The car had approximately 93 thousand miles on it, but drove well. It predated federal regulations requiring padded dashboards, so an expansive pale tan metal dashboard spread out before me as I drove. There was a hole in the dashboard where the radio should have been, over which a metal plate matching the rest of the dashboard was attached, a little loosely, just enough to remind me that the original owner had opted to purchase the car without a radio. C'mon! Who bought a car without a radio even in in 1964? But I believe seat belts were still an optional item at that time, and the original owner had gone for that extra expense. In the rear window, in the bottom right corner, a small sticker in the shape of the Chevrolet logo boasted factory air conditioning, which in those days was still an add-on item, the vents in a unit mounted under the dashboard and resting on the transmission hump in the middle of the front seat. A huge windshield wrapped around me, and a steering wheel that was almost two feet across offered some leverage to make up for the lack of power steering. Years later, there were times I spent an entire day driving in Denver traffic, parking the car again and again, and came home feeling I had had quite an upper-body workout.

But the lack of radio, and many miles of driving through the open country of northeastern Colorado made for many hours of contemplation and full attention to the pleasure of driving. Most of the towns I was required to travel to were about an hour apart, just enough time to settle into the rythm of driving on two lane highways at a casual sixty, sixty-five miles an hour. Sun and sky. What some might deride as boring scenery continually fascinated me. Rolling flatland cut by dry washes and gullies; agriculture on a scale unimaginable anywhere farther east -- huge center pivot irrigation sprinklers watering most of a quarter section of land, over one hundred acres of green surrounded by small brown crescents in the corners where the circles failed to fill out land squared by surveyors. And in short order another small town would appear, a few houses marking the approach, speed limit decreases, and that soon out of town again.

Shortly after I started in Fort Morgan, I went backpacking with some friends just west of Boulder. Of course I drove to show off my new car. The paved road ended just beyond the town of Eldora, our trailhead was a few miles farther yet, up a rough and twisting dirt forest service road. The car was handling well when a Jeep appeared right on my bumper. I had been driving in second gear, but when it looked like I might be holding up traffic, I dropped it into first, and we left the Jeep far behind. When we met our other friends at the trailhead parking lot (the Jeep still nowhere to be seen) I offered to drive through the wilderness up and over Arapahoe Pass.