The recent issue of Denver magazine 5280 features a chronology of the city’s 150 year history. It’s clear that visitors and transplants from the East have played a critical role in the formation and development of this town. In 1858, the first gold claim was staked by Kansas-born General William Larimer, and named for Kansas governor James W. Denver. Thus, a city was born. A year later, William Newton Byers arrived from Omaha (territory slightly to the east of Colorado) and set up the Rocky Mountain News. Byers had a hand in virtually every promotion and marketing effort to keep the city growing. In 1908, the Democratic National Convention was held here, winning praise from eastern newspapers for the city and the scenery, although not for the food. More recently, the Beats- Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady- chronicled their adventures in Denver. in literature that became iconic for their and subsequent generations. The list goes on, with the August 2008 DNC bringing the media back to Denver- with better food reviews this time. The history got me thinking about travelers and pioneers, people who- as I have done- leave home to find a different place, a place where reinventing self is possible and the reinvention works both ways.
Most adults physically leave home. Nonetheless, they carry home with them: replicating daily rituals, conversations, work and relationship habits acquired in childhood and worn as skin through life. Home extends beyond the residence and takes in the workplace, the community. There are some people, fewer in number, who look in the mirror one day and decide: “This isn’t my life anymore. It’s time to leave and make a new home, a place that’s my own.” They literally and metaphorically leave the home of the familiar ways of being and thinking and feeling. Some may become travel writers like Paul Theroux, seeing the differences of the world’s places and cultures as a diverse wardrobe for the human experience. Others become renegades in their fields, challenging conventional thinking and knowing, and persisting- like Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso- on a journey to relocate the eye of thought. Others of us home leavers set out to explore what poet James Lenfestey describes in his poem “Travels to the Interior”:
The spice scent alone was worth
the time and expense, Then the
taste flattered by powdered delights,
brain buzzed by local drinks, eyes dazzled
by the landscape and ruins of others.
The only country so far missed is my own.
The one shaped like a man, rivers and
canyons deep within. Ruins too.
And somewhere, a sacred spring.
(James P. Lenfestey. “Han-Shan is the Cure for Warts.” 2006. Red Dragonfly Press. Minnesota)
