[Today’s run: 6 miles]
After all of my trips to Ft. Collins this summer, Thursday night was the first time I had made it up to Estes Park.
The schedule they have me on involves leaving my hotel in Ft. Collins and relocating to a hotel near the airport on Thursday evening, then flying out early Friday morning. So this time I headed up the Big Thompson Canyon after work on Thursday, drove through Estes, stopping only to say “hi” to our ex-neighbor in the briefest way. Then I drove down the peak-to-peak highway to Nederland, the Boulder Canyon to Boulder and US 36 to Denver and ended up at my hotel on Tower Road near DIA around 9 pm.
We lived in Estes Park from the fall of 1996 through early 2007. My family gets upset with me because I am wistful about that time. Let me just say it was terrible. There is no other place in the world where I have shed so many tears and experienced such bewildered anguish both in others and in myself. My wife suffered through a tremendous illness which coincided with the adolescence of our children. It was a crucible time for all of us. And though we survived it, I’m not sure we can say much more.
When I talk about it now my children say, “Dad, you don’t know what it was like.” We all had great challenges. And, I am sorry to say, we weren’t very good at helping each other. So each flew off to their own hurts.
We moved away in 2007 and have been slowly recovering ever since. Some things may never recover.
But I still love the place. It is beautiful and quiet and cool and wild and beautiful. The problem is that some of those same qualities were what was killing my family.
So now I live in pestilential Mississippi where my wife thrives along with the bugs and alligators and kudzu; and encouraging, church-going neighbors, lower costs and helpful relatives. It is a trade I wish I didn’t have to make, but truly is a good deal; like taking medicine or buying insurance; like living in real life with real people instead of a solitary, blissed-out haze.
And I drove through Estes this last week and remembered some of the good and some of the bad. I feasted my eyes on the beautiful landscape: mountains so close you can almost reach out and touch them, but, if you tried to go there you would be pressed to the limit and probably die. A place of dreams.
I remind myself of a family we knew while living there: they were dirt poor and Estes was/is not a cheap place to live. They basically lived in a tent, the parents and two children. The young daughter was sexually attacked; they suffered pain and literal squalor to live in Estes Park for awhile. That’s perverse; that’s wrong. But I understand it.
People think of me as a down-to-earth kind of guy. I don’t know where they get that idea. I guess my only excuse is that I didn’t realize the root of it all. When we finally figured it out, I didn’t hesitate, we moved. Like these mountain climbers who come back from some big, doomed adventure missing frozen fingers and toes, I still look back on it as a defining and beautiful place. I think fondly of it while also regretting that I subjected my loved ones to it.