BEST MADE PROJECTS

The Road Home
By Matthew Beaudin

In the winter, the roadside fences look like fresh sutures holding the land together. 

The road leaves Montrose, CO gently before the sagebrush seas near Gunnison. It gives way to frozen farmland and the jutting towers of Monarch pass. Atop the pass, the store marking the Continental Divide is buried, its roof only peeking out from underneath the enormous drifts.

The road drops down into Salida before it’s a silver thread stitching the Arkansas River valley to the Collegiate peaks. If the earth were to come apart, it might split right there. 

It’s an arrow to Manitou Springs from there, where my father and step-mom live, or a windy, depressed road to Denver with a lone gas station every 30 minutes, ablaze in the dark and shattering cold, jewels against the blackness. 

They look forgotten, those stores.  

I know the road’s turns, where the pavement changes colors, and where to stop along the way if I’m tired, hungry or lonely. I know it as well as I know myself. I’ve slept in my car in parking lots along the way, the dog and I in a sleeping bag in the -13º below night. Sometimes I pull over and walk the dirt roads that shoot off the highway, veins across the public lands. There’s a dirt road near Sargents, CO, that our family dog would run down chasing the over-loaded car for miles, because he was too stubborn to get in unless he was foaming-at-the-mouth tired. Bluu was his name. An unstoppable 100 pound lab and setter mix. 

For years it’s meant different things to me, this road. When I was little, it was the road to my dad’s home in Colorado Springs from our summer house — a pitched tent and the public pool — in Gunnison. 

He was back in school then, working for his teacher licensure. We’d backpack on the weekends and eat pack-smashed PB and J tortillas for five meals out of six. 

In high school, it was the way to stadiums burning holes into the Friday night black. It’s strange to think of that now.

Years later, after I moved to Telluride, it was the way to Denver, the fabric of a first love unraveling over empty miles. Wearing with the tires. 

It has been the way to things I’d rather not go to ever again. A suffocating tunnel of pavement and oppressive sky on the way to a funeral. I was run over by the tugboat clouds.

It was the way here, or what became the way home. 

It collides with my past and present, but the future is nothing here but snow whispering over pavement, there and gone. 

Now, it’s a road to someplace that used to be home I struggle to define and embrace. The place between things. Home is the other way.

I glance out the window now in the middle of the drive to the Front Range from Telluride on 285 and wonder what it will mean next. Things are always changing on this road. On this day, I’m driving to a job interview away from Telluride that may mean the begging of another home. Another chapter of my life, being written right now on this lonely Colorado road. I love it profoundly because I’ve grown up with each mile marker in each season. It’s my diary. 

Some days on 285, the world is saturated in color. I’ve seen the winter colors beaming, the grasses bleached white and the reds of the bushes bleeding out.

Some days, even the sky plays backup: The clouds, enormous silver puffs, sailing on the plains, leaving town-size stamps of shade on yellowed valley below.

But not this day.

I look at the smokestack clouds that tower above Blue Mesa reservoir and the backs of the mountains rise and fall, great whales on a make-believe ocean.