by Rebekah Shardy

Before we stayed at a Zen sangha in Crestone, Colorado, Molly and I were best friends. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t the trip that made us non-friends, but an assortment of misadventures – the internal, interpersonal kind – that lead us down different paths.

One glorious Friday in June, when Spring was just about to surrender her last inhibition to voluptuous Summer, we packed a few things (no, you don’t take your leg waxing kit to a Buddhist commune) and hurled ourselves down Route 115, a curvaceous, one-lane road leading through southern Colorado for one unforgettable night at a Zen monastery.

Oddly, this New Age mecca is in the middle of potato farmers, real cowboys and other good 'ole boys that put on the oldest rodeo in the state of Colorado. It’s an unnatural place to spot a bald Buddhist nun at the Tasty Freeze.

While I drove, Molly read from a numerology book, trying to pin a personality type on her ‘homme du jour’ – yes, like the soup of the day, but apt to chill faster. Molly was a little older than me, but much prettier, capable of flirting and still in the game for romance. I listened politely and tried to encourage her hopefulness that this man – unlike any other before or after – would cherish her as all men should based on arcane mathematics, astrology and any other supernatural force we could muster. In fact, the man would tire of Molly long before I would become weary of trying to bolster her confidence. Can I get an ‘amen,’ sisters? I’m sure you’ve been there before.

We stopped outside of Salida for a picnic that I prepared. Salida used to be an outpost of northern Mexico. It’s a haunt for old-hippy-artists, RV retirees and tourism capitalists serving the affluent young on their way to Colorado ski resorts. There’s an aura of the perniciously strange in and around Salida. I once interviewed the owner of a local restaurant – “ET’s Landing” – about the daytime sighting of a UFO that brought nationwide coverage. There’s serious mojo in Salida, you betcha.

We perched just by the rambunctious waters of the Arkansas river that runs along the road going into Salida to enjoy pita sandwiches and fresh fruit. I think I brought a book of exquisite verse I tried to read aloud above the water. A huge fly landed on my hand. I don’t mean that it was just big. It was HUGE in a weird, science fiction way. It nearly covered my fist, and I’m not a daintily appointed person. I waved it away but it came back and set on my book, watching me very closely with its little octagonal eyes, as if it were reading my lips.

By late afternoon, Molly and I had traveled south to the gravel road that leads to Crestone. If Salida is Ripley’s Believe it or Not, Crestone is the honest-to-god Twilight Zone. (CONTINUE...)