[Today’s run: 6 miles]<\/p>\n
After all of my trips to Ft. Collins this summer, Thursday night was the first time I had made it up to Estes Park.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
We lived in Estes Park from the fall of 1996 through early 2007.\u00a0 My family gets upset with me because I am wistful about that time.\u00a0 Let me just say it was terrible.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 My wife suffered through a tremendous illness which coincided with the adolescence of our children.\u00a0 It was a crucible time for all of us.\u00a0 And though we survived it, I’m not sure we can say much more.<\/p>\n
When I talk about it now my children say, “Dad, you don’t know what it was like.”\u00a0 We all had great challenges.\u00a0 And, I am sorry to say, we weren’t very good at helping each other.\u00a0 So each flew off to their own hurts.<\/p>\n
We moved away in 2007 and have been slowly recovering ever since.\u00a0 Some things may never recover.<\/p>\n
But I still love the place.\u00a0 It is beautiful and quiet and cool and wild and beautiful.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The problem is that some of those same qualities were what was killing my family.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
And I drove through Estes this last week and remembered some of the good and some of the bad.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 A place of dreams.<\/p>\n
I remind myself of a family we knew while living there:\u00a0 they were dirt poor and Estes was\/is not\u00a0 a cheap place to live.\u00a0 They basically lived in a tent, the parents and two children.\u00a0 The young daughter was sexually attacked; they suffered pain and literal squalor to live in Estes Park for awhile.\u00a0 That’s perverse; that’s wrong.\u00a0 But I understand it.<\/p>\n
People think of me as a down-to-earth kind of guy.\u00a0 I don’t know where they get that idea.\u00a0 I guess my only excuse is that I didn’t realize the root of it all.\u00a0 When we finally figured it out, I didn’t hesitate, we moved.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I think fondly of it while also regretting that I subjected my loved ones to it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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[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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4880"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4885,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4880\/revisions\/4885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}