Leaving Boulder Again, much has changed, but not that much, mostly me…

My siblings and I shared at least one experience when we moved out of the house and into our first apartment after college.  Along with all the usual new household purchases, we bought a quart of the good orange juice – the expensive kind with lots of pulp.  It might be only a one-time splurge, but for now this juice was ours!  Growing up with 3 others, such luxuries were divided into tiny glasses and only accompanied breakfast.  But when I bought it, I’d drink my juice whenever I liked, and straight from the container, thank you very much.  I first bought the expensive orange juice in Boulder, Colorado from 1995 to 1997.  As a destination, it was a bit like Mecca for me, not just for its proximity to mountains, its sunshine, or its famously “open” atmosphere, (many a young middle-class adult made a similar pilgrimage growing their hair into dread locks and eschewing their parental resources to live off the street in Boulder in a 90’s re-visioning of Haight Ashbury – “trustafarians” they were known) I was drawn to this town because it was the summer gathering and training grounds for many of the world’s elite practitioners of the self punishing sport I loved, triathalon.  In 1994, I had just come back from competing in the World Championships in Wellington, New Zealand and I was ready to up my game.   Of course upping my game meant that I would have to find an apartment, get a job with flexibility to train, and pay for health insurance.   

My two years in Boulder were very much a coming of age for me, in every way imaginable.  Despite all that college did for me, I was a child of the flat lands, a mid-westerner at heart and I was completely unprepared for what the Colorado Mountains would hold for me.  Here I learned to manage a lease, buy groceries, choose health insurance, and talk to women outside of a college kegger.  I discovered more of the community I needed from my coworkers at the restaurant where I worked, than those with whom I swam, biked and ran.  I was looking for teammates like those I had in college; only to be reminded that triathlon is an individual sport and those who excel at it are necessarily individualistic.  I went climbing outside for the first time on real rock; I learned that activities in the mountains had their own esthetic and reward far beyond what they did for my aerobic capacity.  I learned to snowboard in powder, and in the middle of my best season, broke my leg.  I fell in love and had my first real adult relationship, and watched from the sidelines as she went through a truly tragic and random family catastrophe.  I fell out of love with my chosen sport.  Most importantly, I was exposed, for the first time, to a diversity of approaches to living the good life.   Success became a fluid concept, more in proportion to the intentionality of choices made and less in how much it earned in real and social capital.  As a marker of this internal transformation, I grew my hair out and stopped shaving my chin – a cliché to be sure but who at 25 is not guilty of such a transgression?  All I needed was a Che t-shirt and my transformation would have been complete.

As I approached my leaving Boulder to go off to graduate school and the next step of my journey, I remember doubting if I would ever live there again.  Though I knew I had to leave and was excited about my future, the tears I cried alone in my car as I drove east on highway 36 bordered on the ridiculous.  Looking back in the rearview as the Flat Irons retreated closed a chapter for me. 

We knew we would come back to Boulder on this adventure because a college friend, Karel Starek, was starting an organic farm just outside of town.  He and his wife were beginning a new phase in their journey and it was focused upon being closer to the food they ate.  They were creating a small community on the site of an old dairy farm, complete with acres of pasture land, a 3000 sq ft tropical greenhouse, and 3 new strawbale houses for themselves, their workers and volunteers.  They wanted to be a WWOOF site and we would be their first volunteers.  

My anticipation increased as we crossed the divide and grew closer to familiar territory.  I hoped that much of Boulder’s 1995 charm would remain despite 15 years of growth, bubble pops and the relentless approach of the Denver suburbs.  On the drive, I fantasized about all the things we would do while there.  Five weeks in my old stomping grounds, think of all the trouble we could get up to.  I literally believed that we could revisit every hike, every bike, every haunt, every jaunt, and maybe throw in some paddling, while at the same time giving our best effort to Karel and Alice’s farm.  This is the problem with being an optimist, everything is possible when you’re motivated to recapture, in five short weeks, all the adventures I had while living there for 2 and a half years. 

