Sleater-Kinney is for lovers.

I’m a fan of maps. Turns out, she is too. And the occasional spot of indie rock, as much as I hate the term. She likes waffles, too. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself with the maps.

So I took her out on a Monday morning for waffles at the pancake house. It was in a relatively suburban area on a holiday, so the place was crammed with the suburbanites who make a mess of their tables and tip poorly. Across from us, a woman stabbed the yolks of her eggs benedict repeatedly with a butter knife like Norman Bates in Psycho, and two teenage girls sat off by themselves drinking water and not eating.

She didn’t get waffles. She got a short stack of pancakes. “I’m never going to get them. You’re always going to owe me waffles, as long as you live.”

“I like owing you,” I said over my huge omelet. The thing had to have been made with a dozen eggs and hung precariously over the sides of the plate, oozing cheese everywhere. Truly an embarrassing meal. One might call it the “Really Gross Enormous Breakfast.”

“I like when you owe me,” she said back, her eyes twinkling over the orange juice.

One of the things that B and I do with regularity and precision is mock others. We spent most of breakfast doing just that, and then she hatched a plan to drive to Pike’s Peak.

“My flight leaves at five,” I said.
She looked at her watch. “It’s 10:30 now. An hour and a half there, an hour on the mountain, and we’ll be back in plenty of time.”

I saw her logic and nodded. I drove. She has a raft of CDs that she’s burned full of indie hits, all of them stacked in the console under the CD player. Most of them are scratched beyond anyone’s reasonable expectation of playability. I asked her about this. “So I’ll make more,” she said, “because blank CDs are so totally expensive.”

The music continues until I hear something I haven’t heard before. “That’s Sleater-Kinney, I think,” she said absently. I turned down a two-lane road and drove over a set of moribund railroad tracks. B ruffled a map open. It’s a local map of Denver, not the most detailed. After peering at the roads for a while, she said, “yeah. This will get us to Deckers. Just follow this and then we turn onto 62 down to Pikes Peak.”

The road went higher into the mountains. I ticked off the feet above sea level in my mind. I’d never been above 9000 feet before, and I was worried what the thin air would do to my lungs. I mean, I’ve seen Touching the Void and K2, and I’ve read Into Thin Air. Hypoxia is no joke.

About half an hour after we crossed the tracks we came to a fork in the road. Usually, when the people who build roads see fit to drop a fork on the landscape, they usually also see fit to place adequate signage, and you get the feeling that they really are good people because they don’t want you to get lost. Not so here. “Which
way, B___?” I asked. I mean, she’s got the map, right?

“Go to the right. Yeah.” I went to the right and we quickly found ourselves on a one lane dirt path cut into the side of the mountain. There was no railing and the road surface was all washboarded from decades of neglect, but the view was tremendous, when I could spare a few seconds to look. Eventually, as we go up a really steep grade that I fear might do us in, I relent and ask her, “Are you sure this is the right way?”

“It’s what the map says. You OK?”
“I love it. Cardio workout when the rear end fishtails on me. How long you figure we’ve got?”

She stared at the map again. The red miniskirt she was wearing hiked up a bit farther on her thigh and I wanted to touch it, but my sense of self-preservation kicked in and I kept my hands to myself, on the steering wheel. “The road’s kind of squiggly, you know, um…so maybe…10 miles?”

Now, my flight was at five. The airport is a good 65 miles from our exact (not too exact, because remember, the road is really squiggly) position. On a free flowing highway, that would take an hour. It’s 12:30. An hour back to where we were, that’s 1:30. Another hour to get home: 2:30. Pack, shower, change: 3:30. An hour to get to the airport: 4:30. You see where I wasn’t going that night. Besides, I couldn’t drive much over 20 on the little road we were on anyway. That meant, if my math was right, another half hour to Deckers, wherever the hell that was.

“I’m going home tomorrow, B___. Fuck it.”

She smiled behind her sunglasses. “That was my plan all along.”

“What?”

“Keep you here for another day. You know you want to.”

“I do want to. I’ll leave in the morning.”

I keep driving up this road and then back down it. The Platte River runs through the mountain valley and there are all kinds of guys standing in the river in hip waders fly fishing. It’s a scene out of A River Runs Through It, and I said so. “I am haunted by waters…”

B giggled. I’m still not sure if it was more from my lame attempt at humor or because we managed to get back on paved road. The town of Deckers slid past us and she looked at the map again. “When I was a kid and we’d go someplace, I’d always have the map. I’d look at it and say ‘OK. Here’s where we are, and in a minute, we’ll be here, and then here, and here.’ I like how you can see where you are on a piece of paper. And where you’re going to be,” She said. I listen to that, thinking I would have explained my love of maps the same way. I did the same thing when I was a kid. She was doing that now, and if I had the map, I’d be doing the same thing, too.

Eventually, I am able to open the thing up and actually make some time. “What’s that?” she said, pointing down the road.

“It looks like a guy,” I said, slowing down a bit. The guy in the road was actually a cop holding a flare, urging us to slow down even more Not entirely without reason, either. An overturned truck, just like the kind I used to drive, sits on the road in the other lane, the windshield cracked and leaking fuel all over the place. I couldn’t help thinking that that could have been us up on that road, albeit on a slightly smaller scale.

A few minutes later, I pulled over by the river and had a cigarette. I skipped a few stones; B took some pictures. She came down to the bank of the river, where I was, and kind of wedged herself between my arms. We stood there for a while, holding each other and listening to the cars go by and the water rolling over the rocks.

It’s not much further to Pike’s Peak. Takes an hour to get up the thing, especially when you’re stuck behind a dumbass in an F-150 Extended Cab Super Duper Lucky Chucky Limo Pickup with a downdraft carburetor and 16 cylinder triton diesel engine or whatever going three miles an hour up a 37% grade. I exaggerate, of course. The grade wasn’t that steep.

There’s an oxygen bar at the top of the mountain and a time capsule out on a precipice overlooking the mountain view. Some fraternity or sorority put the time capsule there, I think. There were Greek letters involved, at any rate. I stood there for a while and looked out at the mountains, the air thin and cleansing. B didn’t come down with me because she was wearing flip-flops, and in her words, they are “so totally not appropriate for all occasions.”

She asked me what the thing out on the precipice was when I got back. “Not worth the trip out,” I said. What I didn’t tell her was that she was totally worth the trip back.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A week later, on the phone, she said, in passing, “We should have taken the left fork.”

“When did you figure that out?” I asked.

“Halfway up the road.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We were going to get there. And besides, you loved every minute of it.”

She’s right about that. A well-timed detour and Sleater-Kinney on the stereo. Any girl who understands the value of these things is a girl I can get behind.

(a note: I was going to put a picture or two in here for visual edification, but the pictures aren’t mine, and as such, they don’t belong here. Maybe, just maybe, if you ask her really nice, she’ll post a couple.)