Paring Down and Moving On

Within a year of visiting Colorado, we make our move.

We have purchased a wonderful house in Silver Cliff, the stepchild town next to the better-known Westcliffe. While we know renting is the smartest way to ease ourselves into this new lifestyle, frankly, there's not much on the rental market. So we take yet another leap of faith and buy it. So much for wise first steps.

Our new home is much smaller than the one we own now, so I weed out and pare down our possessions. This feels good. No, great. I think of the scripture when Christ challenges his disciples to go forth into the world to carry the good news, wearing nothing but the clothing on their backs. THAT’S paring down. My task is a snap by comparison. Some goes to friends, some to the donation center, more to a consignment shop and some we sell during a pool party.

The new house is actually quite old. Rebuilt in 1990, it was originally a Presbyterian parsonage located a few blocks away. It has the original ponderosa pine floors (complete with square nails) and red window frames. It is full of western charm, sided in cedar and topped with a red metal roof. The grounds are the prettiest we’ve seen in the area with whispering aspens, pines, a sunken deck, stone walls and a fire ring. And the mountain view is breathtaking.

A Wing and a Prayer

Seven months after we first return from the Wet Mountain Valley our time is filled with prayers for guidance, discussions with perplexed family, trips back to Westcliffe in the name of research, and much agonizing. It seems as though we have received mostly negative input from those around us, yet our hearts just keep calling us there.

We're not without our own concerns about keeping our business alive from a remote location. Not to mention the challenges facing city people trying to relocate “off the grid”. Solar power. Cell phone service only – and expensive analog roam at that. Septic tanks and water wells. Back up generators. No neighbors for miles. One supermarket. No dentist or pharmacy. We have tried to think of every imaginable contingency but know that nothing but experience will truly inform us. With that thought in mind, we make the decision to bite the bullet and move over the coming summer.

It is a true test of faith. We still don’t have the Dallas office situation worked out. Perhaps the bigger story in our transition is the fact that, coming back from our first visit to the Wet Mountain Valley having been to a Christian family camp there, Dana had what he terms a mini-conversion. And so now, in additional to changing location, we're changing the entire direction of our business from secular to faith-based. Heaven help us.

The Romance of the West

I’m not from the west. Far from it, in fact: I grew up in New Jersey (exit 131). In 1978, upon my graduation from high school, my family moved to Dallas riding the crest of the oil industry boom. Our move meant I could go to college at the University of Texas where people were paying an astonishing $4 a credit hour. But I moved to Texas at an odd point in time. My east coast, New York City suburban mentality never could reconcile with tooled cowboy belts, mechanical bulls and “who shot J.R.?”. I high-tailed it back east three months after graduation with no job and $300 in my pocket.

For seven years I sowed my wild oats – mainly in the shadowy recesses of Manhattan nightclubs. It was in the city that my journalism degree took me through public relations to advertising. It is where I honed my craft by day and choked out the last breaths of my adolescence by night. And then I was done. I missed my family. I missed having money in my pocket. I looked up at those skyscrapers, at the hundreds of windows behind which thousands of people moved through their lives. And suddenly the city was way too big for me. I needed a city that was manageable. A city that gave me choices but not quite so many. As the 80s drew to a close and Dallas emerged as less hick and more hip, I again headed west.

But I never truly felt a part of “The West”. My husband grew up in Oklahoma on a farm. With horses and cows. He knew a gelding from a stallion, a bull from a steer. But not me. As his family got to know me in our early years together they would collectively giggle at my attempts to pull something out of the fishing hole or keep my children’s white shorts from turning red in the Oklahoma country dirt. Don’t get me wrong – I have come to appreciate the subtle beauty in that part of the country. The vastness of the sky, the rolling fields changing colors with the seasons and even with the movement of the sun each day. The rough-hewn fence-posts connected by prickly barbed wire. The majesty of an ancient Live Oak. The vibrancy of a roadside field of Indian Paintbrush.

In the Wet Mountain Valley, the fields are as long as the mountains are high. The geography is less gentle than Texas and it just feels more western to me. Less a melting pot of American southwest and Mexican cultures and just pure American West. Wagon trains and cowboys. Bears and Indians. I can’t say why but this appeals to some part of me more than Texas does. I look forward to the solitude of winter. Coming from the east coast, I’m not afraid of the snow and the cold. I never moved away from the weather. Just the crowds.

The Seed is Planted

On the back of my Mapquested directions to our Colorado destinations, I begin sketching out an idea for a mountain retreat: we’d buy 35 acres of land and on the property we’d have an elegant yet Spartan cabin that we’d rent out to city dwellers who need a quiet repose from the stress of urban living. It would have an outdoor shower, a feather bed and aromatherapy. No TV. No Internet. No telephone. We’d create packages with horseback riding, yoga classes and massages in town. Everyone would live happily ever after.

I know it is the dream of countless Texans who have escaped the August heat in the cool mountain regions of Colorado. For a week after their return they float in a gauzy dream state, holding on to the final fleeting remnants of the peace they found in their mountain hideaway. Maybe I’ll move there, they think. It’s so pure, so clean, so beautiful. No crowds, no cars, no shopping malls or multiplex movie theaters. Why don’t more people live there?

At first, I'm afraid to share my thoughts with my husband. While I tend to be the more practical one and he the dreamer, I know that if he shoots down my notion with the fair dose of reality it, quite frankly, deserves I will be crushed. I feel I have never been so on fire about anything in my life. Did I think I was motivated in the past? Because THIS is motivation. This is the real deal.

But he doesn't shoot it down. We see eye to eye through that tiny sliver called hope. Chance. Daring. Craziness, boredom, burnout, inspiration. Call it what you will, but we're going for it.

How to Move to the Country (without getting run out of town).

In 2003, our family of four found the Wet Mountain Valley in Custer County, Colorado. Some people would call it a "God thing"; I had been researching beach vacations for months when my husband informed me - in May, no less - that he "needed to go to a mountain". Through a friend we found space at a Christian camp and, though we bristled at the thought of nightly praise and worship and no television we forged on. A year later, we moved.

We have resided in a tiny community boasting fewer than 5,000 residents countywide since the summer of 2004. We moved from the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex, which is populated by millions. Dubbed The Crisis Chronicles after our family's shocked murmurings following our moving announcement, this is our story.