"Happy Birthday, Daddy." Jessie woke me with a kiss on the cheek.
"Hey."
"How are you feeling?"
I sat up, winced, stretched, winced again. "Like I went ten rounds with a cement mixer." I rolled my neck, rotated my arms, worked the stiffness out of my upper body and then stood, nearly fell over. New aches and pains had taken up residence in my bones and muscles and I wasn't prepared for that.
"You're an old man," my lover said with a giggle.
I flipped her the bird. "It's not the years, it's the mileage."
"Ok, Indy."
I relieved myself - yup, pissing blood - and checked out my torso in the mirror after tenderly shrugging my shirt off. I looked like an alien I was so many different colors. Purple and red and yellow mostly. The reds were a wild variety of shades, and the yellows were sickly. My face wasn't too bad. Not a lot better, but I'd protected it enough I didn't look like I'd made out with a meatgrinder.
I changed clothes and Jessie changed my bandages and we woke McKenna. "Rise and shine, sleepyhead," Jessie above, perched above her on all fours.
The little programmer blinked, stretched, groaned. "Still tired."
"Time to get some grub and some coffee. We've got a forest to see today. And some mountains I think."
"Must we?"
"Might as well," I told her. "It's on the way home."
Granby was a tourist trap on a bay, struggling to decide if it was a marina or a quaint woodsy village, and failing at everything except disrupting a pristine view. They should've just leaned into the tourist trap, it would feel so falsely forced then.
We pushed through crowds of people, waited ages for coffee and donuts, then packed up and started driving again. The roads were thin and winding, cut along ridges, climbing up and down valleys, the homes getting poorer and poorer the farther we got from the town. Eventually, the woods took over completely, only the occasionally trailer or shack appearing deep between the trees. It was beautiful. Pristine. Even with the other cars climbing into the Rockies with us, it felt undisturbed.
The mountains were close, like if you got out and started walking, just over that ridge and another one over there, you'd be able to reach up and touch the peak.
It was wildly beautiful.
We traded off driving responsibilities. My body was still tired, still knitting itself back together, so the girls took some of the time behind the wheel, navigating the tight roads and tight turns with skill, weaving the big vehicle up the steep roads from one lookout point to another. Higher and higher we climbed across and through and up the mountains. The lookouts got more and more epic further we drove, our field of view getting father and deeper. The views stretched for miles out and what felt like miles down, green living trees and brown dead ones carpeting the rising and falling landscape.
It felt like a single step would take us irrevocably into that wilderness. More than any park we'd visited, the Rockies felt close and accessible.
"Are you sure you want a picture taken?" McKenna asked as Jessie and I nuzzled noses against a picturesque rock restraining wall overlooking trees growing up from the base of a cliff.
"Why wouldn't we?" Jessie seemed confused.
"Cuz Gary looks like a worn out punching bag?"
"Still want to remember that I was here with him."
The shutter clicked on Jessie's cellphone, once, then twice more in quick succession. "Picture with you guys?"
I grinned. "You can only make me look better."
We ate lunch at the rest stop high up in the mountains. Half observatory, half gift shop and cafeteria, it provided McKenna a perfect opportunity to load up on candy. We munched on grilled cheese and hot chocolate, and I asked her how she stayed so small.
"Squats. Deadlifts. Lunges. Lots of them. Makes me nice and round in some places, nice and slim in others." She batted her eyes at us. "You should try it, Jess."
"Daddy likes me just the way I am. Besides, no amount of squats will give me tits like yours. That's what I'd really want."
I pulled Jessie against me and kissed her hair. "Don't change. I think you're hot."
"Daddy thinks I'm hot." She giggled and made cat ears with her hands and took another bite of her sandwich.
This far up in the mountains there was snow on the ground and at a stop-off overlooking a deep valley and frigid lake, we took the opportunity to have a brief snowball fight. I won, of course, superior skill with projectiles overriding my lack of mobility due to injury. It was funny to watch the girls dodge snowballs, laugh at the impacts, and then hustle back to the truck for hot chocolate.
The changes in environment were drastic. Snow-covered peaks and valleys fogged by clouds mingled with sparse, rocky fields blasted with chilling winds gave way after a short drive to thick, luscious pine forests and far warmer temps. And everything was accessible - far more than Yellowstone, it felt like if you crossed that stream, or took two steps off that path, you'd be alone on another mountain. The park felt close and immediate and I loved it. I couldn't see myself living in Colorado with all the hippies and the busybodies, but maybe Wyoming. Maybe if this world kept going to shit I'd find myself a nice quiet corner of the mountains and let it all burn down and explode off in the distance.
"Can you stop at the next pull-off that has a restroom?"Jessie asked sweetly, interrupting my musings of relocation.
"Sure. I could stand to stretch my legs a little bit too."
The next cluster of brown restrooms was down in the sunny, summery valley between ridges, and I parked in the deserted lot and got out with the girls. I rolled my neck and glanced around at the wild environment. I'd been white-knuckling it through a couple of mountain turns that looked barely big enough to allow the SUV, much less the campers and trucks that kept trying to pass me, and my shoulders were knotted up with tension and my legs felt like I needed a run. I was too sore for that, but I could take a nice little nature walk whole Jessie was in the bathroom. I locked the SUV, beeped it a couple times in confirmation. We were alone at this out-of-the-way stop, I could go for a brief walk, leave the girls with the vehicle.
"I'm just gonna take that path for a couple hundred yards while you're in there," I told Jessie "I just need to stretch my legs a bit, those turns are killer."
"Can I come with you?" McKenna piped up.
I shrugged. "Sure. Jess, you want us to stay here until you're out?"
She rolled her eyes and looked around. "Seriously? I'm good. Security provided by Sig Sauer."She lifted the hem of her shirt to show me the butt of her Three Twenty.
