A reflection this week rather than a trip. I have been thinking about where all of this actually started, and it turns out it started twice.
I was just out in Colorado for a concert. We went out ahead of it and spent the day before and the morning of driving around parts of the state we had not seen. The Lariat Loop and Golden and the towns strung along it, stopping for whatever looked worth stopping for. Then Boulder the next day. I did not expect how much being up there would make me miss it. The smell of it, the air, the way it feels to be in that country, all of it came back at once and I was not ready for that. Somewhere in the middle of all that driving I started thinking about the first time I ever came out here.
The first mountains I ever saw were the Ozarks. We went down there as a family when I was young, and for a while that was what the word meant to me, and it was good enough. Hills, trees, water. To see real mountains we went to Colorado, and we went twice, and I would like to tell you about the two trips separately, but I cannot do it. They have run together into one trip in my head. One was a cabin in Estes Park with just my family, and the other was with a group from our church, in a lodge we rented at the YMCA of the Rockies. We went into Rocky Mountain National Park on both of them. There was a drive up Pikes Peak somewhere in there and I could not tell you which of the two it belonged to. I would have been eleven or twelve for both of them.
What I do remember, clearly, is the deck. The cabin had one, and it looked out into pine forest running up the mountain. I spent a good part of that trip out on it, sitting or standing at the rail and not doing much of anything at all. We had seed and peanuts with us, and we would put some out and then wait to see what came. The birds came first, and then the chipmunks, working up their nerve a little at a time until they were coming right up to take a peanut and running back off with it. That is the whole memory. A kid on a deck with a handful of seed, watching the tree line.
The rest of it is streams and lunches, because we stopped constantly. Playing around in water cold enough that you noticed it, eating picnic lunches at pull-offs along the way, loading back into the car and going again. It was summer and it was still cool out, which is not what a Missouri kid expects from the middle of the year. I would like to say I fell in love with the mountains out there. I did not. What happened on that trip was that I saw them, and I liked them, and I went home. Falling in love came a few years later, and it happened in New Mexico.
I went to Philmont Scout Ranch with the Boy Scouts in July of 1998, when I was fourteen or fifteen, and then again in 2002. We took the train down, Amtrak out of Kansas City to Raton. None of us slept. We spent the whole night playing cards and games up in the viewing car and down in the dining car, which is what happens when you put that many teenagers on a train overnight and nobody makes anyone go to bed. We got off into a heat I had never experienced before in my life.
Then it was vans, and basecamp, and the whole machine of the place. Signing in, physicals, a gear check, and putting your pack on a scale in front of everybody so you could find out what you had actually decided to carry, and then dinner and an opening ceremony that evening. We sent two crews out that year, and ours was expedition 717J2, Troop 216 out of St. Joseph. Every crew goes out with a guide for the first day. Ours taught us the things that do not come out of a book, how to hang a bear bag, how to use a sump, all the small tricks that make a week out there work instead of fall apart. Then on day two he left us and we were on our own. We were ready.
The weather was good to us, and we got rained on one day and the rest of the week was about as good as it gets out there. The food was fuel and nothing more, the way backpacking food always is when you are carrying it, and not one of us cared even a little. And there were the pines. Miles of them, and us walking through the middle of it with everything we needed on our backs. That week is where the pine trees got me, and the backpacking with them, and neither one has let go since.
A few years earlier I had been sitting on a deck with a handful of seed, looking into the pines from the outside and waiting for something to come to me. Day two, our guide turned back toward basecamp, and we walked the other way, into the trees.
