Rocky Mountain High South to Santa Fe

I’ve had the desert on my brain since the start.

I’ve been aiming at the southwest since the beginning of this adventure, and over the past week I finally made my way down. I took a break halfway, driving south from Felt to Fort Collins, a seven-hour, mostly-Wyoming journey that ran me from lush river valleys into the dizzying wide-open that makes me a little afraid of the place. It’s hard to believe it’s all the same state.

I passed through town with names like Eden and Little America and Phosphate, wondered at how the bottoms of the clouds look flat, how it seems you can see forever. I misidentified a mountain as Devil’s Tower, thinking maybe I could see something that distant even though I was in the far southwestern corner of the state.

I didn’t do too much in Colorado, because work has been on an uptick — one that’s only increased more now that I’ve arrived in Santa Fe. Which is wonderful, of course; too much work is a privilege of a problem. But since I’m also enrolled in an amazing memoir-writing workshop and headed to a poetry retreat in Taos at the end of the month, I’m definitely feeling stretched a bit thin; I was glad I forwent adventuring in Utah (for now).

I did sit at a really cool coffee shop near CSU called Alleycat for hours and hours, doing work; it’s the kind of place with art on the ceiling and baristas so friendly and eager you know there’s got to be some kind of chemical assistance going on. (It is, after all, Colorado.) It’s also open 24 hours a day, so kids come in to work and study and play Scrabble or, bafflingly, to practice guitar despite the presence of fairly loud house music. It’s schizophrenic in the best way, but head phones are required.

I also went on a couple of fairly short hikes — a quick summit of Arthur’s Rock in nearby Lory State Park, an attempt at Sky Pond via Glacier Gulch a bit further afield in the Rockies, which I took with a side serving of briefly exploring Estes Park. It was maybe one of my favorite hikes so far, even though I didn’t quite make the end of it; although you can’t tell from my photos, there was enough snow on the ground that going much further seemed too risky. As it stood, I basically had to slide back down the trail on my boots in a squat, enduring the side-eye of the prepared climbers with crampons.

The highlight of my Colorado stopover, easily, was the chance to catch up with an old college friend I hadn’t seen since graduation, Kristiane. We met in Boulder to meander and sip coffee and people-watch and pretend it hadn’t been five years already. Then finally, on Wednesday, I loaded myself and my stuff back into the car for seven more hours of driving.

Travel is magic in so many small ways. You’re privy to these little moments you otherwise would surely have missed: a single hot air balloon hovering over the Grand Tetons at sunrise; a pair of horses standing silently side-by-side in an otherwise empty field, not scratching each other, not anything — just being two clusters of consciousness together. A wind turbine, biblically gargantuan right alongside the road, slowed to a stop just as I was pulling by. It was perhaps the eeriest thing I have ever experienced.

But it’s not all magic. In fact, a lot of times it’s waiting in a shitty Safeway stockroom for the toilet, or eating a salad in the car in the same store’s parking lot. I’m glad to have a full six weeks away from driving, which my body is absolutely done with. A quick check on Google Maps reveals I’ve driven about 4,600 miles, but that’s not counting the back roads or day trips or hours spent hours tooling around the national parks. I’ve crossed the continental divide at least half a dozen times, I’ve slept in more beds than I care to count. Even if I hadn’t been so eager for the desert, this would seem a perfect place to call home for a while.

I got so lucky with my sublet, too; the house actually has a home gym with a squat rack, as well as books like Being and Time and On What Matters stacked on every single available surface. In a cute little wink from reality, my lovely hosts, who are out of the country visiting family for the duration of my rental period, use the same Target-sourced cutlery as my parents do, which gives the whole thing an addtional ring of semi-permanence. I was able to unpack my suitcase in its entirety for the first time since leaving Florida, to launder all my crunched clothes just because. This space — an average-sized home with good, clean tile countertops and a built-in shelf in the shower, with art on the walls and a stereo system whose iPod is loaded with Outkast and Beck and Miles Davis… it’s absolutely shocking how luxurious it feels. It’s nigh-pornographic. There are wind chimes in the backyard and a pull-out hose in the kitchen sink faucet. It makes me want to stop my nonsense and grow up.

So, we’ll see what happens. I only arrived here yesterday, the self-dubbed “land of enchantment” foretelling itself the whole way with its bright yellow and teal license plates. It’s still up high — much higher, in fact, than Denver — but the landscape is different. A little less lush. The plant life is shorter and sometimes absent. Somehow not quite the mountains that surround it and not quite the arid waste you think of when you hear the word, the high desert asks you to look for its beauty, demands both your attention and, with its climate, your respect.

Additionally, my house is around the block from the Camino Real, and I recently learned Santa Fe is actually the second-oldest city in the country, beaten only by — you guessed it — Saint Augustine.

I guess I just have a thing for historic Spanish towns.