Having gone into the shadowed clouds, I knew I would have to come down. But wasting precious gasoline along the way was not in the cards. One deep breath to remind myself to live a little longer. And channeling moriarty, daring fate, sliding the shift lever to N, one more to plunge down a twisting serpentine freeway into the darkness, eyes sharpened, cornering miles and miles over the speed limits, no engine braking to bleed away momentum, only arms and legs straining against implacable physics to bring me down safely.

A long plateau, where no light clung to any surface, winding ahead into another sprawl of mountains. Nestled between the peaks hovered the most curious rest stop I'd ever seen, adjoined to some research station, a tiny fraction of the Antarctic here at hand. Following shaded sidewalk lamps around the building to the restroom, I sensed the hum of equipment rumbling deep into the rock, a subterranean process that still allowed a tiny stream to run through the grounds before disappearing over the edge of a cliff into the hollow roar of a unseen river far below.

Even before the descent had flooded my muscles with endorphins, before relief sucked them all dry, I knew I soon had to stop for the night, with Denver still floating in the sky behind me.

The rest stop signs made it absolutely clear no sleeping or camping in cars would be permitted. But I eyed the scrub lining the slopes shrewdly, looking for a desiccated shrub or flattened arroyo to hide my tent. Gathering all the warm clothes I had and my sleeping bag, rolled foam mat and tent, I waited for several minutes until the parking lot slumbered into stillness, then quickly hiked into the hillside. Once above the cars, it became clear that every spot which had seemed flat still steeply angled its way down the mountain.

Too tired to try again elsewhere, I settled on smooth area above and behind a dry clump of scrub taller than my head that I guessed would hide the tent from the main building at least. Once inside, I quivered into all my layers, then felt my weight supported by the foot of my tent, its six stakes clinging tenaciously to the mountainside, as the sleeping bag inched forward on the slippery ridged foam.

At least twice during the night, I awoke shivering violently as the cold air seeped up off the mountain and slid sideways into every gap between the foam and my body. I would check my pulse and temperature, wrap myself tighter into my cocoon, then slip uneasily back into twitching slumber.

In the morning, as early dawn above lit the tent bright as a lightbulb, I crawled out and found a nearby stand of scrub to pee behind, at which point I realized that the tent wasn't quite as hidden as I had thought, but as no one had come to bother me, perhaps that didn't matter so much. I deflated the tent into its bag and descended to the parking lot, contented with the mere fact of my survival and sat behind the wheel of the car, bemusedly munching dry fruit loops. If death didn't want me for the moment, what more sinister entities waited first in line?

Later, the sun lifted higher, unfolding the most beautiful colors I had ever seen, as jagged purple and green striations lifted out of black and gray seams, capped themselves white and sank back into black and gray. The mountains had seized my questions, and frozen them. Stealing glances at the distant skyline as I drove, only a nagging annoyance remained that the telephone wires hadn't been buried, and instead hopscotched along crazily, marring the view of each peak. The road I traveled had been cut into the rock also, and I felt a moment's guilt for that, but then that too was gone into a kind of aimless sadness. What does it mean to forgive a virus or a flea? We could gouge into those rocks until nothing remained but gray and black, put disgusting signs and wires in every rabbit hole, but the mountains would look down indifferently, blindly, at all of us.