Long have the Rocky Mountains loomed as the arch enemy of the colonial East’s attempts to “manifest its destiny.” To live among them is to live a life of extremity… peaks to summit, walls to climb, valleys to trek. It’s where America invented the idea of a “national park” inside the wildest place in the Lower 48, where cowboy boots are used to press the gas pedal of blue Porsches. It’s where John Muir immortalized granite peaks and ancient trees in valleys older than man itself. It’s where a kid from the flat outskirts of Chicagland dreamt of fantastic lines that rose above the horizon line. All that we fight over disappears in the shade of a Redwood and a Sequoia that seems to reach high enough to touch the sky.

Creative souls find their refuge in Colorado’s Boulder and Golden, the Big Sky Country outside Bozeman MT, the designer stores lining the streets of Jackson WY. I got some of my best lessons on existentialism from homeless artists in Boulder CO, a lesson on storytelling and free margarita from a designer-turned-bartender in Denver CO, a lesson on community and “Trump’s America” at the town rodeo in Bridgeport, CA.

I thought I’d learn about the soul of the Rockies, about the way the spine of America had gripped the soul of so many restless hearts the way it gripped my untested Illinoisan one, from paddle-boarding in Evergreen CO, from camping in Flathead National Forest, from sunsets casting their golden glow over titans like the Tetons and the Sierras. I found mountains to be sure, but the way they’ve moved people didn’t become real to me until I was graced with two hours of conversation on the midnight bus from Denver to Boulder, a veteran struggling with homelessness but not with heart, having no problem lending his only five dollars to a kid he didn’t know, a kindness that kindled a respect between strangers in a 7/11 parking lot surrounded by trust-fund hippies.