Colorado Rocky Mountain High

"He was born in the summer
of his twenty-seventh year
Comin' home
To a place he'd never been before…"
- John Denver

Well, it wasn't my twenty-seventh year, but close.  The first time I drove through the gates of the Adventure Unlimited Ranches I was "coming home to a place I'd never been before".  But the story of my relationship to this place nestled high in the Rocky Mountains at the base of Columbia, started when I was 11 years old.

My best friend from Sunday School, Becky (and her younger sister Suzy, who was my sister Nancy's best friend) went to Adventure Unlimited every summer for weeks of horseback riding, canoeing, singing camp songs, and sleeping under the stars.  Preparation for "camp" however started in the spring.  There were shopping trips for boots, cowgirl shirts and hats, jeans, pocket knifes and flashlight.  And my sister and I loved being included in any way we could. 

We were the eldest children in a family of eight and camp was not an option on an already stretched budget.  But rather than feeling jealous or resentful, something that still surprises me, we felt so happy to be able to participate in "camp" through the shopping expeditions and the long Saturday afternoons of taking turns standing at the ironing board pressing name labels into every piece of clothing they would take with them.

Once school was out in early June, the four of us, with Becky and Suzy's mother, Jane, would kick into high gear.  We would scour the packing list looking to see if there was anything we missed.  I felt like I carried that list in my head with me.  I would go over and over it as I drifted off to sleep at night.  Did we have enough bandanas, did we remember to label Becky's new belt, how would we pack the cowboy boots so that they didn't take up too much room. 

By the time we were actually ready to put everything in the big trunks with the chrome corner "bumpers" and the wide leather handle, I had already done so in my head a hundred times.  I had done it so often that I had to sit on my hands when, to my surprise, Becky's mom put the jeans on the left, instead of in the middle next to the cowgirl shirts with the pearl snaps and pointy pocket flaps.  Didn't she realize that they went together?

Nancy and I were included in everything right down to taking Becky and Suzy to the airport.  And that was really where it all started…at least for me.  Becky was a great best friend.  She knew how much I longed to be there with her.  So she wrote me almost every day describing everything about camp.  She drew maps and told me stories.  I would write back with my questions about names of horses, what they had for breakfast, and the love lives of counselors.

I would try to follow the camp schedule from my bunkbed and suburban neighborhood back home. 

And when she returned at the end of her Colorado summer, we could hardly wait for her photographs to come back from the lab.  We would pour over them…me asking hundreds of questions and Becky patiently answering all of them.

By the summer of my almost, but not quite, twenty-seventh year, although my dad had passed on, we had found a way for each of my younger siblings (who wanted to) to go to camp.  And although I had been very active in local youth activities sponsored by the Adventure Unlimited organization's regional chapters, serving on teen boards and volunteering throughout high school, I had never been to "the ranches".

That first drive through the gates of "A/U" was truly a homecoming.  Thanks to Becky's maps, sketches, photographs, letters, and endless patience with my bottomless pit of questions, I knew this property like the back of my hand…or more accurately…like the landscape of my heart.

But there was, however, one place that surprised me…Marianne's chapel.  It was named for one of the real heriones of my lifetime (I had many historical and fictional ones…Mary Baker Eddy, Jo March, Elizabeth Bennett, Isaak Dinesen, Joan of Arc), Marianne Andrews, who with her husband, John (affectionately called Cap) founded the Adventure Unlimited Ranches. Since it had been built in her memory some years after Becky had stopped coming to camp I had never heard about it and so was astonished to have something new to add to the map etched on my heart.  After I had climbed the stairs to the Chuckwagon loft… letting my fingers drift across sun-bleached and faded spines of score of old blue cloth covered Nancy Drew mysteries, well-loved but weary hymnals, and Audubon field guides, lay on a bottom bunk in Horseshoe cabin L…reading the names of girls I might have known engraved in the bed slats above me, and sat in the middle of the island at Valerie Lake…straining to hear the sounds of camp songs echoing through the decades and across the valley - I wandered down the path to the chapel.

There I let myself be "born again.  I let Marianne's dream of nurturing the best in children …cherishing their spiritual maturity, witnessing their boundless bliss, and giving them a laboratory, through this camp, to practice practical scientific Christianity…become my own. 

When the wind whispers through the aspens above my cabin and the breeze sings through the pines…when the little stream murmurs a prayer just beyond my porch and the hummingbirds whir and weave around me while I sit, looking out across Valerie Lake, and pray…it is God's message of grace I hear…but the voices are those of Marianne, Becky, Maree, Cap, Mac, Annie, Deb, Alison, and so many more...I hear the voices of all the teens who have filled this valley with healing, songs, tears, and laughter...and my heart...and my home are full.

This is my home…but it is not a place on a map.  It was my home long before I ever stepped on this piece of geographical real estate in the Arkansas Valley.  This place existed in my heart for almost a dozen years before felt it's sage and ochre landscape under my feet.  I could come here at a moment's notice and never needed a penny to have access to her promise.

Coming here was "coming home…" but carrying her with me…her mission, her opportunities, her purpose and promise…has grounded me on a rock through many personal storms.

Last night, when the words to "Rocky Mountain High" wafted up from the campfire to my cabin porch I wept tears of deep gratitude and peace. Not just for the gift of being graced with another year of serving her purpose through this office.  But my tears were also for the gift of knowing that each of those teens (and maybe even a friend or sibling they might be sharing letters with back home) now has a home that can never be taken from them.  This is a home where they can always go and rediscover something pure and good and selfless in themselves…a place they will carry within their heart forever.  And, I hope, it is a  place where the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures became a "key to every door".

"He was born in the summer
of his twenty-seventh year.
Comin' home
To a place he'd never been before.
He left yesterday behind him,
You might say he was born again.
You might say he found the key to every door.

Colorado Rocky Mountain high,
I've seen it rainin' fir in the sky
The shadow from the starlight
Is softer than a lullaby,
Rocky Mountain High…
Colorado"

It 's good to be home,
Kate