#21 - Getting Away
One year ago today, I left good old Maine to depart for a foreign land, an autumn respite from autumnal concerns. Every few years such a pilgrimage seems necessary, not so much to put distance between me and home but to open up horizons again, horizons lost behind wood piles in the depth of winter, distances unseen through corn stalks and sunflowers and the cascades of bills and junk mail - the stuff of staying home. Getting away now and then is a good idea.
The American southwest is about as foreign to Maine as you can get, certainly more foreign than most of Europe, which is where a lot of people feel the urge to travel to - another good reason to go west. I went West.
My plane lifted off into an October sunrise. The night before saw the first heavy frost of the season, and everything looked frosted with pink and gold at first light. Pockets of ground fog lay in the shadows of quiet valleys. Otherwise the sky was clear, and as we swung westward the hill country quickly rose into the White Mountains and then the Green Mountains. The Connecticut River weaved a billowing ribbon of mist away to the South. Beautiful New England, I thought, is a wonderful place to come from. Very soon we were swooping around for a steep descent into a pocket in the hills around Burlington, Vermont.
After leaving Burlington, we flew over New York and beyond. The pilot banked over Niagara Falls to give all aboard a spectacular view of that misting cauldron, and then we headed for Chicago, a plane change and to points I had never seen. Denver, Colorado was my destination.
As we approached Denver, I finally saw the first of what I had come to see, the Rocky Mountains, looming just beyond the city at the edge of the Great Plains. Snowy Heights, I could see. Mountain goats and eagles, high country ranches and gold mines, rushing torrents and aspen-splendored valleys, and beaver, whose pelts were once the lure largely responsible for the early exploration and settlement of most of this continent - these things I still could only imagine. With my morning's breakfast still in my paunch, I had, in a few hours, already covered the distance that used to take months in a wagon loaded with iron pots and barrels of flour. I wanted to climb out of that plane and get on with this adventure.
In the airport I met a beautiful girl who was looking for someone just like me. She was my wife. The first night we stayed at Denver's famous Brown Palace Hotel, where once a prize-winning bull was displayed, very much alive, after he was purchased at the highest price ever paid for a bull. Denver's vast stockyards, packing houses and cattle auction arenas bear irrefutable witness to the importance of cattle in that part of the world.
Leaving the cowtown behind us, we headed into the Rockies and wound south over high passes, through tunnels, crisscrossing the continental divide several times in the first day. We went through places like Lawson and Silver Plume, whose only view was up, and through the famous town of Leadville, the highest municipality in the United States. No matter where we turned, great snowy peaks dominated the horizon all around.
The end of the first day's drive, we passed down through Wolf Creek Pass, which is an especially beautiful area with tall trees, bounding streams and picturesque ranches nestled in green valleys. Finally, we reached Pagosa Springs, near Colorado’s south border, a town whose merchants specialize in outfitting hunters and people packing by horseback into the mountains. There were horses tied up in front of the motel and a sign in the lobby asking lodgers to “Please Do Not Dress Game in Your Room” - quite a switch from worrying about the tomato patch I had been trying to save from the frost only 48 hours before.
The next day we explored the Pueblo ruins at Mesa Verde, and from there made our way into New Mexico. Everything we saw was new and very foreign: the arid soil, the cacti, the miles of barbed wire, arroyos, adobe buildings, the unlimited views and the infinite sky and the quality of the air and the ethereal light. Every few miles took us through entirely new terrain (New Mexico has more ecotypes than any other state), from barren desert to cool mountain forest in less than an hour's time. One night we drove 200 miles through the San Juan Mountains in the moonlight, seeing nothing but deer and owls, our memories charged with images we will never forget. In the Sangre de Cristos, we came upon the wholly awesome Eagle Nest Valley. The gigantic scale and beauty of this place had a very humbling effect on us. We traveled and explored for a week and never tired of it.
Towns like Taos, Santa Fe and Las Vegas, New Mexico were no longer just names, and many of the towns we visited were younger than our house in Maine. The Rio Grande and the Santa Fe Trail and Shiprock, they all exist.
The New Mexican cuisine with tortillas, sopapillas and refried beans became standard fare three times a day, served with eggs at breakfast, beer at lunch, candles at night. We developed an insatiable appetite for that wonderful food and were warned that even years later we would still crave it. It's true.
The last day was left to glimpse, in a tiny 300-mile loop, the immense, pale green ocean of the Great Plains. That day, more than anything else, drove home to me what a tiny dot on the Earth was that woodpile of mine back in Maine and what a limited view the man working at it had. Getting away every now and then is a good idea.