By The Campfire

May 28, 2008

My wife and I once drove from Fort Worth to Colorado Springs starting at 9 pm, a dumb idea, even for people more stupid than I am. But we did it. We’d driven from college at the University of Alabama and visited my wife’s sister in Fort Worth for a few days (a time in which I acquired food poison no different than if I were purchasing a gun at a local Texas establishment with which to point at the roof of my mouth and plow my brain). I wallowed in the backyard of a rented house for the better part of an evening, face deep in the cool grass, fertilizing the shrubbery and cacti with what had been described to me as Mexican food earlier in the evening.

In a weakened mental state and suffering from being 21 years old, I decided the next day that it would be a wonderful idea to pack our turd-brown Vega (I believe that was the official color listed in the bill of sale) and drive to Susan’s other sister’s house in Colorado Springs in the cool of the evening, since it was hardly cool during the day in Texas. So we headed out on Highway 287 toward Raton, New Mexico and on north to C. Springs.

Have you ever been in a room with no electricity and no moonlight, a space so bone-hard dark that when you felt your way to the john, you were peeing and waiting for the splash to tell you if the target was accomplished? The darkness outside Wichita Falls, Texas at that time in the late 1970’s was ebony plus several shades south. It was so dark the stars seemed movie-specked faked. So thick that the streetlights were sucked into the inky black hole of the night. The pitiful headlights on the Vega battled up front but could only muster enough illumination to tell me what might be 12 feet ahead.

The road around Amarillo was similar. There were times when we couldn’t pick up a radio station, not even bad country and western music. At one point, we smelled something burning. It had the aroma of roasting dope with an armadillo chaser. I estimated during that trip that we saw at least 400 road-crossing armadillos or flat ones before we got to Raton – no other animals except dillos. We pulled over so I could extract a chunk of sagebrush that had wedged itself between the Vega’s cartoon radiator and aluminum lawnmower engine. That was the smell.

Dawn arrived just north of Raton, New Mexico and with it I saw the mountains my wife had told me about since we’d gotten married. The Rockies cut the earth like the Smokies could only dream of doing. The folds I’d seen in Gatlinburg were nice hills; these peaks were Everest-like to my Southern eyes. I drove speechless for at least two hours, watching the sun project long shadows across what seemed like hundreds of miles. Light was not like light where I grew up. I couldn’t wrap any words around it then and I fail when I try now.

The light there was as pure as clover honey and I swear I could smell it. Rosemary or Juniper or some variation of pine I’d never sniffed filled the plastic Vega vents. The sky was as blue as the rim on my grandmother’s enameled cookery. There was no humidity to dull it or gray it down and the chill on my windshield was wintry compared to Texas.

The Southern atmosphere diffuses the sunlight and smears and smoothes it out across the land in a thick paste. Not in the Rockies, The sun was doing zero to millions in seconds with no curve in its trajectory from it to me. In the South, when it came to light, God threw curves and sliders and sinkers. He bounced it off this and that. Up here it was only fastballs and He hit you hard with it.

I have been deep into the Canadian Rockies since then on shoots and seen similar light. I have seen the sunsets in Maui that can drop anything else on earth to amateur sunset status after one viewing. I have seen astounding scenery in dozens of places and felt humbled by what the earth is capable of doing without our interference. But I will never feel the same as I did that morning outside Raton, New Mexico as we passed into Colorado and the flatness turned to jagged incredulity, smashing against a blue that no painter can ever replicate and the light was perfectly foreign to me, like a language I couldn’t use but wanted to hear endlessly. My Southern smallness escaped that day and I have kept my eyes and mind open ever since because I know one day, I will see something else that makes me feel the same way.

I look for it every day.

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