“Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to”
As an eleven year old boy growing up in the shadow of the Adirondack Mountains of Northern New York, my father took my eight year old brother and I “Out West” to experience the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. More than fifty years later and my recollections are as if we’d headed West just yesterday.
For much of my adult life, I have romanced the trip in such a way that, in my mind, it bears a strong resemblance to some lauded period piece using a masterfully directed “coming of age” manuscript. The time was the early seventies when much of the world was still fresh and new.
My dad was a NYSDOT engineer in Albany, but both he and my mother were from very small towns in the heart of the Adirondacks. Just before I was born and before settling in Albany, my parents spent a period of roughly five years traveling the country but spending most of that time where my dad worked as a young project engineer in Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico. It seems that “wanderlust” is in my DNA.
By the time my sister was born in 1964 to the Albany region, my parents and I had moved twenty-two times all over the country. My brother would be born the following year and we would spend our youths about twenty miles north of Albany and ninety minutes from the childhood homes of our parents, where much of the extended family lived. The Adirondacks are gloriously beautiful and I learned the ways of an “Adirondacker” along with hunting, fishing, and skiing, from my father and grandparents.
During those twenty -two moves when my dad was chasing his own wanderlust, I was born in Oregon and for a few days, it was just my mother and me. Later, when I was just two or three, I have memories of our homes in Tucumcari, New Mexico and Wheatridge, Colorado. I think I fell in love with the West at about the same time I was learning to walk.
When that special summer came along and we did our trip West, my eyes were never so wide open. I feasted on the trout we’d catch each day and drank in the mountains, taking sustenance from the different landscapes we encountered. Every few days we’d head into a town to clean up, grab a room at a little hotel, and scope out a diner where we’d ask to have a supper of our own fish, cooked up on the grill. My dad had the trip planned out to include remote places like the Madison River near Ennis, Montana and the Wind River, near Lander, Wyoming. He veered from the beaten path and we’d backpack into sections of river he wanted to try, and fish remote beaver ponds with mountain backdrops so beautiful that a person might forget to breathe!
The early seventies were an excellent time to experience life on the road. I clearly remember being in downtown Ennis when it wasn’t much more than a ranching community and spotting a girl who appeared to be my age, perhaps a year older, making a call from a phone booth I was approaching. My father and brother were still at the restaurant we’d just eaten at and while they ordered dessert, I went out to reconnoiter the town. Just as I was coming up on the phone booth, the girl ended her call stepping out onto the sidewalk as if a meeting between us had been predestined. I asked her if she’d like to join me and a moment later she was showing me the sites. I’d never before met a girl from “Out West” and could immediately tell that she was different from the eastern girls I’d encountered. Very pretty, with long, flowing blonde hair and a strong sense of independence. I hadn’t yet had my growth spurt, so we were about the same height. A year or two later and I’d have been over six-feet. We’d been together for just twenty minutes, or so, when I spied my father and brother walking toward us. I knew that once the girl and I parted ways I would be in for a good razzing from my dad and brother who was not yet old enough to appreciate the fairer sex. I survived the rousing and, I don’t know why, but we never again brought it up. I think my dad knew that for an eleven-year old boy, fast approaching twelve, I’d had a special experience. And I did. I’m 62 now and still, on occasion, think of that girl and how I’d decided then and there that my someday wife would be from somewhere out west. Twelve years later I met my first wife in Colorado. True to a promise I’d made with myself after that trip and upon graduation from college, I’d taken everything I could squeeze into my little red Honda Civic and with $1,800 in my pocket, I drove West and landed in Denver. Like me, my wife was from the northeast and, again, like me, skiing had become the most important thing in her life. She’d just graduated from the University of Colorado that year and was working in the ski industry as a marketing rep for Winter Park Resort. Before our divorce some eleven years later, we skied all over the Western US. What is it they say …”all good things…”.
I would remain in Colorado for another twenty years having a robust career in the oil and gas and mining industries. The first thing that came to mind upon waking each morning was just how fortunate I’d been to see my boyhood dream of living in the Rocky Mountain West come to fruition. It wasn’t easy maintaining a professional career and chasing the lifestyle of a mountain athlete for over almost three decades. Along with finding success in my work, I’d become an elite cyclist and skier and wanted to continue chasing the dream I’d created. For thirty years, I was up by five AM and worked long hours, capped-off by a ride or long run on my way home each evening. I had little time for anything else. I remarried a few times and ultimately realized why I wasn’t such a great mate. It takes two to make for a successful marriage and I can’t blame every disastrous result completely on myself, but I was extremely hard working and hard playing, with a strong desire for solitude, individuality, and independence. As my current wife, and the one I’ve known the longest will attest, I simply never found the right girl until she stepped into my life fourteen years ago. She was right!
