I once read somewhere that if your soul yearns for a place, you will know.
The call of the West was one that I could not ignore. I felt sure of the inclination, and was convinced that its endless plains, mountainous terrain, and elusive charm would somehow—if only temporarily—pacify my internal restlessness. Repression hallmarks my day-to-day, but there are certain impulses from which I cannot refrain. Moving to Colorado for a summer was, therefore, a necessary happy medium.
I’d only been to the opposite coast once, at age twelve, when my family and I went on a ten-day road trip that spanned a substantial portion of the Golden State and trickled into endlessness, as most quests of youth tend to. The nautical allure of my Connecticut hometown confers a particular nostalgic pull from which I do not know if I will ever wish to permanently and thoroughly untether myself, but there do not exist the medicinal smells of pine forests and the crispness about the air anywhere else other than the great big west and I am convinced that I need my dose. Perhaps someone native from the region would consider my grouping of the west into singular epithets an injustice, but I am charmed by all of its properties and not at liberty to discern.
Within me reside two wolves—one a tremendous homebody, the other an adventurous zealot. That’s why, upon stumbling at the semi-niche seasonal role as an administrative assistant at a ranch in Steamboat Springs, I thought to myself: this is perfect. I’d originally wanted something to do with writing, but given that those roles are frequently very permanent, and hard to come by at that, I decided to vest my greatest efforts into applying for and getting the ranch job. Besides, I find that the best writing comes from a life devoted to anything but writing. Of course, one ought to practice and to attempt to master the craft, though mastery will unfailingly always be one day away, but the acquisition of experiences unrelated directly to writing was a greater goal of mine. The pay was terrible, of course, for I was inexperienced, but I ended up getting the job and the flight and I packed my bags and traded coasts.
The ranch was a sprawling 300-acre property with horses, livestock, and a fruit and vegetable farm, ensconced within great mountainous Colorado glory. I’ve always maintained that mountains are highly sentient, with their inescapable, all-knowing presence.
I had a small room in a guesthouse by night. By day, I was in an “office” attached to the barn—a small, very wooden space with an ancient desktop, clacking keyboard, and permanent, lingering horse smell about the room. None of these bothered me to any particular degree. I’d never had any formal dabbles in equestrianism, but I’ve always maintained an affinity for horses.
The bedroom and the office were charming. The ranch was grand. The owners were terribly kind and showed me the ropes and were not peeved at any of my scant blunders. When people are taken care of, and when every block of their Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid has been attended to, they tend not to concern themselves with trite grievances. Contentedness has a tranquilizing effect upon the soul. I also think that the people living out West are in league with Nature and reap the bounties that she sows and are subsequently rendered immune to prolonged and poignant bouts of stress or anger. Adam and Eve settled in the West and found Eden again.
Naturally, however, I did not know anyone. I’d been aware of that well prior to embarking on this endeavor. And that was the goal, after all—to thrust myself into a situation where I could not anchor myself to the familiar, as I often did. That first two weeks, my car was a solace. Me, myself, and I enjoyed our solitary hikes. The air—that lovely air—and gorgeous scenery exceeded my most divine imaginings. I got plenty of exercise that way, slept well, and contentedly clacked away while I daydreamed. I lived a very interior life, not to any sort of chagrin. I cherish my introversion and always have. But during the first two weeks, my interactions with anyone that was not a middle-aged couple or a middle-aged ranch hand were nonexistent.
Shortly followed my very own, real-life stumblin’ in (“meet cute” is a bit too cheery for my personal vernacular—I borrowed from Suzi Quatro and Chris Norman’s 1970s hit and find that I prefer how this flows).
I was sitting in that office one morning, nose-blind to the horse musk by then, balancing the checkbook—I’ll spare you the trite details of Quickbooks operations; talking about work is very unseductive—when he came in, brow raised, the faintest bit of a smile threatening to overtake the stoic countenance he revealed upon removing his hat.
“You must be the new hire. Count?”
(I have a name, of course, which he later on tended to use very often. I’ve met people where I very immediately got the impression that the flagrant name usage they employed was inspired directly by some sort of Dale Carnegie technique or dark psychology advice, where their interlocutor’s name would be jammed into sentences very overtly and tactlessly. It would come across as forced. But his words buttered the toast of silence. He was never performative. He spoke intentionally and tastefully, all without possessing an ostensibly refined lexicon.)
“Yes,” I looked up and smiled. “And you must be…?”
