Comparisons, Emptiness

I’ve been back from Colorado for a week. Upon my return, while doing simple things like grocery shopping and dog walking, I became uncomfortably aware of an incredible cacophony assaulting my eyes and ears. It was, of course, no more than the noise and motion of a city surrounding me once again. I had rather expected the silence where we went to be deafening, but instead it just made more room for the sounds of birds and wind and water.

But before we get to the rest, I was meaning to give you a comparison, ask you all if you thought my quilt was a good representation of aspens. I was up in the heights among them again so I took a picture. If you haven’t been around aspens, they grow in groves at very high elevation (7000+ feet, I think). These particular ones were sunning themselves across the road from my cabin near the Continental Divide. I like aspens no matter the weather – they seem very graceful to me – but I did miss hearing the sound of the wind fluttering the leaves.

Again, it seems, my idea of peace will be tied up in an aspen grove, in the mountains, near running water. That very sort of quiet and happy memory, of sun and wind and water, is what prompted me to create my small quilt in the first place. It’s a good memory to have sewn.

High altitudes slow you down. They remove the distractions of cell phone and internet, for we had no signal, no cable where we were for a few days. Altitude also requires that you move rather slower than usual. Not an altitude for jogging if you usually live at sea level. At 10,000 feet, if you’re a flat-lander, you might very well run out of air before you finish an entire sentence.

I wish my camera had a better light sensor, because I’m always amazed at the colors I see in the forests and desert. I never feel as if I capture how the colors look to my eye, although I want to bring them home and find fabric that reminds me of them. The wash of reds and oranges and browns in a scrubby bush that grows along a river. The rust and deep green and silver of evergreen forests. The sudden inner pink sparkle of a rock split in half. The striations of limestone and sandstone where it has been cut away for a road. The gold and orange of dried flowers waiting for spring.

In large or empty places like northern Colorado and southern Wyoming, often cameras fail to capture the sense of where you are. You are left instead with occasional geese and bighorn sheep and moose–and good luck convincing them to be photogenic!  But at least they are subjects that will agree to fit entirely within your viewfinder, when the mountains to your right steadfastly refuse to captured in their entirety.

After my train trip through the Midwest, I mentioned my love of not only seeing the place I’m going TO, but also the places that are between me and there. The long road and I have always had a bond. I have seen an obscene number of the highways of this country. I have seen many small byways as well. I do not love them all, but I’m happy to visit most of them at least once.

I’d still prefer a train ride.

It’s hard, coming back to life, to maintain a sense of where I was, and how my shoulders decided not to live up there near my ears for a while, amid the busy day-to-day of everything. I envied the three who owned the cabins in which we stayed for their lack of distraction. I wondered if I could do that. It’s peaceful, yes. Would it become too remote without benefit of all my wires?  Would I become bored?  Does the constant sound of the wind over the mountains drive you crazy after a while?  I have no real idea what it would be like, so it’s all romantic notions, since my life is so far removed from there.

But it’s definitely nice to visit sometimes.