The Mountains
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
They had been holding out on me.
“You mean this was here all the time?” I asked my parents as our car, unaccustomed to high altitude, sputtered up a Rocky Mountain highway west of Denver.
Photographs of mountains had not prepared an 11-year-old Kansas kid for this much dirt, so many rocks, millions of trees.
It looked as if Mom’s pinking shears had snipped the landscape. Gray and white mountaintops were like jagged teeth cutting into the postcard blue sky.
Raised on two-dimensional land, I knew only length and width until Colorado — macho, rugged and handsome — elevated me into the world of 3-D.
Childhood trips to visit my grandparents in the Arkansas hills had taught me nothing about mountains.
So, in the early ’70s, on that first real family vacation, the car crept around hairpin curves on Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park.
The Rockies filled the windshield. Colorado had more earth than sky. The way I figured, a person could scrape together all the dirt in Kansas and only build about four mountains, maybe five.
In Colorado, our ’65 Dodge didn’t hover over the land like it did on the prairie. The car ascended peaks and then dove into canyons. Surrounded by dirt walls, we seemed to be submerged in the earth.
Dad stopped at every scenic overlook for us to gawk and to take photographs and by the time we got above the timberline, I was smitten with Colorado. Who wouldn’t be? The air, thin and tingly, could make the dead dance a jig.
It was that dry air that felt so good. It was the shortage of oxygen that made me inhale deeply, taking in the clean smell of pine.
We had out-climbed the trees and from 12,000 feet, I saw a kingdom of mountaintops in every direction, the peaks bright with snow.
It was summertime, probably July, and at one stop, my brother and I ran up the mountainside to see who could shape the first snowball. Mom cautioned us to watch our step. She was looking out for the delicate alpine flowers which had a short enough lifespan without us trampling them.
Using binoculars at the visitor’s center, we spotted big horn sheep grazing on a mountainside. In the gift store, I bought a copper bracelet, something that would help me remember this perfect place.
I was swallowed up by Colorado, so much that I could hardly stand it. I had fallen in love with this aggressive landscape which was yang to Kansas’ yin.
One night, our family rented a cabin along one of a million fast-moving streams in the state. Late that afternoon, I sat alone in the forest and listened as the white water bounced over rocks, running as fast as it could in search of an ocean.
I absorbed the surroundings, hoping to remember everything: the sharp-edged boulders, the smooth river rocks, the smell of spruce, and I vowed that someday, somehow, I would return to Colorado.
Later, eastbound through the foothills, I twisted in the backseat, wanting to lasso the Rockies and drag them back to Kansas.
Now that I’d seen them, breathed them, marked them on my soul, could I live without mountains?
Yeah. After a few days, the flat land reclaimed me. I lost the crushed-ice taste of thin mountain air, could no longer smell the fragrance of freshly torn pine needles, forgot about the smooth water of lakes high in the mountains.
However, I’ve made good on that childhood promise; I’ve returned to Colorado about 10 times, most recently this past spring.
The prairie is long and lean and beautiful, but sometimes, you just have to climb a mountain.
“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net.
F Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.