He was tall and brunette, in a plain navy tee and jeans. The spring and early summer had tanned him, but not preposterously so. Perhaps he was not yet of the age where the sun enacts her gentle furies, though he did not look as youthful as the twenty-something college boys in my year to whose appearances I had grown accustomed and who served as the baseline for attraction. He had by now long been settled into the handsomeness of his mid-to-late twenties. I immediately noticed the leather belt, too. I always notice a belt. It signals an intentionality in getting dressed. A man could be in expensive and form-fitting clothes, but if he lacks a belt, that oversight diminishes what the getup would otherwise convey. Notice belts, but do not stare! For obvious reasons.
“The foreman.” He introduced himself and stepped forward to shake my hand.
I remember being briefly flustered and not knowing whether I ought to stand and remain seated. The potential awkwardness of gracelessly scooting back my chair and hitting my knees against the desk while rising trumped my worry of coming across as rude by remaining seated, so I stayed in my chair and smiled and shook his rough hand.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
That summer quickly went on to become an unforgettable series of delightful vignettes. If I weren’t an avoidant, I think it would be the end-all-be-all. The summer I would be perpetually doomed to compare all other flings to.
“The pleasure is mine.”
According to psychology, happiness and satisfaction are significantly correlated with experiencing awe.
And, upon seeing blades of grass anew in the moonlight, prodding the new earth with my shoulder blades, watching deft hands wrangle and tie and wrestle, rediscovering creeks and swimming, hearing a low voice romance me in the dark, I could not help the awestruck sensations that roiled through me, for two months’ worth of dreamy weeks, no matter how innocuous the undertaking. This state of mind, whose echoes are destined to remain in the canyons and valleys of my psyche, bore the traces of childlike fascination that is far too frequently lost far too early. I would feel giddy at dinner because there was a big broad shoulder so close to mine and I had never paid attention to such a sensation before.
This newfound sense of wonder, of seeing the world, continued into my penultimate year of college with my best friend. This joy became girlish, juvenile, and charged with creativity and art and it became flip-turning the campus we had always known and making it our own. It was one of the best years of my life and it was filled with awe.
“What does a foreman do?” I asked as we lay in the grass, cutting into the not-unpleasant silence between us. The crickets were performing their nighttime symphonies and the sky was perfectly clear and neither one of us was prone to droning chatter.
He’d asked me, later on the same day that we met, if I would be available tonight for him to pick me up before he did his nighttime rounds so that we might talk. He had come into the office, tipped the hat, mildly sweat-soaked from the demands of the daytime’s sweltering hours, and asked with a kind smile. I liked how he asked. And I am always down for a quest of any sort, particularly one that is set to occur during the night. For the night is half-real, half-myth.
I had a guess, and might have looked it up the day we met on the computer, but my question meant: what is your experience?
“If the ranch were a ship, I’d be the captain.” He paused. “Mr. and Mrs. would be the Ferdinand and Isabella, then,” he joked.
I picked up on the due diligence of employer-employee hierarchy.
If I had to choose my type back then, it would have been JFK guys: tall, polite, charming, put-together gentlemen of a good upbringing and decent manners. My Colorado Cowboy looked like a tanned, rugged JFK, if I made the imaginative leap—brown-haired, pretty-smiling—and he was polite and sweet, but the resemblances ended where critical judgments began. For I was a firm believer in the formal education. I had a preference for chatty, knowledgeable all-American boys who were brought up in households with lively dinner tables and political debates, highly in contrast to the sullen sterility of the Eastern European post-Communist familial dynamics that I’d grown up knowing.
He had not gone to college, primarily by choice.
“How come?” I’d asked. By now I’d detected his competence. Perhaps I was conflating age with intelligence, as he was seven years older than me, but I had gotten the impression that he possessed an innate intellectual aptitude that underpinned the sensible, intentional life he appeared to be leading. I was therefore surprised when he shared that he had forsaken a formal education. In my mind, college was something everyone did; ought to do.
“I didn’t like the idea of having my entire life mapped out for me. Still don’t. I viewed college as the catalyst for that,” he said, lying still in the grass. “I’d go, and then I would be expected to work a job that isn’t on a ranch, because what the hell did I get that degree for then, and I’d be on a trajectory I never wanted to be on.”
The crickets sang in the night and I arranged my thoughts.
