Finding Leadville Chapter 10: Moving in and Holding On

The author upon arriving to her cabin home in Alma, CO and enjoying the view from the deck

Letting Go

I've taken on

the form of

a mighty boulder

once safe

in a fortitude stillness

atop a sturdy ridge.

But, the just-enough

has bumped me,

the past placed her hands

on my backside

and pushed me

toward future.

I begin my

roll and tumble

into the canyon,

gravity and momentum

my companions.

Don't try to reroute me.

Don't try to stop me.

You'll only

get in my way.

The country road toward the author's cabin

The icy road kept winding. 

Clutching the steering wheel of my 2001 Subaru Forester, I tensed as it rattled up the mountain. To my right, the road dropped off, a cavern of sloping mountainside, nary a barrier to keep me on the road. Gulping, I kept my eyes straight ahead. Every cell in my body wanted to drink up the magical ascension of land all around me but I sure as shit had to focus. 

It was April Fools Day, my mother's birthday, and snow blanketed the sea of pine and aspen. The night before, I was nervously tucked into bed at an AirBnB in Omaha Nebraska, wondering what this moment would look like, feel like, be like. 

I barely slept in that rented basement room – instead, I rose from the bed at midnight and undressed in front of the standing mirror. I looked at every inch of my body, turning round to inspect skin and fat, hair and nails, muscle and scars. A body. My body. Vulnerable in the Midwest moonlight.

A small pile of my sweatpants and t-shirt lay on the floor, underwear kicked to the side of the room. I drew my hands to my face and touched the darkened lines beneath my eyes. My fingers traced my cheeks, following the weary pathways of tears fallen then up to the crowfeet crinkles at my temples formed from how I smile with my whole face. I turned, chin over shoulder, inspecting the curve of my spine leading to a strong backside. The rolling hills of my skin, exposed.

No turning back now, I thought, a bit dramatic.  

I let out a whimper.  

What do I even want? Naked in Nebraska, I stared at the mirror: rounded thighs, dimpled butt, one knee larger than the other from a past injury. Doubt prickled me, goosebumps rising on my exposed skin. 

I picked up my phone and texted a friend. 

“I’m 8 hours away from the CO place. Can’t believe I’m doing this.”

Within a minute, my phone buzzed: “I believe it.” I was surprised she was awake. 

Air whooshed out of my lungs and I dropped into a heap on the floor. 

OK, the mind prompted, OK. I’m willing. I am willing to try. Notes-to-self I had written over and over again throughout the years began to take over my mental script. I can believe in myself. I am willing to mess up, to learn, to grow. I am willing to be independent, to do this on my own. No one else is going to do this for me. 

I slept in fits, waking every hour on the hour. Each time, I peered out the bedside window to check on the Subaru. She was stuffed, my belongings pressed against the windows, parked on the street. Exposed, bursting with "too much," a bit like how I felt. Unable to release my anxiety, my mind spun thoughts of someone stealing my car. Sweat dampened my hairline, and my shirt stuck to my skin. Fortunately, no one swiped the car. Unfortunately, I did not get a great rest that night. 

Before my alarm could go off, I was up making coffee, throwing toiletries back into my backpack, and then scooting into the front seat. By that afternoon, I was driving up the mountain toward Hoosier’s Pass with a small line of better-equipped-for-this-part-of-town vehicles towed behind me, impatient. 

My phone pinged. A turn was approaching. The Continental Divide sign greeted me at the top of the Pass with its soon-recognizable trailhead posting. I was halfway between the Atlantic and Pacific. Halfway. I sputtered out a half laugh. How appropriate. I was halfway between everything, it seemed. Between dark and light, healing and pain, grudge and forgiveness, then and now.

I crested the top and followed the road down the other side. The impatient queue of cars soared past at the first sign of the white dotted line. This would happen all summer long. I got used to being overtaken because of the lack of horsepower in my car's 2001 engine. My chest surged and a sob half formed. I was two minutes away from the tip of Lakeview Drive, my new home. 

I swallowed, taking a few steady but insufficient breaths. I could really feel the altitude. After turning onto the county road, I checked my high-tech watch to get an idea of how high up I really was: 11,000 ft. My head spun and the windshield glossed with my mental fog. I had been living right around 900 ft (barely) in Minnesota for the last almost-decade. This was the most extreme jump my body had experienced. I turned into the country road and it immediately began to climb even higher.

