Denver is one of those airports I rarely leave – we connect there, in and out in the thin air and then on to somewhere else. I think I’ve only left the airport twice, and once was by force thanks to a combination of weather and airline ineptitude. When we walked out of the terminal Friday night I was struck by the novelty of seeing the Colorado landscape from a constant altitude.
Actually, Denver is a city I haven’t spent any real time in. I lived in Colorado for a summer and went to Denver a grand total of once, for a Rockies game and a wander through a LoDo I wasn’t old enough to drink in. The majority of that summer was spent driving into the mountains and out onto the prairie at all hours of the night, blasting Garth Brooks and singing out the windows. Denver was too much a city to hold our attention those warm months of our last summer of irresponsibility.
Denver some horrifying number of years later was perfectly capable of keeping us busy for two days, and our winter training in Tennessee thus far meant that we walked to the car thinking it “wasn’t that cold” only to see flakes of snow swirling around the street lights. How things change, when a Californian thinks mid thirties “aren’t that cold.” I guess I’m wearing socks with my loafers permanently these days, though I actually wore my new Christmas cowboy boots which kept my feet warm and qualified me (in my opinion, at least) for the pink and green cowboy shirt I bought from Rockmount Ranchware, a longtime business in Denver and inventor of the snap-front western shirt. The building is from 1908 (old for a western town) and is part of the great old building haven that is LoDo, lots of brick and square architecture, arcades of windows and fancy saloon doors on the fronts and nothing but blank faces with faded advertisements painted on the sides. Further out, Denver sports the sad evidence of a building boom in the 70’s and 80’s, but in downtown someone fought the good fight for the old warehouses; it isn’t hard to imagine the streets filled with ox carts and the wooden sidewalks crammed with prospectors and cowboys lookin’ for a good time.
We spent time in the Colorado History museum, where I lost Mike to a huge room filled with mining equipment and at Hammond’s Candies (well out of downtown) where he lost me to people making lollipops by hand. I’d never seen hard candy being made and I was amazed at how alive the rope of flexible candy was. Four people were making heart shaped suckers – one pulled a stretch of candy and cut it; it slithered across the heated surface to the woman who lifted one end and coiled it, just like a cowboy and a lasso. The next person dimpled the top into the bow of a heart and pinched the point at the bottom, and the last inserted the stick and slid it onwards to harden. That the store at the end of the tour was a wonderland of color and sugar didn’t hurt the experience, nor did the amazing sweet smell of the air inside. No wonder the Oompa Loompas were a little nuts – I was sugar high in just half an hour.
We learned that not living near stores we like makes us unrestrained shoppers, that altitude really does give flatlanders headaches and dry mouths and that Denverites love to eat breakfast out. A huge percentage of the nice restaurants in downtown serve a breakfast or a brunch and also believe in morning cocktails. I ate a pancake flight the first morning, beignets the second and if we had breakfast spots like that in Nashville I’d stay in for dinner and get out for breakfast far more often. Leaving Denver behind, we drove to Golden and cruised downtown (where we saw geese skating on a frozen pond) and braved the winds of Lookout Mountain to see Buffalo Bill’s grave. Lonely place, up that high, whistling wind tearing through the pines. I don’t think he was considering January when he wanted to be buried up there; it was colder than cold – but maybe he knew that people would flock to Colorado, and he’d need to be up here, clinging to the rock, just to have some privacy. Looking down and out shows the growth of Denver and its associated communities, spreading across the prairie in a way I don’t remember from college, expanding to fill the open space in every direction. I think people spend so much time looking at the mountains that they sometimes miss the beauty of the flat plain that runs into them, seeing it as nothing more than space to fill with houses and buildings and roads … but I remember the drives across the sweet grass scented prairie evenings with as much fondness as I do the twisty mountain roads. I like that intermediate space where the flat ends, full stop, and starts pushing skyward, and I’m sorry to see it as covered up as it has become. I think Bill would be too.
The associated gift shop sold the most appalling ticky tacky and I wondered why it is that people associate cutesy bears and cartoon trees with the rugged intensity of the Rockies. I’ve seen this same kind of kitsch in every gift store I’ve seen in mountain towns in Colorado, and the sheer disconnect boggles me. I bought the kind of postcard that I remember from my childhood (a faded photo and deckle edges) and then we headed back down and skirted the mountain all the way to Boulder and on to Longmont, to streets that I still know how to navigate and the warm glow of good friends and shared memories and glorious Mexican food. Leaving the restaurant we split into the girls’ car and the boys’ car and if you’d been anywhere within a couple of blocks you would have heard about this thing called wantin’ and havin’ it all blasting from a car taking the long way home, in the dark, just because it could. I guess some things never change, and as much as I liked Denver, that’s the best reason I can think of to leave the airport more often.
Here's the proof: Denver
