Empty nest and a punctured gas tank
The next several days were strangely quiet. I understand “Empty Nest Syndrome" is a normal thing for any parents but Harrison’s absence left behind such a vacuum that I really didn’t know quite how to deal with it. For 18 years life had centered on him. I had spent maybe fewer than a dozen nights not under the same roof with Harrison since he was born. At the same time there was an underlying high level of anxiety in constantly wondering what he was doing and how it was going at college.
Our house was now insanely quiet. When Mary was home in the evenings we sort of looked at each other in disbelief of the relative silence. I suddenly did not have to worry about cooking dinners Harrison would eat — we could even have spicy foods. There were no OCD meltdowns over what time lunch was, or whether we had lunch at all. We didn’t have to worry about supervising his clothing choices, or getting him to and from school and other activities.
I also started early season practices for high-school and middle-school cross-country teams that week with new assistant coach, Heather Ramer, who taught English at the school. Between holding practices, introducing Heather to the running program, and planning out the season schedule, it helped take my mind off the void of not having Harrison home anymore. However, the double-edge sword was that I was accustomed to having Harrison at practices and on the team, and thus there was another empty space. Coaching didn’t seem quite the same.
Meanwhile, Harrison seemed to be enjoying his independence. To be clear, he had never spent a night away from home without at least one of his parents. He’d never gone to a summer camp, done a sleep-over at a friend’s house or anything like that. The first few days only the cross-country team was on campus, but soon the other students began to arrive for orientation. Though Harrison did not call home much, there was a fair amount of “tele-coaching" about choosing running shoes for certain workouts, or what clothes to wear for other activities. We were apprehensive about a late-evening college orientation trip to the hot springs in Buena Vista. We learned later that he apparently bumped his head on a water slide there and had a noisy reaction that his teammates helped him through. Otherwise he was having a blast with his new friends in the summer camp atmosphere.
I wanted to be at the college for at least part of orientation, so one evening I left Westcliffe after cross-country practice and headed for Leadville. It’s about a two-hour drive. As the late-summer days were getting shorter I found myself stopping to refuel in Buena Vista and racing daylight to get to CMC. There were some thunderstorms moving through the area.
There’s a place about eight miles south of town the locals call “Lower Malta Curve,” which is where the highway makes an S curve crossing a high bridge over the Arkansas River, and then back north toward Leadville past a small complex of ramshackle cabins and shacks. I remembered when I was the newspaper editor in Leadville, on my early morning trips to Salida for production day, I would regularly see the sheep ranchers just north of this curve standing around in the driveway with high-powered rifles laid out across the hoods of ancient pickup trucks. Often they would be smoking cigarettes in the cold mornings, waiting to shoot at coyotes marauding their sheep in the pasture across the highway. Sometimes they would actually be taking aim as I drove by. Today that ranch is a jumble of deserted and collapsing buildings.
This evening as I arrived at this spot a rainstorm had just passed through, and the last rays of sun were sinking over the shoulder of Mount Massive. The pavement was inky black from the rain and to make visibility even worse a vehicle was tailgating me with its brights on. As I drove around the second curve at the old sheep ranch there was suddenly something in the road. It looked like a black box or a piece of electronic equipment. I had no time to react and hit it square on. I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the disintegrated debris of whatever this object had been scattering in the headlights of the car behind me. My little Suzuki seemed to take it all in stride, but the car that had been tailgating suddenly backed off. I drove on the last few miles to the college and parked. When I got out, I could smell gas. Apparently the road debris had punctured the gas tank, and when I turned off the engine the rest of the gasoline drained out. This resulted in a call to the campus maintenance department and a hazardous material clean-up. There was enough gas in the fuel line for me to drive the car to the lower lot where we parked it with a pan of kitty litter underneath the tank in case of more leakage.
Now I was stranded in Leadville with no vehicle. It took a full day to make arrangements to have it towed to a local repair shop where it was in line behind a lot of other cars while they ordered a new gas tank. Mary was stuck with work and unable to drive up and get me. During this time I was able to meet with one of Harrison’s welding professors, and also help him prepare for the start of classes the next week.
I used Harrison’s bike to get around Leadville. One evening I strapped on a backpack and rode to the grocery store. On the way back to the college I took in the sights of Leadville as the sun was setting and reflected on my history with the town. I entertained the notion of riding the bicycle 100 miles back to Westcliffe. I’d ridden bikes that far before and knew I could do it in a day, but decided that would be my last resort. After a couple days I mentioned being stranded to my burro racing friends Erin and Smokey, and they offered to loan me their Honda CR-V to get back to Westcliffe. Smokey owns Community Threads, a thrift store and sports shop, and Erin is a recovering teacher and clay artist. As I drove the red SUV home on a bluebird fall day there was a comical moment when I realized the music in the car was not a radio station but a Grateful Dead cassette tape on auto replay. Their Honda would stay parked at our house in Westcliffe for a few weeks while I waited for my car to be repaired, and used my old pickup to get around.
The weekend before the semester began the CMC team was staffing the Winfield aid station for the Leadville Trail 100 ultramarathon. This aid station is at the 50-mile turnaround for the race. It would be an all-day outing. I talked to Darren and arranged to bring some of my middle- and high-school runners to help out as well. Mary went along as a chaperone. It was a real eye-opener for these young runners to see up close what racers went through at the halfway point of a high-altitude 100-mile running race. Also, since most of them knew Harrison from his high-school days, it was a glimpse at what was possible through running after they graduated.
Harrison seemed more tuned in to his new teammates and it was a struggle for both Mary and me to stand back and try not to give him guidance on social cues, and behaviors, and also to not prod him to focus on the work at hand. Of course Nate was there to keep an eye on him, and he seemed to have struck up a friendship with Lexi as well. It was a long day and finally we loaded up the kids and drove back to Westcliffe, leaving Harrison there with what seemed to be his new family.
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