“I see what you’re saying. I don’t like the idea that college is a pipeline to a certain job or life,” I said “However, I will say that going has forged me into a much more resolute and confident person. Many of my favorite aspects of college have been outside of the classroom, but still on campus. And I’m only halfway finished.”
I didn’t know, then, how quickly that second half would fly by. It all feels like a dream, now.
“Well,” he turned to me and smiled. “I’ve spent many years outside of the classroom, so I agree with that.” The smile was so pretty. “I’ve seen a good bit of the world, too. But the ranch always draws me back, no matter how far I go.”
I liked how he spoke. His sentences were always sensible, never frivolous, but always nearly poetic in spite of his directness.
We spent the summer in a creek that he brought me to, on horseback, in the bed of his truck, on wooden fences. I watched his deft hands wrangle rope and maneuver reins and I became enchanted by this brand of virility. Masculinity is a spectrum, and he resided where ruggedness, strength, wit, and gentleness compounded.
Education is not always formal. He was not formally educated, but he was not uneducated. I had associated a lack of the desire for tertiary schooling with the impoverishment I’d witnessed at my urban high school: physical fights, failing grades in every class, and a trajectory into menial and unfulfilling jobs at restaurants and auto repair shops. But that was a quite narrow view, though it was what I’d thus far known to be true. My cowboy, however, simply did not subscribe to what he viewed as a trajectory to a life that he did not want. This was a conscious and informed choice, aligned with the life he wished to live, made by rising above certain thought patterns as opposed to being unable to reach them.
I liked that he did not hold back in revealing parts of himself to me. I sometimes think that this is a form of being less vulnerable, paradoxical as it may seem, than withholding disclosure. I once knew a boy who danced around just about anything that he might divulge. He would let it slip that his brother was too dorky for a frat or that certain songs reminded him of growing up in Florida, as he played them for me in bed, but as far as greater intimacy went, he was so averse to elaborating that it came across as excessive offense more than nonchalance.
He told me his fears. He only had three. This is anonymous, and I am obscuring all names and personal info, thus it would be wrong of me to reveal what these fears were. But I remember them clearly. He laughed when I then told him my childish fear of spiders and my refusal to kill bugs despite my aversion to them. He understood, though. He spoke the language of horses. He understood that all beings deserve their life. He said he was not one to kill bugs, either.
I liked him so much.
How soft you so often were.
He told me about his affinity for health and how pedantic he was about physical well-being. He liked that the ranch demanded much of his body but did not annihilate it, as many physical jobs do, and for that he was immensely grateful. He told me—and this made me laugh—that he did not wish for his spine to curve and for his shoulders to hunch forward if he were seated at a desk all day.
“I’m going to have that in the back of my mind, now.”
“Good. If I come in and you’re slouching, I’m going to lose my attraction to you,” he’d teased.
My attraction. We were a few (dare I say) dates into the summer, but my attraction spawned butterflies in my stomach. We hadn’t even kissed yet. It was brilliantly overt, but subtle. Just how I liked it. I didn’t like the binary form that proclamations took. I didn't like texting for that reason, either. People got away with saying all of the intimate stuff over the phone, thus sapping face-to-face interactions dry of the delicate spark that they would otherwise possess.
We ended up kissing, of course, but I am not going to make my readers into unwilling voyeurs.
Him and I would sit next to each other at the diner looking like one of those freaky, co-dependent couples who cannot bear to unstick themselves from one another to be more than an inch apart. The We Couples, I call them. They are always a we—we this, we that, we do not have identities of our own. But it was not about proximity for me, though it was nice sitting next to such a resolute form. The booth’s claustrophobia was a pleasant sensation.
I thought of the one Borges story, Funes the Memorious, where the paralyzed Ireneo Funes possesses a memory unlike anything ever conceptualized. Every individual leaf he sees—its dimensions, color, texture—fated to permanently sear into his memory. He has more memories than time to sift through them all. In the story, Funes cannot fathom a dog as a concept representative of many things. For him, every dog and its every angle and coordinate are entirely distinct. The dog that we know to be the same dog is, for Funes, a different dog facing forward, a different dog from the side, a different dog from bird’s eye view.
Sitting in the booth, shoulder to shoulder, I compartmentalized my varied impressions of and with the same person. I familiarized myself with the intimacy of hearing a voice but not seeing a mouth move and relying instead on the affectations of my memory to conjure up the proper facial expressions. I felt the shoulder and the arm knock gently against mine when he laughed. We shared utensils.
I enjoyed doing nothing with you all summer.
