Pagosa Bar

A cool bar, though it was populated with the kind of locals you would expect to find drinking in a bar at 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon. 

Still, I enjoyed myself. I drank four pints of ice-cold Coors Light and watched ESPN. I sat for a while on the back patio under a sky so blue it hurt my eyes. The temperature was 83º, very close to the town's all-time high for May 12th.

But my favorite part was when one of the road workers entered the bar and reported that someone had apparently left the bar drunkenly and walked fifty feet through the freshly-poured concrete. 

A buzz began to scatter through the bar; this was obviously the most exciting thing to have happened in weeks, perhaps all of 2026.

The bartender pulled out an iPad and we gathered to review the security footage to see if we could determine the culprit. We were a makeshift detective agency, determined to be the heroes of the story, not accomplices of the person who had traipsed through the fresh cement of a construction project that had been ongoing longer than a presidential term. And when we could not, a sense of dissatisfaction and slight shame enveloped us all, though it faded within twenty minutes and our confederation dissipated as quickly as it formed. 

The whole scene made me happy. It was not happiness from achievement or excitement, but rather from witnessing - the quiet pleasure of being momentarily part of this sincere and shabby human ritual. 

Many years have passed since I have been a true barfly, but on this afternoon, this 83º day at 7100 feet, I felt like one again.