Whispers

This is what I saw when I first crossed into the Centennial State for the summer in late May.

That sign does, like the others, say "Welcome to Colorful Colorado." A bit of a stretch for that particular spot on the Kansas/Colorado border of Highway 36, but also strangely perfect. Colorado presented itself as a blank slate on which to scribble the events of the summer. I like that idea. A wide open space. Colorado, colorful because you draw it that way.

Not to say that I came here without preconceived notions. I have my version of this part of the world; I know what I look for from it. I've always loved the American West, ever since childhood road trips to the Black Hills or Estes Park where I'd first step out of the car in Big Thompson Canyon and feel that crisp mountain air and climb around on the rocks. It has an atmosphere. The Midwest is really more like an empty canvas that we write on; the land itself is everywhere in the Midwest, at least for city Midwesterners, throughly and consistently ignored. Here the land has its own presence, not just that of the roads and the structures we build on it.

But it's not just the contours of the earth. In the last few years I've come to recognize that I love the American West for its fusion of powerful natural beauty and manifest human quirkiness. Look at the Black Hills up in South Dakota. Even as a kid I think it struck me strange, on some level, that I had to reconcile the mysterious energy of those dark pine-covered hills with the Western kitsch of Wall Drug, buffalo burgers and moccasins, the gift shops in Keystone, the parking lot at Mt. Rushmore. And oh, lord, I love Grand Lake CO for this same unexpected marriage. The mornings and the twilight hours here are music. And then add the people who live here. "Colorful Colorado" is damn right.

I get so sulky when I have to leave Colorado. I stomp my feet halfheartedly and whine. I get embarrassingly touched by John Denver songs. This period of my life has been teeming with incessant beginnings and endings. I've chosen this and regret nothing, but nonetheless it makes for an awful lot of these three-day spans where I walk around a place and feel like it's whispering to me, asking why I'm leaving and where I'm going. I've learned so much from these places, and as I kick the asphalt in Grand Lake I feel the presence of this town and the people with whom I've shared it, and it presents itself to me like the opposite of that empty field on Highway 36: it is full, saturated with experience, an inscrutable lesson that I've somehow internalized.

I talked about these things in the essay that managed to score me a gig as Artist-in-Residence at Joshua Tree National Park this coming October-November. I included audio excerpts from Terlingua Meditations and On the Beach at Kantishna, and I described them as "responses to powerful places, spots where the atmosphere of nature fused with my own consciousness to create a unique synthesis." My creative work has often involved attempts to explicate the subjective, expressing the universals hidden within moments of personal experience.

Tonight, this weekend, I'm going to hold it in. I'm feeling selfish.

Terlingua: literally, "earth language." The aspens are starting to turn. Happy Fall.