Making A Home Out West

I am an easterner. I was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina, raised in Plattsburgh, New York, and grew up in New Hampshire. At 30, I moved to Colorado to become the westerner I’ve always wanted to be. There is so much about my personality seems western: a need for independence, an affinity for rural living, and being surrounded by wilderness.

All 39 years of my life have been about movement, dislocation; change; I am the child of a military family. It only makes sense that I end up a westerner where literature and myth has created a western persona of someone who can’t stay still.

I live western for the first time in 2004 as I drive I-70 across the country; from Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I feel safely ensconced in my blue Subaru as the Pennsylvania mountains blur by me and as I am in awe of the plains of Kansas. As I drive across the eastern plains of Colorado, I finally see the Rocky Mountains white peaks in the distance. I drive through Denver and start the ascent into the mountains. After three hours of tunnels and narrow canyons, I finally see the “Steamboat City Limits” sign and recognize the ski resort where I’ve skied several times. I look at the directions for Hilltop Parkway; my new roommate is expecting me. The next two days I’m lost. This is no longer vacation land; it is home.

Matt and Erin, who I know from Vermont, invite me to their home for dinner several times my first week. They don’t want me to be lonely because they know what it’s like to be in a new place where you don’t know anyone. They introduce me to their circle of friends. On day 14, I meet Laura. Laura is friendly and invites me to her house to watch a movie and I can bring Abbey. Abbey and Dugan, Laura’s dog, love each other and play during the entire movie. We go on a group hike the next day with three of her friends; they all have dogs, too. We go to the Mad Creek trail west of town and the dogs play in the creek as we all get to know each other. I now have five friends in Colorado.

Steamboat Springs, population 10,0000 is a western, cowboy town with horses in fields outside of town, rodeos, and winter carnivals with horses pulling children on skis through the downtown. Steamboat is famous for being “Ski Town, U.S.A.®” and for the number of Olympians who live there. I start running and biking, like everyone else here, and decide to train for a triathlon. It’s been a goal for many years and it is not difficult to become a triathlete here with an outdoor, hot spring-fed pool, a multitude of running trails, and safe, scenic roads for biking. I become a triathlete, I volunteer on the running series committee and the chamber marketing committee.

I try to set down roots in my first western town but I don’t like my job and my friends start coupling. I cannot afford a home here and decide to find a job somewhere else. I love living in Steamboat and the Yampa Valley with a world-class ski resort in my backyard, but it’s time to move on. I find a job in a Granby, Colorado: population 1,500. I buy a house. I find a different job. I join a writer’s group. I get a second dog. I’m setting down roots and making a home out west.

The one thing my new home doesn’t have: my books. One day I will have a library in my house and all my books that are in my mom’s basement and sister’s attic will be reunited. I do have the necessary ones, the ones that motivated me to come west: Wallace Stegner’s Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, The Stories That Shape Us, a collection of contemporary women writing about the west, and my favorite Woven on the Wind Women Write about Friendship in the Sagebrush West. These made the trip across country because they remind me of being in the east when I read them as preparation to come west.

For now, I’m simply in love with this place; I love this landscape and the people in it. For the first time I’m living in the present. When I see my dogs running free on a trail with yellow and purple wildflowers, and aspen leaves scattered on the ground, the high peaks of the Rocky Mountains in the distance – I feel connected.

There is a herd of mule deer that wander on the hills across the street from my house that will soon be a new development filled with houses and people. But for now, I walk my dogs on the vacant roads with mountains surrounding me. I hike around my neighborhood I remember the warnings about mountain lions and hope I never see one. This is another sign that I’m in the right place; more wildlife, less people.

It took me thirty seven years to finally find a place where I feel connected and grounded; no longer pursuing that “thing” out there in the future. I don’t know how long I will live here; I still don’t know if I can say in one place for the rest of my lifetime. But for now, Granby feels like the right place. And, as the sun sets behind the rolling sage-filled hills to the west, a fox runs across the field in front of my house. He’s heading back to his den in the culvert down the road. I can see a herd of mule deer grazing on the hills and the horizon become darker blue. A star-filled sky ends the day and as I watch this entire scene, I feel at lucky, safe, and finally, fulfilled.

© 2010 Kristen Lodge