Momentum
Every road in Boulder is climbing up or down, one way or the other. In the face of the jutting Flatirons, the
idea of level ground is only superstition. To offset the tilt, the residents all lean slightly: the ponderosa pine on ragged
escarpments, rainbow trout huddled sideways in snow-melt rapids, the mountain bluebirds deflected by rampant Chinooks,
a woman alone for the first time in her life, separated. Panting and pushing a stroller along narrow paved slopes
that switchback around Chautauqua cottages, she is numbly looking for any way out.
So perhaps it was vertigo as she turned the corner downhill that caused her to let go. Or by chance the stroller,
a bright yellow low-rider built like a three-wheel chariot, might have tugged just raring to go. Maybe it was simply
bygones and gravity. All the same, that stroller came loose and took off, its escape energizing like a flash flood
or a rockslide or a roller coaster car gaining speed in its dizzying descent. Absurdly following the one-way sign,
banking left and then right on airborne wheels, the carriage careened onto Baseline Road heading east precisely
along the 40th Parallel. Somehow even the hang gliders overhead paused to gasp.
Naturally nobody noticed the paraplegic angling down the wheelchair access trail and pulling up to the crosswalk
just as the runaway barreled by, and then lickety split, the chase was on. The all-terrain chair with its dusty aluminum
frame and whizzing knobby-tire black-spoke wheels seemed to whinny as the rider shifted back and leaned forward,
gloved hands cranking deftly 11 o’clock to 4 o’clock, following through 6 to 9 o’clock, the forearm pistons
cycling in the furious whirring pursuit.
If this scene were the Tour de France peloton rocketing down from granite ramparts, bystanders would be cheering
wildly to witness the hurtle toward certain death. The contestants would be driven, accelerating by unbalanced force
and desire, jostling for almost control while abandoning their bodies. Somewhere ahead a line would be crossed to
separate the victory from the loss, and a stopwatch would measure time as the difference between flying and falling.
But in Boulder where a thousand prayer flags flap with faded and tattered faith, people know to get out of the way.
They recognize Newton’s first law of motion, how in the absence of friction, revolving wheels will keep turning over
any distance, almost forever, in the effort to reach equivalent heights. What came down from 5400 feet above sea level,
could or should or would roll to a standstill in the Great Smokies, thereabouts, rising again to bearings over a mile
above waving grasslands.
There in the Blue Ridge haze where deciduous shadows slant and sway and the birds migrate vertically, tales abound of a
woman’s ghost wandering the hidden hills. On moonless nights, they say, she drifts along the balsam-fringed ridges
watching as the constellations curve clockwise in a geometric blur. From space, her laughter, like light,
travels at one constant speed. Her exhilaration escapes and collides interchangeably without appearing from
nowhere or disappearing into nothing. In reality, she was already gone before she left.
for Holly Near, who in a
writing workshop suggested that everything we write be a story that says "and then what happenend?"
Copyright © 2007 by Mary Ann Schaefer
All work owned by individual author and should not be reproduced without permission.
