A Drive through Independence Pass

A few weeks ago, I climbed over the Continental Divide via Independence Pass in Colorado.

By “climbed”, I do mean affording myself of the modern convenience of a rental Jeep Cherokee. I was en route to a memorial service on the back side of Aspen Mountain, at ~10,000 feet. I started at my best friend’s home in Boulder, and because I was late, I chose the “shortest” route that Siri offered, neglecting to check the details beforehand.

I was encouraged with a brief glance that this route got me off the Interstate in short order, as that is my preferred travel any day of the week, mostly: let’s go SEE the towns, rather than bypass them. Storefronts of small towns struggling to survive yet prevailing after 100 years in the family. Go, America. That’s the country I wish to be a part of.

The first ascent was through Loveland Pass, which involved going through a long tunnel to the other side of the mountain. I am terrified of tunnels and did not see this one coming. I was advised to turn on my headlights, but I could not figure out how to do so in this rental

contraption, and I had clearly violated every single one of my father’s safety rules prior to

taking off from the rental lot at the airport. I am quite claustrophobic and was also oddly deeply impacted by Princess Diana’s death in a tunnel in 1997. I gritted my teeth and clenched my fingers around the steering wheel and tried to remember box breathing during that brief but endless period. Then, phew. I did it.

What I didn’t realize, again because I didn’t review the driving directions beforehand, was the ascents still before me.

The views and the scenery were breathtaking but obscured by the fears of gradually transitioning to a very narrow two-lane highway. The car in front of me was a large pick-up with double-wheels on the back axle, and it was extending well over the middle-line simply by virtue of its size. It seemed the higher we climbed, the narrower the road became.

Eventually we passed through Leadville, then Twin Lakes, with the appropriate bodies of water visible below. I didn’t stop to take it in. I was, I perceived, pressed for time and should hurry ahead.

And my nervous system was increasingly responsive to the angst of a narrow two-lane highway on a road full of very tight switch-backs. I live at sea level. Mountain driving in a foreign vehicle is not in my bailiwick.

In the moment, I could not have articulated what then happened. But as the ascent grade steepened, I saw it. A pull-off to my left, with adequate parking, and the concrete sign and then, a photo of me, age seven: Independence Pass.

I couldn’t stop, so I kept going while hyperventilating. The flashback image was so intense, so clear. I was in pigtails and my favorite orange and yellow skort dress (don’t judge. They were all the rage in the 1970s).

My father had decided, not too long after we moved from northwestern Minnesota to the wilds of the Nebraska Panhandle, that we should take a Sunday drive in very late Spring, because I was learning about the Oregon Trail in school, and he thought I should see Independence Pass for myself. Map navigation was not his strong suit, ever, and my mom immediately expressed skepticism that the distance traveled from our house in the panhandle of Nebraska, all the way to Independence Pass, and back home again, was too much for a Sunday drive. My father insisted, and off we went.

I positioned myself as per usual in the backseat of our ginormous 1972 green Chevy Caprice,

with my teal bucket of crayons and loads of coloring books to choose from. I loved splaying my elbows between the two front seats because I could see through the windshield what was

coming. I couldn’t have articulated this then, but perhaps that was a clue to my recognition

later of claustrophobia. The drive south through the Panhandle is predictably alternating

between flat and slightly hilly, and northwestern Colorado is open and sparse. I don’t recall any of those legs of the drive, until the beginnings of the ascent to the pass, when the road

narrowed.

My father had never driven in the mountains until this fateful Sunday afternoon. There is no

punch line here. Nothing went wrong, we didn’t fall into the gulch, we didn’t get run off the

road by an RV, we didn’t lose the function of the brakes in the Caprice on the other side of the Continental Divide. But it was a miserable ride. I remember my mother’s abject terror at the one-lane stretches, I remember my father expressing his fear in yelling at her, I remember my own perspective from my backseat looking-through-the-windshield perch at oncoming RVs, challenging our position on the switchbacks. He saw the pull-out at the Pass, he pulled over and parked, we snapped the photo of me in an instant, and we turned around and began the descent and the drive home. In complete silence.

I crossed the Divide and made my way into Aspen and then to another ascent that, while on a narrower dirt road, was much less provocative because I arrived at a place of reflection over those several miles. My body recorded that traumatic Sunday afternoon 53 years ago and retrieved it instantaneously in sight of that concrete marker, but my response to that memory does *not* need to remain cemented. I can alter it. And I did, on my final ascent up the back side of Aspen Mountain, to the memorial of a dear friend’s father. I thought about legacy. I thought about my dad, doing his level best on a Sunday afternoon to engage with his precocious daughter. I thought about his abject fear in making that ascent to the top of the Pass. (Side note: his brother, whom he loved and adored, lived in Evergreen, Colorado, and we never ever visited, despite the fact that it was only four hours away. I wonder if this drive to Independence Pass dissuaded him from ever traveling to Uncle Bob’s.)

My dad gave so much of himself that day. He didn’t know the fear he was driving into when he insisted we go for a Sunday drive. He couldn’t say aloud how afraid he was, in the moment. Mom couldn’t do anything but react, and I just took it all in, too much, into my own baby nervous system, her fear, his fear, and my own worry as I stared through that windshield from my midline backseat perch.

Legacy shows up not just in Story, but in sensation and in emotion and in feeling. And all of those things traversed my body in that ascent. Once I arrived at a beautiful memorial for another’s Dad, that trifecta became apparent to me. I heard stories that weren’t my dad’s, but I could easily pull out a similar feeling from a different story in my own experience with my 15 years with my own dad. Story after story, I could find my own dad. And over that beautiful, quintessential sunny Colorado Sunday afternoon on the side of Aspen Mountain, I found my dad in a whole new way. Complete. A whole person. *My* whole person. Legacy.

Jenie