(This is the original version of a column I wrote for The Dallas Morning News. I like this version better only because it’s a little longer.)
We were somewhere outside of Amarillo driving toward Colorado when the feeling kicked in. It happens once every road trip. Usually I’m with my wife, but this time I was driving with a photographer on our way to the Continental divide.
Anyone who’s been over-served at a bar with his friends has had that post-midnight moment where it dawns on him to say, brilliantly, “Guys, we could buy this bar. And live in it.” It’s like that, but for me it comes when I see some little modern-day version of a Norman Rockwell village outside the car window passing by at 60 miles per hour.
I usually say to my wife, “Honey, we could move here. I could buy the little newspaper. You could get your nurse practitioner license and be like the doctor in Northern Exposure. We’d know everyone in town. We’d have Sunday dinner with Sheriff Andy Taylor. They probably have pie-baking contests, like, every week.”
I didn’t this time, what with the wife at home and the guy next to me looking nothing like her. But the feeling was there.
I’ve lived the bulk of my adult life in The DFW, as we in-the-know people call it. I style (key word, there) myself an outdoorsy type. More rugged than the fey, urbanized types both in my profession and among my friends, who think a hunting expedition is the twice-yearly sale at Nordstrom. They don’t have calluses on their hands. OK, granted, mine are because I’m too cheap to buy weight-lifting and gardening gloves, but still.
Our destination was a little town called Creede, Colorado. The year-round population is 400. This is man’s country, by God, and it made me feel ditto.
For a day. Then I relearn what I block out every trip.
“It’s only 8:45 at night. How can the restaurant be closing in 15 minutes?”
“There’s no 24-hour pharmacy?”
“What do you mean, ‘What’s a Starbucks?’”
“Walk? To there? What am I, a steroid-pumped Chinese Olympian?”
The charm of being in a town with just 400 people gives way to the horrifying realization that you are in a town with only 400 people. When you’re in an office building, you say good morning the first time you pass a co-worker in the hall. The second time you grin, raise your eyebrows, and nod. The third time you get intensely interested in anything that allows you to avoid eye contact. If you see you’re headed towards the bathroom at the same time, you go and hide behind the copy machines.
That’s what it’s like walking around Creede. You realize that if, hypothetically speaking, you go out and enjoy the wild, late-night (8 p.m.) bar scene, and you are over-served and make a fool of yourself with that stuffed elk I couldn’t get my foot out of, anyone who doesn’t see it in person will hear about it within an hour. God bless the alienating, soul-crushing anonymity of the big city.
And good Lord, these people are fit. Annoyingly so. Look, you can’t trust anyone who owns more than three types of extreme sports equipment. There’s always something wrong with their feet and they have exactly no problem in shedding their shoes and socks and whittling away at whatever is the problem. Right there on a dining patio.
The cabin where I stayed – it belongs to a well-known Dallas restaurateur – was plush, like something from a Ralph Lauren catalogue. Still, I found myself pouting like a girl over the water pressure. And help me Jesus, but how can there be that many insects in the Alpine zone? As I gazed in the mirror, the dry air making me realize I hadn’t packed (forgive me, Dad) my moisturizer, a moment of clarity occurred.
“Yep, I’m a dandy.”
I couldn’t get back to Dallas fast enough. We drove through the night at speeds I can’t mention.
As the dawn broke we did likewise the outer boundary of The DFW. I savored the sweet, ozone-thick, cool 95-degree morning air. The hum of 24-hour everything. The comforting echo of distant gunfire. The embrace of a people for whom a mile uphill is not, thank you, considered walking distance.
I was back to the soft city. I was home.