And just like that, you're 25 years
old.
The passage of time can be vertiginous
when the places around you have changed far less than you. When
you return to those formative places, those character factories of
your late teens and early 20s, just the sensory nostalgia of
homecoming is enough to make you forget all the interim. The same
fiery sunrises, same cracked dirt oven heat of mid-afternoon, same
raw smell of ponderosas after rain.
Then there are the re-lived
experiences, the big dinners and star-strewn nights with your old
friends who are back to visit. You talk, of course, about the
new stuff, the desk jobs and the boyfriends and the graduate
programs, but that's not what sticks in your abdomen and spins your
mind for a loop. It's the dumb movie quotes you remember, the
now-swollen legend of the day you peaked seven mountains and still
made it to the bar afterward, the night you fell out of your
roommate's truck.
But places with real depth do more than
hold you in the bosom of the past. The land, like us, is never still.
There is endless challenge in the mountains, a springboard capacity
for absorbing even the longest fallers and propelling them back into
the unknown clean and galvanized, bringing along the frontier zen of
morning sun beside a little trout stream, the indefatigable cheer of
banjo rolls on the crisp night air.
These are the places to which we
return, the love we don't let die. An average of 29,127 days on this
ball of earth and rock and water -- how many will be spent in the same
stale fluorescent-lit air, having the same superficial conversations,
thinking the same tedious thoughts?
