I grew up in Colorado, a mile above sea level. I was taught that the air we breathed was a little different than the rest of the country, thinner, breeding a hearty stock. The Continental Divide went through our state, home to Pikes Peak, the Denver Broncos and crystal clear Rocky Mountain spring water pure enough for Coors to make beer out of. In elementary school, I learned that Colorado had its own gold rush and that Indian tribes like the Arapahoe, Apache, Cheyenne, and Shoshone roamed the dry plains and hid out in mountain cliffs waiting for stagecoaches they could ambush. As my family drove along the winding asphalt, a path that had been blasted straight through granite boulders, I would imagine I could see Indians in taupe deerskins, their faces painted, sitting tall on their palomino horses, watching us pass. Sometimes, I imagined that a whole tribe would gallop down the mountain, the feathers from their headdresses waving in the wind, and overtake us, even though we were in a car not a stagecoach. They would kidnap me and take me to live with them in their hidden teepee camp, deep within the mountains, and raise me to skin buffalos and dance around fires at midnight. I could spend all day painting the walls of my teepee. It all sounded pretty great to a ten year old who gave little thought to small pox, childbirth, and war with the white man.
On all our drives, we never did see Indians, but we did see deer once in awhile. Less often, Big Horn Sheep or Rams, with their curled “horns.” Either was worthy of my dad slowing the car down and pulling over to the shoulder so we could watch them chew their cud in silence. I always got the feeling that seeing anything alive in the woods or mountains was about as near to good luck as you could get. Far better than a four leaf clover or a birthday candle cake wish or catching the bouquet at a wedding. To happen upon a creature who had chosen to reveal itself to you was to encounter the holy. Such ground was hallowed, a Celtic “thin place,” two worlds intersecting. Once we were staying in Estes Park and several elk walked right through downtown and my dad said something like, “Well, that right there is about as good as it gets.” I was a teenager then, curling my hair with a curling iron, wearing nylons and make-up. I’d been to Disneyland. Had my drivers license. Seeing those elk, though, made me want to toss it all, don a backpack, and walk, like Thoreau, right into the woods.
Recently I read Wendell Berry’s book “The Memory of Old Jack,” about an aging farmer who senses the end is near. Berry expertly stitches together an agrarian picture of a farmer’s life in the early 1900’s. As the elderly Jack goes about his day in the town he has spent the summation of his years, he flashes back to key events that shaped his life. Mainly, the reader gets the sense that as a farmer, his was a life intimately tied to the land. He lived outdoors, working the soil, and whatever the earth yielded determined the course of his life. You could shoot your dinner just walking down the garden path. A whole town existed in a seasonal rhythm. Where the wild things are—this is where the farmer crafted a life.
And I have to wonder if, as the agricultural community recedes in our culture, we are missing out on this element of being knit into the organic landscape. In an age where environmental awareness is far greater than it was in “Old Jack’s” era, and people seem to get along just fine in the urban jungle, having never seen a deer or a mountain goat in the wild, does this really matter? Are we missing out on something, and if so, what exactly? Is there a spiritual element that this next generation will never know the lack of?
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