“Shit!” My car sputtered and stopped moving forward. Imprisoning the tires were piled of ankle-deep slush and snow. I was stuck. It was a quarter mile up to the cabin where I was about to sign a six-month lease. But instead of holding a pen, I was spinning my wheels in the early April snowfall. My worn-down tires were diligently proving how worthless they were in this weather.

A lone truck pulled up behind me and waited for me to move. 

“Uh, I’m not going anywhere,” I mumbled, rolling down my window. I was tired and starting to feel bad for myself. It was a long drive. I was almost there. And I wasn’t sure what I needed to do to get moving again. I hate feeling incapable and in that moment I felt all of its burden. 

I waved the truck on, and it began to edge past me, my embarrassment halting any possible effort of asking for help. Fortunately, it slowed and a man leaned out the front. 

“Ya got chains for those tires?” he asked. 

Red-faced, I replied, “No. I’m trying to get up this hill. Nothing seems to work.” 

“Here, let me see what I got.” He disappeared into his backseats and then emerged with a small yellow shovel, “Let’s clear ya a bit so you can backtrack.” 

Seconds later he was behind my car shoveling the slush away from my spun-out tires. With a nod, he clambered back into his truck and took off. It was just enough shoveling that I could reverse and move back down the road to where I first turned. Looking at the steering wheel, I realized that my hands were turning white with pressure. I loosened my grip, closed my eyes, and willed away my tears. 

Then, Colleen arrived.  

Colleen was the house manager and fortunately knew the approximate timing of my arrival. She pulled up in her SUV next to me, rolled down the window, and shouted: “Back up, press the gas and follow me! Don’t lose your momentum!” With that, she floored it and ripped up the impossibly slick road. 

No time to think, only time to trust. 

I did what she said and flew up behind her. I yanked the steering wheel in a frenzy as my car desperately maneuvered the slushy uphill. I was flooded with a remarkable sense of power, thrill, and the wild abandon of acting alongside fear. It was like getting on the Swings at the amusement park for the first time at seven years old. I had kicked and screamed as the chairs lifted up off the ground, tearful at the uncertainty of height and speed colliding. But once we started spinning in the air, I was elated, awestruck. I love a good ride.

I have no idea how I didn’t just go flying off the deep steep edges of the road that day. I somehow stayed the course, followed the lead of capable Colleen, and within a few minutes I was parked right out front of the cutest mountain cabin there ever was. My heart felt like it was about to pound right out of my chest. 

I started laughing. 

Laughter is an excellent companion to fear. It arrives alongside grief and anger, annoyance and difficulty. Laughter is our way of normalizing the moment; of lessening the burden and allowing ourselves to be so deliciously human and raw. I threw open my car door and with big gulping breaths reached out my hand to greet this new friend. 

That is how I arrived, by the skin of my teeth, at an 80's-built cabin on the edge of Hoosier’s Pass in Alma, Colorado, 11,000 feet altitude. My summer home. My training ground for the Leadville 100. My place of refuge to deepen my relationship with my mind and my body.

I can’t believe I’m here. Again, a small voice inside me whispered as I stepped over the threshold, knocking the snow off my boots. I kicked them off and began to look around. 

Another voice said, a bit more loudly, I believe it. 

Thanks, Ben, I smiled to myself.

I took the pen from Colleen’s outreached hand and signed my name on the dotted lease line. I was home for now.

After clearing out my Subaru and hoisting my belongings down the flight of stairs into my basement bedroom, I poured wine into the first available glass I could find. I knew that I would have three roommates, yet none of them home. With shallow breath, I tentatively nosed my way through the house. 

Inside the cabin

Across from the stairway and past the kitchen, beneath the tall ceilings, a sliding door led out to a wood paneled deck. I pushed my way through it and gasped. Mt. Lincoln stood victorious, unmoving, snowcapped beyond an expanse of tall fir trees and aspens. Below the deck, chipmunks skittered, moose and bear tracks evident. Wind rippled their branches and ceremony of birdsong filled the thin air. 

A whoosh of familiarity rushed through my veins.

When I close my eyes and dream up a peaceful setting where my body is at ease, my mind can slow down, and the worries of the world can wash away, I think about a treehouse in my childhood backyard. 

