A COVID Christmas

The holidays were coming. I had no plans to travel, but at the last minute decided maybe I should set up a little vacation for myself. That's what normal people did, wasn't it? I booked an Airbnb in the town of Crestone, which is more of a mecca for spiritual seekers than a resort destination. I had never been there but it seemed like it would be pretty laid-back.

When my travel day arrived, it turned out to be the coldest day of the year. It was -6 degrees as a packed up the car. I think this is the coldest temp I have ever been outside in. Thankfully (and strangely, given that it was at much higher elevation), my destination was supposed to be a balmy 20 degrees.

Normally it would have taken around four hours to drive there, but it had just snowed in the mountains and chain laws were in effect along large sections of road. I chose to go the long way, meaning the lower-elevation way. Along the way, I stopped at a grocery store to pick up a rotisserie chicken for Christmas dinner.

The roads on my chosen route were not too bad. But the weather was strange, the air hazy with ice crystals and low cloud. I was delighted to see this full halo around the sun at one point. I had never seen one in person before.

As I got closer to my destination, the snow disappeared, and temperatures rose toward 20 degrees. I entered the San Luis Valley, where dust storms blurred the horizon.

By the time I reached the Airbnb it was dark. I stepped out of my car to find that the air outside felt nearly warm after the -6 of that morning. The unit was a nice little studio over someone's garage. It had a loft for sleeping and a gas fireplace, and a full kitchen so I could cook Christmas dinner.

When I arrived I went to close the curtains, and realized that only the windows on two of the walls had them. The others were bare. I peered through the windows but couldn't see what was out there in the darkness. For all I knew ,the entire town was watching me unwind and make dinner. It was a little unnerving.

In the morning I could see that a couple of the curtainless windows faced only trees, but another faced my host's home, where the blinds were drawn. Are they ever opened? Who knows?

The unit

I tried to go for a walk, but soon my feet started hurting terribly and I had to turn around. The plantar fasciitis that I had developed on my Moab trip had revved back into activity. Still, I was able to get a picture of my rental beneath the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo range.

Well. I hung out. I wrote, and ate. There was a nice deck where I could see across the San Luis Valley to the snow-crested San Juan Mountains on the other side.

Eventually I decided I should go for a scenic drive. I went up one of the Forest Service roads that goes to hiking trails, and had the good luck to spot this bighorn sheep.

It did not seem impressed with me.

Afterward, I went and toured some galleries in the little town. When I say little, I mean very little: Crestone's population is only 144. One of the galleries was basically a woman's house, and her large living room was filled with paintings, antiques and oddities, as well as two dogs and a cockatoo. She was making beet soup in the kitchen. She was Polish. I said I'd never had beet soup and she said I should come back tomorrow and have some.

Somewhere in all this activity, I developed a tickle in my throat. That evening, it turned into a true sore throat, and the next day—Christmas Eve morning—found me hurrying to get to the grocery store before it closed for Christmas, so I could pick up a COVID test.

I brought it back and shut myself in, but didn't take it, since the symptoms had just appeared. Instead ,I ate junk food, and tried not to be bummed that I wouldn't get to hike or visit any hot springs or other attractions like I'd planned, or even go back to the gallery for beet soup.

Slowly my symptoms worsened. I couldn't keep warm, and spent the whole night half-awake at the edge of shivering. Christmas day found the freezing cold joined by bouts of fever, then by an immensely productive cough. The cough became a constant companion.

I still managed to make some collard greens and cranberry sauce to go with my rotisserie chicken. I tried to make some gluten-free ginger snaps, too, but they ended up more like pancakes. Sadly, my illness can't be blamed for that.

Between the fever and the exhaustion and coughing I was nearly miserable, but not quite. It was, at least, peaceful. I put on some classical Christmas music and turned up the heat until the gas fireplace flickered into blue-flamed life, and read some books.

That night I coughed more than slept, but was still fit enough to walk about the next day. I decided I ought to go visit something where there was nobody else around to infect. I went to a stupa.

Stupas are shrines or monuments that may act as reliquaries, holding artifacts or remains of saints. This one was dedicated to the Buddhist teacher Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and contains "tens of thousands of tsa-tsas (miniature replicas of a stupa containing relics of the Buddha and mantra scrolls)," among other objects. You can read more about it here.

When I arrived I was alone. It was a bright winter day with the prayer flags flapping in the wind.

This is not the only stupa in town, and definitely not the only religious site. Like I said at the beginning, Crestone is a kind of spiritual mecca. In 1977, a Canadian businessman named Maurice Strong—once dubbed "the most powerful Canadian" by the CBC—and his partners purchased a large tract of land here, intending to develop it. After Strong and his wife Hanne moved their family down, they found themselves visited by Glen Anderson, a local mystic. Anderson told them that in the 60s, he'd prophesied that a commercial real estate development would make way for a spiritual community.

Hanne, already spiritually-minded, took to the idea. She consulted with spiritual advisors, until she and Maurice were driven to form a foundation that began giving land to spiritual organizations from around the world. Now Crestone has more than two dozen dozen ashrams, monasteries, temples, retreat centers, stupas, labyrinths, and other sacred landmarks—quite a bounty for a town with a population of 144.

Well, sacred mecca or no, I needed to get back to my rental and rest my sick body. I did venture out onto the balcony to record the sunset, where a sliver of moon balanced over a strip of orange.

The next day was my final in Crestone. It was also my day to test for COVID. Guess what? It caught me.

Since then, I've been asked many times what COVID felt like. For me, it was like a flu, and yet I've had worse flus. Of course, it wasn't fun.

When I packed up my rental I sent a note to the owner warning her that I'd tested positive for COVID. Then I went out to look at another spiritual site before my drive home. It was a ziggurat.

The signs did not explain the purpose of the ziggurat. Perhaps it doesn't need one.

When I got home, I mailed a thank-you card to the beet soup woman, apologizing for not being able to visit but saying I appreciated her hospitality. I had to estimate her address via google maps, and wasn't sure it would reach her. But a month later I got a card back. She said it was all well because she ended up being sick too.

That is my story of going to Crestone.