We piled into the red metal cage, smiling wildly, giddy with an excitement that edged toward terror. We’d crammed ourselves in like kids across a pleather backseat on a 1970’s road trip. The attendant wreaked of corndogs as he pinned us in place with stiff metal over-the-shoulder harnesses moments before liftoff. That slow, glorious ascent up the impossibly tall shaft, feeling every mechanical clunk as the people between the toes of our shoes became ants and we squeezed each other’s hands or knees now and then across the eternity of rising, rising, like Icarus, into a brilliant Colorado sun that as yet only kissed the crowns of our heads. We craned our necks to take in the shaft, assess our altitude and predict the looming freefall, but of course there’s no way to see it, no way to gauge how close we might be to plummeting back to asphalt. It’s not unlike getting to leap from a high-rise window but without dying, and as the tortured anticipation builds, you wonder, Have I always wanted to know what that’s like?
The whole summer stretched on like that moment. Our golden summer. I never wanted it to end so I crammed it so full of frivolity and merriment and adventure, I’m surprised even now how well we savored it above the pervasive, nagging foreknowledge of its imminent demise.
Weekends we ran a consignment shop and lived in the 300-square feet behind it, a makeshift kitchen slash arts-and-crafts workshop slash clothes-processing warehouse, overlooking which was a loft just big enough to sleep five people by night and house ten thousand Legos and a miniature pool table by day. It was as close to paradise as I could create for them on a budget of less than zero.
Naturally, I (over?)compensated for our substandard living conditions by whisking them away every week to some not-too-far-off but nonetheless magical mountain town or theater production or alpine lake or riverside campsite or cheesy amusement park. The shop was closed Mondays and Tuesdays, so every Sunday after closing we towed a 4000-pound dinosaur of a camper across the state and spent the next 48 hours exploring and ghost-storying and campfire-cooking. By August, the boys could disconnect and stabilize the camper and set up its slide-out beds in less than fifteen minutes. I simply adored being able to sleep comfortably in the same 200 square feet with them, hearing their breathing. And they didn’t hate it, at least not yet.
The divorce had not yet been finalized, so I suppose we were all pretty raw still. The oldest would start high school in the fall, and with it all the addictions and wounded rage I could not have predicted but somehow vaguely intuited. But for that moment, that summer, we were alive and free and poised precariously on the exhilarating ledge of some unknown something that would take the breath out of us.