Imogene Pass

It was 27 years ago that I saw her see God. Twenty-four years since her mother Anna brought her ashes up here and spread them in this alpine meadow. It was now August and it had been 22 years since I'd been here to visit the bronze marker her mother had set at the foot of this boulder at 11,600 feet.

Before she died at age 21, Michelle took time to write down her wishes. She didn't want to be buried. Her daddy's horses needed the land to graze. She wanted to be cremated. She wanted to rise with her smoke back to her God. She didn't care what they did with her ashes, but she wrote, "A field of wildflowers near Ouray, Colorado is a wonderful memory for me."

Pursued by a Book

The picture on the magazine page looked like snowy TV static. Beads of sweat formed on my brow as I stared at the pattern. You remember Magic Eye 3D pictures, right? If you focused your eyes past the image on the page, a hidden three-dimensional shape was supposed to reveal itself: a sailboat or palm trees or winged birds in flight.

These 3D pictures were all the rage in the early ‘90s. Newspapers featured them in the Sunday funnies. They showed up as plot elements on TV shows like Seinfeld and Friends. Three different Magic Eye books spent a total of 73 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. Even the gentlemen’s magazines were getting in on it.

This may have partially explained the beads of sweat as I sat in my studio apartment, the summer of ’92 at age 31, trying to defocus my eyes on a magazine page with the banner:

“HEY! This page has bodacious 3-D Ta-Tas.”

After 10 or 15 minutes of crossing my eyes and moving the

page back and forth, I couldn’t see anything but what looked like a close-up of beach sand.