Colorado

When I first got in to the Denver airport a few weeks ago, I was running on less than 2 hours of sleep and a lot of caffeine.  In that state of energized delirium, I caught my first glimpse of the mountains and wrote the piece below.  It doesn't do any justice to the sight (or to my state).

Was leaving the airport on the bus and saw the mountains.  At first, I didn’t know what they were.  At a distance they were just a darker blue, the snow on top the clouds, so I thought they were sky.  But then I realized they were earth and the majesty of them hit me like a million waves, crashing over me with awe and joy and I teared up and almost started to cry, but instead I wrote this down.

The first wave was my guess at the technical definition.  Because I’m me, so of course it was.  A land formation so tall that the tops are always covered in snow.  And there it was, the air so cold that the water couldn’t stand it, so it froze up and went to meet the ground.

Then the beauty of it.  How they looked like the sky, but were the earth, and the blue turning to brown as we drove and saw them from different angles and got slightly closer, but they stayed distant, their sheer size allowing them to deny us even the sense of motion when in their presence.

Then the enormity of them.  Two enormities, really, if enormity is a word you can pluralize.  The first enormity, and the smaller of the two, is the insane physical presence of them.  Once I realized they were there, they stayed with me.  I tried to think of how big they are, how much earth how much rock how much snow, and my brain kind of fizzled out.  I haven’t seen something like that in a long time, and it really just serves as a reminder of the overall enormity of our planet, because these giant massive brain-fizzling things are just a tiny piece of the overall blue marble hanging in space. 

And then, brain still fizzling from how BIG they are, I slipped into thinking of how old they are.  That washed over me and left me still.  (Can you imagine me still?!)  They were built by the violence of the earth, crushing and gnawing at itself as its pieces ground together in the mindless, blind, apathetic frenzy of nature.  The earth clawed its way up and over its own bones to reach the sky, touching the clouds and claiming the air.  That was eons ago.  Days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, they have all passed by and the mountains still stand.  They are the definition of weathering the storm. They were here before anything we knew began, and they’re still watching.  Like they’re waiting for something, and one day they’ll rise up and swat us down like gnats, for disturbing their sleep.

I’m running on two hours of sleep, a caramel macchiato, and the excitement of being on vacation for the first time in so long that I don’t really know what my last vacation was.  I’ve been on the ground in Colorado for less than two hours, most of that has been spent in a plane and on a bus.  I’m gross and travel-weary and I can feel the exhaustion in my eyes, trying to burn its way through the caffeine.  And I kinda never want to leave.