It was because of a trip to the mountains that my wife, Emily, and I finally tied the knot. It was because of that same trip to the mountains that our son was born. Finally, it was because of that trip to the mountains that we were willing to essentially give away our house and jobs so we could get back to the mountains. The ring that I have been wearing on my finger for a little over three years is a constant reminder of that trip and what led up to it.
My hometown had a population of 107. My parents lucked into finding a cheap, run down resort that had been operating as a hippie commune in the Chippewa National Forest; it was small and run, for the most part, by my parents, brother, and I. My parents had taken motorcycle trips across the country before settling down and that urge to travel never left them...so we traveled every chance we got. My family happened to be one of those ubiquitous Midwestern families that show up in Colorado for a week at a time to visit the ski resorts or the trails. We were, however, a family that never repeated trips; we were always visiting different areas in different seasons so I was at least able to picture the different areas of Colorado, as varied as it is, despite having limited time and a great distance to travel to these places from home. When added together, the time that I had spent in the mountains was already impressive by the average Midwest-to-Mountain-Family-Tourist-Unit standards when my parents decided to take an off-season- late fall / winter- sabbatical to Estes Park.
The township and county I had grown up in was very poor economically and it was a big deal to many kids my age if they were able to get as far away from home as Duluth; my parents, while relatively poor also, were the type of poor people that used their meager resources to travel. This is the sort of distinction that accounts for the very divergent images conjured in educated minds when the word hobo appears in print versus the word homeless, and this distinction also means a lot more fun and adventure...the positive kind of adventure, not the kind you have when ill-prepared and things are going wrong...although there was that kind of adventure too...but things are better for the hobo. There was a very peculiar way of thinking among the stationary families- I guess they would be the homeless in my metaphor...hmmm...too harsh- the ones that complained loudly and often about the rut they were in but never really did anything about it; some acquaintances of mine were somehow unable to understand that the same money they spent in the bars and on cable television could get them someplace new and exciting if they just held on to it a bit longer- in other words, money was not the real obstacle. When we moved to Estes Park I was surrounded by kids whose parents had crossed the devil take the hind-most line in thinking as well- but they had stayed. The kids did not come from wealthy families with summer homes on cliffs and three mile long paved driveways leading up to them; they were families that had decided they had to live in a small mountain town at any cost, and...Bam... they had done it. They were much closer in the way they lived to the way I had come to view the way small towns should function. The people that lived there were not the type to seriously make remarks like, “Oh, I could never afford to live there,” before hopping in a shiny new car.
My brother and I were enrolled in Estes Park High School and we both felt at home immediately. Estes Park may get gazillions of visitors when the roads are open in Rocky Mountain National Park, but life there is a lot different in the winter when the tourists leave and the elk come down to seize the town. “Whose streets?“ ****elk bugling**** “Whose streets?“ ****elk bugling**** The elk know where the power lies when they take their turn to block traffic, litter on the sidewalks, and stick the local police with herding responsibilities.
It was amazing being able to experience Estes Park strictly as a little mountain town- an actual town as opposed to an amusement park. Sure, it was a place with some major criminal minds at work, for instance it was a town where all of the copies of On the road, The Dharma Bums, and The Monkeywrench Gang had disappeared from the shelves at the library. Really though, those books going missing was probably the biggest rip in the social fabric of the town that I experienced. When I walked around town during those six months I saw it for the simple beauty of it, as a place where real people lived, some of the nicest I had ever met, and the laid-back attitudes of even the most high-strung people I met made life there even better. I saw it as the kind of place that I could spend the rest of my life in, and that meant a lot to me because I was always very restless; it was not just a crowded destination that I would be dragged away from kicking and screaming by the howling demands of beating the interest on student loans and paying the bills. The immense herds of elk that set up camp alongside the houses during winter were one of the ’only in the mountains’ type of things that I got to experience that year, but also the acceptance of it was a heart-warming little quirk- “I’ll be there at 7...if the elk let me past.”
Mountain life changed something in me forever- that late fall and winter were like crossing a burning bridge; all of the earlier trips had meant a lot to me, but actually being a part of a small mountain community would come back to me constantly- while driving, hiking, in the bedroom…whatever, it was a part of me now. It knew it was possible to live in the mountains. I just had to find a way.
