4/27/98.. A morning in Alamosa.

There we were again. Waking up in a Super8, in the way to hell and gone. Choked down the complementary cardboard "breakfast", and shuffled out into sizzling sunlight. Frost on the rental car in the shade, but already skin-tingling bright in the desert sun. It all seemed very familiar. On the road again.

Peggy and I flew into Denver on the 17th and picked up a cheap rental from Resort Rentacar, then headed for the hills to see Seth. There were six inches of snow in Boulder, but the temperature was in the 70s. No wonder the locals dress funny.

The sudden dislocation of jet travel makes you slightly transparent. Until you catch up with yourself nothing is quite in focus. We're so used to strolling crosslots by Festiva, that the leap to Colorado left us breathless and confused. Isn't that what a vacation is supposed to do? School break.

We wandered around Boulder in a state of distraction for a day, then Seth took off from classes, and we pointed our oxen south and west. Stopped to visit a saxophone cousin in Colorado Springs, then abandoned the interstate for the secondaries, and the high and dry. All three of us were in suspension. Seth slightly feverish. Taurus sluggish through the gears.

But the country is stunning. Snowcapped Rockies glittering in the thin white air. Wild streams in spate with snowmelt, up in the crowded mountains, and the endless vistas of the West between ranges. Antelope playing. Honest.

It always comes as a surprise that western mountains rise up in clumps and ranges, out of such a high flatness. You expect the landscape to be all tilted and vertiginous. Instead you drive for horizontal hours, the distant blueshadowed silhouettes of mountains standing aloof, across an arid heatshimmer. And it's hard to judge the scale. What looks like Mt. Washington proves to be a lesser lump up close, while great massifs are dwarfed by the distances. Out on the plains the big peaks show themselves, but as you approach, the lesser heights lift around you and block the view. Only the Spanish Peaks, standing alone, behaved like proper mountains, towering up white, cloaked in clouds, forcing us to dodge and weave into the San Juan Valley.

We'd made it to the holiday place, but we were still jetlagged, still rushing. We blew through Taos at sunset. Only stopping long enough to stroll the plaza and eat chili rellanos to die for. Then pushing on in the dark for Santa Fe.

One of our schemes had been to wander from hot spring to hot spring. Spa-ing to the sublime. So far we'd either been unable to find them, or they were closed. High river season. But in Santa Fe, we'd heard, there was a Japanese spa that would cure all. After a Super8 night we circled the downtown and went upslope to 10,000 Waves.

Santa Fe has sprawled out onto the flats in 20th century style, and it could be a Western anywhere, between Walmart and the BurgerKing. But the heart of the old town has retained its own flavor, if tourist-trampled and overpriced. There are still peddlers in the shade of the plaza selling blankets and silverwork, and a leisurely pace. Up in the hills back of town an adobe suburb is climbing every canyon. It feels like Santa Barbara, or LA, in adobe.

10,000 Waves is a multi-peaked cluster of rough cedar structures in oriental deco. And was much more pricey than we'd been led to believe. So, while Peggy and Seth soaked themselves, and thought about the massages, I sat in the parking lot and played with watercolors. And began to come back to myself. Drew the log and adobe house next door. I'm just not there until my hands are talking.

The Santa Fe building style is so evocative. Even when the adobe has been replaced with hitech alternatives, and the roofs have prefab inserts for drainage, the forms are enticing. The structures are so stubbornly cubic, while all the details are rounded smooth. Suburban Santa Fe looks like a pueblo. Waves of pink and sienna and salmon adobe clusters descending from pine green hills. Hot smells of resinous woods, cool breezes off the mountains.

As I was drawing, a young black lab came up and dropped a gooey ball in my lap. My heart sank. Two days before we flew out, Bagel was hit by a truck, and we had to put him down. Peggy saw it happen, and her screams brought me running. We aren't over it yet. Still revisiting the moment, trying to wish it away. Bagel had become a heedless old thing. Deaf, half blind, determined to do as he chose regardless of our best intentions. Peggy had called him to heel, but he decided to run across the road anyhow, to visit a strange dog. Still, you feel responsible. Should we have put him on a leash in his wayward old age, when he'd been so proudly obedient as a pup? Such a loyal companion. But this pup with a drooly ball doesn't know from Bagel, and I throw the damned thing.. away from the road.

We took a brief tour of the old town, but the road fever had got to us, and by early afternoon we were out on the sideroads making our way to Abiquiu, the home of Georgia O'Keefe. It was closed, of course, and visits were booked ahead through June. Happenstance wandering is like that. It's a scheduled world out there, but that makes the places with open doors all the more enticing. And the landscape is always open. The barebone hills and sinuous arroyos the artist distilled so well. It came as a surprise that Abiquiu has so much big timber, huge cottonwoods filling the river valley. How selective the artist's eye is. You'd never have guessed there was a drop of water in O'Keefe's world. We filled our eyes and headed north. Back to Taos via the gorge of the Rio Grande.

It wasn't until we'd been on the road for three days that I felt I was in my own skin. Outside a motel in Alamosa, sketching the Super8 sign. Back in the rhythm. Our goal for the day was to hike in the Great Sand Dunes, and we were rolling up the San Juan Valley while the Sangre De Christos were still shadowing their feet.

