Finding Home                       
  I live beside the Colorado River, on a thirty-four mile stretch of road appropriately called the Colorado River Road. At the downstream end, the road meets Interstate 70, and the river its confluence with the Eagle.  At this confluence, the river turns west and flows into Glenwood Canyon and to points further southwest, including Moab, Powell Reservoir, and the Grand Canyon.

  But upstream of the interstate, the river is still small enough to wade across in early winter, and it remains a mostly wild and untrammeled place.  The lower half of the river is flanked by a handful of large ranches, and the upper half by BLM land, neither of which seem to be in any imminent danger of development. Our place is roughly in the middle of the two.  We only own six acres, but they’re pretty diverse, with two along the river, and four across the River Road.  Of the remaining four acres, two are flat enough for my wife to run her horses and cows, and the other two are up on hills which afford the livestock a place to explore and to have some nice views of the Flat Top Mountains and the river below. 

 I love living here next to the river, for in so many ways being here is really a dream come true.  I’ve always loved oceans and brooks and rivers, for water that is dynamic and moving and alive just stirs something in my soul that a mere lake, no matter how large, cannot. Beside a river, I feel a connectedness to everything that the moving water touches from the snowcapped peaks above the valley to the desert canyons that the river eventually carves.  With an ocean, I feel connected to the entire rest of the world.  When my wife and I were finally ready to get ourselves away from the noise and bad air and traffic of Denver, we looked through many river valleys before settling on this one, but we made a very good choice.  My only stipulation at the start was that we had to live near a creek at a minimum, one large enough to sustain a year-round population of trout.  It didn’t have to be big enough to float a watercraft through, although that would obviously be a major plus. 

  At first we looked along the Colorado River valley west of Glenwood Springs, which is near where my wife Terena is from.  But in recent years, the ramped-up amount of gas drilling in that area has really spoiled what having an interstate highway through the middle of it already didn't.  Almost anywhere you stand between Silt and Parachute, multiple numbers of drill rigs can be seen, especially at night.  If you buy land there there’s no guarantee that some day Encana or Halliburton trucks won’t be driving across your property to access a drill pad in the middle of it. Then since most of Terena’s clients come from the Roaring Fork valley we looked up there, but anything near moving water, let alone the Roaring Fork River itself, was prohibitively expensive.  Finally we turned towards the Eagle River valley, which is growing rapidly and would have numerous job opportunities for me, and a lot of potential dog clients for Terena.  But as with the Roaring Fork Valley, anything near the Eagle River is very expensive, and there’s the perpetual distant hum of I-70 to listen to.

  And so we ended up finding a place along the Colorado River, in the place I was hoping to be in all along.  It was a stretch of river and road that I had first stumbled upon in the first weekend road trip I had made when I first moved to Colorado many years earlier. In the years since, I had made many more forays here to camp and fish and float the whitewater sections further upstream in the area around State Bridge.  Before it burned down, the State Bridge Lodge had been a favorite spot for my wife and I to reconnoiter for weekend getaways. 

  When people see our place for the first time, they usually marvel at how beautiful the surrounding area is, and how lucky we are to have found such a great spot.  They'll often ask how in the world we were able to find a place to live in such as this one.  Not only are we right on the river, but we have no immediate neighbors, there is county open space across the river that can't be developed, and our backyard view is dominated by a colorful rock formation five hundred feet high called Sleeping Indian Mesa.  Terena is able to run her business from the house without ever going to town, and it serves as a great place to run a float fishing business out of for me. 

  The wheels started turning for all of this back in 2002, when Terena began taking classes to learn how to write a business plan.  She had the idea of starting a school for dog trainers, but knew that she would need to know more about running a business at that level than she knew at the time.  The business plan she wrote was so well done that would eventually win an award for it from the Small Business Administration.

  Then in mid-year, I got laid off from the high-tech job I had, right on the heels or returning home from what was probably the most successful business trip I'd ever had.  Two large projects that had been on going in California were finally signed off on by the customers, which would allow the company I was working for to finally bill them for it.  Terena and I decided that this was the time to get out of Denver and to relocate our lives in the mountains, which is where we had both wanted to be all along. 

