Crestone quiet

In a way, you’d have to say a person has to work pretty hard to get to Crestone, Colorado.

It’s one of only two towns I know that are actually at the end of the road. The other is Homer, Alaska. The only way out is to go back the way you came. The road you’re driving on will end pretty soon, either in a dead-end or will peter out into a forest trail. In either case, you and your car are not going over that mountain.

It’s not that things aren’t developed in Crestone, though things are pretty basic. I stopped by the post office the other day to buy some first class stamps. Seems the post office is really just a series of PO boxes with nobody home. Not even a stamp machine. I imagine it’s open some time to ship boxes or buy postage, but it wasn’t obvious by reading the postings on the door. If you need serious civilization/shopping, a body has to drive north to Salida or south to Alamosa, each about 45 minutes away. It’s a bit of an investment in time and energy.

Crestone has a couple jewelry shops, a used-stuff store, an organic food market, the aforementioned post office, a credit union, and not much more. I hear there’s a new mercantile store that hopes to sell some hardware items later this year. And except for occasional weekend complaints aimed at The Laughing Buddha bar and dance operation, Crestone is a pretty quiet place.

***

People talk about going to quiet places. Peace and solitude and all that. Well, such things are said about Crestone. Just how quiet is it?

Pretty often here, if you just stop and listen, you can hear wind singing through piñon pine needles. You can hear the occasional high altitude jetliner. Their silent flashing is fun to watch at night, too, in the crystal clear skies overhead. There is bird song here, of course. Mostly magpies and piñon jays.

But quiet. Well, here at the Nada Hermitage last Sunday afternoon I took my lawn chair out away from my private cabin just far enough so I could sit and study Challenger peak overhead to the east. And just to make it feel more like a picnic, I popped the top on a Modelo Especial and grabbed the box of Cheez-Its. So while I’m sitting out there in all this quiet -- doing my best to be mindful -- I picked up my beer and took a nice, long swallow.

Odd. An unusual sound. What was it? Neighbor’s dog? I took another swig. Same response. I listened to the opening after the next sip. Wasn’t effervescence in the bottle. That sound I recognized. But this new sound. Another sip. There it was again.

Heavens. The sound I heard and felt was the pop of effervescence inside my mouth. One more sip. Yup. That’s it.

All I can say is that if you go someplace where you can sip a nice cold beer and hear the bubbles pop inside your head before you swallow, that’s a quiet place.

And that’s the Nada Hermitage at Crestone.

You could come. See: http://www.spirituallifeinstitute.org/Nada.html

Today’s elder idea: My friends, perennial city dwellers from California, are impressed with the silence [of the Arizona desert.] The silence, like the visual setting, seems unreal. Overdramatic. Contrived. We talk about it, dispelling the silence in our immediate neighborhood, for a radius of a hundred feet or so. But when we pause in our conversation the silence is there again at once, complete, centered in our minds. An absurd stillness....

Ed Abbey

excerpt from ‘A Walk in the Desert Hills’

from Beyond the Wall (1984)