June 25
Roll The Bones: Buena Vista
Words by Chris Nelson
Photography by Mike Sit
Mike Sit says he’s a small, green pea — flung across a school cafeteria from the chewed tines of a communal fork.
He and I are driving southwest down the highway from Denver, headed for a weekend in a charming mountain town with natural hot springs, a drive-in movie theatre, and a 1,000-inmate correctional complex nestled in the heart of the Rockies: Buena Vista.
I ask him how he feels about his creativity and his artistic expression as he sits in the passenger seat, elbows on the dash, left eye near the viewfinder of his perfectly preserved 1970s Nikon F2. Mike leans toward the windshield, pulling focus to capture the vast mountain valley that suddenly unfolds along Colorado Highway 285, and he tells me, simply, that he is a pea.
To anyone else, a description so devastatingly, moronically beautiful might seem too absurd to register, but not to me. I know exactly what he means, and I always have, because Mike has been my best friend since 1989.
We were born three weeks apart, grew up on the same suburban block outside Chicago, and we both had brothers — loud, lovable, maddening — but found a quieter kind of brotherhood in each other.
We roll into Buena Vista — pronounced “byoo-nah” by locals, a linguistic leftover from its 1879 founding — and hike the trails along the Arkansas River before heading to Wesley & Rose, an impeccably curated restaurant inside the Surf Hotel. We take two seats at the bar, order burgers, and pick up our neverending conversation about nothing in particular. After a few minutes, a bartender can’t help but point out our eerily similar mannerisms.
Mike and I shared a hilariously chaotic, strangely heartwarming childhood, but now our lives have drifted far from where they began, and the distance grows with every receding inch of hairline.
Mike’s a father now. His daughter is two — beautiful, smart, funny. In a few months, he and his brilliant, baddie wife will welcome another baby. Parenthood has softened him, slowed him down, and the emotionally raw boy I once knew better than myself has become a steady, confident man, exploring chapters of life I haven’t yet opened.
We drive up Cottonwood Pass, park near the 12,000-foot summit, and hike into the San Isabel National Forest in search of an alpine lake hidden somewhere above the timberline. Our pace is slow because Mike is struggling to keep his breath at this elevation, and he keeps stopping to shoot photos.
Mike is my all-time favorite photographer. During his long shifts at the hospital, working as a nurse anesthetist, he daydreams about developing black-and-white prints in the professional-grade darkroom he and his genius father built in the basement of his adorable suburban home.
The only other passion of his that comes close to photography is music. One summer in high school, on the first day of break, he ate shit on his skateboard, broke his ass, and had to spend the rest of summer break inside. So he taught himself guitar, and by fall he played like he’d been born with one in his hands. While he has played in a few bands over the years, these days he prefers living-room ditties and harmonica jams with his daughter.
Near the end of the hike, we hit thick, grimy mounds of snow that block the trail. We turn back and drive down to Cottonwood Hot Springs — a place that looks like a rundown mini golf course, but offers peace in the form of 106-degree geothermal pools. We soak until our fingers wrinkle, eat wood-fired sourdough pizza for dinner, and drive to the edge of town to watch Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts at the Comanche Drive-In.
As the sun sets behind the peaks and the superhero mayhem begins, we sit in the back of my car, quietly eating handfuls of white cheddar popcorn. Before long, we realize the best thing about drive-ins: you can talk through the movie without being a dick. Our conversation meanders from the fascinating to the mundane as helicopters crash and buildings collapse in the background of our moment.
I am wrong about my best friend and growing apart. In moments like this, it is clear that I am one of the few fortunate souls who will go through this life with someone who knows me through and through, and I do not have to worry about losing him. Right now we are exploring vastly different territories of life, day after day until we come together again, share our findings, and establish some poppycock postulation about what it all means and how we can do better as we move forward in our separate directions.
We have a long-exposure friendship - two lives side by side, blurry at the edges but steady in the center - and we are two peas in a pod.
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