I was promised horses.  I remember this distinctly.

My dad knew as well as I that moving isn’t easy, especially to a place so very far away, so he would cushion it with promises such as these.  Thoughts of horses and mountain ranches made the process of tearing away from my homeland all that more bearable, so I complied.  My visions were of a log cabin situated on the hips of the foothills, with gentle mares that would lean their heads in my window in the heat of summer mornings.  Of dirt roads and tractors, of cattle and barbed wire.  But mostly horses, of course.

Colorado is not all horses and ranches.  Our house turned out to squat in a quiet patch of suburb that seems a subtle copy of the very neighborhood from which I had come.  It is a pale ivory and not made of logs, and the grass lives in trim, green patches like quilt squares, not in long stalks that whisper to my elbows.  And the mountains?  Well, I see them.  They loom in the distance like storm clouds held forever at bay.  They are dark and brooding as they sit there, their tips just visible above the houses in front of ours, and I wonder daily if they might be up to something.

There are no horses in suburbia.  As I dreamed on our migration west of this new home, my head vibrating against the window as plain after great plain slid by, I could see horses trotting even through neighborhoods, even through towns and cities.  I imagined taking my gelding to school to pick up groceries.  Who needed a license when I could ride The Black Stallion, Strider, Trigger?  Hell, even Mister Ed would have worked.  But there were no horses, no such luck.  It was not the Colorado I was promised.  The wilderness, the cowboys, the romance of wind and weather—where were they?  The rivers of concrete, the herds of houses and brittle street lamps had herded them off, perhaps into the folds of mountain.  Beyond my sight, in any case.  I received a bundle of letters from my old Girl Scout Troup asking what I had named my horse, what color it was, how fast it went; they had been well informed of my fevered excitement.  I didn’t write back.  

Clouds hang in the sky with that awkward presence of not belonging and knowing it.  They have stretched themselves at breaking points into feathers. You always expect the sunlight to burn them away, but it can never succeed.  They have been prophesized by farmers and weathermen to always drift in feathery complacency from sky to bleached-blue sky.  If I press my cheek against my window and look to the side, I can see Denver hunched in the distance, stewing in the crowd of brown smog that sticks to the tips of building tops.  We have two great pine trees in our backyard, and I used to climb up and whisper to them that they might perhaps work harder to make the air clean, because the brown is rather ugly.

And yet… There are no horses, no ranches, no cowboys or ragged cliffs on my way to school, no romance of logs and tumbleweeds and wolves like smoke, but that does not mean that the wild has not found its way into my home.

In winter, when the snow gathers the nerve to crawl in battleship clouds from their roosts in the mountains and blast at our houses, I can feel the warmth and rush of nature pressing flush against my bones.  It drifts and packs against the deadened blades of grass and concrete rivers so that one cannot discern what is of man and what is of nature, what has been poured from trucks and what has crawled up through the dirt.  Some days, when I am alone in my beautiful beast of a car, I pick up speed and grind the brakes so I slide along the snow-packed road just to surrender to the power of ice and snow for a handful of small moments. Come spring, when the wind begins to get a hold on its fury and sends jet streams and gales to gasp and roar between houses, and I lean into them like the arms of a lover.  It streaks in from the plains and yanks at my hair, my jacket, howling in my hears that I am small and unaware of most things.   By the time summer rolls over and up against the mountains, the ice has melted away from the street, leaving gouges in the asphalt that bounce us out of our seats and test the reliability of seat belts.  On one hotter day, I spent a whole three hours at a friend’s house watching a mother hawk find food for her children, and the bear sightings get closer and closer with each summer.  When fall reasserts herself, she grips flaming fingers around the land and washes saplings and giants in reds and yellows.  On mornings, it is not cool, but bitter and invasive of even the finest, state-of-the-art coats.  These seasons crash together, quarreling over whose time it is to go, fleeting by and bleeding together with all the beauty and violence of time, all the wild rush of horses.

And that is how my people and I live, in this balance of nature and man, of summer and winter, of wilderness and the cool calm of suburbia.  We will never stop trying to do our righteous battle with the miraculous aspen saplings that find their ways into the creases of sidewalks, with the snow that pays no heed to grass or street, with deer that pace in and taste at the leaves of rose bushes.  We push Nature, and she pushes us, and we hang there together, suspended and whole in conflict and unity.  There are few horses here.  But I think I will ride out my life between mountains and city just as well, watching the wilderness trickle through the concrete cracks.