Turning east off Rt 17 at Mosca you can see where a child had spilled a bucket of sand at the foot of the hills, and whipped it into a mini Sahara. As you drive the 16 miles in, that bucketful of sculpted sand rises and spreads until it fills the view, with green and white mountains peaking up behind it. When we sloped into the parkinglot we were the first visitors to hit the sand that day.

Between the lot and the dunes a wide and shallow watercourse of mountain runoff ripples and rushes. Shoes in hand we hotfooted across, teeth bared. Hooting. There were patches of ice here and there, and the water was icy everywhere. Then we barefooted in the hot sand, leaving our boots and sneakers behind. Not a trace of previous passages on the sands. The very image of solitude.

And such dunes. The tallest in America, they say. Climbing to 700 feet above the valley floor. The result of eons of wind bourn erosion in the San Juan Valley. The prevailing southwesterlies carrying the sand toward this gap in the Sangre De Christos but dropping its load at the foot of the higher slopes. And a sea of sandy waves still in slow motion.

We trekked up the soft ridges, our feet opening wide, realizing how puny we were as the dunes continued to rise in front of us, and the figures of other visitors crossing the stream were mere ants. Seth had been here before, in Summer, and he reported that the place was then mobbed with sand surfers, sunbathers, and all the raw hoo. He also said that from the crest of the big dunes above us all you could see were bigger dunes rising beyond. We settled for a two hour scramble in the patterned waste. Making sandfalls on the steep scalloped crest backs, investigating the subtle color variations and the play of textures in the drift. We followed our tracks back to our footgear, and the return crossing didn't even seem cold, our feet were so tingled. I begin to understand foot massage.

Even the execrable repast we had at Loretta's in Villa Grove (to be avoided) didn't take the charm off the day. Maybe we could ride the American Road forever, eating diner food, and waving plastic at the natives.

Back in Boulder we came down to earth, more or less. Now the temps were in the 80s and the scene was in full display. How to define it: Neo-Buddhist in spandex? Boulder has all the lala of California, that stagey unreality which makes you look for the cameras. Svelte Yuppettes, bejeweled and bangled to the elbows, on mountain bikes, sharing the bike lanes with grimey skate boarders in dredlocks and sack hats. Smart cafe sippers in threepiece and laptop cheek-to-jowl with lolling X-ers in toos and mutilations. Buskers with fake British accents working the strollers on Pearl Street. Shaveheaded CU jocks in muscleshirts.

You feel bloated in Boulder. In need of vigorous exercise. Everyone is checking your muscle tone. Makes for gorgeous bods, and a slightly frenetic vibe. A state of hedonistic self-consciousness. But it's so easy to take the air. The mountains are just a few blocks uptown, full of local trails and whitewater sluices. We were loaned a book called "50 Hiking Trails in the Front Range." That's just in the back yard. And the traffic flow is laid out for biking. I spent a morning on Seth's mountain bike, and we tried out different trails each afternoon. You can climb from summer weather into spring balm and go right up to the snowpack on the back slopes.

Seth has snowboarded through another winter, but is now playing pickup basketball at CU, and lifting weights so he won't get muscled off the court. Maybe we all should live in such healthy spots. Except that the ironies stick up as baldly as the Flat Irons. Celestial Seasonings, but no returnable bottles. Bike trails and megalopolitan sprawl. Well behaved traffic crowding into the malls. Naropa Institute and Tibetan accouterments in town, Rocky Flats nuclear waste dump and Coors brewing just over the hill. Trustifarians with signature guitars, and self-proclaimed Primitive Christians asking for lodging. You can buy American Spirit cigarettes by the per at the Penny Lane Cafe. Or a large Chai: $2.

Seth took us on a tour of CU on Saturday, culminating in a bicycle auction. He'd hoped to find some cheap parts, and I was even playing with the idea of finding a Bowdoinham bike. These were all the abandoned or seized bikes on campus that couldn't be reconnected with their owners. When the bidding for the first one we were interested in went over $300, we realized the crowd was too rich for our blood. Later, when I cruised the bike shops for new and secondhand, and an education in the new technology, I saw that the auction prices were absurdly inflated. It takes deep pockets to go to college, as I already know. I was also amused to be catered to as an old geek in a young sports town.

We slept on Andy's futon, while he was on a shamanic retreat in the desert, and got to hang out with Seth's crowd, which always cheers us. They are as unsettled in their 20s as we were, but their range is global. Kerouac still speaks to them, and they casually talk about bopping to Seattle or the Carolinas, as though that was just down the street. Then, we had just dropped into the Rocky Mountain High for a quick week. And it was all too quick.

We did a touch and go in St. Louis. Just long enough to see that the trees were all in leaf in the Mississippi Valley, and the humidity was rising, then plunked down at Logan in a Friday rush hour. Everywhere we looked down, between Denver and Massachusetts, a yellowbrown smutch hung in the air, but back on the ground in New England the colors were so richly saturated after the bleached atmosphere in the West that you wanted to take a sponge and blot the landscape.

Now all we have to do is reset our mental clocks.