Western Dream

Thoughts sitting in the car with Norm driving through Colorado. That Western Dream that had me transfixed for so many years. I haven't been out to this area of the country in 5 years. Immediately what struck me while riding shotgun with my friend was the vastness of this place. We had just touched down at the Denver airport and there were no skyscrapers to be seen. Just rolling plains patched with snow and withered yellow grasses, on the horizon enormous granite monoliths rising like muscled shoulders of the earth. The Rocky Mountains, majestic, lonesome, storied, dressed in their winter white and presiding over the Western landscape like powder-wigged judges. We passed through Boulder, Golden, Empire, past long-abandoned silver mines, along clear cold rivers, through darkened tunnels, over wind-swept passes. Roadside cafes twinkling in the late afternoon sun (even though it was cloudy.) I had forgotten how it can be cloudy and sunny at the same time out here. It's just bright. So much sky, so much emptiness. When I was a younger man I used to see places such as this and immediately want to move. I'm unsure what has happened to me that I don't have that knee-jerk reaction anymore. I thought I would leave my East Coast life behind me. I thought I would turn the page and escape my past. I'd show'em. I had a head full of ideas and a mind that raced with possibilities. What's astonishing is that I had any success at all with it. I had a diseased mind and threw myself headlong into the sun. When I think of my failed Western Experiment I smile. I made it but the cost was too high. And now I've got my sights set on other dreams, older dreams. Cottonwoods stand sentry along isolated creeks that cut through valleys shrouded in timelessness. Houses constructed of timber and rock nestle against mountainsides beneath the hunched mountain ranges. We wind through landscapes filled with rugged beauty but we are just visitors. And today I'm cool with that.