“I’m never not happy here.”

“Rocky Mountain High” isn’t a song by John Denver. Well, yeah, it is. If you remember that far back. But, mainly, it’s a feeling, and a fact.

We went to the Rockies recently, as you might know from our July 29th post about Gray-headed juncos.

The high mountains, with their pines, peaks and canyons, can take a flatlander’s breath away. Literally. But you get used to that.

On the trail at eight or nine thousand feet the scent of evergreen is strong. There are running streams and lots of rocks. These mountains aren’t called the Rockies for nothing.

There’s snow on the gray granite heights, even in summer. Some mountains, especially near the little town of Basalt, have stratified stone that’s surprisingly red-orange.

There are birds you probably won’t see back home. Red-naped Sapsuckers and Red-shafted Northern Flickers, Black-billed Magpies, American Dippers, Ravens, Western Tanagers, Golden Eagles.

People who are lucky enough to live in the Rockies will tell you how much they appreciate their place in the world. That’s a big part of having a good life: appreciating your place in the world.

We know a literate, smart and well-spoken Colorado guy who said, “I’m never not happy here.”

That may sound like a double negative, sort of, but it’s not. We understand. A while back, we wrote a little piece about “never seeing nothin’.”

When the sky suddenly cleared in the afternoon of a day that had been mostly overcast, the guy’s wife added, proudly: “The sun never doesn’t shine at least part of the day.”

What a freakin’ great sentence.

Sounds wrong. Sounds quirky. But it’s exactly right. “The sun never doesn’t shine at least part of the day.”

Man, that’s a place I’d like to never not visit.

3 Responses to ““I’m never not happy here.””

  1. Katie Storer says:

    Hello,

    I love your column. This morning at the grocery store, getting my morning dose of Starbuck’s coffee, a national morning news show was airing a story about a NYC zoo peacock that had flown the coop – literally. It landed on the ledge of a building on Fifth Avenue. I missed a large portion of the story because the sound was turned off and the closed captioning was turned on. The first thing I saw was “two-fisted”, which made me think of your column. Next, I realized it was a story about a bird. I do not know if they were talking about your blog in conjunction with this news story, but I thought I’d mention it so that you could check it out.

    Thank you for your interesting take on life – and birds. I look forward to every update!
    Katie

  2. Marc D. says:

    Jolly good post – the Rocky Mountain high. Once years ago atop El Capitan in New Mexico, my brain oxygen deprived, I also felt that strange elation that precedes death by asphyxiation, and that enhances orgasms, so they say, when self-abuse is combined with self-strangulation. Dreadful thought. And, I was never not happy when we lived in the Southwest, and indeed the sun did shine somewhere in El Paso almost every day for uninterrupted days on end in what seemed like geologic time. Hasta luego, Marc

  3. Colorado was my home for twenty years. There are a lot of happy people running around… 🙂