Rocky Mountain High

(Here is the original version - the director's cut, if you will - of a column that was written for the 8-19-07 edition of The Janesville Messenger. A poorly edited version ran in that issue under my byline.)


For those of you who may be regular readers of this column, you may have noticed something missing for the past month and a half. Specifically, this column.

The events of the last couple of months – a death in my family and an unusually busy time at work – led to a total breakdown in my creative process. In other words, Writer’s Block. It must come as a shock to my friends, but I literally had nothing to say.

Fortunately – or maybe not, for my friends - I found the cure. It came in the form of a week’s stay in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. Never before has my vacation been so well timed or so badly needed.

And it didn’t disappoint. For lovers of the great outdoors, RMNP is paradise. We took full advantage of it, hiking over 35 mountainous miles during the course of the week. An afternoon rafting trip on some river rapids was a high point. I’ll also never forget being greeted at the top of a mountain trail by a well-aimed July snowball thrown by my son. And when we weren’t hiking or venturing about, I even managed to read the new Harry Potter book.

Shaving? Ha! My razor sat lonely and unloved as my beard grew out, revealing enough white hair to rival Miracle the buffalo. And speaking of hoofed mammals, bighorn sheep, elk and mule deer were plentiful in the park. So were stores that sold elk jerky, buffalo jerky and various other types of jerky. Apparently, jerky is the state snack in Colorado because everyone is advertising it.

Important travel tip – if you are driving 1200 miles with two teenagers in your car, make sure you have a DVD player with you. The only time they stopped sniping at each other was when they were watching a movie.

Though I did all I could to leave Wisconsin behind for 10 days, it was impossible to do so because my dreaded Blackberry – which also serves as my cell phone – was there with us. My wife begged and pleaded with me not to bring it along. She knew I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to check my work e-mail. Unfortunately, it was the only phone we own with a nationwide calling plan, so I felt we had no choice but to bring it in case of emergency – which did come, in the form of the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis. We wasted no time in dialing relatives and friends in the Twin Cities to check on their safety.

As usual, she was right; I peeked at my work e-mail on a daily basis. It was a good thing too, because by the end of the week, I was getting some nasty e-mails from people wondering why I hadn’t responded to their earlier inquiries. As a courtesy, I had set my auto-responder to reply with my vacation message only once to each person who sent me an e-mail. Unfortunately, by the end of my vacation, people had forgotten that I was gone and started wondering why I was ignoring them. Of course, in the old days, someone would have just picked up the phone and called my office, but we are now squarely in the impersonal electronic communication era. So from a trail overlooking a mountain lake, I was tap-tapping my tiny keyboard explaining to someone in Louisiana that I was 1200 miles from the office.

But even that reminder of what was waiting for me back home couldn’t replace the pure joy of being able to just get away from it all. When I hear of people that don’t take vacations – and I’m amazed how many people don’t - frankly, I don’t know how they can survive. My father, a farmer, was that way. He took one day of vacation a year, to spend the day betting on the ponies at Arlington Park in Chicago. The other 364 days, he milked cows twice a day, drove tractors, shoveled manure. The only real vacation he and my mother had in 37 years of marriage was their honeymoon.

Maybe it’s all in what you’re used to, but I think that for pure mental health reasons, every human needs a peaceful yearly respite of some kind, even if it doesn’t involve a long trip.