In the years that followed, and as I worked through college and the immense debt that resulted, the dream of moving to Colorado never died…but I also now had a bride-to-be to convince that moving well over a thousand miles away from anyone she knew was a good idea. I mixed in Colorado trips with Boundary Waters trips, but the times when both of our potential vacation times coincided- winter- we went to warm places, as my wife formerly preferred to hibernate during the winter.
Emily and I had been together for five years and had broken several wedding dates, life was too hectic. We were stuck. We were in the Twin Cities still, though we had been talking about moving for years, along with getting married. Life in the big city, even though the Twin Cities Metro area is not that big, was too much for me to handle, and once I was out of college and my friends started settling down I was pulled toward the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and all that the northwoods had to offer; my wife very rarely two days off in a row and my spontaneous nature meant that I was traveling alone. I had been leaving every weekend to go out camping, hiking and paddling in the North Woods- to keep my sanity, really.
Life in Minnesota was not right for us, but we did not realize what was wrong at the moment. Emily loved being surrounded by lakes, trees, moose, wolves, and bear, but in the end it did not inspire her the way that the mountains in Colorado do.
Some of my acquaintances that have been to an AA meeting or ten often say that problems cannot be solved by a change of geography, but I have never been able to follow that logic because every time I get away to the wilderness my problems are solved, as if by magic....temporarily anyway. Maybe some types of problems, modes of thinking, habits, and on and on, will follow you wherever you go, and the teenage logic that ‘well, there isn’t anything else to do around here’ sticks with some people who have a hard time finding inspiration... but it seems to follow that if you live someplace that excites you that you will be able to easily rise above whatever self-loathing mire you get stuck in.
We took a break from each other. I quit my job and moved North to tramp around the forests I had grown up in. My experiences that summer led to me to start writing and formed the skeleton of my first book, Heading North- A Novel. As I tramped around for six months Colorado was on my mind and when my wife and I started talking again I mentioned that I was planning a trip to the mountains.
Anyway, when Emily and I got back together and finally went out to the mountains, loaded up with sleeping bags and provisions in my little Ranger pick-up truck, things fell into place quickly. As we drove along the Big Thompson River she turned to me and with a twinkle in her eyes like I had never seen before and asked, “So when are we moving here?” I showed her around Estes Park, then we hiked up to Gem Lake, which had essentially been in my backyard when I had lived in town. Though it is a short, easy hike, we did not encounter too many people. Once we got to the lake we surprisingly had the place to ourselves for at least forty-five minutes- amazing. We continued through to Grand Lake and the White River National Forest to Glenwood Springs, then to Hunter-Frying Pan and Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness Areas.
Emily was enthralled. The bighorn sheep, mule deer, elk, moose, bear and the mountains won her over completely; okay, so the bear and moose not as much because of our lives in Minnesota, but they definitely contributed to the overall feeling of the trip. I proposed again during the trip and we vowed that we would finally follow through and get married as soon as possible.
We did some quick planning once we got back to Minnesota and as quickly as we could coordinate everyone in our immediate families getting a few days off we flew to California. It was only weeks after we had returned from Colorado, but the weather forecasts for the Rockies looked ominous, and not everyone in our wedding party had much lee-way with their jobs if flights were cancelled. We were married near Monterrey and honeymooned along Big Sur.
We had a surprise not long after returning from our honeymoon- around nine months after our trip to Colorado we were to have a new expedition member, our son. Our actual move to Colorado came at the end of a month long, 6000 mile road trip which found us starting a descent south around Pompey’s Pillar to the Absaroka- Beartooth Wilderness and found us as far South as Perdido Key, Florida; while en route to our southern destination we stopped long enough to scour the Western Slope for employment opportunities. We were contacted while on the beach that we were needed back in Gunnison, and so we began the trip back West; the wonder of modern cellular telephones finally clenched onto my skull and I have since taken the step in selling out to ‘convenience’ by getting a cell phone. I flew back to the Twin Cities, rented a monster truck and car trailer, drove up to the North Woods to collect our belongings, including furniture, kayaks, dinghy, canoe, bikes, and everything else that we did not have time to find new homes for -had to beat the storms- and began my harrowing 50 mph journey back through weigh stations, snowstorms, and meowing cats with my trucker rig.
Now our son is two and a half years old and enjoys every minute of tramping through the mountains around our Gunnison home. We could not see living any other way. The people we have met here are the nicest we have found anywhere, despite what is said about ’Minnesota Nice,’ and the two huge mule deer bucks that stopped for a visit earlier this afternoon at our livingroom window were nice to see as well.
