Conversations

I spent last weekend quite literally in the Cold. Up in the Rocky Mountains on a pair of skis.

My son and I flew out to Denver to ski with his girlfriend, who goes to school out there. I was just so touched and excited that they invited me along for the fun, even if I hadn’t skied in (gulp) thirty years.

At the Arapahoe Basin

I was a bit apprehensive at first, and yes, I did get knocked on my a** by a reckless snowboarder – “It’s always a snowboarder,” my son’s girlfriend said (sorry, snowboarders).

But sore butts aside, we had a ball! Not only did I challenge myself physically and mentally by learning a new trick (or rather, relearning one), but I also felt like I was truly out in the world for the first time since Covid.

While my family has traveled during the pandemic – to the beach, to a family wedding in California – it’s always felt insular somehow. Perhaps because we were all tentative about it. Starting a conversation with a fellow traveler, coming too close to someone, often felt like a violation. Like we were putting ourselves and others in danger.

But if my trip to Denver is any indication of what’s happening all over, the lot of us seem to be renegotiating our rules of engagement. Most of the people we encountered over the weekend – on the plane, at the airport, in the city, on the slopes, were relaxed. They’d pierced their personal bubbles and were reaching out again in that friendly, easy-going way we used to all take for granted.

And it was glorious.

As I loosened up, settled into our weekend activities, I found that what I missed most about putting myself out in the world in an uninhibited way wasn’t the movies, the live music, the events, the restaurants – as nice as those are. It was simple conversation. The kind born of new experiences and encounters with strangers. Because every once in a while, you get the mind-expanding sort that have you pondering another person’s particular wisdom for days. Their struggles, their triumphs, their outlook.

And on our way home from Denver, we were blessed with exactly one of those.

The conversation was with a woman who sat next to us on our flight. She was the kind of lady who said, “I’m so sorry, sweetie,” if she accidentally bumped you, made plenty of room for the person sitting next to her (me), and had a general aura of…goodness.

We’d already shared a laugh about our hour-long delay, and gabbed about a TV show she was hooked on (“True Story,” starring Wesley Snipes and Kevin Hart – she says it’s fantastic!), but then, all of a sudden and out of the blue, some real magic happened.

“I’m from Virginia, originally,” she said. “I’m going home on vacation to see my siblings.”

“Oh,” I said. “How long have you been living in Denver? You move there for work?”

She took a deep breath and smiled big, shaking her head.

“I don’t live in Denver and I will never live in Denver,” she told me. “I live three hours away in a tiny little town called Moffat.”

My son was listening in. “I’ve heard of Moffat,” he said. “It’s in the middle of nowhere.”

He loves places in the middle of nowhere, especially ones surrounded by beauty. Living off the grid, building a home of his own and raising a family there is a dream of his. One of many at this stage of his life, as he tries on passions and prospective careers like Stetson hats. He got on his phone straight away and started Googling Moffat, showing us a picture or two.

“Yup, that’s it,” my flight friend confirmed.

(Moffat, Colorado, pop. 116 as of 2010 census. It’s got at least 117 now.)

“Where I come from, I was either going to end up dead or in jail,” she told me. “So, four years ago, I bought a one-way ticket to Denver. I packed only one backpack full of stuff, and left the rest behind. When I landed, I took a bus as far away from the city as I could get.”

I understand the appeal. I’d once bought a one-way ticket to Prague about five and a half minutes after the Berlin Wall fell. I sold my car to make it happen, and showed up on the doorstep of a great aunt I’d never met, hoping she’d let me stay for a few nights until I got my bearings. I know how life-changing such a decision can be; the way it transforms your perceptions of who you are and what you think you want. How it sends you down a dark, mystical path under the blanket of a sky filled with more stars than you’ve ever imagined in your whole life.

Still, I was flabbergasted at her revelation, and uncharacteristically at a loss for words. With her black, razor-cut jeans, funky, short hairstyle, and oversized sweatshirt, my flight friend did not look like the middle-of-nowhere type.