My dad was a resourceful man. His father was a carpenter and passed down the value of hard work and a good set of tools to his son. On the farmland of western Massachusetts, we had a life that was surrounded by the fruit of my dad’s labor. After a full work week at the local Correctional Center where he created programming for inmates, he'd put his hands to work. He was flawed and, I'm sure to the nature of his work, was dysregulated often; but the man taught me how to live well. He taught me how to work, how to create, and how to change the tide of a single day from simple stillness to excitement. One example of this was the treehouse.

Behind our peeling white farmhouse, dad piled up a large plot of sand every summer. We affectionately called this The Sandpile. Retrieving his sand by the truck bedful from a nearby granite operation, he’d recruit us kids to help him shovel it off the red Ford’s bed and onto the existing lot. The Sandpile wrapped around an old oak tree and became the base for all our imaginative games. We built forts with moats, became chocolatiers for the afternoon, or acted out stories about dragons in faraway lands. We pulled cicada shells from the trees and used them as armor for the army men standing at attention and mixed water in buckets to create mud pie delights. 

The Sandpile was summertime. 

One year, my dad built a treehouse on The Sandpile’s tree. It had a basic panel floor and slatted sides with no roof to call its own; instead, the branches of the tree sheltered our little heads with elegance. To ensure we could climb up, my dad gave the treehouse the ultimate ladder: an enormous fishing net made of weathered rope dug up from the Rhode Island beachside. He nailed it down at the fort’s entrance and pulled it out slightly to create a concave ascension. He anchored it below with what I thought were railroad spikes, ensuring the net’s steadiness. 

It quickly became our summer home. Scurrying up and down that net to our treehouse, we could be anything: pirates one day, spiders another. Hours of imagination colored those long summer hours. 

Across the way from the treehouse, an old green tractor sat at a standstill, inoperative – a time machine. Twisting the steering wheel and pushing the clutch and levers, we propelled ourselves back in time to the early pioneering days. We drummed up icy snow conditions on those summer days and then raced to our beloved treehouse for protection from the elements. Reenacting everything we learned –  from World War II to Lewis & Clark to Amelia Earhart – our treehouse held us as we discovered and played. 

Most important to me, though, this treehouse became my refuge. Moments when I felt unseen and unloved, moments when I was scared or unsure, the treehouse and her fishing net had arms big enough to hold me. Days in which I knew I could get into trouble and risk getting spanked, I would flee up the tree and sit with my back against the strong trunk top. I’d pull my knees into my chest and look out across the field that stood on our property. The robins and geese flew over me, then got smaller and smaller as they retreated beyond the trees at the field’s edge. 

I could be a bird, I remember thinking. I drew one alongside a small poem I had written. Even then, I had notebooks with me. 

Little did I know, I was learning what it took for me to regulate my emotions. I was a little girl filled with anger and sorrow, confusion and grief. Some of this was unprocessed from grandparents passing and when I learned my mom miscarried a sibling who would have been older than me. Much of it was making sense of my emotions in a home where they felt too big.

I also felt unspoken confusion at messages of conditional love from my parents, teachers, and church leaders – for me to be a respectable “good girl” of whom Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the Holy Trinity, and all the perfect saints would be proud. That in order to be loved I had to stay still and be quiet and cross my legs and be ladylike. I’d bargain with God some days, up in the tree. I'd ask him to let me fly away with the geese. I promised I'd be a good girl; I'd offer to be ladylike and quiet and problem-free, all in exchange for the wings.

Those wooden boards held me. The sky went on forever, reminding me there was an expanse beyond my understanding of life: there was more, beyond the farmhouse. There were places to go and people to love. I’d fill composition notebooks with lists of what I wanted to do. I could be the one to go off into the world and create it all. It created a sense ease in my worried little body.

So, when I arrived at the cabin on the side of Hoosier’s Pass and I stepped onto the plain boards and simple slatted sides of the back deck that overlooked the expanse of forever and a mountainside, I felt like a bird. I felt at ease. I opened my arms like wings.

The ten-year-old inside of me exhaled, the reality settling into her grown bones. She did it. She was a bird. She was living out the list in her notebook, all on her own.

I dropped onto the deck floor, wrapping my wings around my knees and pulling them into my chest. Backed up against the side of the home, I leaned my head against the tiles and let out a soft, warm smile. No bargaining with God needed. No need to be a "good girl."

I was always good enough to be free, to be loved, to be me. It was time to unlearn anything on the contrary.

View of the deck from the inside