This Place

Friday marked fourteen years since the day I arrived in Colorado.

I did not think much of the place back then. I was accustomed to the wildness and wet of the Pacific Northwest. Compared to the Olympic and Cascade mountains, the Rockies seemed so brown and barren.

I complained – vociferously – about the lack of water. For five years of my childhood we lived on an island in Puget Sound. Most of my years in Washington I’d seen water every day; it was part of the landscape.

Here in Denver – well, there is a river that runs through town, but it’s far too hemmed in and has no beauty to recommend it. There’s no ocean. Most lakes are man-made. Even now, I find a sunset with no beach, no waterfront, somehow lacking.

But somehow, without even noticing it, I fell in love with Colorado.

It was probably the sunshine that hooked me first. Almost every day is partly to mostly sunny, year-round. Sure, there is snow, but not so much as people think; not in the city, anyway. It doesn’t stay on the ground very long. Lots of times it doesn’t even melt, but tidily evaporates and leaves the pavement dry.

Everything is spread out, and open, and spacious. Few places have traffic problems. You don't feel closed in. It's not flat, like some parts of the Midwest where you can see forever but there's nothing to see. Here, it's not flat, but it's open. Sometimes people from other parts of the country have a hard time with that: they feel exposed. And all this space, well, it may seem wasteful.

Colorado’s best feature may not be its mountains, or its prairies, its people, or its wildlife, but the broad, fascinating expanse of sky that stretches out above it all. It’s really our dominant feature, much more so than the Rockies.

The sky here is big. It has "presence." You notice it.

Colorado has great clouds. All kinds and forms and shades and colors. And they all have shape to them, piling up, spreading out, catching the light.

Not like the Northwest where you have more a “cloud cover” than “clouds.” I know all that cloud cover provides the moisture that makes the Northwest such a green growing place, a fruitful garden.

I would like to see more of that here, it’s true.

But you can’t really have it both ways.

So, I’ll choose to look up and enjoy the sky overhead.