The phrase “if he wanted to, he would” has been robbed of its inherent virtue by chronically online sentiments and distorted into near irony by gender warfare. This epithet has been taken by the Internet to mean that a man who might express his affection by cooking, for example, should instead be getting you roses on a meticulous schedule ordained by the Internet, and that if he does not, it proves that he is not interested. These binary standards impart arbitrary metrics onto a dynamic that is supposed to be entirely unique—a product of the passage of time, merged interests, and authentic exploration.
What I find is that the phrase should actually be interpreted as follows: regard and interest and love will make themselves known, without force. People do not act for people that they do not care for. The world spins on its axis because it is full of people acting upon desires and impulses and obligations. Romantically, these exist when a stranger’s interest is sparked, when a date sails as smoothly as a galleon upon calm waters, and when a lover is enamored with their partner. People do kind things and make their affinity known for people that they are actually interested in. If he wanted to, he would does not mean expensive dinner dates or trending jewelry. The world wide web is a highlight reel—I wonder how many relationships, hallmarked by elaborate gift-giving and regular posting, aren’t simply overcompensating.
But I did not like these warm and elated feelings being conflated with intimacy. I would think of the joy I was experiencing, and then the metaphysical alarm bells in my head would ring on account of my elation being affixed to something as fleeting as a romantic interest. Perhaps it was because of the very blatant expiration date—end of summer—looming over our heads like a dark cloud (I do not even like saying “our” or “we” or “us.” To me this is emblematic of a loss of sense of self. Even though it actually is not). But I think it is my nature—an aversion to commitment, a fear of what is too good to be true, and a fierce independence and natural inclination toward solitude—driving my discomfort. I would find myself getting peeved that my summer was not my own right after a bout of jubilation. I’d start hearing criticisms in the back of my mind, of his innocuous behaviors or even his interest in me.
Now I know that it was not because I thought I was not worthy; but rather, because intimacy terrified me and I fought to distance myself even though I was not sure that I even really wanted to. The closer we got, the greater my desire to run away.
You were so kind. I loved your smile, and your strong forearms. I liked how much sense everything that you said made. I liked how you saw the world.
The summer was good to me because I knew it would end. I didn’t have to ruin anything or become anyone’s enemy. I just had to go. Circumstance absolved me. I’d gone into the summer without expectations, without checkboxes, without an end goal other than to acquaint myself with the foreign plains and sentient mountains of Colorado, and, in turn, to acquaint myself with me a bit more. Bits of us lie beneath every rock we have yet to turn over. How many personalities have we abandoned in daily monotony? Where do pieces of our souls lie dormant? What are we quelling and forcing into submission whenever we ignore our intuition as it whispers to us as loudly as it possibly can?
I sometimes wonder how he is doing, but I do not bring myself to look. He is much older now. Perhaps he is married. Perhaps he’s a father. I am now entering the best years of my life, and I know we were not soulmates, but I don’t think I wish to see wedding or baby photos. I don’t know what I’d think. So I do not look.
Perhaps I will find myself back out there again, though the particular Steamboat Springs Ranch chapter is to remain closed forevermore. The call, a deep-seated, firm whisper, has not faded. But it lies buried beneath the other experiences that I yearn for and wish to bring into fruition. In the same way that I am averse to commitment (so much so that I only use erasable highlighters), and afraid of emotional intimacy—though unfairly so, for I hope that the other person tells me everything about themselves, for I truly wish to know, without me needing to share anything—I am also averse to settling in any particular, physical place. I do not know what lives will flutter past me when I signal to the universe that I am establishing roots. The sheer permanence of that is daunting—forsaking the infinitude of lives that can be lived in favor of an ephemeral state of mind.
But then I wonder about the infinite timelines paradox that I had once come up with—where, according to the sheer magnitude of infinity, it is not a loss to choose and to commit, for by missing out on everything, we are truly missing out on nothing at all.
My greatest constant, however, has always been writing. At the altar of writing I would lay down my livelihood. The timeline in which I am a writer is the timeline that I will always return to.
To write is agony. To have written is pure bliss.
Whenever I am before my keyboard or wield a pen before paper, the passing moments are equal parts torture and catharsis. But reading back what I wrote fills me with a prideful elation not to be found elsewhere and is why I will never abandon my post so long as I live. I am my most spiritually sound whenever I am writing. I sleep better. Writing quells my obsessive and intrusive thoughts and I am at ease, for I know that I am responding to the grandest call of them all.