About six months after she’d left her job as an engineer working on the Space Shuttle program in Houston to be with me in Colorado, we found ourselves immersed in the carnage of the “Housing Crisis” recession, which impacted people from all sorts of professions – including mine in the field of natural gas pipeline and facilities engineering and construction. I lost a very good job as a project manager in Cortez , Colorado, overseeing operations on opening the new Paradox Basin play. Though I was well connected in the industry as it exists in Colorado and New Mexico, I concluded that I could only be out of work for six months and that this job search could take that long. I dug in for the most important job search of my life and, after four months I’d had a couple of interviews in the Denver area, about a seven hour drive to Durango and a couple of interviews in Salt Lake, which would have kept me within six hours of my daughter. But times were hard for a lot of people. After not landing any of those jobs, I’d searched the last two months as they rolled by, still hugely averse to moving out of the area, I was at the end of my rope and I took a job in Pennsylvania and hoped for the best. There was a new shale gas play that pulled engineering types from all over the country, some of whom I’d known well and some were just acquaintances. This helped because I then didn’t take my job loss so personally. Being laid-off had happened to so many of us and so many of us were forced to leave our Colorado homes. Combined with lifestyle reasons, I was vehement about never leaving my eleven year old daughter behind. Doing so was the most difficult thing I’d ever have to do, and I knew it. I was at war with myself while making the decision to move so far away.
Though the parenting arrangement had both her mother and me as working partners, with her mother at least having to make a small monthly child support payment, she never made a contribution. This meant that I was not only paying on behalf of my daughter, but was effectively paying alimony, as well. Though I brought this to the attention of the courts, nothing was done about it and she was allowed to not have a job and use a good portion of my payment to live on. On what I was paying , my daughter should have easily had her needs met. The courts had mistakenly calculated my end to be far (about 50%) greater than it should have been and I had no luck in getting the courts to recalculate the apportionments using my actual income as opposed to the amount that had been used in error. There had been no provision for alimony in the agreement, only child support, but on it went, my paying for both ex-wife and daughter and working 60 hour weeks to get the job done. The only means I had to continue making that kind of money was to take the job in Pennsylvania, so I did. Aside from the hardship of having to leave my home of thirty years, the offer was solid and, for a time, I was able to keep my ex-wife off my back. To say that I was being pulled in diametrically opposed directions would be a huge understatement. Every time I would call to speak with my child, her mother would counter by saying she was unavailable. I tried my luck on my daughter’s cell phone, but by then she was only allowed to use it in the presence of her mother. I had no means of staying in communication with my child so I called the Colorado Family Support office in Durango to file a complaint. I’d tried the courts one last time, but it was clear that it was a waste of time and emotional energy. My ex-wife simply continued to not return any calls from the Family Support office but there were no repercussions for her abuse of the system.
I loved my daughter very much and she’d spent a large chunk of her first eleven years on earth with me. We were pals and I made sure to steer her into the sports and activities that had given me so much joy. I also attempted to imbue my set of values and it all seemed to be sinking in until I was forced to leave. I ended up with a terribly painful ulcer and my back problems became so debilitating that I literally couldn’t keep my mind straight. What a horrible way to start a brand new, high-profile job. I have since had six surgeries to keep me from landing in a wheelchair and haven’t seen my daughter in fourteen years. With my back spiraling out of control, I ran into years of extreme pain and could no longer travel. Like two small ships in a huge, stormy sea, my daughter and I have drifted and my greatest hopes of having her be a big part of my life have been dashed.
I cannot express into words what was lost in that move from Colorado to Pennsylvania. In the beginning, I spent night after night with dreams of Colorado coming so fast, I’d cry myself to sleep. It was as if photos of my daughter were pasted under my eyelids and when I closed my eyes to sleep at night, there she was. I could do nothing but cry a river. Today, my daughter and I are at such odds that we can’t look upon any single issue and see it the same way. I get solace from the knowledge that I had eleven wonderful years with her, and in so doing, taught her my values. She went to college and has made a good life for herself right there in Southern Colorado. This has made things easier as a significant part of what I’ve wished for all these years is that she could continue to grow up and make a life for herself there in the bosom of the Southwest.
Ultimately, my wife and I moved to Texas, where she is from, going to Texas A&M and getting (and paying for) a B.Sc in aerospace engineering and going to work for the following fourteen years at NASA, at the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake. Upon returning to the area, she again went to work for her old employer, no longer reporting to NASA but taking a job in the oil and gas industry for BP, at its North American headquarters just outside Houston, as a technical writer. Three years later, she secured an excellent position with a large engineering firm in San Antonio. We reside in Central Texas where she can work from home and has been for the last four years. She should be able to retire with me in another five years, or so. We have a wonderful home on some property and live a very rural and quiet existence with our three wonderful dogs. I had one surgery in Pennsylvania and had my sixth surgery, here in Texas, in 2023. I still suffer from immense pain and remain as active as I can to keep my back problems at bay. Still, it is a good life full of exercise, working on our home and property, and playing guitar which has helped keep me going after saying goodbye to a lifetime of mountain sports and activities. It is my hope that my adult daughter and I can find our way back to some kind of healthy relationship, but I no longer blame myself for having to leave Colorado so she could stay in it. Her college was paid for and I believe I’ve done everything in my power in attempting to stay in touch. Perhaps the winds of fate will one day blow us together.
That transition from my known Colorado life to Pennsylvania and the unknown was without question, the most trying period of my life. I got through it by the skin of my teeth but learned a lot about life. I don’t know how I did it and, even with all the positives to counter the negatives, I know I could never bear something like it again.
-End
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