A Mountain High After an Airport Low

The rain is drawing glistening lines down the window panes in Aspen Highlands and the thunder is rolling down the pass from the Maroon Bell Mountains like a parade of big bass drums. Maroon Creek is a torrent behind Jean Erck’s house, full of self-importance and new rainfall. I have been here a week, living in a world of pristine air and blue sky, green trees and red mountains.

The trip here was an exercise in grim endurance. Carol Arth Waters, who lives in Rancho Mirage, two towns away from my house in La Quinta, performed the ultimate act of friendship. She picked me up at 5:30 in the morning and took me to the airport in Palm Springs.

When I reached the United Airlines counter, a smiling young woman named Jean Ruggiero combined three lumpy parcels in one efficient box so I could check it. No matter how much I plan, and study magazine pictures of women striding through airports carrying one case as thin as a cracker, I always end up looking as if I am smuggling a couple of watermelons and enough laundry to outfit a dormitory.

When we landed at Stapleton Airport in Denver, I retrieved my raincoat and heavy Aran Island sweater from the overhead bin and went to inquire about the connecting flight to Aspen.

“The flight from Aspen has been canceled. The plane is still in Aspen with engine trouble,” said the man behind the counter. “You go out and get on the shuttle bus marked E and go to the Continental desk. Maybe you can get on standby for their Aspen flight at 12:25.”

“But someone told me the Continental concourse is in Building D,” I said.

“It is,” said the man behind the counter. “You have (to ride to building E and) walk back.”

I am not a fast walker owing to my prefabricated knee.

I walked down three corridors, each one longer than a city block, and finally reached a curb where three shuttle buses were parked. I got on the bus marked E and we started around the airport. We passed Building D with the Continental Airlines signs tantalizingly in view. We stopped at the bus stop at Building E and I lurched off, carrying my purse, my raincoat and that sweater, which by that time I devoutly wished were back in the Aran Islands.

With dogged determination, I clumped along to Building D. Inside, there was no indication of which way to go, so I went to the right. A man behind the counter told me to go to the back of a long line. I stood there for a couple of minutes and then got to wondering whether I was in the right place. I had a 50-50 chance of being wrong and the odds were not going my way. I asked a woman in front of me where she was going. Baltimore, she said.

I found an information desk where a woman told me I had walked about a block past the corridor leading to the gate where the Continental Aspen shuttle would be. So I trudged back. When I reached the gate, the area was already filled with people whose jaws were set like pipe wrenches and whose eyes were either dull with resignation or smoldering with anger.

The harried clerk behind the counter took my ticket and placed it on the bottom of a sheaf of tickets. Everyone else who had been on my canceled flight had been faster than me and also seemed to know which concourse to aim for.

There is a Marine Corps saying, “There’s always 10% who don’t get the word.” But why am I always in that obtuse 10%?

All of us were screaming, squawking, mumbling and nattering at the clerk, whose name was Barbara Gardner. We sounded like enraged myna birds, all explaining why we had to be put on the standby list for the 12:25 to Aspen. Gardner maintained an unbelievable aplomb and even called somebody somewhere to find out if there were a chance of finding another plane for us, because Continental’s next two flights to Aspen were booked solid.

She turned to answer a question from a man standing about three rows away from the counter and a woman in front said, “I was here before he was.” He started to say something as she overrode him with a voice like an electric lawn edger, saying: “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to get in front of me. I know the world.” Pause. “And I know God.”

A comfort for her perhaps, but a non sequitur nonetheless.

Gardner took the top 12 tickets off the pile for possible standbys on the next flight which, by then, was an hour and a half late. I was resigned to waiting until the next day or renting a car for a drive through mountains I did not know. So I bleated, “I have a fake knee which made me walk the slowest and be on the bottom of the pile which will cause me to spend my sunset years in Denver.”

Gardner said, “Sit down. I’ll call you when I can.”

And may her tribe increase. I did and she did and I was allowed on the next airplane and landed in Aspen only two hours late. I called Jean and when the first drop of rain fell on my head, the marathon walks and the snarling people were gone like dandelion fluff. Poof.

It has rained in shining patches of each day ever since and I feel rewarded and shot with midsummer wonder.