They say that having memories prior to age four is uncommon. But I’ve verified with my parents and some extended family that my memory is selectively accurate back to age two and three, where there’s not a lot, but the preponderance of the things I do remember are outdoors related, like skiing on the little hill behind our then home in Lakewood, Colorado, when I was between two and three, or the time we were traveling through Oregon and my father made the decision to snuff-out a grass fire along the shoulder of the road. The fire must have just begun, ostensibly either from an errant cigarette toss, or from the exhaust pipe of a passing motorhome. This form of grass fire used to be quite common, with thousands of motorhomes heading west during the summer and making dozens of pull-off’s to snap some photographs from the relative ease of the highway shoulder. I’ve been badly burned when working on my truck and misjudging the heat of a tailpipe with the engine just turned off and cooling down. It left a two-inch, half-moon shaped scar in the crook for my elbow which took tewenty years to fade. Anyway, you get the idea. Just a few seconds with the tailpipe in the grass is enough to do the job of igniting a fire. These fires don’t need much time before they are considered “out of control”, so stopping them quickly is something we should all pay mind to. My dad kept a military shovel folded under the driver’s seat. While I was still very young, I remember watching him out there in his sweat-soaked tee-shirt and being enveloped in a certain feeling resembling what I would later come to know as pride. My dad dutifully tended to the fire and squashed it before it had time to get a toehold in the tall, dry grass. I have numerous other memories of the outdoors that are still hot, like those embers glowing in the evening breeze.
I spent my youth in the shadow of the Adirondack mountains of northern New York and the birthplace of our family, in the High Peaks region, harkening back to the 1850’s. It was as if I was formed as a direct byproduct of those mountains, learning everything I could about what it meant to be an “Adirondacker”. When we were kids, my brother, sister , and I would hear the term “God’s Country” as used by our parents to describe our home territory during the two hour drive north to see our grandparents and relatives. The term “Adirondacker” is a colloquialism meant to describe a particular type of mountain man, native to the region. I would take these skills of hunting, fishing, and woodcraft with me when I moved to Colorado, immediately after college. There, I would live for almost thirty years, working and playing in the mountains of Colorado.
When you do your growing up in a place like the Adirondacks and have ancestral lines that go back some 170 years, you can’t help but have that be a driving influence in defining who you become. I would take what I learned as a mountain athlete and jack of all trades background and apply it to my entire life, making conscious choices to take the “high road” and live in the mountains no matter the length of the commute or other sacrifices that come with it. I didn’t sign on for a life of convenience, so, between holding down a good job as a project engineer for a mining and minerals processing consulting firm in Golden, an hour below and the pursuing the lifetime of mountain activities that occupied so much of my being, I had no “free time”. Certainly not of the kind it seemed so many others had, watching fooball and “knocking back a few” when the weekend rolled around. I’d have been bored out of my mind and burdened with guilt over not making the most of my time. I wanted every waking moment of my life to count for something, and knew well that I was exchanging my early to mid-twenties to become a Colorado mountain athlete of some reknown for doing what I’m sure would have made my parents more comfortble, getting a master’s degree which they believed would invariably make my life easier over the long-term. Though I agreed with them from a career perspective, I went ahead with my plans. For an athlete, there is a narrow window of time when you’re better than you’ll ever be again, and this doesn’t tend to last more than a decade, that is, if you’re fortunate enough to not aquire a significant injury or other problem that would lead to being sidelined, perhaps forever. I felt an almost equal pull but in the final analysis, I erred on the side of maximizing my young aduldhood as an athlete and would figure the career part out when I got to that bridge. When it comes down to it, neither way can possibly be construed as the “right way” and, while I’m certain that my parents weren’t overjoyed with some of my choices during that time in my life, they didn’t attempt to stand in my way and, for this, I have been eternally grateful.
After spending almost twenty years in the mountains north and west of Golden, I was about to pull the “crux” move of my lifetime and leave the relative security of the life I’d cultivated there, and move seven hours southwest to run my girlfriend’s cowboy-realtor father’s land-clearing business in Durango, one of Colorado’s last bastions of remote wilderness. I remember knowing that it wasn’t going to be easy making a living with a capitally intensive startup business, so I spent a month considering the opportunity. The business was solid in concept but I knew that clearing brush with a backhoe-sized, purpose -built machine all day every day might not be enough to keep me intellectually satisfied. I tucked away some ideas and said yes to the opportunity.
I would take that business and, within the span of two years, morph it into a forest restoration company working throughout Southwest Colorado and Northwestern New Mexico.
For the next eight years I owned and operated that business and lived in the place of my dreams, often staying on-site in my travel trailer, well off the beaten path and, of course, off the grid. I’ve spent a good portion of my life living in and amongst the mountains and natural world. Evenings would come, and bone-tired from the nature of the work, I would have dinner and read myself to sleep while spending some quality time with one of both of my dogs at the time. The forestry work was fulfilling in a way that nothing else ever had been. The work was necessary for the health of the ponderosa pine ecosystem we restored and there was a perfect blend of physicality and intellectual wrestling with the running the business and handling clients, which kept me extremely fit for my sports and running the business kept my brain occupied. I can remember walking around a site with Judd, one of my full-time four-footed companions, in the evening and looking at the areas we’d already completed. The before and after difference was something to see. I would feel an immense sense of pride well up inside me. But, in the end, the work proved to take more than my back could give and, for the first time, I came to know a kind of pain I’d never before felt. My lower back was failing me quickly and, as hard as it was to let the business go, I was fortunate enough to make a reentry into engineering and project management, though instead of the mining industry, this time it would be for the natural gas industry. This was a shining example of a brand of luck I wasn’t all that familiar with.
