While The Century Turned

As the century turned I was fulfilling a lifelong goal to live and work along the front range of the Rocky Mountains. Having landed what seemed to be an excellent job with a dot com startup there I immersed myself in the Front Range lifestyle with glee and gusto. Mere yards from the Bear Creek Park trailhead and not much farther from Monument Creek Trail, which I frequently bicycled to and from work on when the weather was good, a feeling of having finally arrived settled in. Earning the highest salary of my career there, I began looking at buying a house for the first time in my life. And as hedge against something going awry there, I had already purchased a parcel of property on the front range of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains about 250 miles south upon which I could eventually build the ultimate dream home/studio where I could live and operate my own business through the final decade of my professional career. The dot com bubble had already burst about four months before moving to the Front Range of the Rockies, and even though it had not yet been publically announced as such, as much as I hated to admit it, I had a nagging suspicion my stay there would probably not last more than a year. Turned out that assessment was precise.

So when the new century began, I was laid off with a decent severance package and enough savings in the bank to set out at leisurely pace around town, touring along the Front Range, and deeper west into the Rocky Mountains performing as an itinerant singer/songwriter. My performances were greeted by appreciative audiences and I was able to make a little money selling CDs to many of them. It was springtime in the mountains and I was having a ball at it, but I knew it couldn't last unless I wanted to live in poverty sooner than later. Interviewing for a new job between performances soon yielded offers from one biotech company and two state government agencies close to the parcel I had just purchased in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, so I accepted the best of those three offers after spending five months of the most enjoyable period of my life roaming around so foot loose and fancy free.

I was happier then than I ever imagined I would be at the turn of the century, especially considering the drastic turn of events when the dot com bubble burst finally caught up with me. Six years later I retired and started my own business, living and working full time in a fully off-grid home/studio of my own design esconced deep within pristine wilderness forestland. It was remote. It was ultra quiet. It provided 300 days per year of sunshine to power systems. Its night sky rated at Bortle Class 1, and after snow fell, no one dared venture up the canyon.

But alas, twenty-three years after finalizing purchase of that unique parcel of wilderness land, and after living on it yearround for seventeen years, the USFS set its arsonists loose and they turned it and the surrounding 341,705 acres into a burnt, poisoned, uninhabitable wasteland.

Four years after that governmental clusterfuck, my life is finally getting back on track as the second quarter of the 21st century begins. The first quarter–good, bad and ugly–was a trip, by any measure. What the second quarter holds in store is anyone's guess, but unless the convicted felon in the White House succeeds in efforts to establish a fascist regime in this nation, I expect it's going to be a trip no less unpredictable and delightful as the first quarter.