May 13, 2009 - Ready to Move Home!

Grand Junction has some incredible hiking and mountain biking trails. When we lived here 10 years ago, we often drove 3 hours or more out of town on weekends to hike and backcountry ski in new places each time, but that doesn't feel right anymore to burn all of that fuel. Staying in town forced us to explore a little right around the edges of the city, and we found some wonderful places to visit. But that's all it really was - visiting, not really living. It makes sense to have wilderness areas, places of exceptional beauty preserved so that future generations can view them in their natural, undisturbed (or at least somewhat restored to natural) state. But, lately when we see places where people are living in harmony with the land they are on, we find even more beauty. There seems to be more life, both domesticated and wild, and more diversity, more of a feeling of wholeness than we see in wilderness areas. I'm sure some people would argue with me, because often human beings living in a place means environmental degradation, but I believe that humans have the ability to contribute in a positive way to any habitable environment, and when they are just visitors, there is less life than there might be otherwise. I'm starting to think that humans are not meant to live so isolated from nature that they have to drive to a wilderness area to "visit" nature, take pictures, and scurry back to their antiseptic artificial homes. We learned in Maine that there really is a feeling of connection and fulfillment the more you derive your daily needs for food, fuel and shelter from the land that you're living on. The more you participate in nature, the more you give and the more the land and everything living on it gives back. It's a feeling of connection, thankfulness, commitment and aliveness. It's a great feeling, (a knowing?) and it's one that now that we've touched it once, we can't wait to get back to it. So, in retrospect, we're not entirely sure we made the right decision to move to GJ for the winter. If we attempt it again, it will be for a shorter duration than the six months that we did this time. We did come out ahead money wise. Linc was happy to learn a new skill, residential energy auditing. He even had hopes of establishing a branch of the energy auditing business in Pagosa Springs for awhile, but after looking at the economics of it all, decided against it. He also was really thankful for the chance to renew some very rusty HVAC and plumbing system design skills, working for a couple of different engineering companies in the valley, and Jeanne was able to do the same for several different companies as a physical therapist. But it felt like we were in a state of suspended animation all winter long. Often it didn't feel like we were fully alive, just numb.

What really raised our spirts were our two visits down to Pagosa Springs to live in the yurt for a couple of days at a time. We immediately felt more relaxed and happy, and the elation usually lasted for a few days after we returned. Both times we also drove up onto Wolf Creek Pass for some backcountry skiing, enjoying the high altitude climbs and the long downhills in untracked powder back to the highway.

We even found out you can cook pancakes right on a wood cookstove!

During our visit to the yurt in early April, it was warm, and there was enough bare soil to allow us to clear a small area for our first garden. Jeanne was so excited that she went ahead and planted peas, in the middle of a sudden snow storm the next day.