I drove on and up toward the midsized city of Grand Junction, known by West Slope Coloradans as Junction. These last few weeks, the mountains, these San Juans, and the Abajo farther west in Utah, slept under snow-maker clouds. Finally, relief from drought. This late spring was colder than the mean, with snow and rain when and where I didn’t expect it. Silken clouds spun cool air.

As I wandered the roads north, my eyes searched for any brown sign that meant federal land. At a turn in a narrowing canyon, I read: UNCOMPAGHRE PLATEAU – NATIONAL FOREST ACCESS.  I pulled up sharply. My Silverado, in saddle to a camper on its bed, groaned up the sharp, gray gravel to the sleeting montane forests. At the top of the deserted plateau, I rode past a fire ring etched into the earth. Gray sky sealed in the horizon, yielding fleeting visions of far-off mountains in the east, brighted with snow.

I cranked up my canvass-skinned camper, which, without heat or a cook stove, was a mere wheeled tent. Cold rain descended like locusts from an unseen swarm. I dressed against it.

I walked the road. Soon, I encountered two camoed dudes on a four-wheeler.

“You guys shootin’?”

“Yeahhh. Toms.”

“Oh, shit,” I muttered. Quickly I reversed my camo winter cap so it’s orange lining flashed anyone with a rifle a warning that I wasn’t a gobbling, strutting turkey. Who was I kidding? They’d shoot me onsite, the stupidest tom on the mountain, my mouth opened toward a drowning sky.

“I saw one a little lower,” I said, exhaling frost. “Down in the canyon.”

“A beard?”

I guessed he meant a tom. “Nah.”

“Say, you know what the weather’s gonna be?” one of the men asked.

“Yeah. 30% chance of precip today. 60% tonight. ’Course up here, it’ll be snow. Any bear up here?”

“We just seen the biggest bear track.” He looked up at the low ceiling of cloud with a hint of disgust. “I think we’re headin’ out.”

“Yeah me too.”

“There’s a camp, canyn.” I couldn’t make out what he said: ‘campground’ or ‘canyon,’ but I pretended I’d heard. “Down at the end a the road. You really oughtta see it.”

I nodded like I understood. I pretended. I aimed to please, to impress, like some men aimed guns. It was called impression management, a clinical term used when an evaluator like myself thought someone he was evaluating was trying to appear in a favorable light. Impression management. Just fancy, book language for ass kissing. The term fit me.

Whenever I went out camping, I carried these 3 x 5 index cards with me. On them, I jotted down impressions, goals, insights, ideas for stories. It was my form of journaling. On this trip, on my very first index card, I started a list of resolutions, the New Year’s kind.

Resolution # 1: No more Impression Management. 

The hunters mucked off. I reached a local summit, yearning for a cliffside vista. Yet plateaus can be maddening things in their lack of definable edges. This place was all mud rut and undulating subalpine forest stitched between mountain parks. I returned to my camper, slipped on an orange vest against bullets, and walked the road toward the campground or canyon, whatever that hunter had suggested I check out. A couple hours later, the hike ended at Dominguez Canyon.

Dominguez was a shallow defile that wound and dropped softly off the edge of the Uncompaghre Plateau. Short orange bluffs slipped seamlessly into the canyon’s U-shape, which was forested with pine. Between raindrops, I took out my phone and snapped a couple pics through the heavy mist. The sleet picked up, and I headed back to the camper.

That night, I opened the drape on the window of my camper and watched, like a boy, the snow float down in manna and gather in the crooks of the upper tier of my canvass-shelled hull. It got down into the teens that night, but the cold kept other people at bay. I needed solitude. I wrote it down on my index card.

Resolution # 2: No People.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within