24
WE GOT OFF at the Alamosa stop and stuck out our thumbs, trying to look wholesome and innocent. When that didn’t work, Robinson told me it was time for me to show some leg.
“You show it,” I countered. “You’re the one who always charms everyone.” (Also? I hadn’t shaved since we left home.)
“Except that cop,” he said ruefully.
Eventually, a nice old man in an El Camino pulled up. We told him we were headed to the Great Sand Dunes National Park, and he nodded approvingly and drove us right up to the visitors’ center. He wouldn’t even take ten bucks for gas.
Instead, he slipped me a twenty as I was pulling my backpack from underneath the seat. “Go out for dinner tonight,” he urged. “Y’all need some meat on your bones.” For a moment he gazed wistfully at the sand dunes, gleaming golden at the base of blue, snow-capped mountains. “If my Meg was alive, I’d call her up and tell her to put a roast in the oven.” His eyes seemed to film over. Then he snapped back to the present. “Take care of yourselves, all right?” And then he drove away.
I tried to shake off the strange, sad feeling his good-bye had given me. I looked over at Robinson, who was waving at me from the edge of a creek that cut along the base of the dunes.
“It’s like someone picked up a piece of the Sahara and put it down in Colorado,” he said when I approached.
“It’s amazing,” I said, snapping a picture that I knew wouldn’t do it justice. “Why do people end up in towns like K-Falls when there are places like this in the world?”
“That’s an excellent question,” Robinson said. He flung his arms out wide, as if he could hug the whole huge vista. “We should probably never go back.” He looked pretty pleased by that idea.
We began walking up a ridge to the top of the dunes. It was tough going—the sand was loose, and our feet sank deep into it. I could hear Robinson breathing hard behind me. As we neared the top, the wind picked up the sand and flung it, stinging, against us.
“It’s like full-body exfoliation,” Robinson said, wiping the grit from his face. “There are people who pay good money for this.”
“The glass is always half-full for you, isn’t it?” I asked. I would have smiled, but I’d have gotten sand in my teeth. Optimism was one of his best qualities.
Stinging sand aside, we arrived in a spot that was breathtakingly beautiful. On nearby dunes we saw some people hiking up and others sliding back down on what looked like snowboards. Their delighted shouts carried through the air, which was already shimmering with heat.
Robinson began to strum an imaginary guitar: “Even castles made of sand …” Then he looked at me somewhat sheepishly. “Jimi Hendrix.”
“I know,” I told him. “My dad has that album.” I squinted into the distance. Beyond the dunes, the prairie was full of yellow wildflowers. I held my camera at arm’s length and took a picture of us squinting and grinning, on top of the world.
We might have hiked back down then, but I turned and saw an old plastic sled half-buried in the sand. I pointed, and Robinson’s eyes lit up. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked, but I knew he was, so I didn’t wait for an answer.
I climbed onto the front of the sled, and Robinson stood behind me, his hands on my back. He began to run, pushing me, and then he leapt in. He wrapped his arms around my waist and buried his head in my hair as we raced down the slope. The wind whipped the sand into my face, but I didn’t care—I screamed with delight.
At the bottom of the dune, we lay on the sand, breathless.
“Wow,” Robinson said.
“Who needs snow?” I yelled, flinging up my arms. “Want to go again?”
Of course he did.
We spent a giddy, thrilling hour hiking up and then racing down, after which we were so hot and tired we could barely move.
“I’m dying of thirst,” Robinson said, collapsing at my feet. “Also I think my nose is fried.”
“‘What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well,’” I said.
“Huh?” Robinson asked, rubbing his nose.
“It’s a line from The Little Prince.”
“You and your books,” he said teasingly.
“It wouldn’t kill you to read one.”
He raised a dark eyebrow. “You never know. It might,” he said, and smiled. “So where’s that well, then?”
I tossed him a water bottle from my backpack, but it arced wide. He scrambled to get it, then opened the lid and drained the liquid in about two seconds.
“You’re lucky I’ve got another one for myself,” I chided. “Otherwise that would’ve been very greedy. Very scalawag-ish.”
He snorted. “I know you, Axi. Of course you have extra water. Now I’m going to close my eyes. Wake me in ten.” Then he put a shirt over his face and fell asleep, just like that, at the bottom of a sand dune.
We washed off the grit in cold, clear Medano Creek, and we set up our tent at a nearby campground. After dinner—canned chili heated over the fire—we stored our food and packs in the metal bearproof box on the edge of the campsite.
Night came suddenly, as if someone had blown out the sun like a candle. And then the stars burst from the sky, more than I’d ever seen in my life. I stared up, dazzled, and by this point almost too spent to speak.
Robinson looked up, too. “There’s something I wanted to say to you that I never got a chance to,” he said.
I knew not to get my hopes up by now. “What’s that?” I asked.
“You throw like a girl.”
“You are such a jerk,” I said, laughing. I picked up the rinsed-out chili can and took aim. “I’ll show you throwing like a girl!”
“I’m kidding. Those are the last lines from the movie Sahara,” he said. “Since we spent the day in the desert and all.”
I put the can back down. I was too exhausted to throw, anyway. Instead, I took a deep drink of water. And I looked at the long, lean shape of Robinson through the darkness, thinking that there were many different kinds of thirst.