May 05, 2006

The Aspen Effect

"Aspen is different than i remember" he said to my mother on the cell phone.

"It's bigger now than it used to be."

I drove north out of Aspen on county road 82. I listened to one side of the conversation between my parents as we left the edge of town.

My father is a smart man, but hearing his conversation in third person, i saw an amusing naiveté as he talked about Aspen. The last time he had been there was with my mother in the mid 1970's. To his apparent surprise, time- and the progression it yields- has turned the Aspen of his memory into something bigger. Time pulls, or sometimes pushes, all things, including city limits forward, for better; and for worse. Of all people, my father understands that.

As it were then though, he sat shotgun and continued to tell my mother in a surprising tone that things there had changed over time.

Everything changes.

A few miles up Hwy. 82 he hung up the phone. The call was not made by my father to express his surprise in real estate development in Pitken County Colorado. The call was made by my mother to to tell him of a death in the family. A heart attack, age 62. He was my father's cousin.

Highway 82 takes advantage of the work the Roaring Fork River has done during the latest epoch. The road follows the river along the valley the river is carving in the strata on its way north towards its confluence with the Colorado River.

As we drove along the river, we spoke of family, and lack thereof. We spoke of family dynamics, of growing old, of moving on, and just plain moving.

Everything changes.

As it were, I was moving, in every sense of the word. In the gloaming, the valley glowed with a steel gray vapor rising off of the ground. The valley curled up at it's edges like wet paper, it's torn edges wrapping up into into granite mountains frosted in snow. Pyramid peak sat up beside the Maroon Bells, crevices of snow trailing down between dark rock like burnt paper and ash, smoldering at the edges of a book i was writing that no one would read. If memory could ever manifest, it would look like the view out of the driver's side window while my father spoke to me. As it were, I was moving. Literally. Across the country. And though in my memory, where i was headed to was solid and still; it was not.

Everything changes.

The valley floor below us was getting deeper. People I know were growing older. The Mountain range was getting taller. I was moving.

Everything changes.

I saw my life. I saw the techtonic plates. I saw the polar ice flows. I saw the Roaring Fork River eroding the earth below. I saw the earth in it's solar system. I saw the galaxy moving farther away from everything else. I saw life and I saw me in it. And i saw it with amusing naiveté, and realized nothing ever stops changing.

I am being pushed. And I am being pulled. And like techtonic plates and ice flows, i am breaking apart. And somewhere else, I am coming together again. Like with gravity, thermal convection, and ocean currents, there are forces bigger than me that i cannot see that push me apart, and pull me together.

Everything changes.

As I traveled the continent with my father, I was finding my fault lines. I felt the trenches of separation. And I am witnessing the collisions, and the mountains they are forming.

The crescent moon hung above the valley. The light faded. The fog vanished. My father began to change the subject. My cell phone rang in my pocket. It was an unknown number. I shifted into fifth gear.

Everything changes.

Posted by Todd Roeth at May 5, 2006 08:46 PM