And of course, it wasn’t possible to do all those things, even if it didn’t snow nearly 4 feet while we were there.  So, what we did hit up was a “best of” kind of experience with Boulder.  Feel free to take issue with this list as there are many classics which do not appear.  Are there other Boulder ex-pats?  If so, do your worst.  While in town, we:

Biked along the Boulder Creek path and up Sunshine Canyon
Hiked on Mt. Sanitas
Ate at a few classics including: Illegal Pete’s, Abo’s Pizza, Dot’s Diner, Moe’s Broadway Bagels, and some new favs; Half-Fast subs, Shine, Tehona, and The Bramble and Hare. 
Caught up with at least 6 old friends who live in the Denver/ Boulder area. 
Attended the Conference on World Affairs (65^th year!)
Watched Zip Code Man and The Contortionist Dude perform on Pearl Street
Biked to the Farmer’s Market

At the farm we:
Helped care for 70 plus sheep, 76 chickens (1 went out in a blaze of glory – but that’s another story), 3 turkeys, 2 dogs and 1 very loving cat.
Built the shearing enclosure and assisted in shearing the hole flock
Worked on the interior of the new Farm Houses, all straw bale and cob construction
Built and repaired new permanent electrical fences
Cleaned up at least a ½ acre of wood pile scrap and debris
Built a cafeteria mineral feeder – you don’t know what that is? Well, neither did we.
Planted over 650 native, and fruit trees
Developed the farms WWOOFer application process and contributed to their infrastructure
Took and processed over 100 photos for their website
Assisted with post natal care of lambs during a late spring snowstorm involving bottle feeding and blow driers
Stained the interior wood beams of the new farm house
Put up and took down over 10,000 yards of electro-net fencing (in order to move sheep)
Cleaned, scrapped, hauled, toted, and moved sheep, moved sheep, moved sheep.

We learned some lasting lessons while at The Golden Hoof, including how to drive a Bobcat and tractor, the essentials of cob wall construction, a little bit about animal husbandry, the physics of electric fences and once again were reminded of the power of intentional decision making and its relationship to living the good life.  Karel and Alice Starek are nothing, if not intentional, about everything they do with regard to this next step of their journey.  That intentionality should come out in their final products, but for them (and us) it’s more about the journey than the destination. 

Meanwhile in the People’s Republic of Boulder. . .

Boulder is exactly the kind of place where these kinds of transitions are celebrated, and almost expected.  It retains a certain self-absorbed charm despite all its growth and upward mobility.  I still am (at least a little bit) in love with her, despite the realization that her wiles don’t quite play as well as the once did.  But like the TV show Portlandia, Boulder needs to laugh at itself a bit more.  I’m not sure that 5 weeks there enough time for me to gain if indeed that awareness has seeped into the culture.   A former roommate of mine joked that Boulder was a town where people would spend hours in a local bookshop reading books about themselves.  They’re still in that seat, just reading from their kindle. 

I think when you are young and discovering yourself, you are easily wooed by a place which takes itself so damned seriously.  Much like when we are 17 and read Keroac for the first time, we can be blown away by the overall ego of his prose.  One doesn’t need to step into the Herbal Apothecary or eavesdrop at the Boulder “Farmer’s” Market to sense the stuffed shirt (though to be fair it is a tye-died shirt) of this town, though if you do the rewards will be all yours.  Allow me this brief cul de sac to share what I overheard as we cruised the stalls of overpriced granola and some guy selling "compost juice" for $25 a quart! 

“These are all made by hand, with only locally-sourced organic ingredients…”
“I could like totally feel her energy as I walked into the room…”
“I completely tore apart my house looking for my yoga mat!” – said by a dude. 

Thank you, Boulder, thank you.  I had forgotten just how hip and cool you are.

Now let me be the first to say that I’m just as guilty of taking myself too seriously as Mr. Yoga crisis, hence the blog, but I’m not sure that I have lived in a place that will cut you the slack to wallow in it.  Appalachia does pretension as well as a pig rides a bicycle, and that is the fountain from which I’ve been drinking for the past 13 years.  While I may have come of age in the thin air of the Front Range, I matured in the ancient mountains of the Blue Ridge.  I gave up single-barrel Anejo tequila for a mason jar of corn squeezins’.  I am all about the locally-sourced food and hand-made thingamajigs; I just find it rather amusing that this is somehow new, hip, and different.  In Appalachia this is a way of life, not some new trend. The ever-growing farmer’s market in Boone NC had just as much local energy and local ethic without all the hooplah for the benefit of tourists.  If you want good food and you live in Boone, go to the farmer’s market on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and plan about an hour more than you need on Saturdays because you will run into everyone you know and have to catch up. 

So leaving Boulder this time was less of a chapter closer and more of a bitter sweet surrender.  I realize that I am the one who’s changed, moved on and grown up a little – thank goodness.  It was kind of like seeing an old girlfriend whom you still think of as a good friend.  You realize that she’s still great; going her own way, completely understand what you saw in her, but that you are also totally over her.