  Our trips to the mountains that summer took on a new rationale.  It was no longer just about camping and floating rivers and four-wheeling, but also about finding a new place we could call home.  Since Terena had roots in Garfield County having grown up in New Castle, we started there.  But the Roaring Fork valley was very expensive, especially along its waterways.  Eagle County along the I-70 corridor was also pricey, plus neither one of us was crazy about being close to the highway.  We looked west of Glenwood Canyon, but the river there was often off-color and the fracking boom was already taking hold there.  Horror stories were already beginning to emerge about people getting their drinking water ruined by drill rigs, and of rigs being put up on people's land without their having any say in it due to not owning the mineral rights. 

  So that left the lower Upper Colorado River, and area that I had known and loved for sixteen years. One weekend I got up into the mountains a day before Terena, and had spent it really checking out the valley with a more critical eye than I ever had before.  There were only a handful of properties for sale, but all had issues.  They would either be on the wrong side of the road or railroad from the river, or wouldn't have the room for horses that she would want to have, or would be more or bigger than we could afford.
  But then rounding the corner, I spied a perfect little ranch on a bend in the river with a huge stripey rock formation behind it.  I thought, "Too bad that's not for sale, that one would be perfect!".  Only when I got to the bottom of the hill and saw the driveway to it did I see the "For Sale" sign.  I added that phone number to my notebook and took some pictures of it.  It had several outbuildings and what looked like living units, an arena, fencing for horses, and irrigation.  And of course, it was right on the Colorado River.
  I showed it to Terena the next day, and she agreed that it looked pretty good, but her first priority at the time was getting involved with the potential purchase of the private land surrounding Sweetwater Lake, not far away. Someone she knew was trying to purchase it, and would slice us off a parcel if they did, but that negotiation was stalling.  The property that I found was more expensive than were hoping to pay, but once we locked in on it, Terena was able to redo her business plan and make all of the numbers work, primarily by increasing the amount of dog boarding we would do.  By raising some money from some investors, and by dipping into my still-good credit resources, we were able to pull it off, and in January of that year we began moving our stuff from the Front Range up to our new place in the hills.

  In October of 2002 Terena and I had gotten married, but instead of a honeymoon we put all of our time and financial resources into trying to pull off this whole change of life move we were contemplating.  Negotiations with the owner of the property we wanted to move into were tricky, but it got done. Our initial payments to the owner were stiff, but it was a lease-to-own arrangement and whatever we paid in rent would be applied to the eventual purchase of it, which we were hoping to do once our businesses got off and running.  In addition, we spent a lot of the money she had raised getting the place ready for the dogs we would have boarded there, and for the apprentices who would be living there.  This involved putting up a lot of fences, and cleaning up the three-unit apartment building and wiring it up for the internet.  By April we had moved out of our house in Denver, and were up at our new place full time.  My old place had been rented to a lesbian couple who would eventually wreck it, which would lead to a bad time for me the following year cleaning up their mess. But up in the mountains life looked promising, and we spent all our waking hours getting everything ready for students and dogs. 

  In June of that first year, Terena had an unusual experience.  She was driving down to Glenwood Springs on a hot, sunny day, and as she was getting on the on-ramp to I-70 she noticed an upraised hand in the tall grass.  Curious, she pulled over and got out.  She found an older man in the grass barely conscious, bile coming out of the corners of his mouth, weakly saying, "Water….water…".  Her first thought was that he was some homeless crackhead on a bender, but having a big heart she wasn't going to just leave him there, or call 911 to let the cops deal with it. So she got some water from her van, gave it to the old man, and revived him.  Once he was able to sit up and speak, she found out that he was hitchhiking to Glenwood, and gave him a ride. 

  Along the way, she learned that he was not a substance abuse, but a once-independent business owner who had Parkinson's Disease.  He lived up the river from us, but his disease had progressed to the point that he could longer drive.  Now to get to town, he used his thumb instead of his truck.  He also mentioned that later in the fall, he would be moving to an assisted-living facility because he was getting to the point where he could no longer take care of himself, and that he would be selling his house. 

  When I got home that evening, Terena told me about what had happened with the old man whose name was John. It was an interesting story, and we didn't think too much about it at the time.  When we would ride our bikes that summer, we would usually go past his place on our way up to the canyon and would hope to see him around to say hello.  But he never seemed to be there, and his place was a bit of a mess.  The house he was living in was one that he had built himself, racing against his terrible disease to get it finished while he could still work on it.  But in the end the Parkinson's won, with the place about 90 percent finished. 

