The first stop on the Million Dollar Highway was Box Canyon Falls. Whole trees jammed one spillway; whole hillsides had been softened by floods. Then up and over the Million Dollar Highway to Silverton, where I bought a rock.
I always get a rock for Haitch, or usually. This time it had entirely slipped my mind through Copper Creek and Black Canyon because I suck. Then, as we crunched through Silverton (which, like Ouray, has one paved road, or none because it was being resurfaced at the time), we saw a rock stand.
Ages ago in Denver we saw what would have been the perfect photograph if it had been possible to capture the image without its subject's notice. A shorty, nowhere near 10, had a lemonade stand on his corner lot. Apparently business wasn't brisk, because his expression rivaled Puddleglum's for pessimism.
These kids were too young to be discouraged. I think. If the older was even five, I'll eat my hat. They were dazzlingly towheaded and fairly shone out of the empty lot where they had set up shop. It looked an unlikely spot as we drove by, but I hadn't noticed the traintracks like a spine in the road. RDC said, "You should get Haitch a rock." Oh yeah.
So we investigated the rail station (the Saybrook train station looked only slightly less decrepit last time I looked) and looked at some old rail cars (including one ambulance car still running on a 1918 Cadillac automobile engine) and then looked through town. We looked into the town hall (which has a great dome I would have photographed if there hadn't been a jumbo potted tree directly under the rotunda) and the one-time prison and now museum. Repeating our strange new habit of poking around town, we did that, which is basically the historic walking tour. This jaunt also included its Carnegie library, which was just fine, especially its nonfiction room in the basement.
Upstairs, I spotted a book I showed to RDC to rival the legendary Tact for Dummies: Virgin Planet, a seeming combination of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland and...that short story that's a twist on the saying "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" (the blind doctors want to remove from his face the one or two bulging, soft tumors that they are sure are causing his dementia). The back cover matter of Planet proclaimed an astronaut's crash landing somewhere that had been man-less for 300 years. Apparently this man faced the same difficulties Taylor does on the Planet of the Apes. Lord. (Of course now I regret not borrowing it, but please, it's bad enough I interrupt Goldbug Variations with Second Summer of the Sisterhood. I don't need to encourage myself.)
So anyway. I made sure to walk by the two young entrepeneurs. They had wee little chairs by a wooden crate. The older pawed through the bills and change they'd collected in a coffee mug, probably not yet having mastered arithmetic (or maybe he or they had: they were businessmen). So I asked the younger, "Where do your rocks come from?"
"The mine." Duh. They were clearly not from the empty lot behind him.
"How much are your rocks?"
He began to pick up rocks from the array on the crate. "This one...is two dollars," putting it down and randomly picking up another hunk of granite, "and this one...is two dollars and fifty cents,"...pausing as in Godot's "Endgame" before picking up, with difficulty, the largest of the rocks about the size of my fist, "and this one...is five dollars..."
I had already picked out the one I wanted, a yellow quartz, so I touched it and asked how much that one was.
"A quarter."
I managed to stifle my laughter until I was around the corner and in the car again. That was the funniest thing of the whole trip.
The funnest part of the whole trip was next. Back up and more down to Ouray, north of Ouray to a not-quite-town called Orvis. We were looking for Orvis Hot Springs. Our aim was County Road 3 off State Route 550. Believe me when I say these were driveway-level turn-offs. We saw a sign that said "Orvis Springs" and thought that was it.
It was not. The sign actually said "Orvis Springs Inc. Custom Meat Processing." We thought, for heaven's sake, all we want to do is soak. Where do they get their meat anyway? And we drove up a long driveway that probably also counted as a county road and passed a shed outside of which stood a frame with a grate set into the ground below. I recognized it not because it looked like anything I've seen in (pictures of) slaughterhouses but because it was a larger version of the game room in the kitchens of Chenonceau. I know you hang small game for a day or two to facilitate dressing, but these were elk- (or human-) size hooks. We had turned to hightail it the hell out of there as a man approached us on a tractor (which we could outrun, as long as his other brother Daryl didn't show up wielding a chainsaw, because believe me, the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" jokes kept coming). The man, with the weary smile of one who has had to deal with this once too often, directed us back out to the state road and to the next turn-off.
It's easy to miss Orvis Hot Springs because it's in a little dell and its privacy fences are cloaked in green. It needs the privacy fences because, praise be, the entire outdoor area is clothing-optional.
We spent the next three hours in a 40' long, four- to five-foot-deep, pebble-bottomed, 99- to 102-degree pond, surrounded by mountains, sage, hollyhocks, sunflowers, cottonwoods, and willow, occasionally being rained on, moving now closer and now farther from a plume that fed in unadulterated, hot, mineral (but not sulphury) water, and we did this unimpeded by the known carcinogen that is a bathing suit.
And the next day we went home.