Rock slide in Colorado closes I-70 and may dampen spring break plans

According to the Denver Post, boulders the size of buses punched holes in the road and bridges. My first thought (well, after my HOLY COW THOSE BOULDERS ARE HUGE thought) was, “What about all the spring breakers? How will they make it to the ski lodges in time?” I-70 is how Kansas Citians drive to Colorado. Jump on I-70 and go west until you hit mountains. There’s simply no other way. I imagined local church youth groups scrambling for alternatives, or losing adult sponsors who envisioned adding 3 hours, the time the detour would take, to their sentence crammed in a bus full of young teens. Really, for any midwesterner looking forward to a Rocky Mountain spring break, this could have been sad news. When you only have one week in which to stuff all your end-of-winter fun, 6 more hours lost to driving can sound devastating. As luck would have it, though, the rock slide was in Glenwood Springs, west of Denver and most of the ski resorts.

Even with that catastrophe averted, this could be a wonderful opportunity for us to reevaluate how we approach vacation, sabbatical, break, whatever you want to call it. Burdened by the weight of responsibility to reach the destination as soon as possible in order to maximize the efficiency of precious and very limited time off, it’s easy to plow through the countryside, zipping across the interstate in and effort to escape the flatlands of Kansas as quickly as possible. Many people elect to ride in busses that travel at night so that they can sleep through the drive. Fall asleep in Kansas City, awake at your Coloradan ski resort, without the pain of experiencing the in-between.

In many ways, we are a culture that has lost our appreciation of the sanctity, the power, the pith of the in-between. In setting our 5 and 10 year life goals, how often do we stop and look around at where we are now? We will never again be here, in this moment, in this place. If we only think about that final destination, we may miss something life changing right here and now. Waking up suddenly in the mountains can’t compare with watching the gentle, subtle variation in the landscape that builds up to the mountains. It is enough to inspire a person to pull the car over, step out, and inhale the great silence of a landscape that deceptively presents itself as barren but is really teeming with life.

In fact, there is no such thing as a barren landscape, no such thing as an empty life, but sometimes it requires a rock slide and a long, arduous detour to slow us down enough to acknowledge it.