Leaving

saying goodbye to the San Luis Valley

Mar 29, 2026

When I arrived in Alamosa I hoped that leaving would be painful. This may seem a masochistic sentiment, but as a well practiced leaver, this is the best way I can describe an effective or meaningful time somewhere. If you have really grown roots or tendrils in a place, the removal should hurt some.

In my final weeks I drive back and forth on the highway trying to commit it to memory. I pass the faded billboard split between a warning that dog fighting is a crime and a more recent ad for Wendy’s 100% beef burgers. The mountains are lost in the blue today, dimpled snow lining the roadway. I study each mile, wondering how I will explain my time here, how I will translate what I love to people who haven’t seen it. I take note of the tin roofs, haggard trees gathered around farm houses as if to protect them. Light falls in stripes across the sage, dark fence posts in a rhythm against the road. Hay bales with the sides chewed away, worn away by cattle. I make sure to spend time with my old friends, the Sangres. I try to recall the names of the peaks, their identities like distant relatives, familiar yet jumbled, hard to put names to faces.

I recently read an article The Coastal Elites Are Right, Actually - by A.M. Hickman that puts a lot of my reflections and thoughts into words - it talks about the difference between the American hinterlands, and the places where the ‘coastal elite’ live. (It’s long but I would really recommend reading this! It is fascinating.) I think I fall into the category Hickman describes as ‘deracinated’. A rather visceral word describing a person who is “without roots, they have been severed (or have severed themselves) from their home-place, or they may descend from a long line of geographically unstable people who have chased opportunity around the country or even around the globe.”1

Morose ponderings of rootlessness accompany all of my exits and entrances. I take comfort in the movie Past Lives, where Hae Sung says “I like you for who you are; and who you are is a person who leaves.” In the words of Ann Patchett, “some people are leavers, and some are stayers.” I seem to be a leaver. Despite Hae Sung’s words, I think it might be a curse. I was told as a child that Third Culture Kids (TCK) have a significant life change or move every three years. I questioned this at the time but I, like the man in the story, An Appointment in Samarra, seem to find that no matter where I go, Leaving seems to be waiting for me.

In Alamosa, many people are stayers. They’ve been stayers since before Colorado was a state, before it was a part of the US, and before it was a part of any national entity. People have been on their land for generations; they care deeply about this place. It’s an experience I have both questioned and admired. It is in fact, an experience that will never be open to me. You cannot create generations of history and land for yourself; you can only inherit it.

A.M. Hickman describes the people who live in the hinterlands, in places like Alamosa, as “blessed greatly with a world that works. They have their family, most likely; they have a place that is for them. They are blooming where they’re planted — because anything else seems strange, foreign, unnerving. Such people are blessed indeed, for they are removed from the weird and destabilizing ennui that real deracination breeds. They are content to live in our “interior swamps” and “sweaty dust bowls” without complaint, without yearning for some vestigial ruin of bygone luxury and sun-drenched decrepitude — they are strong people who need no great favors from the realms of power, climate, culture, or good wine. And indeed, the hinterlands are theirs, and their resilience is their immense and wonderful power.”2

Often people think about the San Luis Valley as a place that is under-resourced, impoverished, in need. There is truth to some of this. Most families are under the poverty line. The life of a farmer is difficult, impossible even, as climate change tightens its fist each year. Alamosa is far from the hubs of the coastal elite, far from the halls of power and decision-making.

But as I leave, I can’t help but think of Alamosa as a place of tremendous resource. Most people these days, an increasing number, fall into my category of deracination. We don’t know the year our ancestors immigrated to or were brought to this country. We often grow up miles or even countries apart from our extended family. We don’t know our stories.

There are lots of stories here. People don’t like to talk about themselves much, but they love to talk about their community, their place. Sitting around a dinner table and you hear the story of the Saguache sheep farmers coming together to rescue sheep stolen by bandits. Or the time people from all over the valley came together to dig out barns from the snow so the cows could be fed. Conversation often revolves around what buildings used to be, who owned them, who lived in them, what businesses used to be there and why they left. There are stories of surviving tough times, of legislation that almost got passed, of people who left and came back. People always come back, Valley residents say. It’s the frog spirits from when the valley used to be a giant prehistoric swamp, these spirits possess you and bring you back.

