Reading: Iris Murdoch, Under the Net Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

Moving: Walked 4 miles

4 August 2001: Mountains, no meat

That's a line from The Robber Bride. Charis hears someone is trying to cure herself of cancer on her own, without Western medical intervention, and Charis mentally checks off, "Mountains, no meat," and the phrase, for whatever reason, amuses me. I'm the one who can laugh at "No soap, radio!" so obviously this is meaningless.

By the time we got around to trying to make reservations to camp last week, which was Tuesday, there were no sites left anywhere we wanted to be. So instead we partook of executive camping, which happens in a hotel and involves running hot water and a real mattress.

When we checked into the lodge, RDC checked in and I checked out the lobby. It has large dead animals in it. Meat trophies like deer and elk, non-regular-but-edible meat trophies like bighorn sheep and mountain goats, all heads dating from the first decades of the last century. Of dubious taste, but old enough. What offended me was two bears, polar and Alaskan brown--nothing you're likely to slaughter in the Colorado mountains--and killed in 1971 and '73.

On the way to the room, I seethed about this to RDC, who wondered at how unlike it is to voice my displeasure. He asked if I'd taken a marker to the bears, then reflected that my usual reason for a marker, a misused or missing apostrophe, was not these bears' problem. Their problematic punctuation was the parenthesis: "and death i think is no parenthesis."

We had reserved a kayak on Grand Lake, but when Saturday dawned cloudy we ditched that idea. Grand Lake is maybe 55 on its most generous day. In late summer, when it's that warm, and the weather is similarly hot, I can swim in that, if not happily, at least content that it's the cleanest and only natural water in the state. When it's cloudy, I have no wish to sit about in a boat in damp clothes in the teeth of a stiff breeze and the jaws of glacial melt. So we bailed.

Instead we induled in hot sulphur springs in, wait for it, Hot Sulphur Springs Resort in the town of, wait for it, Hot Sulphur Springs. The only flaw was that bathing suits were required. Otherwise it was lovely. There were 22 pools, mostly small, for two or three people, ranging in temperature from 90 to 112 degrees. My favorite was, surprise surprise, the coolest, 90 to 94, for two comfortably or three familiarly, at the top of the slope overlooking the Colorado River (about 40 feet wide, maybe three feet deep under its banks) and the Continental Divide. I soaked in it and read Irish Murdoch and marveled at how stupid I was not to have removed my silver bracelet, which now looks copper, and eventually hardly noticed the smell. That much. My second favorite pool was the largest, long enough for three strokes of breast stroke, breast stroke because it was about 18 inches deep and I didn't want to get my hair in anyway. Two sides of its rectangle were built into the slope, showing the original cave Ute Indians sheltered in while using the springs, and over the long side fell a waterfall much hotter than the mean pool temperature of 108. I did manage to get all the way--up to my ears, at least--into the 112 degree pool, though only for a few minutes.

Afterward we walked up, and up, and up some more, from the lodge to the little ski area of Silver Creek or Solvista or whatever it's called now. We looked at real estate listings and went into a model home just because, though I'd rather live in a real small town and not a resort one where the postal carriers and schoolteachers can't afford to be. When we would leave Aspen on a Monday morning and drive down valley to I-70, the upstream traffic would be chockful of, not skiers, but the service workers who were not deliberately poor so they could ski, like my sister and her friends, but the actual low-income people who lived 40 miles from their jobs. Still, it was a lovely walk.