The Canyon
And if I only could,
I'd make a deal with God,
And I'd get him to swap our places,
Be running up that road,
Be running up that hill,
With no problems.
If I only could
Be running up that hill
With no problems...
Kate Bush "Running up that Hill"
The first time I was "up" the canyon, it was night. A very dark night, and to top it off, I was blindfolded and stoned. The new Kate Bush, Hounds of Love cassette that Gretchen had given me was blasting it's music out of my car stereo, and between the blindfold, the pot and the music, I was actually hallucinating. I had no idea where we were going. It was Gretchen's birthday present to me - a trip (in more ways than one) to a mysterious place.
The car, that also contained Penny and Kathy, stopped, sandy sounds grinding underneath the tires. Gretchen helped me out of the car. A surprisingly cool, dry wind greeted me. I also could hear, and feel the rushing water. I still didn't know where I was - I'd been in Fort Collins all of two months by then.
It's a simple story really. I'd finished my graduate degree, and had to find a post-doctoral position so that I could learn how to really do science, write lots of papers, and get a plum academic job when I was done. I thought I'd landed the perfect job. The guy was famous (well, in my field, at least.) Fabulous work came out of his lab, and most of his postdocs were prolific and successful. All I had to do was put in a few years of good solid work, and I was on my way. But it seemed, other plans were afoot for me, and besides, the truth about Stan, the man I went to work for, was much, much more complicated. But that story will have to wait for another time and another author. This is my story.
I had packed all my stuff in a U-Haul trailer in Cleveland, hitched it to my itty bitty Nissan, and drove myself out to Colorado. I'd been out west a number of times, but never to Colorado. I'd spent years as a kid really digging John "Rocky Mountain High" Denver, so Colorado was a dream. An amazing dream. I couldn't believe my luck to have been able to live in Colorado. As I drove across the slow hills of Nebraska, waiting for the mountains to show themselves to me, I tried to imagine what my life in Colorado would be like. I had no idea.
"So, who's your favorite poet?" Gretchen asked. We'd been brought together by someone who knew Gretchen, who I'd been in contact with from Ohio. We were sitting at Avogadro's Number, soon to become embedded in my brain as simply "Avos", along with the wickedly good tempeh burgers and the Newcastle Ale they had on draught, that was still my habit 17 years later.
"Audre Lorde," I responded. I'd just finished reading Sister Outsider , a book Gretchen had in her hand at the moment. We hit it off immediately. I was looking for a place to live, she was looking for a housemate. It was perfect.
I remember it took her a while to finally make the decision. I'm much more impulsive. The next day, while looking at other places to live, I drove over to where Gretchen lived (soon to be my dwelling, but for only about three months.) I was introduced to Jennifer, Gretchen's then girlfriend, and Penny and Kathy, friends of Gretchen. It was that day, that I began to understand both the complexity of the person Gretchen, as well as her incredible magnetism.
Getting out of the car, and feeling the breeze, I was completely befuddled. I had absolutely no idea where we were (it had been about a 30 minute drive). Gretchen walked me about 100 feet, stopped me, faced me in one direction, then took off my blindfold. Ahead of me was an incredible vista - city lights below, and a star-studded sky above. To my left, a river roared. I couldn't really see it, it was too dark, but it filled my ears, and my mind with it's presence.
"Where are we?" I asked.
"Poudre Canyon" she replied. "They are about to build here, this view will be gone forever." Indeed, months later, on my daily sojourns up and down the canyon, I witnessed the fences and new buildings, and realized I'd never see that exact vista again. But the canyon itself became my home, and my friend.
Canyons in the west are awesome things. Millions of years of water etching out rock, creating steep hills where trees and scrub struggle to stay on the soil, incredible rapids and flash floods. I was told, over and over, the story of the Thompson Canyon Flood (the next big canyon south) that happened in 1976, 11 years before I arrived. It was a story that was still fresh in the minds of many in the region. As I looked at that vista, on that night, I could not have imagined that I'd live up there. It would have been an amazing dream, but it came true.
"There's a house for rent in Poudre Village - and I think we should check it out" Gretchen said, a few weeks later. I was pretty flexible. The house we lived at, on what we whimsically called Lavender Lane, since there were four lesbian households in a row on the street, was adequate, close enough to bike to work, in a decent place. It had a great lawn, perfect for the long games of hacky-sack we'd play with friends and neighbors.
Poudre Village was one of a small number of settlements of houses in Poudre Canyon. In fact, it was the largest. Large enough to have a restaurant, although it was closed most of the time. That's all it had besides houses. It was tucked into the canyon, with rocky hills of the national forest surrounding it on one side, and the river on the other. The minute I saw the house, I loved it. It was a small house - two bedrooms, a decent sized living room, a sun room, and a big kitchen. It had a big plot of land, and a sign that said " All Ye Who Seek Good Spirits Enter Here" Apparently, it had been a sign for a local bar, but it seemed utterly appropriate. We agree to rent it, and moved up a few weeks later. It was a lucky thing I'd barely unpacked.
