Crested Butte Colorado
Before I left for Eastern Europe last September, I played some gigs in Colorado with The Billy Jeter Band. The bass player, guitar player, drummer and I had flown in to Colorado Springs. Billy rented a car for us to drive to Crested Butte for rehearsal and a four gig mini-tour. The guys let me drive most of the way. Nearly a year ago I had anxiety when riding in a car as a passenger. Riding in busses around the steep cliff-side roads of Montenegro has finally cured me. I´ve surrendered many fears to the great Blue Elk in the sky this past year. I’ve begrudgingly faced the reality that stability, security, the capacity to control anything is a delusion.
The interstate was only two- lanes and flat; so I was golden. The metal mesh put in place to capture boulders before they roll onto the traffic below, became more prevalent as we climbed. My catastrophizing voice started whispering. The gradient on each side of the road became increasingly steep and the gravel on each side crept closer into the lane. Soon the hair-pin curves became more frequent, and the temperature began to drop. I imagined wagon trains of settlers carving these paths. What sort of people thought trundling across these slopes and ravines seemed like the thing to do?
The higher we drove, the colder and foggier it became. The growing list of potential risks did not, however, dampen the confidence of those hauling 40 ft long RVs goose-necked to giant pick up trucks around the slick, loose-footed, curves with low visibility at top speed. Nearly a year ago I´d felt a certain anger at myself for my inability to share their care-free attitude. Which, of course, I projected onto them before I figured this feeling out.
We stopped at a beautiful river along the way so the bass player could dip his toes in. We kept trying to find where the Arkansas river flowed through Colorado, but this, we determined, was not the Arkansas. We took selfies, the guitar player drank beer, and I made a bouquet of the alpine flowers that were growing near the banks. I left it on a rock as a token of gratitude for the calm vibe that I’d managed to glom onto from my calm band mates, and for the invigorating crisp air.
We marveled at the scale of the mountains and our minds drew comparisons to the hills of back home. I parsed through the vocabulary of the various ways in which one can describe a mountain. Butte, hill, crest, plateau, canyon, mesa. I wondered aloud about what distinguishes a butte from a mesa. The guys all offered up various ideas.
My mind wandered to when I learned the word Montserrat; the name of the mountain range outside of Barcelona. Montserrat means jagged or serrated, just as the name implies. Then to the glistening onyx-black freezing cold fjords I’d seen in Norway. I thought about the necessary recalibration of my experience of the word “scale” on a trip to the alps of Salzburg with my college choir.
At that point I had never been to Montenegro but had done my research. I was ready to head to the Black Mountains that surround me at present. It´s an unusual country with fjords and the Mediterranean Sea all smashed together.
We talked about the mountains of Arkansas, Petit Jean, Nebo and Magazine and how small their scale is in comparison to the Colorado mountains that surrounded us. My fourth-generation family farm lay at the feet of Mount Magazine. A few years earlier I´d laid on the ground there wishing a fissure would open and swallow me whole rather than having to face the difficult journey that I knew was ahead of me should I find the courage to honor myself properly, divorce my husband, leave my land that I loved so deeply, and strike out alone in the world. I´d delayed the agonizing pain that I knew awaited me until my subconscious would simply no longer allow it.
We continued to climb and wondered aloud what makes a butte a butte. Naturally we wouldn’t be a rock and roll band if we didn´t make the obligatory butt jokes and shyly admit our love of Beavis and Butthead.
Billy, the songwriter, band leader and mastermind of the Colorado mini tour, explained that a butte is monolithic. It stands alone among the range of surrounding mountains. There it is. I´m a butte. A monolith standing alone. Only buttes aren’t sad about it. The stand proudly in their strength. They don´t bawl and squall about it, as my grandmother would say. In spite of my monolithic status, the Alpine tundra; gorges, snow ski resorts, and unfamiliar wildlife (like all things foreign to me) felt like heaven.
We were beat by the time we’d made it to the band leader´s chalet-style house in Crested Butte. His wife made a beautiful spread of food and a couple of their lovely friends came over to welcome us. Being surrounded by people who so deeply love music had a restorative effect on us. I´d secretly sold my house and finally let the cat out of the bag that I was moving, site unseen, to the Black Mountains of Montenegro. I felt that disconnected feeling I get when I tell people I’m leaving the states. I feel their energy pull back and a small crack of separation emerge. I suppose they can´t fathom what the hell would possess a person to do such a thing. Or maybe some can´t imagine how would they ever just up and leave their current life and move abroad. In that moment I was a monolith again.
After a very long and productive rehearsal the next day, we went to a popular pizza joint and sat in the groovily-decorated basement on couches and drank pitchers of PBR:
Our very friendly, kilt-wearing, mohawk-sporting waiter gave us his homemade mix cassette tapes as gifts as we parted.
On day three we drove over another winding pass and stopped to ogle the Black Gorge cutting through the black mountains. As we marveled at the abyss of the gorge, I took it as a sign of things to come. I´d be living in a place literally named Black Mountain. I´d left it up to the universe. If my house sold at the price I wanted, I´d go. If not, I´d stay.
The altitude finally started getting to most of us at various intervals throughout the day. We arrived in Paeonia, an area I imagined named for what must´ve once been a land of endless peonies. My imagination was validated by a street named Peony. My favorite flower.
We arrived at the gig site, a cool restaurant/bar in the middle of a peach orchard. They made peach cider, among other flavors. We in the band tended to favor the cranberry-jalepeño all night.
The guys unfurled all the analog gear on the covered shed stage that made up the sound system. I helped unload the drums and unrolled cords.
Children were pumping their legs on a tire swing that oscillated them in a wide arc over a creek with each pump. The outdoor diners seemed interested in how we´d sound. Everything seemed magical and perfect, and the sound check went well. Then, a few seconds before we were to start, a downpour fell from the Colorado sky. Everyone scattered, but eventually returned. It threw us all off and we were exhausted and drunk and addled but managed to eventually reel ourselves back in and deliver what felt like heart-felt music by the last half of the night.
Billy and his wife, Susan stayed in their RV in the orchard, Jason the guitar player and Patrick the drummer stayed at a local inn, Brian the bass player and I each had our own glamping tents in the orchard.
Beyond exhausted, I fell into the cushy Boho-princess bed in my glamping tent. I cried because there was no one to take my boots off and enjoy the beauty and fun of the experience with; dug through my backpack for the complementary body lotion from the hotel room in Crested Butte, and drenched myself in it.
The air was drying my skin out so badly that I constantly had tears streaming whether I was crying or not. The wrinkles in my face echoed the depths of the crevasse we´d seen along the way. I drank wine from a coffee cup and stared at the amazing stars.
The next morning, I woke to a herd of elk slowly moving over the plain in front of the purple mountain beyond my glamping tent. They disturbed what I thought were oddly shaped rocks. I finally made them out to be some sort of pheasant or turkey. I made a cup of Swiss Miss instant cocoa, then a cup of coffee. Still felt exhausted, drunk, and shriveled by the western air. I tried to focus on the glam part of the experience and went through my gratitude list. I found two tangerines in my backpack and hoped the vitamin C would kick in soon. We still had a gig to do in Gunnison.
I scrolled back through my phone for a Mark Twain quote I´d seen to try and sum up what I was feeling. It read “My loyalties will not be bound by national borders; or confined in time by one nation´s history or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green Hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.”,