Early on, I gave my allegiance to the mountains. Not just any mountains—the Rocky Mountains. I don’t know the name for the strange alchemy of our kinship but it runs deep in my veins, a current as strong as instinct. The naturalist and writer, Terry Tempest Williams says, “perhaps the most radical act we can commit is to stay home” and it’s for this reason that my writing life, like a James Fennimore Cooper novel, has been a series of removes in the foothills along the Front Range of Colorado as I’ve tried to establish a solid place to make a literary stand.
When I was young and willful, determined to do things alone, determined to show I was competent and not afraid, I took up residence in a horse barn, rumored to be an historic Pony Express stop.
The barn sat on a bucolic ten acres near a pond on the sunless side of Left Hand Canyon about 20 miles outside Boulder, Colorado. Like other mountain places I’d rented, it had a rusticity and funk that were inversely proportional its monthly cost, with a toilet I dug myself out back and barn doors whose gaps I padded each night with three inches of foam to keep both critters and the cold mountain air from rushing in. Yet, it was not without modern conveniences: I got the phone man to run a line 400 feet from another outbuilding, so I could have a sluggish dial-up internet connection. In summer, I bathed with a solar shower hung near the creek and in winter, in four inches of warmed water in a stock tank in the kitchen.
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