A year later, after we'd moved out of that house, some friends of ours moved in. By then, Gretchen and I had gone somewhat our separate ways (we still saw each other, but it wasn't the same as living together). She was living with her then partner Penny, in a small trailer in town, and I was living alone in a sweet little house (converted one car garage), one that Kathy had given up to live in a Tipi. I'd visit our friends up the canyon once in a while, and one time, one said "So what happened? Where is everyone?" She was referring to the fact that while we lived up there, we had a steady stream of women visiting. We had quite a number of really huge parties. A week (even in the winter) almost never went by without a visit by someone. Some weeks a day didn't go by without a visit. I think she thought it was the magic of the place, but it wasn't that, really. The place had magic, for sure, but it was really the the magic of Gretchen, and Gretchen in that place. And perhaps maybe I had a little to do with it, I don't know.
By that time, I'd been writing poetry for almost 8 years. I felt as though I'd been dropped into this vat of creative energy. I don't know how much of it was the natural surroundings, how much of it was the women around me. Truthfully, except for men at the lab, I got to know no men during my stay in Colorado - de facto lesbian separatism sans the philosophy. The mountains and rivers called to me, I was surrounded by creativity, I couldn't help but absorb some.
"I need to hear more of your heart, here," she said. "And you might not want to use that phrase - it's too ... academic." Gretchen liked to read my poetry, liked to give me feedback. I remember the scribbles on the yellow legal pad pages that I'd write my initial drafts on. I still have some, with Gretchen's loose, square, neat handwriting on it. I wrote an incredible amount of poetry that year. So much, that at times I'd look around me, and words would tumble out of my eyes.
Rocks scatter in my path as
I scramble
trip and stumble to the river.
It roars in my dreams.
water tumbling lithely over
stones worn smooth
after eons of washing, cooling streams.
We'd spend hours talking about poetry, about writing, about my angst in work, her angst in school. My life at work, and my life “up the canyon” were two completely different worlds. Life in the canyon was full of heart, fully engaged my mind in deep creativity. It was fun, deep, playful, even sexy at times, although I never had a girlfriend in Colorado. My life away from work was also jumbled and confused, because I was deeply unhappy at work.
And that chasm kept growing during my year up the canyon. Weekends would be spent hanging out, writing poetry, being deeply creative – the rest of the week was filled with what felt to me at the time to be empty activities – I felt I was only playing at being a scientist.
At one point during that year, Kathy, Gretchen, Penny, me and some others created what we called “The Broomstick Factory Press.” It was basically a lesbian feminist 'zine, full of poetry, prose, political commentary and drawings and photos by women in Fort Collins and beyond. I think we put out three issues. Somewhere deep in a filing box I still have them.
This happened just at the beginning of the desktop publishing revolution. Kathy worked at Kinko's at the time, and she'd spend countless hours in Pagemaker, and we'd spend countless hours cutting and pasting stuff to make the issues. We'd have Broomstick Factory Press parties in the house, with women who would come from Boulder, Denver and Fort Collins to brainstorm ideas and, well, party.
One party was especially memorable. Gretchen had spent time in Africa, specifically Kenya, and for some reason, she knew how to build a mud hut. So one day, we invited basically all of the women all of us knew (which added up to a lot – I think over 40 women showed up that day.) We barbecued, built the mud hut, and partied for a very long time.
The magic of that time and those women continued to make my work feel painfully shallow. My dream of big science – getting a tenure track job at a big research university, building up a big lab, getting big funding, seemed pointless as I delved deeply into a creative and spiritual side of me that I hadn't known existed before.
I came close to quitting that job at least twice. I came close to looking for a job doing almost anything else besides science. There were more reasons than the disparity between the life I lead “up the canyon” and my work life that made me want to quit. But in the end, I stayed, and re-visioned my future as an academic doing smaller science at a liberal arts college.
I wonder, sometimes, what would have happened had I followed my heart then. I probably wasn't ready to do that yet. I hadn't come into full touch with my heart, with my inner pain and wounds. I hadn't come into full awareness of my emotional life. But there are no mistakes in life – so it wasn't a mistake to keep going in science for a while. And it wouldn't have been a mistake to leave it then.
A couple of months ago, I drove up the canyon from Fort Collins with my partner. So much has changed in the almost twenty years since I lived there. That place that Gretchen first took me is now this unrecognizable set of strange structures – it seems to be a utility of some sort. Poudre Park is much more developed, as is the canyon in general. There are a lot more rafters, kayakers and hikers going up there. But the house is still there. And I hope that some of the magic remains. It certainly remains in my heart.