I drove into you as a mountain today.

You grew in front of me, flat and craggy, catching the 10 o’clock light.  Your fingers were gulches of green taming the red rocks.  Soft and weathered and outstretched, asking me to scramble up them, holding on to the wrinkles of your knuckles until I was sitting in the palm of your hand.

Someone once told me that the mountains here in Colorado were intimidating.

“They don’t hug you like the Appalachians do,” he said.  They aren’t tamed, nor do they burn like in southern California.  They aren’t rolling and humid green like those in the Northwest, gazing quietly over the Puget Sound.

But I say that’s all wrong.  These are my mountains, you are my mountain.  The years have worn them down into tectonic silk.  They are you, and you are begging me to come explore you.  To drive through your tunnels, to climb and hang from your rock faces, to breathe in your sage and your spruce and your balsam, beautiful and intoxicating even in its rot.

I saw you today as a nursery tree.  Your ancient trunk felled and fetid, but already, a neat and straight row of saplings was pushing through your bark, living again.

And then I was climbing your mountain again.  When I stumbled up, you curled your wooded fingers behind me so I wouldn’t fall.  So that if I lost my footing, tumbled backward, you cupped me in the padded bed of your fingertips.

With your help, I made it to the top of the tallest peak, hidden inside cloud formations whose names you pushed into my ears and my mind with the coolest, sweetest breeze.

I turned to the East and asked you to let me look far, so you blew the wind harder to clear the cumulus fog and you opened up the sky.  You pulled a juniper up from the ground next to me so I wouldn’t be blinded by your fresh sun.

I squinted anyway.

But I looked so far.  My arms stretched out, my fingers walking with the delicate authority of an officer of peace, my eyes riding on their backs, straddling my bare knuckles.  Past the great plains, past truckstops and cornfields as the humidity grew and grew.  All the way to the sea they walked, and then you whispered:

“You are a feather, walk on the waves,” so I did.  My tiring hands sliced through the nervous Atlantic, and even there on the mountain, I felt the spray of the storm on my cheeks.

My hands crossed two more countries.  And they came to the sea again, my eyes so tired they didn’t believe themselves.  The blue water looked like a memory, the sail boats bobbed in a postcard.  They belonged in a box and back on the mountain, I sighed with defeat.

I cupped the ocean into my palms, sustenance for the journey home, but before I could bring it back to my mouth to drink, there you were, perched on a cliff, reading a book about me.  You saw my hands, and you feared the long journey, but you came to them anyway.  You let them carry you back the way they had come, past a tired country, across a raging ocean, past state lines and cows and billboards. 

I waited there under the juniper, today.  And you came to me as a mountain.

Someone once told me these mountains were intimidating.  How wrong, o how wrong.

You came to me as a mountain, and it is the only place I belong.