Office." Apparently, Red Wing was a town because, in addition to a post office, there was a house. I pulled up to the house and knocked on the door. Dogs barked and a woman in a bathrobe emerged. From behind the screen door, she listened as I explained my need to find the service road that would get me to Alamosa. She looked beyond me to my sporty rent-a-car, and said, "That's what you're driving? There is a dirt road goes right over that mountain." she said pointing to a snow covered peak of at least 10,000 feet. And then she directed me to the service road entrance by saying, "Just drive down to the end of the fence and turn right. The road'll wind around a couple corners and then head straight over. Good luck."

There were two roads near the end of the fence, and it was hard to know where the fence ended, or was supposed to end, because actually the fence just sort of disintegrated near the end. This caused me to guess which road she considered to be "at the end of fence." I guessed the first dirt road, and I drove on it, over bumps and through water-filled dips. As I wrestled with the steering wheel, a song appeared in my head, "Over hill. Over dale, we will hit the dusty trail, as those caissons go rolling along." (I have no idea what a caisson is, so don't ask).

The road began a steep ascent up the mountain, and never rescinded. I was extremely nervous and anxious: "What if I miss my lecture?? I've never missed a talk before. I'll lose my $2000 speaking fee. I won't be able to pay bills! How long will this road take??" My mind wouldn't stop screaming in panic. I had that whole body hot flash you get when you almost crash your car - but mine wasn't going away. I needed relief, so I punched on the radio. I swear to the heavens, this is the song that came out: The Beach Boys singing, "I want to go home. Let me go home. Yeah yeah. Hoist up the sails boys, I wanna go home." It tortured me more, so I shut it off immediately. Yet another example of Voltaire's observation, "God is a comic playing to an audience that's  to laugh."

Outside my windows, which were increasingly being covered with splashing mud, there were no signs of civilization - only trees and rocks. And then SNOW. After going uphill for what seemed like a long time, I hit the snow line in spring time. That's how high up on this mountain I was. And my car began sliding and slipping. I could picture a search and rescue crew finding me after a blizzard, digging me out after I'd been trapped for a week, and asking me right off the bat, "What were you thinking when you rented a sports car??" I just knew my car was going to slide off the mountain road, and get stuck between two trees. I don't carry a cell phone.

It was 3:35 already and downhill was nowhere in sight. I was thinking I'd guessed the wrong road at the end of the fence. Maybe I wasn't on the brown-dashed line. Maybe I was on a jackass trail. And then I navigated around a slippery bend in the road, and saw a downhill straightaway of road that intersected with a highway - the highway I was looking for, 160! I've never been so excited to see a highway before, or since, in my life. There was a construction crew at the highway intersection. They told me Alamosa was 30 minutes down the road. I jammed on the gas hoping I could make it in less than 20 minutes. I fully expected that I would probably get ANOTHER SPEEDING TICKET. I knew Karma was going to catch up with me.

But I didn't get a ticket, and somehow I raced into the campus parking lot at 4:01 PM. With a heavy shoulder bag and a suitcase in tow, I ran frantically into the first building searching desperately for where my event was being held. My host appeared out of nowhere and quickly escorted me backstage. I was sweating profusely and out of breath. I could hear the audience talking and rumbling. My host said he'd try to do an extra-long introduction to give me a chance to catch my breath. About two minutes later, I was on stage, still trembling with nerves. The time was ten after four. "It's so important to have a roadmap to success..." I began.

And then life took an even stranger twist. After my talk, my host invited me to attend the college's basketball game. A student, who had attended my lecture, sat down beside me, and struck up a conversation with me about his dream job - airline pilot. And then he invited me to go flying with him the next morning (which I had available), because he already had his flying license and was constantly trying to log more hours. Up into the Colorado sky we flew - which was a great thrill to me being that it was the first time I'd ever been in a two-seater plane. We flew low to the ground, high above the tree tops, over Colorado's Great Sand Dunes National Monument, and... over the mountain. I could not believe my very eyes - we were flying over the brown-dotted line road that horrified me less than twenty four hours before - my pilot informed me that it was called the Laveta Pass. We flew on and swooped down over the Spam-can Post Office, and then circled back over the great mountain range. My pilot could not believe the actual route I had driven. Neither could I.

I felt greatly ashamed that I stole from the gas/convenience store. I stopped on the drive back home and paid them the money and gave them an apology. Luckily they were forgiving, but it was a terrible way to try and compensate for my speeding ticket. I feel I paid far more than $15 in stress and gray hair that day, and I believe that you can't steal without later having something stolen from you (and I have). But if I learned anything from the experience (besides not to steal), it's this: One bad event can trigger another unless you're quick to accept your responsibility and change your attitude.

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