Snow fell in the "high country." Most of the ski resorts had not opened but with cross country skis all you have to do is park your car and head out onto a trail. I skied at Berthoud Pass and at Cameron Pass...snow still being spotty lower down in the Middle Park valley. At Cameron, I took the short trail up to Zimmerman Lake, skiing along its shoreline, looking up from time to time at the Medicine Bow Mountains in the not-too-far-away distance.
Yesterday I arrived in Washington at Dulles Airport...far from the wide spaces of Zimmerman Lake into a different scene. But this man-made landscape was also filled with light, an interior illumination designed to move people between airline planes, between arrivals and departures, between countries and continents. On the lake, I had to move myself though a "natural" space (though the lake is actually a man-made reservoir)...at Dulles, I was moved by trains, escalators, moving sidewalks.
Both of these were experiences with space, with movement, both of them visually stimulating, both of them liberateing in a sense. But vastly different in how my individual energy at the lake was not channeled to become part of a vast, collective energy system structured by architects and engineers hired by governments. And how the private experience at the lake (no one else was on the trail that day) became a social experience shared by thousands of fellow travelers. Interesting how we can move between these zones, these geographies and somehow remain the same. Or do we?