  By September, Terena and were starting realize that we were losing our own race, that of getting paying students into our new dog training school by the time our startup money and my credit ran out.  We had potential students interested, but since we weren't accredited by the state they could not get student loans.  Getting accredited by the state was also an expensive and involved process that we hadn't adequately factored in.  I bought a boat to start building a float fishing business, but there were lots of permits that I needed before I could start making any money at that, as well as lots of gear to buy.  The good news was that there was more boarding business to be had than we realized, and so our dreams were still alive, but where we trying to make them happen was just too expensive. 

  So we began to think about Plan B.  My house in Denver was rented out so that wasn't an option, but considered trying to rent some where cheaper or even moving in with her parents in New Castle.  Neither option was that appealing, and in the few months we had been there we had really grown to love the valley we were in and the river we were living beside.  At some point, we thought, what about John's house?  We rode our bikes over there one day and looked at his place with a far more critical eye than we had before.  For the first time, we walked around the back yard and tried to visualize it with dog fencing and a boat ramp.  It wasn't that hard to do.  There wasn't any room for Terena's horses, but the property across the street seemed to be John's as well, judging by all of the piles of out-of-code electrical components that were over there.  John had been an electrical contractor back in the day, and had several rusting trucks and trailers over there with his business name on them.
  Finally it came down to trying to buy his place or moving in with Terena's parents until I could get back into my house in the big city we had been so glad to put in our rearview mirror.  We tracked down John, and then his realtor.  The real estate economy in Colorado was very strong back then, and particularly in the mountains, and this was waterfront property so it wouldn't be on the market for long. 
  John had just moved into his new digs at a nursing home in Rifle when we were finally able to get ahold of him, but he remembered Terena and the kindness she had showed him on that day in June.  Being a bachelor, he wasn't in need to squeeze every penny possible he could out of the place.  In the end, we were not only able to buy the house from him, but he sold it to us for less than the appraised value, and he carried the financing! It shows how karma can work its way around, sometimes in unexpected ways.  Terena did a good turn for someone,  and ten years later its still paying dividends off for us.
  We felt very grateful to John, and tried to show it in the time he had left.  My father passed away that year, and in some small way I transferred the attention that I might have shown my father onto John instead.  The job I had took me into Garfield County occasionally, and I would stop by to say hi to John and see how he was doing.  Not so long before, he had been a strong and proud and independent man, and being trapped in a nursing home was miserable experience for him.  Cleaning up his home and property proved to be a formidable task that took the better part of a year, but every now and then we would come across something interesting.  Once we were going through some VHS tapes and found one labled, "Alaska Trip".  Curious, I put it in the machine to watch it and found that it was of John and some friends fishing in Alaska not too many years earlier, back when his disease was in its infancy. Just before Christmas, I took the tapes and an extra VCR over to the nursing home and hooked it all up for him.  Then we spent the next couple of hours or so watching the tapes together.  In the darkened room, I could see the glow in his face as he looked twenty years younger, seeing images of himself as the strong healthy man he once was.  For a short time, he was no longer the helpless old man that I knew, but the man who had hiked into the Grand Canyon, and who had bicycled through Europe, and had fished for salmon in Alaska.  In one sequence, he hooked a nice big Chinook and as he brought it to net, his old friends congratulating him. I looked over at him in the warm light of the TV and saw tears streaming down his face, and knew that in that moment he wasn't sick anymore. He was back in that Alaskan river once more, wet and cold and happy. 

  When people see the life that we've managed to carve out for ourselves here, and wonder if its possible to do something similar for themselves, the answer is yes.  But it takes a lot of luck, and for lots of things to fall into place that you may or may not have any control over.  Three years after we bought John's house, Terena's parent's bought the original ranch that we had leased, and having her family a mile away has added yet another dimension to our life here. Her ninety-year-old grandmother also moved up to live in one of the ranch units we fixed up, so Terena got to be a part of her grandmother's life for her last seven years. 

  Our life here is not perfect by any means, for we are not perfect people and our relationship even less so.  But the place we live in is as perfect as one could ever hope to find, and knowing that makes dealing with the day to day grind of scratching out a living much easier to deal with. I owned two homes before we bought this place, and each one was just somewhere to be until the next stage in life came along.  Living here, there is no "next place" to come, this is it, we are in the place we were meant to be.  I hope to be here forever, but if for some reason that doesn't come to pass I'll always be grateful for the opportunity to have spent the time I have here, and to have been able to share it with others. It’s a special place that works itself deep into your marrow and into your soul, and I feel very lucky to have been able to call it home.