Alamosa is a little-known place in Colorado, similar perhaps to Galilee in Jesus day. Many people cannot imagine moving to such a place and deciding to live there. For those who cannot see this place as beautiful or valuable, A.M. Hickman suggests this. “To say that life in the hinterlands “sucks” is really only to make an admission that you yourself are in rough shape — that your family has cut their roots off, that you may be without faith, that you are in so low a state that you need the land and culture around you to do favors for you, to give you little pick-me-ups, to make life easy and pretty and sunny for you, even if it is mind-numbingly expensive to get there.”3

One of the sorrows of my deracinated life is a lack of a ‘hometown’. I seem to be accruing places I love by the minute, but this only increases my bitterness at the ability of some to bring a spouse back to the place that formed them; to meet all of the people they love in one fell swoop. But there will be no hometown tour for me. Instead, I walk with God in the cool of the evening. I give a tour of my walk home. The orange low-lying wall that barely shields passersby from the catastrophe of scattered dog poop. The morgue where I read a book in a bad French accent. The abandoned white church building, its roofline always so crisp against the blue sky. The elderly black chihuahuas sitting behind their fence, no longer able to see passersby, but barking just in case.

A moment in time can’t really be a hometown, and you certainly can’t revisit it. But if I could, I would bring people back to the pond hockey tournament. This tournament took place through sheer force of will and prayer, and the miraculous strength of the softest, thinnest ice you’ve ever experienced. I lay awake the first night, listening to a giant room full of people breathing softly, desperately trying to fall asleep. But I couldn’t. The day was too precious to lose even a minute. Bitter black tea kept me awake in the morning, my fingers chapped as I tied on my skates. There are burritos in the fire, cheese melted and the potatoes cold - the best thing I’ve ever eaten. I danced on a rock in the sun, watching the games take place in ponds where the run off from the silver mines used to be. The Creede cliffs scratched into the background.

That night I learn to play Euchre, sharing a real cane sugar coke out of a glass bottle with a friend. The night is as sweet and cool as my drink. A couple of local musicians strum folk songs in the background. Seth watches intently, his eyes filled with deep fondness, for the music maybe, or his friends who lost their home in a forest fire. The glass of wine is forgotten in his hand.

The next Sunday, at church, I look one last time at the light filtering in through stained glass. It is a streak of orange, blue around the edges. The side of the piano bench gleams like a mirror. The wooden parquet floor, sanctified by the many feet that have walked across it. Mary, her lavender cardigan and green coat. Vanessa laughing at a secret joke. A guitar leaned against a chair.

The light in the church is beautiful, but it doesn’t quite compare to New Mexico. The sky there is pink, and the mountains are pink, and there is a sign that says Your Public Lands. The only land I own, in fact. I make sure to study the red clay of the mine gouged into the side of the hill, covered in part by a silken overlay of snow. It looks like blood seeping through a bandage. My friend wants to stop the car. We have been chasing the sunset through the windy roads of the Arroyo Secco. It’s pure gold, burning through trees like the smell of our ginger peach tea.

My drive to Grand Junction is layered with 13,000 feet of powder sugar trees, and the tops of mountains so white they become indistinguishable from the overcast sky. I get back to my job of memorizing landscapes. The grooves in the canyon walls like sheet music, dead trees on top of the rocky overhang like the wiry hairs on a baby elephant’s head. The sun, pale as a communion wafer dissolving into wintry clouds. In Colorado, the presence and force of geology feels undeniable. The way the mountain sides and rock faces merge and clash feels like a still photo of waves in the ocean - textures and weight crashing against each other. Andy says that when he first arrived, it was the geology that made him fall in love with the San Luis Valley. I think his roots grew straight into the granite then and there.

Eventually, it comes time to do what I’m best at. Leave. I bid adieu to the box elder beetle crawling along the arch of my chair. We call them The Elders. They were here before me, and they’ll be here after me. The kitchen is their Public Lands. I cue This Must Be the Place by the Talking Heads and A Step You Can’t Take Back from Begin Again. These are staple songs for any Leaver. I repack my suitcases in the airport, shuffling denim from one black case to the other.

Here comes the train upon the track

And there goes the pain, it cuts to black

Are you ready for the last act to take a step

You can’t take back?4

And then I’m on the tarmac, the wind is picking up, and I know God is there. “I love this place,” I say.

“I love this place too,” God says.

There are a few moments of silence. “I loved this place before you got here.” God reminds me.

I ponder the many millennia God has spent loving this place. The rocks, the fields, the people.

“I will love this place after you leave.” God assures me.

I nod. “Me too”.

A few weeks later, I sit in Pittsburgh traffic, commiserating with a fellow deracinated friend. But as I lay in bed that night, I round the bend in my mind, and the mountains are there, sun at the top. Mt. Blanca drenched in a sunset haze. I feel transcendent.

Mountain sage, desert pine, how I hate to leave it all behind.

Southern ways are new to me but for a song it’s where I long to be.

Western sky, shining warm upon my back. Save a fiery setting sun for me.5