Something happens to me every time I return to Colorado. Last weekend, I went back for the third time since moving to Seattle fourteen months ago. Each time my plane sets down at DIA and I take my first steps into that vast peak-roofed travel cathedral, I feel doors swing open in my mind. My chest expands. I can think. I can breathe. I’m home.
The area around the Denver airport is a vast, flat expanse. In winter (and often in summer, too), the view from an airplane is a monochromatic patchwork, ranging from tan to mahogany. On the ground, it’s just brown. When I first moved from the green plains of Illinois to the brown plains of Colorado, I wondered how anyone could live that way. After eleven years there, I learned to see the richness in the shades of brown—the golden of the autumn wheat fields, the texture of plowed furrows under winter frost. You could look out across those plains forever were it not for the intrusion of the mountains in the west. The Rockies aren’t like other mountains—certainly not like the lone, majestic peaks here in Washington. The Rockies were born of violence, of sheer, raw power. They’re staggeringly tall, frighteningly daunting, impossibly long . Their beauty is a punch in the gut. Sometimes, even when I lived there, I would cry at the sight of them.
I’m glad we moved to Seattle. I haven’t been able to say that before, I’ve been so weighed down with the pain of leaving Colorado. I’m glad to have the experience of living on a coast, living near water, living in a city, living in the lush, green, Pacific Northwest, meeting the people I’ve met here. I’m glad of it all in the way I’m glad to have a read a book or seen a movie, even ones that don’t immediately rise to my list of favorites. I’m glad of it in the way writers are always glad for new experiences. Living here is fuel for my imagination, the newness of it is the crude oil of creativity.
But Colorado, that wide open part of Colorado where the mountains of my adulthood meet the plains of my childhood, is where my heart still lives. Perhaps someday, I’ll feel the way those first brazen settlers did when they crossed the impossible Rockies into a land of hope, freedom, and opportunity. Today, the sky is weighing down on me and the trees are crowding in around me, and I’m thinking those mountains were put there for a reason.
At the same time, I'm thankful to be living in the future. Every miraculous trip through the sky reminds me, we're not those early settlers. We live in a time when things left behind aren't left forever, and when words connect us at the speed of light. Even over mountains.
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3 comments:
You know, I was feeling very homesick this past weekend for the rolling hills around Madison. For the feet of snow, the raging thunderstorms, and just Wisconsin. And I was thinking in the car this morning how odd it was that I've been here for a year now, and I'm still fascinated by the mountains on the horizon.
I am glad you don't wholly regret the move anymore. I know how you feel about one place being home, though, because every day I'm not in my islands I feel out of my element. It might have been easier for me not having the ability to go back for many years -- I had to accept my new surroundings, I didn't have a choice. But it still took me years to love the mainland, and that's with all the diverse incredible landscapes it had to offer. Took me a long time to get used to the people being so different.
The geologist in me would quibble with your disparate characterizations of the geneses of the Rockies vs the Cascades, because the Cascades all had violent, recent births, and while there's tens of kilometers of displacement on the vertical faults of the Rockies -- that took eons to happen. That system is pretty quiescent in geophysical terms.
You're right, Laural. I guess all mountains had violent births and you certainly can't argue with the power of an active volcano. I just feel it more with the Rockies, with their sheer, jagged cliff-faces and their comparative lack of greenery to soften the rock.
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