Ghost Ranch — Last Days
I’m a huge believer that where you live makes all the difference in how you look at the world. I know, maybe it seems obvious to most of us, but then again, part of the reason to travel and explore other places is to give us a glimpse into how another environment might shape our lives. It isn’t just the terrain, or the light, or the cold, or the vistas, it’s how we relate to them. Some folks might thrive in our Pacific Northwest mist and fog and grey days, but others might prefer a Big Sky, lots of sun, hard cold winter winds and think this is where they belong. Maybe days of equatorial temperatures, no delineated seasons, 12 hours of light and dark 365 days a year might be what they desire. I left the snows and frigid temperatures of Wisconsin with my tail between my legs. What doesn’t kill you, I figured, might, at the very least, give you frostbite and an irresistible urge to hibernate four months of the year.
But the point is, you want to find that place that feels like Home, smells like Home, sounds like Home, whatever home is to you. The last day of our trip to New Mexico we wandered with our former neighbor into the hills where Georgia O’Keefe made her home after an early career in New York. Big difference, the canyons of the Big Apple to those under a Big Sky. She chose the wide open spaces, a vast view, a terrain of red rock escarpments and thunderstorms she could see coming across the valley for miles. Maybe she even liked the pitiless summer sun, the hot dessicating winds and four seasons that each were challenging in very different ways. Her paintings became spare as the semi-arid land she adopted and life distilled down to essences.
Where you live shapes your perceptions. More so for those of us who live in the actual, not virtual, world. Maybe not so much for the thermostatically pampered, but even so, a little. New Mexico was a panoramic sweep of mountain ranges, red rock canyons, arid lands, volcanic scree, a country shaped by elements that relentlessly carve and sculpt, erode and tunnel through what is mostly wilderness. It’s a primal place with the occasional ruins where others barely clung to the cliffs and disappeared when the droughts lasted too long. You see a few signs, petroglyphs left, signifying who knows what. It’s a place for the imagination to expand, for myths to be written, for dreams to be caught. I admit to feeling the power of the place. But it never felt like home. And home is where we’re headed.
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