“Wow,” was all I could manage.

And she laughed.

“I know, right?” She said. “And let me tell you – we city people, we got everything right at our fingertips. The good and the bad. In Moffat, there’s nothing, and you gotta learn how to get your needs. When I moved into my cabin, it didn’t have water or electricity. I had to build it out. Now, I got power, and I’ve got water on the property, but not in the house yet.”

Double wow! Here was a city girl from a bad neighborhood, who was now a homesteader. And she was doing it alone! This is just the best of America, I thought. Fascinated, totally drawn in, I asked her what the community out there was like. I imagined eclectic sorts and cowboys – maybe a few hippies. Definitely off-the-gridders and a handful of end-of-the-world types who’d dug out bunkers and stocked them with canned goods and weaponry.

“It’s wonderful!” She said, all pride and joy. “I could’ve never done it without my neighbors. We’re like family and we have each other’s backs, cause only we know how hard it is where we are, and how great it is.”

“And you love it?”

“Girl,” she said. “I would never go back. Ne-Ver. For the first time ever I love my life! I mean, I miss my family – but I’m from Moffat now.”

She leaned in close to me as everyone started getting up, readying to exit the aircraft. “My friends at home tell me, I could never do what you did, and I say to them – You don’t even know what you’re capable of. I didn’t know. I just knew that with humility and gratitude and love anything was possible.”

She got up and pulled her bag down from the overhead – a simple, black backpack. I wondered if it was the one she’d packed up for her move to Colorado.

“That’s what I tell people,” she continued. “And I meet all kinds of people, because I work at a gas station. And even though I’m just in Moffat, I’m the highest paid assistant manager in the whole company – out of every single station they’ve got. Most people are nice when they come in, but you get the troubled ones here and there. One guy came in, hands shaking, needing his tobacco. But his credit card was denied, and he got so mad. He called me n*****. I said to him – You may not like my face, but I love your face, sir. Because that’s what I try to do: meet people where they are with love.”

I reached out to her with my hand, unthinking. I realized in that moment how unaccustomed I’d become to touching anyone except for my family and close, close friends. Covid had done that to me, to all of us.

“You’ve got to write this down,” I said. “All of it – even little things you don’t think are important. This is a great story and you need to share it.”

She nodded in that merry way of hers’. “I try to write in my journal as much as I can.”

I practically begged her to keep up with it. If she was too tired to write, she might do an audio journal into her phone (she does have a phone), or make a short video. I told her about Talasbuan, the Swedish forest family who lives off the grid, and hosts an enchanting YouTube channel that I follow like a groupie.

“Aw, sweet, thanks for saying that,” she said.

I told her I meant it, but I could tell that she was just too busy living her life to spend much time on documenting it. She was in the midst of that magnificent frenzy that comes from building something, becoming part of a tribe, being happy.

(This is a cabin in Moffat, although probably not her cabin.)

That’s why I’m sharing her story. My flight friend hasn’t the time or inclination to get it all down, but I do. Because her story has touched my life and righted me in that way brief, but important encounters do. The kind that pick you up, adjust your perspective, pull you away from a precipice you didn’t even realize you were standing on. She reminded me that anything is possible. How when we face the unknown, we walk by faith, not by sight.

I figure if you’ve made the time to read all the way to the end of this missive, you’ve been righted a bit, too. You’ll probably tell this story to a friend, who might pass it along to a sister. Even if it only spreads to a few dozen people outside of our group of Coldsters, that’s a few dozen people who’ll be reminded of what we can do. That most of us don’t fit neatly into the slots we’ve been assigned by birth, media narratives, political plots, and traditional mythologies. We are all bundles of potential ready to be realized, firecrackers yearning to be lit.

And we are reminded of that most often through spontaneous conversations with people we meet in passing who we will likely never see again. These are the sprinkles of fairy dust that keep our insights fresh and our hearts soft and open.

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