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61 Continental Divide 3655 m 12,061 ft Loveland Pass, Colorado —national park service sign Yesterday we drove over the pass at Loveland. Snow gauzed the crests. Between the peaks, great bowls of white up-tilted to the Colorado lacquer of the sky. Scallops huge as meadows followed us like turning faces as we eased up the last saddle to the pass. And then over. Nothing is the same. The scallops are a lesser shade of blue, the flash-pan sun no longer slashes at our eyes. Our ears popped once or twice and we yawned on the descent. When we were children, he brought us here. The Great Divide, his God voice calling up another natural wonder: Watershed of the Continent. Buoyant summer—the mountain columbines preened for their reflections in a tender sky. The idea got us light-headed. He stopped the car and we spit on both sides, my mother embarrassed before the passing cars. One later summer, I came here with him. My lips tugged with irony, braces, defending my hard-won smallholding from invading sovereignty. 62 I looked away when he pointed, pretended to read in the back seat, muttered, Could you find the line without the park signs? Yesterday, the snowfields hushed us. Rim to rim, the sky a dry enamel blue and him dead. We could have shed tears that would flow in two oceans, but the car coughed when we topped out and we all thought: How thin the air is at such an altitude. ...

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