The Injury Report, Carpenter Ridge, Sept 2026

Considering aging atop Carpenter Ridge

It started in the lamest way possible. I reached over in the middle of the night to restart my husband’s ineffective snore suppressing machine. Instead of walking around the bed in the dark as had become my habit, I decided to swing my leg over him and hit the button on the black machine on his nightstand. Rolling back over, I felt a strange little tug inside my left knee and as I rolled onto my back, it suddenly froze, half bent. Gasping, I rubbed and twisted, but like a stuck bicycle chain, it wouldn’t budge. A horrendous night passed and at dawn, I lurched to the hot tub. After a few minutes, with a sickening clunk, whatever gave way gave way and my knee finally hinged.

I rested, elevated, iced, and physical therapied through the spring and summer, achieving a mediocre level of comfort, but each month brought slower paces, less mileage, more pain. I used lamaze breathing to straighten my knee. I ate a lot of turmeric. I clam shelled and monster walked, invested in a variety of braces, lathered weed cream, let a doctor stick a very big needle into it. But the trajectory remained the same. Downward. 

By mid-summer, our local hike and bike trail put me on the couch for two days. 

Finally, I called an orthopedic office in Aspen, hoping maybe the other half might have miracle cures our humble little town had not yet heard of. 

They did not. 

In fact, the assistant laughed at my MRI. She, with her 25 year old knees just swimming in synovial fluid, said, “how have you not had surgery yet? Your meniscus, I mean, just look at it.” A blurry blue and white image told me nothing. My knee clunked as I swung it from the exam table. 

A blonde, strapping young surgeon joined us and within five minutes, he recommended me for a partial knee replacement. I told him I needed to think about it. I clunked on out of there, telling  myself that many people needed an ice pack in order to drive home. 

On Monday, I scheduled the surgery.  

At the advice of my daughter, I joined multiple online knee replacement groups. This was bad advice. Every post was some other tale of orthopedic horror, lengthy recoveries, toilet mishaps, pain that lasted for months. Regret. Mangled knee parts I’d never heard of.  

I was scheduled for August 24th. A sense of foreboding clouded what would normally be a month of exuberant end of summer activity. Somewhere along the line, I decided if the thing was shot, I was going to run this sucker right into the ground. I stubbornly limped along trails, accepting a knee that delivered lightning bolts at random intervals, wincing with each rotation of a bike pedal. Clunk, clunk clunkity clunk.  

I mourned my original, unsoiled knee. At a particularly low point on the couch, two days before surgery, I took a picture of my knee cap.

It was a fraught, complicated time.

Although I was weight bearing immediately, the first couple of weeks were as I suspected. Quiet. Movies in the middle of the day. Endless scrolling on my phone. A pile of plastic pill bottles and days spent in and out of consciousness.    

In about a week, I made it to the end of the block. A few days later, to the bus stop. I descended a curb and, eventually, made it past the library. In those first few weeks, I enjoyed a short lived stint as a neighborhood inspirational figure, heel toeing with an abundance of caution, a determined, unkempt escapee of my living room.   

A little under a month later, Tom drove me to Carpenter Ridge, a flat top between Blue Mesa Reservoir and Highway 149. We drove south, appreciating the wide curves of the windy sage hills that keep no secrets. 

This kind of country sends your thoughts wide and your gaze outward and we missed our turn. We turned around in the yellow grass. Turning left onto a dusty road that gradually swept around and up a small hill. Without warning, at the top, the ground dropped dramatically into a deep stack of V’s. The deep drainages of Cebolla and Goose Creeks lie far below. Not expecting the view, we simultaneously exclaimed. 

We followed the winding road through yellowing juniper, oak and willows, the taupe and tan of the sage giving way to the deep greens of the shaded drainage. The air cooled. We were turned away by private property before the river bottom and so turned back and drove up, up, up to the top of Carpenter Ridge.

Carpenter Ridge is not a true flat top or really much of a ridge. There are no obvious drop offs or cliffs. The top is open, but not flat. The views are wide and far. 

We parked at an unmarked intersection. I tested my new knee, braced myself on my new trekking poles, tightened my waste belt, and headed north. Every journey, single steps and all of that. 

I followed the two track while Tom followed in the car, in case I should meet my doom on a gravel road. The gradual undulations of the plateau and the beginning of fall kept me moving. I was slow, I was awkward, but I did it. Two slow, lumbering, glorious miles. 

Learning against a granite boulder, shadow and light narrated the intricate drainages. Just a few seasons ago, distance unspooled behind me like a trailing flag, ten, twelve, fourteen miles… Great descents of distant gulches, dusty, climbs with grimy skin. I once ran up a mountain after work.   

And today, eighteen days after I was injected, opened, grinded, and hammered upon,  overcome by this view of the reservoir and the ridiculousness of this scene. The braided road, the trekking poles, Tom playing the role of helicopter parent.  

Once home, I marked this off of my map, tracing the short road in a red sharpie, smiling reflexively.  

4 ibuprofen swallowed, knee elevated, I fell into a happy afternoon nap.

An arrowhead? Perhaps