Go Places: Road Trips

Nature is Ridiculous Amanda Ward We had another hour to go before we reached Grand Junction and I was thirsty. I cracked open my Mango Arizona Tea and took a sip as we rounded a sharp curve on the interstate. An enormous mesa jutted out of the earth about 100 yards in front of us as we came out of the curve. It was all immensity and immovable red stone and, either from its proximity or the suddenness of its appearance, I was startled. I quickly swallowed the cold tea to avoid choking on it.

“Holy shit!” I shouted.

“What? What happened?” Evan asked as he pumped the breaks on his Ford.

“These fucking mountains. They’re just so…it’s overwhelming. Look at that,” I reasoned, pointing at the mesa. “That is ridiculous. This highway is just carved into the side of a fucking mountain.” We had been driving on a back road through the heart of the northern Colorado Rockies for two hours.

I am no world traveler, but I thought I knew what mountains were. As we planned our move to Colorado, I had spent hours Googling pictures of the Rockies and every one looked like an advertisement for Poland Springs. They all had the same composition: two tall peaks framing an ice-cold river of snowmelt, with the snow-capped mountain range just visible on the center horizon.

Sometimes, in place of a river, there was some sort of wildlife: an elk, a bighorn, a steer. These images exhilarated me as I pictured hiking along a mountain trail with Evan and the dogs, coming ever closer to the distant ridgeline.

The reality of the mountains was altogether something different. As we made our way along the gravel “highway” to Grand Junction, we were surrounded by these ancient landforms. Following the rancher’s trail around the side of a particularly large peak, I was no longer exhilarated; I was terrified. The mountain managed to seem close, while reminding me of its great distance. It filled me up with a sense of enormity, while diminishing my sense of place and purpose. I felt like we were no longer moving. We drove on for twenty minutes and our view of the mountain was completely unchanged. And that was the first time I swore at the Rocky Mountains.

“Fuck nature!” was what I said.

Evan, who had lived in the Rockies all of his childhood, could only laugh at me, and agree that the views were amazing. He didn’t understand. I tried to take a picture with my phone so that I could show him what I was feeling. I set up a shot of the mountain, using my memories of the Google images as my artistic muse, and snapped. To my severe disappointment, the picture captured nothing but the Poland Spring serenity of a mountain view. I was getting anxious, but we continued on to Grand Junction.

Two hours later, we were on an actual paved highway that cut through a new series of Colorado wonders: the mesas. I had been swearing and snapping pictures for the entirety of the trip. And then that single mesa came flying up out of the red earth right in the middle of the highway. It was too much.

“Amanda, you can’t scream like that. I’m driving a damn car,” Evan warned, laughing at me.

I looked back out the window, subdued, and that was the first time I saw the smoke from the Pine Ridge wildfire. I swore again, but quieter.

“Oh yeah, look at that,” Evan said. “That must be the other big wildfire.”

“What caused this one?” I asked, taking a few pictures of the billowing grey smoke.

“I think this one was lightning,” Evan mused.