wide open spaces

To be totally honest I expect nothing from this trip. I do not even think it will be that enjoyable. Yes, it will be nice to see family and friends. It will be nice to get away from the snow. Otherwise, I have no hope or belief that it will bring something more.

I am sitting at the Denver airport. The horizon is defined not by fields as it is in Iowa, but by the Rocky Mountains. When I lived here, I never found them that remarkable. It is true that they are mighty, springing up from the plains out of nowhere. At the same time, to me they do not compare to the volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest that tower above mighty rivers that flow into the expanse of the Pacific. This morning, however, they are magnificent. Again, I never sat and looked at them before. Perhaps I was too wrapped up in other things while I was here. I did not pay attention to a lot of things when I was in Denver. I never thought it would be a significant place in my journey, but given the events of the past year, it turned out to have been stage of some major scenes.

Living in different places as well as travel for me has little to do with location, though I have enjoyed what cities ranging from Washington, DC to Berlin and Windhoek to Prague have had to offer in terms of culture and climate. How I long for a hot afternoon in February in Namibia! Picture sitting by the pool in the desert with a gin and tonic. After the blizzard, that sounds about as close to paradise as I can imagine. That aside, it is who I have met that has made the difference. These people who have enabled me to see myself and see beyond myself have made all the difference. In Iowa, I must admit that there has been more of the former, which has been excruciating at times. There is no truly other word to describe it. I have been accompanied to new depths by those at that stopping point and I have gone deeper all by myself. At times, I have felt weighed down by people who seemed more like psychotherapy patients than friends. I realized that as I consoled them, I was counseling myself. As I explained what I had learned from years of what can be best described as hard living, I was teaching it to myself all over again. There was so much I had not noticed and so much I had forgotten.

For one, I have ceased to believe in signs in Iowa. So-called signs seemed to point me in a variety of directions during my time there. These ways turned out to be dead ends at the end of very rough roads. Kraeutle says there are still signs, but it depends on how we interpret them. Perhaps he is correct and I was just too compulsive or even frivolous in identifying signs.

On my flight from Omaha to Denver, I slept for most of the way, but as we were landing the man next to me asked where I was going. I told him I was going to Portland. As a friendly gesture, I returned the question. He was going to Seattle. Yes, I would be going there on Wednesday as well. The conversation continued and it turned out he actually lived in a suburb of Tacoma and his mother had worked for 25 years at the company where I have an informational interview on Friday. Six months ago, I believe that the silly me would have thought that perhaps this connection meant something, in other words, it was a sign that something might come out of this. Now I just think the world is small and full of coincidences. It was a teachable moment in that sense.

You might recall from writings and photos what a fantastic social life I had in Denver. For a short time, my paths crossed with those of some brilliant, fun, and caring people. At same time, our lives remained parallel in many respects. In graduate school, one is so focused on one’s career and there is a great deal of internal and external pressure. We had our time here filled with late nights in the library, later nights at one of the hundreds of great bars and lounges Denver has to offer, and yet again, even later nights that turned into mornings at the library. Now we are all scattered throughout the world—from West Africa to California to Manhattan. We chat, we comment on each other’s blogs and myspace pages, and there is the occasional phone call. The lines of our lives that intersected for a brief moment have now taken other tangents. Perhaps they will cross again, but certainly not in the way they did here. We will meet for a martini at the Bar Rouge in DC or spend a weekend in Seattle together, we will laugh and reminisce, and our lines will then swerve in another direction once again, just as they swerved into each other here in Denver.

Today this city is just a stopping point and I will not even leave the terminal. The expanse of the plains and the towering Rockies have reminded me of Wide Open Spaces—that song that so simply says so much about growth, growing up, and moving on. In front of these mountains this land is so flat I truly feel like I can stretch my arms again and take off with wings that have been frozen during a chilling winter. Though they were broken and stiff for so long, they still have strength. Are airports, fellow passengers, and airplanes signs of things to come? I do not believe so. They are simply a coincidental backdrop to my own takeoff.

As I step onto the airplane for my next flight, I will.