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What a wild and crazy week, one of my worst and one of my best.

We'll leave out the hassles and go for the gold: I went to Colorado over the weekend! You want to hear about that, don't you? Of course you do. I even brought my TiBook with me. The main thing was, I needed a getaway, and did I ever get away good. When my buddy Rick at Brodsky Bookshop told me of a campground near the Spanish Peaks, I thought it sounded perfect: high in the southern Rockies, primitive, no facilities except an outhouse and a pump, and four miles up a rough dirt road. With any luck, the RVs and the families would would pick another spot, and Texans wouldn't camp if they could buy another house instead. Yee-haw!

You may remember that I had my truck worked on. The '87 Ford had two catalytic converters, a small one and a big one, and now the big one's gone. One satisfies the letter of the law, apparently, and there's a way to "improve" that one too. (For anyone who wonders if this makes a difference, I challenge you to a footrace, only you have to hold a golf ball in your mouth!) I also replaced the muffler with a 24-inch glasspack mated to the standard tailpipe. This arrangement provides vastly better engine breathing and gives a bit of rumble, too. Not as much as I'd expected, but it's there, all right. I realize you probably can't do this where you live and I'm really sorry, because my poor old truck runs like it has a tailwind now. What's more, it gets almost two more miles per gallon. In fact, the engine runs so much better, I'd really like to take an emissions test, just out of curiosity.  

So did it do well on the road? Oh yeah. It even ran just dandy all the way to 11,500 feet, where I forgot to test the TiBook. Supposedly the laptop is rated for only up to 10,000, and I wanted to see if it would turn blue and die when I booted up. My visit to the top of the pass coincided with the rain and hail, however, and all I wanted to do was get away before the lightning started. I did, and it didn't, but you never know.

While I was happily ensconced among the aspens and the spruces, I took the time one night to write a fragment of this column. Here it is, unedited, just as I wrote it then ...

[The following is written completely in the dark, lying on a cot in the back of an '87 Ford pickkup truck covered by an uninsulated aluminum cap, at 9,500 feet in the southern Colorado Rockies.]

All right, I give up and take it all back, besides: a keyboard that glows in the dark is a good idea. Here I thought I was a real touch-typist. Well, I am, but it's those other keys, like the brackets. Oh all right, the numbers too. Blame it on the fact that I'm stretched out on a camp cot and it's freezing. There's only 30 percent battery power left, but I wanted put these impressions to hard disk before I forget them.

For those of you in a similar situation, note that a single-burner propane camp stove thingie inside a metal bucket does a damn good job of heating up the inside of a space like this ... [slowing losing consciousness] ... huh? Uh, better turn that thing off! Actually I did, about ten minutes ago. You should also note that a camper shell the thickness of the pan that comes with those itty-bitty pecan pies one should never buy but on the road, I always do, does not -- repeat, does NOT hold the heat as long as it takes to write that sentence.

 

Earlier I crawled in here and wrote my wife a nice long message, which the rescue party can copy from the TiBook if a bear decides I smell bad enough to be something good to eat. (Bears are funny that way.) While I was typing, and you have NO IDEA how long it just took me to find those parentheses, it started to hail. With the aluminum shell about six inches from the top of my head, I could feel the impacts in my wisdom teeth. Interesting, to say the least. But what I really wanted to say just now is that I have finally discovered why these laptops get hot. Okay, warm. It's so you can take them up to ungodly altitudes and stay alive to type a few well-chosen words. I never thought I'd say this, but at this moment, a hot TiBook on my thighs is a wonderful thing.

It's Saturday night now, or at least it is somewhere. There's absolutely nothing in this campground at 8:47 p.m. to indicate human beings rule the earth. (You do know I'm kidding about that last part, don't you?) I don't even hear any other campers, probably because they've all frozen to death. It's only September, fergodssake! [Whew. Had to resort to the flashlight to get that last exclamation mark.] Tomorrow it's back down to New Mexico, where the last time I looked, it was still officially summer. Too bad I only have 22 percent battery power left. This is like a message from someone trapped in a sunken submarine, isn't it? Eek! 'Night, all ...

Great literature it ain't, but it's the truth. I'm heading for the shower now, and Monday is another day. In fact, it's TO-day, according to the clock. The sleep I didn't get from two nights squirming in the cold is gonna lay me low, so das ist alles.

I loved it though, I really did.

[Note: some of these shots and more will run at FotoFeed all this week. You'll have to go there first, then work your way back . I never got around to putting in a "forward" button.]

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr invites your emails.

Alternative eBook source:

Lots of pictures of el Norte:

Salon Weblog: yackety-yak!

(Beautiful land for sale here: "What It Is About El Rito,")

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