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Doc Holliday is Buried in Our Hills

Mark Pearce

    The sun was setting, and a chilly breeze blew across the top of the mountain. I was warmed from the climb, and the mountain itself had shielded the wind as I ascended. But now at the top there was nothing to break the chill.
    I was alone. The sound of my footsteps on the dry leaves mixed with the Autumn breeze. I had always been fascinated by the legend of Doc Holliday, the consumptive who had come west for his health, but whose brief and blazing life had seemed to invite a quick and early death. Wyatt Earp had said, “He was a dentist whom necessity had made a gambler, a gentleman whom disease had made a vagabond, a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit.”
    And he had come to Colorado to die.
    The grave was easy to find. A white, stone monument, almost an obelisk, on top of the mountain overlooking Glenwood Springs. The day I was there someone had laid a Royal Flush on the grave—10 to Ace of Diamonds—and an empty bottle of Scotch. The cards were slightly curled from a brief sprinkle earlier in the day, and were fluttering in the wind, threatening to fly away. I took the Scotch bottle and set it at the base of the fan of cards, holding them in place.
    I said a prayer for the man who had wandered from Atlanta to Philadelphia to be a dentist, had developed tuberculosis and was given a few months to live, then travelled west for his health, to Texas, to New Mexico—and to his date with history in Tombstone, Arizona. He now lay at my feet in his final resting place in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.
    The sun set as I stood silently on top of the mountain. I began my descent in the dark. Halfway down, in a nook beside the path, was a wooden bench. I sat and watched the lights of Glenwood Springs in the valley below and the dark outline of the mountains beyond.
    Over the years, through a series of road trips to participate in the productions of my plays in various theaters around the country, I had traveled the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border. And I had at last found my home. I would live in the shadow of the Rockies and let my manuscripts travel across the country for me—through the mails and over the internet—from my haven by the hills.
    I continued my descent down the side of the mountain.
    I was not born in Colorado; but like Doc Holliday, I will be buried here.

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