Ground Control
When I was a kid, back before we migrated north from Colorado, my Grandma Jean and Grandpa Joe had a “cabin” on the side of the steep incline leading down to Green Mountain Reservoir. We called it The Cabin and we adored it, but looking back, it was really just an ancient tin trailer with a deck tacked on back like a bow. Really, it was a fort for adults.
This time of year always finds my mind walking backwards towards the Rocky Mountains. Towards the yellowing Aspens you can hear fluttering if you sleep with your window open. Or better even, out on that back deck.
Back towards Grandma Jean – who I miss like a home that’s burned to the ground, who I still reach to call when things get hard, still somehow forgetting - nursing her gritty coffee or Coors and watching Technicolor hangliders pitch themselves off haystack peak on the other side of the reservoir.
To the cold red clay we dug up in the cove, praying for the sun’s decline to slow while we harvested. To the little dirt road that ran around the ear of mountain, to the corner store a mile away with its Lemon Heads and taffy for a dime if you had it.
Grandpa Joe kept an old CB radio on the porch and when the grownups were distracted, we would sneak back there and cast messages out like satellites. We’d pick up the small corded transmitter and call out. And somewhere on those mountain passes, someone would hear us and a voice would return out of the static like a miracle.
One minute I was a single organism: A tiny nine year old girl, bothering the scabs on her knees, watching her big sister make everyone laugh, sneaking off to hide in the high desert succulents and read. And then, I wasn’t. Wasn’t alone. I was talking to truck drivers and anglers and astronauts, listening to their sepia toned stories while my cousins giggled at our audacity in starting these Grown Up Conversations.
Today, I don’t care much for the telephone, am restless to engage with it but for a few exceptions. But there is still something comforting about knowing I could drive to a junkyard, pick up a CB in someone’s wrecked cab and call out.
And from some Milky Way, there would still come a faithful response.
