One thing I’ve learned from this trip is, if you’re traveling without a car, you are at the mercy of other people’s plans. Another thing I’ve learned is that the unexpected directions a trip takes are often the best.
So was the case when Beki told me on Tuesday that she would be going to Colorado Springs on Wednesday rather than Thursday. I already had a Greyhound ticket booked for Thursday night, and was unable to change it, so that left me with a mad scramble to beg a last-minute favor of someone. After a bit of debate, I decided I’d be most comfortable calling up Lisabet, who hosted me last week. She sounded a bit hesitant on the phone, but gave me the go-ahead.
On Wednesday, after a morning of washing/bagging salad greens and picking three dozen bunches of beets (I love it— my hands were soaked in pink juice and I grinned every time a beet pulled free of the earth with a satisfying pop), we were off to make the deliveries, sailing along a ridge with valleys leading up to solid blue mountains on either side. She dropped me off in Colorado Springs, and wished me happy trails.
The library was my hang-out spot for the next few hours, but at 8:45 I found myself plunking down into the back seat of Lisabet’s white clunker car, safe from the rain that pounded through the lamplight.
The evening was, in a word, bliss. Lisabet gave me a bagel with almond butter for supper, we had a conversation about travel and family and teaching and culture, and then we sprawled on the floor and read picture books aloud to each other until we were both so tired we were nearly falling asleep on the Steven Kellog illustrations.
I slept deeply that night, and woke up refreshed and ready to face a new day. At 11:00, Lisabet took me to the newest project of a volunteer art organization called Concrete Couch. The project? Covering the ugly concrete columns in front of a business center with earth-toned mosaics. Within ten minutes I was busy breaking donated kitchen tile with a special lever machine, discussing color schemes and patterns with Lisabet, and slopping around gray mortar the consistency of thick icing with a pallet knife. Three other volunteers helped out, and to my surprise, one of them bought us all gourmet pizza, salad, and cubes of dessert! We all paused, sponging the mortar off our palms, and sat in the sunlight while raindrops pattered around us. The clouds looming overhead just couldn’t make up their mind what they wanted to do.
We ended up working for almost four hours, and Lisabet and I completed a good little chunk of tile rows. My pants were spattered in dried mortar and flecks of crushed tile, damp from sitting on the wet concrete, and I managed to spill some mortar dust all over my shoes. I felt grungy but exuberant, and as I looked at the neat little rows of earth-toned tile, I thought, I’ve left a bit of myself in Colorado. And it made me happy.
On the way out, Lisabet ran into one of her friends, a guy named Jonas whose ridiculously-patched pants, sky-blue fingernails, cloth-scrap bracelets and messy blonde hair screamed “artist.” He invited us in for tea, and we walked into the most unique dwelling I’ve ever seen.
Jonas led us to a giant corrogated metal warehouse that hung out by the train tracks, covered in neon graffiti. Rusty trains chugged by, rattling my molars as we stepped inside a door and wound through a workshop area filled with grit-covered tools, spare parts, old bicycles, and a plastic skeleton hanging from a noose, and entered a door that led to a back room. I stepped inside, and stepped into a different world.
Jonas and two girls shared a room with a twenty-foot ceiling, no plumbing, and no windows, but transformed into a surreal fairy-tale land. The walls leaped out at me with amazing cartoon artwork sprawled in every spare inch, interspersed with designs made of nails and string, black-and-white cereal-box masks, children’s book covers, slogans written in marker and Russian, strands of Christmas lights, and random half-finished slashes of plum-colored paint.
As I spun slowly in awe, Jonas made us hot chocolate flavored with green tea bags— a combination that worked surprisingly well. I sat on the white shag carpet and sipped the tea-chocolate and talked with Lisabet and Jonas and his roommate Courtney about couchsurfing and art and travel and backgrounds, my head spinning with the clutter of wonderful art splattered over the walls, which I found out were all Jonas’s. We only stayed a little while, but the image of that magical corner of the warehouse by the tracks will stay in my memory forever.
Lisabet drove me back to the house, helped me pack up a pasta salad for supper, then drove me over to Sondermann Park. Conversation on the way over? A discussion about values, hypocrisy, and dumpster-diving.
When I said good-bye to Lisabet, I felt an overwhelming sense of inspiration. She has inspired me in so many ways— through her open heart and home, her incredible generosity, and her love of blanket forts and mosaics and card-making parties and children’s books and people.
Euphoric, I wandered through the rugged fields and hills of Sondermann Park, through flaxen-colored grass, sharp against the red gravel of the trails and the rusty earth beneath. Stark gray bushes dotted the hills, and I glimpsed twin deer with velvety antler buds, who stared at me curiously until their mother appeared and hurried them up the hill. I climbed to the ridge of the highest hill and gazed out at the mountains: verdant with pine in the foreground, twilight blue in the middle ground, with one snow-spattered peak drifting above the others. The swatches of white and gray cloud still couldn’t decide whether or not to rain, and slashes of pure springtime blue lit up the sky.
Once again, I was stunned. “How am I even here?” I said aloud. “How did I even get here? How has a month gone by already?” And I laughed, and I jogged down the trail, and I wandered the trails through a forest of oak and cottonwood beside a joyful muddy creek, and the sky was extremely blue, and the babble of the brook was music, and at one point I just took off my backpack and laid down in the middle of the trail, feeling the warm earth against my back, and smiled.
It’s been a good day.
~Lisa Shafter
Money spent today: $0, thanks to various people’s incredible generosity.
Deficit: $15.27
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