It was a midsummer afternoon and my old friend Dawn and I were walking from an un-air-conditioned Nepalese restaurant to our hotel in the dull, flat town of Montrose, Colorado. The sun seemed larger than usual, and brighter. It felt as if we were under a broiler. The road we were on was six lanes wide, or maybe eight. There was no sidewalk, so we were pressed right up against the curb, being passed by flatulent motorcycles—their riders helmetless—and eighteen-wheel trucks that were equally loud but at least generated a breeze.
Our record is forty-three miles in a single day—ninety-one thousand steps, according to our Fitbits. Why not eighty? We always talk about breaking our record—going for a hundred thousand steps—but now I worry that we might be too old, and how weird is that? I was nineteen when we met in the front hall of our dormitory at Kent State, and Dawn was a year younger.
Dawn dresses like a Swiss person. That is to say, she looks at all times as if she is headed to the airport, where she will fly business class. She makes all her own clothes, Dawn, save for some socks and underwear, though she could likely turn those out as well. She just has that look about her—wiry and no-nonsense. Smells like a cardboard box. Dawn grows her hair out, then chops it off to donate it to cancer patients.
What remains is naturally straw-colored—not a touch of gray—and easy to imagine beneath a bonnet or a snood. Once, in Uruguay, I forced her to take a test that would determine whether she was autistic.
What puts people off is most likely her body language—the way she crosses her arms over her chest, for example, makes her look impatient. Also, her voice can be kind of flat. During the height of the pandemic, a woman spit on Dawn. I felt like a director coercing an actress to unhook her bra for a sex scene. Start by just. She took off her mask, and then of course immediately got Covid —a bad case, too. Fifteen months later, walking along the busy highway in Montrose, Colorado, we came upon three eighteen-wheelers parked on a dusty lot.