At that point, I had had a thirteen year run in Southwest Colorado and nearly twenty year’s on Colorado’s Front Range when I purchased my retirement property, fifty acres of land located just twenty miles from downtown Durango. It was as remote a place as I could find without putting myself hours from some town. I was working for one of the larger gas producers based in Bloomfield, New Mexico, and from April through mid-November I lived on my land, completely of the the grid and working between offices in Bloomfield, Cortez, Northern Colorado, and Wyoming. I’d even put in a 1.2 mile motocross track on my property and kept all of my outdoor gear in a nice shed I’d put on the property, right next to my travel trailer. I could get home and take Kelpy for a run, and change into my MX gear and ride for an hour before dark. At night, Kelpy and I would go on moonlit walks listening to the sounds of the night. There were black bears, bobcats, mountain lions, coyotes, eagles, rattlesnakes, prarie dogs, and even a badger that had taken-up residence on the property. Kelpy had become so adept at thinning the prarie dog a jackrabbit populations, I’d only need to feed her regular dog food a few times a week, and that was just so I could be certain that she was getting her nutritional needs met. On weekends, I’d take her for long runs on the area mountain trails and go flyfishing while she cooled of in one of the area trout streams. One Saturday a month, I’d have the same group of friends up for some barbequed elk and a bonfire, where we’d sit and discuss various solutions to the world’s most recent problems. Some time between two an three AM, we’d climb into our sleepimg bags and stay there until I had the coffee fired-up, probably an hour, or, so after daybreak. In the fall, evening temperatures would drop into the thirties and Kelpy would tuck-in so close to the fire I sometimes worried she’d be awakened by the smell of her own singed fur, but, of course, she was too aware for anything like that to happen to her. I swore that she slept with one eye open, as there were plenty of arousing sounds in the night that needed tending to. She was a once in a lifetime dog, my fifth at the time. I’ve gone through most of my life with a dog or two by my side. I could never imagine life any other way.
Some say that all good things come to an end and Kelpy and I were about to be shown the door. The country was headlong into a recession and, because I’d made the decision to be in the capital projects group at work (as opposed to, say, operations, I would come to lose my job. Capital projects meant new spending on designing and building new infrastructure, the first thing companies stop doing in a significant downturn. The work was exciting and could be insanely busy, requiring lot of hours and, as a project mananager with several projects under construction, being on call. I had planned to transition into operations, which was more secure, after I’d gotten closer to reirement, which was still a fair piece away.
Hearing of my pending layoff, this year I moved from my property in Hesperus to a house in Cortez, about thirty minutes away for the winter. My girlfriend, an aerospace engineer working on the space shuttle program at the Johnson Space Center west of Houston, had just recently left her job to join me in Colorado. Chalk if up to really bad timing because we would, the two of us, soon be out of work. I’d never dreamed in a million years that I would be looking for work as far away as Pennsyvania, but that’s how bad things had become in my industry. The Marcellus gas play was second to the Dakotas as being the last place where capital projects were seeking new and inexpensive ways to keep the collective oil and gas pipelines running with new infrastructure. I landing a job a director of operations for a large engineering and construction company based in Houston with a new Northeastern Regional Office in the Pittsburgh area. Part of the job had me travelling back and forth to Houston and the other part running a full-scale engineering office in Pittsburgh. This lasted just two years before my soon to be wife, Genie, and I, and our two dogs, Kelpy and Sage left Pennsylvania for greener pastures in Texas. She fell immediately back in with her old company, only this time she would be working in the oil industry for BP at its headquarters in the Houston area. I had just had two back surgeries and was completley laid-up for almost a year. I knew one thing and that was that I wasn’t going to make it in the urban sprawl of Greater Houston and, after three years, we had our sights set on moving to Central Texas, not far from where Genie, now my wife, had grown up. Sure enough, she landed a solid job in San Antonio and I found us a literal diamond in the rough. A small country home with some outbuildings on some property in Central Texas, about an hour from San Antonio, and the dream, though dormant for the last five years, was back on course. We fell in love with our new home about seven miles from the small town of Lockhart, equidistant from Austin and San Antonio. Here, I once again felt at home, though I obviously would continue to miss my old life if Colorado. I’ve always been a serious cyclist and competed for years in Colorado. I quickly went about riding thousands of miles of rural “Farm to Market” roads up into the Hill Country and down below in the rolling Central Texas ranchlands.
We just celebrated fourteen years together and our ninth here in this house. While I struggle every day with severe back pack pain and have had six surgeries precluding me from almost every one of my all-important activities, I spend my time working on our place, reading, writing, doing yoga, and playing guitar for a couple of hours every evening. I have become not only a player, but a collector, and my “all-things-guitar” hobby keeps me busy rounding out my days. It has been a long and winding road, my love affair with mountain and country life and attempting to live my entire life around that core. I have spent decades chasing after refuge from the world of ours and, while it hasn’t been easy, I can honestly say that “I did it my way”and I wouldn’t change a thing!
Jett, Josie, and Ginger (The Next Generation!)
