THE PALE LIGHT OF SUNSET: SCATTERSHOTS AND HALLUCINATIONS IN AN IMAGINED LIFE

The Dude - 1961

112 1961 The Dude In the winter of my twenty-fifth year I raise my hand during a philosophy lecture at a university in Colorado and ask to be excused. I never go back. I go to my room at a boarding house, pack a small gray duffle bag and catch a bus for El Paso, then change my mind and get off in Walsenburg , Colorado. I hitch-hike west to Crested Butte, a town of some 300 people caught in a time warp. The road ends in Crested Butte; once there, there is no place else to go. For fifty dollars I rent an abandoned shack on Maroon Avenue, a single-lane dirt street beside the creek. The fifty dollars pays for the rest of the winter. I nail up the holes in the walls and heat the place with a small wood stove, burning scraps of lumber I dig from beneath the deep drifts out back. The snow from the high-mountain Colorado winter drifts to the eaves of the house, forming a blanket of insulation that my small stove gradually melts back until I can squeeze along the outside walls of the house in search of wood scraps. I spend the rest of the winter reading. That summer I get a job with a Gunnison outfitter who takes tourists on pack trips into the high country. We work out of an old ranch up a The Pale Light of Sunset 113 canyon just south of Crested Butte. I know my way around the mountains , am good with horses, and, since I am getting paid for it, am even good with the tourists. The outfitter has only two other employees, an Indian and a Mexican. The Indian pretends not to speak Spanish, the Mexican pretends not to speak English, and I pretend not to understand either of them. Some days, we don’t speak for hours, and it gets so we don’t need to. The outfitter stays in Gunnison and lets the three of us run the pack trips. We make a good team. We make an odd team. I am six feet tall and stocky, with blond hair that hangs down almost to my heavy shoulders . I walk upright, almost too straight—I have a stick up my ass, the Mexican says—and when I move, I go directly about my business. The Mexican says you can watch me move and know what is going to happen next. But not the Indian. With him, you ­ never­know what is going to happen next. He has skin the color of a late sunset in New Mexico, a deep, rusty tint that seems to glow even in the feeble light of early morning. His hair is straight, glistening black, and hangs down even longer than mine. He is slender, tall, with lanky arms and legs that he seems to be able to fold at odd angles. When he gets up to move, there is always a hesitation, a moment when he seems on the verge of changing his mind, a split second when you can’t be sure, not of the Indian, not of anything about him. The Mexican is somewhere in the middle, not as heavy as me, not as tall as the Indian. Quicker than both of us. He wears his dark hair short, held back from his forehead by a red bandana, until the day the Indian trades him a leather thong for it. He keeps the thong on, even under his hat. His forearms are sculpted with muscle and he can chin himself with one arm. As long as I know the Mexican, I never really know whether the man has a temper. I have seen him mad, but it always seems as though Lee Maynard 114 the Mexican programs it, makes it happen, doesn’t wait for the rise of a temper that isn’t there. But that is good, I think. God knows what the Mexican would do if he ever lost control. In the early fall when the tourists stop coming, the outfitter takes in hunters and turns them over to us, and we lead the dudes by the hand into the mountains to hunt elk. On the last trip of the season, on a bare ridge that rises far into the West Elk Range, in the early afternoon, with snow beginning to slice almost horizontally through the air...