It started coming out of a concert late at night, up state in Fort Collins when we needed to be home in Denver by morning. Normally, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. That late and you could hit a steady ninety on the freeway, be home in an hour. But the entire stretch of highway between the cities was closed for maintenance all weekend.
We asked around, Thomas and I. There was a back road that would take us all the way home, a guy we knew told us. Through the mountains. It would take a while, four hours for what should’ve been more like one, but honestly I welcomed it. A drive through the mountains, that time of night, a few days before I headed back to college? It sounded beautifully peaceful.
So that was it, I guess. We looked up the route on Thomas’ smart-phone, figured it wouldn’t be too hard to navigate, and started out. We said goodbye to the folks hanging around. It was bitter-sweet. I knew I wouldn’t be seeing them again for a good long while. I knew, too, that every time I came back, we’d be a little farther apart, until, some day, I wouldn’t even bother picking up the phone when I was in town.
For almost an hour we found ourselves headed more or less due south along lonely back roads, the speedometer pushing steadily upwards. We cut straight down the state, mountains to the right, plains to the left, distant lights of Denver illuminating the horizon in front of us in a luminescent haze.
The steering wheel slipped easily between my hands, comfortable, second nature, almost. Press and depress gas, brake, adjust heading. The windows were open, blowing our faces with a steady blast of cool, crisp summer air. Occasionally those back roads through nowhere were punctuated by towns, small and cozy, my sense of nostalgic Americana disrupted by all the empty store fronts. Rural gravestones to the decline of American idealism. I felt the ghosts of an earlier generation pulse through those empty streets, American Graffiti adolescence playing out through my head like a melancholic Elvis Presley.
My mind drifted back to my own childhood. All the long nights in high school, cruising around the suburbs with friends, windows open, music too loud. What felt pointless then now feels welcome, a warm reminder of a life that seems easy going and simple in retrospect.
Thomas and I talk on and off, quiet remarks about the beauty of our landscape, the scarcity of other traffic on the roads around us. I’m scared that it’s gonna be over too soon, that I’m going to find myself pulling into my driveway, going to bed, the night lost to the depths of my memories alongside the ghosts of all those high school friends.
Then we were driving through Boulder. An icon of the state, but my memories of it are limited. A New Years Eve spent wandering through half empty streets, looking for something to do. A sad goodbye to a friend I haven’t seen for years on a hot summer night god knows when. Broken fragments of past lives. The sort of thing you try to forget, cause’ you know if you hold on, you’ll just cut yourself on the shattered edges.
With little warning, we were clear of Boulder proper, shops and middle class homes replaced by trendy mansions on either side of a road quickly sharpening into ever steepening curves. Then the mansions were gone and the streetlights too and we saw the last car we’d see for about an hour. I began to understand the sort of drive I was getting myself into as the speed limit dropped to thirty and I considered briefly that even that might be a little bit high, given all the blind turns jumping out at me.
As we hiked higher into the mountains, our few words turned to a reverential silence. This is it, we both thought, this is home, Colorado, U.S.A. Beautiful, impossibly beautiful. The sky was clear, and above us we saw all the Milky Way spread out, free from the pollution of the city lights.
My head got lost in that sky, flitting between the bright points of light against the velvet darkness, each blinking star a comfortable, cozy respite against all the unknown in between them. I sucked in a breath of fresh air, smelled, practically tasted the pine and cool mountain breeze. I flew through that sky, the steering wheel now little more than an afterthought, even as my reflexes became hyper-aware on the ever-tighter curves. I remembered the faces of a whole collection of people I haven’t known the names of for years. With each one came a bittersweet shard of memory.
We turned a corner, and, interrupting an hour of forrest was a lake, small, but still unexpected in the midst of all the pine and lonely roads. Nestled in tight against the water was a small town, and unlike the ones we passed earlier, this one seemed alive. Of course no one was out by that time of night, but all the shops and homes were lit up bright with Christmas lights, despite it not even being September. Immediately the personality, the love of the place jumped out at me. I considered briefly that I wished I’d grown up in a place like that- it just seemed so much more inviting than a faceless suburb- a place to love, a place to remember, a place to come home to. Alternately, it might be the sort of place one, try as they might, would never leave.
The town disappeared, and once again we found ourselves surrounded by forests, climbing deeper into the mountains. Thomas and I were silent. That town is ingrained forever in my mind, even now, remembered better than the face of the man who sat next to me for the hours of the drive. I’m not sure why- it was, after all, just another small town. Maybe it was the christmas lights. Or maybe it was one of those great points of light against the black, a bastion of the comfortable in amongst the yawning unknown
I wonder if I’d even recognize it, were I to find myself back there. Or if I’d even want to. It seems to me that the moment was, in and of itself, far more perfect than the reality could ever be.
Once again I sank into the easy rhythm of back roads and low speed limits, tight turns and blind corners. The wind drifted restlessly through the trees around me, and I let my arm hang out the open window. I remembered back further into the depths of childhood.
Driving through the mountains with my dad, going to Breckenridge to ski. It was late and I was tired, awake only in the casual manner of a long time stoner, gliding along the open road, my dad driving next to me with a casual ease. And the music, the music is what really holds the scene together. It was well before I started really listening to music, but even then I knew this album. My dad had been playing it in the car for as long as I could remember. Even now, all these years later, its my favorite album, Born to Run. American in a way that apple pie can never be, America in all its beauty and strength, all its crime and poverty, restless idealism in the face of unrelenting tragedy.
No album will ever speak to me like that one does, and that’s not just the Boss’ lyrics. I was raised on it the same way I was raised in Colorado. It will always be my dad, it will always be home, it will always be the open road. In the worst moments and the best, its always the first album I put on. Every word, every chord, known to my heart as the face of a lover.
We began to see road signs again. Blackhawk was coming up in not too many miles, one of the few places in the state where gambling was and is legal. I’d never been before, as far as I could remember, just seen it on TV.
Without warning, it was upon us, and let me tell you, after all those miles of small towns and back roads, seeing it like that was a bit of a shock to my system. It was in the midst of a narrow valley with rocky sides, the casino buildings shooting up high into the sky, seeming almost improper in the midst of all that nature. The whole thing was lit up in overwhelming shades of neon, pinks and greens and purples, blue and gold and red, pulsating, pounding, pushing energy, grabbing hold of your attention and refusing to let go.
The stars my mind had been stuck in all night began slipping, and with them the whole world around me. The endless mountain roads, the neon-illuminated pleasure scape, the towering buildings against old trees and older rock, they were all becoming something out of a broken, stuttering acid trip.
I took deep breaths of the night air to try to clear my head. I considered briefly what would happen if the sort of people living in this place two hundred years ago saw it on that night. It would be as if we were to wake up and find ourselves on an alien planet, impossible geometry tearing down even our most basic frame of reference, bright pulsing bulbs hitting hard at our inner corneas.
As the buildings began to shrink, then disappeared behind us, I got a sick feeling in my gut. If we were through Blackhawk, it meant we were almost home. Timer was just about up on the night. I tried to hold on to the last half hour or so of it in silence, simply letting the peaceful beauty of the night air wash over me.
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