I’ve been talking about mountains for quite some time. Tonight, I put my fragmented thoughts into one cohesive piece of writing. At our paper, our editors make each of the reporters write opinion pieces once a month, which goes against every journalistic rule I’ve ever been taught. But whatever. Another day, another dollar, and in my case I’ve tried to use the 17 inches of column space to write creatively, tell truths and share some of my experiences. Not conventional opinion page material, but whatever. Truth isn’t conventional after all.
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Out on the Kansas short grass prairie, I can see for miles and miles and miles, so far out that I sometimes don’t believe there is more of America that lies to the west. Colorado’s mountains are somewhere out there, I have to remind myself, and yet I can hardly believe that these vast high plains come to an end somewhere and that the earth rises higher from where I now stand.
The truth is that while I’m out on there looking, searching, I’m mostly disappointed: Kansas is so flat, I think to myself. Where are the trees and hills I want so desperately to climb?
Then I venture to find beauty in the landscape — a landscape often castigated for its simplicity — and I have not been disappointed. Because instead of looking across, I look up — and what I see is almost indescribable.
I wish I were a good enough writer to share with you the chill and simultaneous warmth that runs through my blood when I look at the violet blue and blood orange Kansas sunsets each evening. During the afternoon blue weather my mind often drifts, anticipating the descent of the February sun. There are no skyscrapers to block the sunsets’ beauty, no smog to cover their brilliant hues, no landmarks between myself and the western sky to separate me from something divine.
The teasing Spring weather this week reminds me of a walk one March evening several years ago that I took with a close friend, as I tried to comfort her after the boy she had loved had broken their relationship. I can’t remember what we talked about, I can’t remember whether she cried or whether I was any help to her. What I do remember is the sunset that evening long ago, its layers of color so starkly different and wonderful from the dark Iowa winter days that had clouded over us for so many months.
“Let’s walk towards the sunset,” she said at one point during our jaunt, to shake off her sadness. “Let’s pretend those are mountains on the horizon and that’s where we’re headed.”
Of course, there were no mountains on the horizon, only rolling Iowa hills. At the time, I thought what she had said was rather silly, even though I could not disavow that the layers of yellow and orange intersecting with the daylight blue did indeed make it seem as though snow caps were just miles off in the distance.
Given her grief, I played along for her sake. We walked towards the mountains for several hours but we never did reach them. We must have made it back home eventually. She must have dealt with her sadness for the time being. The sun must have set once again, taking with it the sight of our make-believe destination.
But now as I think again, now that Kansas has taught me to appreciate the bleeding evening skies more than I’ve ever acknowledged before, I think about what she said and what she meant.
I have been taught since I was a young girl that we are always in a season of migration: learning, trying, moving, growing. What do we see on our horizons? And how do we reach them? My friend tried to share with me something she believed about her horizon, that it is a real place for her, a place I could go along with her if I believed in it, too. If she had told me so in those words so many years ago, I would have discounted them.
Now, I’m glad I know better.
From where I stand now, something tells me Colorado’s mountains are not too far out of my reach. Each time I’m looking out towards the western horizon, I dream about scaling a rocky mountain and once I’m on top, looking back from where I came. As I walk towards my horizon, my feet crunching the dry, flat Kansas grass, I think about how much I want to use these two feet and these hands and my other God-given accidents, how much I want to defy gravity and cross a Colorado river and delve into a deep cave without any idea about what lies before me.
There is a language in nature that speaks of the divine, and in my wish to walk away from everything I’ve done wrong and run towards what I know I can do right, the horizon is where I look. Out there I know there is a place of untouched earth from where I can yell at the top of my lungs from the top of the highest summit, from where no one — not even a personal god — can hear me.
But that horizon is so far away, and for now I’m content to keep watching and waiting. Because until I meet the mountains, I have the sunsets to sustain me.
