Rocky Mountain high

From Kansas City:

We left the mountains this morning. Looked like it was raining up there. Probably snowing. Yesterday Cindy counted 85 elk in Horseshoe Park. Then we saw a dozen or so turkeys while driving up the Bear Lake Road. And a mountain bluebird, and chickadee, and white breasted nuthatch. The lake was still under heavy snow. The visit and the pictures were necessary for me. Every few years I need a fix. Rocky Mountain National Park -- that spectacle of such grace -- is one of those special places that gives it to me.

I fell in love with the Rockies in my twenty-seventh year. I’m not sure I was exactly coming home to a place I’d never been before, but it was coming home to a place that met some need I still don’t know how to explain. The last couple of days I found myself weeping standing at places fraught with memories, hearing music laden with family history, and retelling stories of a young dad, his brave and loyal wife, and their precious little four year-old daughter.

He had dreamed of finding a beautiful place in Nature where humans were only visitors. Places that rivaled the beautiful pictures of the Rockies on calendars and in National Geographic. Living out some experiences of John Denver’s ‘Rocky Mountain High.’ The acting out of some quest to find that something lost that belongs in the soul. Something you have to travel to. Something that binds a family closer together.

We crossed the country in my fourth car, the Nova I had to buy to replace my Pinto so the kid would be better protected in her back seat perch. And here I was, crossing the high plains in a car that couldn’t do more than 50 on that hot July day because the heat light would come on. The radiator just couldn’t handle it. Entering Colorado at five thousand feet, the car just quit, and there I was stranded in the middle of nowhere with a wife and child who trusted me. At least I hoped so.

But then the officer came by and offered that it was probably just vapor lock. Let the carburetor cool down, he said, then try to start her up again. We did and it did. The car performed flawlessly the rest of the trip.

My goal for the family at Rocky Mountain National Park was to spend a night in Estes Park, camping and getting our gear together. On our two-day, six-mile ascent to Lawn Lake, Jenny would carry only a couple of toys and her Raggedy Ann. I would take the tent, a couple of sleeping bags, the cooking gear, and as much other stuff as I could while Chris would take the rest.

What an amazing trip it was. Except for my nasty altitude headache the second afternoon, all three of us did great. It turned out that Jennifer’s favorite toy became a cast aside liquid detergent bottle she found at our first campsite. She filled in up repeatedly in the Roaring River and went around camp earnestly squirting everything for some reason only she knew. We all laughed. We all had a good time. And upon our descent and our pulling away from the parking lot, I popped John Denver in the tape player. I looked at Chris and she looked at me. We both wept. And JD just kept on singing.

It would be many years before I returned to the Lawn Lake trailhead in Horseshoe Park. In the interim, we were stunned to hear of the flood in 1982 when the manmade dam at Lawn Lake breeched that July after days and days of rain. The town of Estes Park and campers at the national park were warned of the impending flood.

It happened. The dam broke and the flood came. The only humans lost were a couple of backpackers who knew better but still camped along the Roaring River even after the warning. They were swept away and never found. The town got three feet of muddy water as the valley that held the river was scoured and gouged to expose boulders the size of pick-up trucks.

Jenni and I returned to Rocky Mountain National Park and Lawn Lake the summer before she started high school. She came along with me as a participant in a geology field study the high school at which I taught, not hers, offered to the West, culminating at RMNP. I don’t remember talking to her much about our first trip on a trail up the mountain, now sculpted so differently than when we first came. She walked ahead and chatted with her new friends.

And we made it. Again. I don’t know what it meant to her. She doesn’t talk to me much these days. It’s just the way it is.

But it meant a lot to me. Sunday evening I stopped a young pregnant woman on the bridge spanning the alluvial fan, where the exposed rocks seemed the biggest, and told her of my taking my four year old up that trail before the flood. I was proud to tell the story.

I had to tell it again to the woman in the print shop who sold me my newest Ansel Adams image, framed oh so beautifully and ready to take a place in my gallery at home. Long’s Peak it is titled. It was part of the Mural Project Adams did for the Interior Department in 1941-42. I’d never seen it before.

Then I told her I had two -- count ‘em: TWO -- postcards from Ansel Adams -- addressed to me, signed by the man. She pulled back a bit, gave me closer look, and said how she hoped I had them well protected. I assured her I did. Proudly.

The Rockies own a part of me. Lovely Cindy finally knows. She sees it in my face and hears it in my voice. It’s like her being on a beach in Florida. The girl just flowers. She comes alive under the sun. She knows I do the same thing in the mountains. I’m glad she knows. It will be easier for us to come back.

Today’s elder idea: He was born in the summer of his 27th year / coming home to place he’d never been before. He left yesterday behind him / you could say he was born again. / You could say he found a key to every door.

John Denver

from ‘Rocky Mountain High’ (1973 -- the year Jennifer was born)