This weekend, I went on a run and I thought about Colorado. That’s what happens now. I run. I think about Colorado. I think about Colorado when I run.
I moved from Nebraska to Fort Collins, the foot of the foothills, between third and fourth grade. Midwestern memories made room for Western ones: weekend rodeos, sunrise hikes, something called “cruising,” which is just riding in a boy’s pickup truck while he laps around the town’s main drag. Driving anywhere with the windows down felt holier than church.
My Colorado was bike routes and prairie dogs that yipped at your wheels. It was impotent thunderheads, droughts, and dead yards. It was sunny snow days. It was sledding in T-shirts. It was doing 90 mph on the interstate, galloping like a flat stone skipped over still water. It was pop country on the radio. It was rhyming “my daddy’s tractor” and “it don’t matter.” It was white people with dreadlocks and gauges. It was spliffs and too much Febreze. It was the smell of cow dung on the wind, blown in from the nearby meat packing plant. It was golf courses at twilight. It was sky, sky, sky.
It was a place I loved but didn’t see as mine, because some of my friends loved it more.
We learned in elementary school that the author of ‘America the Beautiful’ divined some of the words at the pinnacle of Pike’s Peak. It was our purple mountains majesty that inspired such poetry. (The teacher never said that other states sucked, but that was the vibe of the lesson.) For some people, Colorado had earned this purchase in their hearts that I couldn’t quite figure out. They didn’t just like the mountains, they needed them. At their most rebellious age, they couldn’t picture a life elsewhere. They had found their freedom. They could call off the search, and the angst. They decorated their rooms with the state flag. More than one friend got a tattoo of the John Muir quote, “The mountains are calling, and I must go.”
When I left for college, I was ready to go. I don’t remember much about that flight, but I do know I didn’t spend a lot of time looking out the window, looking down, looking back.
Now, I feel differently. When I do leave my apartment, I leave a building full of people, cross a busy street full of people, and jog to a public park full of people. Outside, I am never tricked into feeling alone. When I look up, tree limbs or top floors obscure the view. I pine for some open space, for unobstructed sky.
I know, I know. It’s boring to read about sky. It’s the sky. It’s blue. Maybe it’s gray. What else is there to say? I’ve tried to describe the Colorado sky to so many people, and I always feel misunderstood and a little crazy, like I’ve wasted everyone’s time. This is how the conversation usually goes:
“It’s just different, though,” I say to someone from Philly. “It’s hard to explain.”
“It’s wide! Like, really really wide,” I say, tensing all 10 fingers into spazz jazz hands.
“Like, you can see for hundreds of miles,” I add, as if that measurement means anything. Generally, people nod. The conversation flows on.
I should admit defeat. But right now, I am missing that sky. I am missing this part of myself that I didn’t know was there. I belong to a place that I thought never claimed me. It feels like a gift.
So. I am going to try again:
The Colorado sky is sometimes blue, sometimes pink, purple, orange, white, and occasionally black when a forest is eaten by fire. Against it, the Rocky Mountains seem flat, like a painted movie set. When you look up, it’s everything you see. You are small enough to be nothing, a rounding error. You feel alone but not lonely. You are jostled from the center of your own life. You are swept along. You are passive tense. You are a kid in the backseat of your parents’ car, their conversation a warm hum, finding peace out your own window.
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A bonus: Judy Collins, singing about the Colorado she knows:
Well done...it transported me for awhile from my quarantine. Thank you. 😎
"It was a place I loved but didn’t see as mine, because some of my friends loved it more." What a great line!