“And I love you, darling Harvey.”
Our honeymoon had begun—the world was fair, and all life lay before us—I couldn’t possibly describe the intoxication of that moment!
After an arduous trip, steaming endlessly, it seemed, across prairie lands of the Great American Desert, we arrived in Colorado. My first glimpse of the Rockies, viewed from the train window one morning, did something to me I was never to get over. All the adjectives in the language have been used to describe that sight, by explorers, by learned travelers, by writers, and by humble people keeping diaries. And still it was an experience so important in my own life that I, too, must try.
People have said they “rise up” suddenly—and so they do. But to me, on that bright, crisp morning, they seemed to have been let down from the sky, like a gigantic backdrop on the stage of the world, their colors of grey and red and startling white painted on by a Master Hand. They looked unreal, like an experience from another world, but at the same time an experience of such magnitude and importance that I must bow in worship before their granite strength and snow-white purity.
“Aren’t they gorgeous?” Harvey asked.
“They’re more than gorgeous,” I answered reverently, then silently prayed to their rugged magnificence that, to the end, the power the sight of them gave me might never wane.
Some premonition told me in that moment my prayer would be heeded. I could not suspect what those mountains would do in the shaping of my life, but I was sure they would shape it. And so they did. I was never again to be away from their influence, and only for brief periods away from their sight. I loved them instinctively that day—and I never lost that love—strange though it may seem for a girl brought up beside the water.
“They are our future” I added to Harvey, my voice trembling with excitement.
“Yes!”
My future, yes—but not our future. Still, I could not know that, then, nor even guess it. But deep in my bones, I felt their power.