Warren Mack: Colorado Landscape (First half, 20th Century)

"The last half of our Exile would surely cast lasting shadows."

Before we left Takoma Park and The East, I would tune into television serials set in The West to vicariously experience TheLight. The atmosphere in the East becomes heavier. It seems to blot out much of light's native intensity. A few Spring and Autumn days might approach the everyday clarity of TheLight in The West, but in Colorado, every day features blinding brilliance. I noticed that difference first. I'd rise early to write on the East-facing concrete pad porch of our Barbie and Ken transitional apartment to watch the sun rise out of Kansas to bathe the bluffs and plains in its purity. At better than a mile high, the air's thin, so the sun slips right in. Sunglasses were never optional there. I wore long sleeves and havelocks to avoid melanomas.

I watched for that returning sun every morning The Muse and I lived there. I found the morning light show reassuring. Sure, we were still in Exile, but it was so damned beautiful there. The view from our new home was to The North. We could easily see the peaks behind Boulder, forty miles distant as the magpie might fly. Our neighborhood was a forest meadow with herds of wild elk and deer roaming and grazing on everything except a few select native plants. In Spring, the yard filled with native White Lupine. I planted yellow and red Yarrow, Columbine, and Russian Sage. It was common to open up the daylight basement slider to find a doe and a couple of fawns lazing on the back lawn. Magpies visited every morning to see what I'd put out for their breakfast. They appreciated the dried overnight cat food the cats wouldn't touch. When I made stock, they'd pick through the resulting goop to select bones to line their nests. Magpies are bone collectors.

Before we left The East, The Muse and I agreed that when I declined to drive her to the airport, it didn't mean I didn't love her. It meant that The Lab could absorb the cost of a cab easier than I could drive her to the airport, which was every inch of forty miles away, halfway to Kansas, fer cripes sake. By the time I'd get home from one of those excursions, The Muse might already be halfway to DC because it was almost a hundred miles round trip and a hundred miles through what the locals called The Mousetrap. I-25 and I-70 cross just North of downtown Denver, right on top of the famed stockyards and a massive warehouse district that bleeds semi trucks pulling long trailers, producing the most perilous possible driving conditions and epic clogs. In those rare times when I would consent to drive The Muse out to the airport, I'd usually take a longer way home to avoid The Mousetrap. The freeways there terrified me.

The quickest route to The Muse's office from our mountaintop subdivision took us along seventy mile-per-hour S-Turns down a 6% grade on I-70. This reliably produced about eight minutes of terror before we'd gently exit at Denver West Boulevard, just around the corner from the lab gate. She'd swipe her badge, and I'd pull up to her building before pulling back off the campus to return to our aerie by a slower route, up Lookout Mountain, with views over the broad Clear Creek Valley, or up US Highway 6 along the rushing Clear Creek Canyon, every inch bathed in that glorious light.

We'd moved into a region that had been growing exponentially for decades. What were once charming little towns along the Front Range had transformed into a mega-city stretching from Colorado Springs nearly to the Wyoming Border. We were right in the middle of that mess, yet we were slightly off to the side. Just that distance down through those S-Turns made all the difference. We had easy access to most of whatever Denver offered without having to suffer from the traffic clogs and other inconveniences raging popularity reliably brings. Our neighborhood was quiet and well off the beaten paths. It was the sort of neighborhood where people entered their homes via the garage, so we'd only occasionally glimpse our neighbors, except the lovely family next door who, with four kids, provided all the kid energy we required. We had landed in TheLight. The last half of our Exile would surely cast lasting shadows.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz