Grand Junction to Denver, Colorado
During my boyhood summers in upstate New York, I
always looked forward to our annual voyage from Newark Valley to New York City.
Each year, on a hazy, sunny August morning, my family
and I would pile into the blue Chrysler station wagon and begin the incredibly
long drive (or so it seemed to me at the age of ten) down the impossibly stretched
and twisted asphalt snake called Route 17. From my backward facing seat at the
rear of the Chrysler, I would watch the retreating highway as we passed between
mounded hills covered in dense forests of deciduous trees – maples, oaks,
hickories, and ash – sometimes pacing the Delaware River, wide but shallow in
the summer heat, flowing over grey shale rocks formed in an ancient muddy
ocean. Occasionally, we would cross broad, mysterious valleys with farms and
fields and intersecting roads. And, of course, there was the parade of towns – Windsor,
Deposit, Hancock, Fishs Eddy, Roscoe, and so on – all of them sleepy clusters
of clapboard houses, grocery stores, and gas stations, the old kind with wood
siding, big plate glass windows, bubble pumps out front, and a shadowy,
mysterious garage on the side. My favorite town was Liberty, where we would
stop for lunch at the Liberty Diner, a classic art-deco glass and steel eatery
straight out of American Graffiti.
An hour or after Liberty we would hit the outer edges
of the urban world, announced by far more buildings, businesses, and streetlights.
Near Goshen we would join US 6, which would take us to Harriman and the New
York State Thruway. As we neared the city, four lanes would become six, even in
1966, while the buildings would rise higher and higher, and brick and wood
would give way to steel and glass. Finally, we would enter what to me was the
incredibly exotic world of the biggest city in America.
For a quarter century now, my trips from Grand
Junction to Denver with my wife and daughters have replicated my childhood
journeys to New York City.
There are remarkable similarities – the general
movement eastward, the sinuous path of the highway as it follows major rivers,
the passage through forests, the succession of small towns, stopping midway for
lunch, even how the route to Denver joins with US 6. All of this creates a powerful
and nostalgic echo of those magical journeys of my youth. So while the
landscape and the towns I pass through to reach Denver are quite different from
my childhood world of upstate New York, I am still sharply reminded of those
boyhood car trips to “The City” whenever I drive to Denver.
These days, our Denver voyages begin by negotiating
the sinuous canyon east of Grand Junction, the one formed by the Colorado River
out of surreal, wind-carved sandstone. After breaking out of the canyon, we
cross the long, broad Plateau Valley between high chalk-colored ramparts and
bluffs. At night, the gas wells blaze like sinister futuristic towers with
their rows of electric lights topped by an orange flame. In this valley, Interstate
70 arrows past De Beque, Parachute, Rifle, Silt, and New Castle – but
unfortunately the traveler doesn’t see much of these towns since they repose
outside the highway’s unstoppable surge.
About an hour from Grand Junction, I-70 enters
Glenwood Springs, and we pass the grand red brick Colorado Hotel with its
century old memories of Teddy Roosevelt and the steaming Olympic size hot
springs pool. With the railroad on the other side of the Colorado River, we
traverse the serpentine Glenwood Canyon – carved from cliffs and pagodas of ancient
limestone and granite hundreds of feet high. Occasionally, a Union Pacific coal
train will snake through the canyon, appearing and disappearing in the route’s
many tunnels.
Next is the long climb into the Rockies through
Gypsum, Eagle, Edwards, Avon, Vail, and Silverthorne – the mountains growing
higher and higher, the grey pyramids past timberline often tipped with snow
even in the summer. Then, at 11,000 feet, we plunge into the nearly three
kilometer long passage of Eisenhower Tunnel, with its overhead lights pulsing
past like something out of a Kubrick movie. Past the tunnel, there’s the long
winding descent through granite mountain cliffs and chasms and gorges through
Georgetown and Idaho Springs, and soon after the houses and buildings begin to
increase – just like when entering the New York City area from Route 17. Finally
there is a vision of the vast prairie stretching all the way to the Kansas
border and beyond – and on that prairie, clustered like a formation of quartz
crystals stand the steel and glass towers of Denver, hazy and golden in the
daylight, a galaxy of lights at night.
Thus, my adult sojourns from Grand Junction to
Denver create a powerful echo to my childhood journeys from Newark Valley to
New York City. Both of them are magic voyages I’ve made time and again through
mountains and valleys, rivers and forests, to metropolises filled with art,
music, wonderful cuisine, and the shining towers and stadiums of a great
American city.
