One last Colorado post: Thinking more clearly west of the Continental Divide

One more vacation post before the week ends. (Yes, our vacation was last week, but rather than announce through an open-access blog that my whole family was out of town, I’m posting about it on a one-week delay.) So, one more Aspen post before I return to the realities of Carlisle…a place that at times is also nearly as bucolic as a vacation. But not quite, because home never is.

Aspen, on the other hand, always feels exotic to me, even though I’ve been spending a week or more there almost every summer since I was born. My family vacationed there when I was growing up; now I vacation there with my children. It’s a longstanding tradition.

I still remember how when I was barely older than Holly, I was aware that I felt different there. Specifically, I felt more creative, though I couldn’t have articulated it that way at the age of eight. I remember countless projects undertaken there as I was growing up that I never would have taken on at home. I read epic novels. I wrote dozens of letters to my friends back home, and to just about anyone else I could think of. I wrote poems and plays.

And it wasn’t just me. My mother would do amazing handiwork projects out there: knitting or needlepoint. My elder sister would take on complicated academic challenges like learning an entire year’s worth of AP bio. One summer when I was a teenager, I devoted most of my time to photography and even taught myself darkroom skills using Aspen’s community college facilities.

Once I was old enough to be aware of this phenomenon, it didn’t seem remarkable to me. We spent four weeks at a stretch in Colorado each summer, and I didn’t have any friends or scheduled activities out there. It made plenty of sense to me that I was more focused on creative projects than at home.

But later, in adulthood, when my vacation allotment shrank to only a week at a time, I was surprised to note I still felt more creative when I was there. I still accomplished more writing and reading, and came up with more ideas in general.

To some extent, this happens to almost everyone when leisure travel takes them away from home. In fact, I read an article recently about the appeal of SkyMall, the in-flight shopping catalog that you find on planes, and the article said that one reason those catalogs succeed is that they carry a range of self-help products – everything from exercise equipment to foreign language tapes – and people tend to be more open to the idea of self-improvement when they are traveling. Out of our usual context, many more changes seem possible.

But in more recent years, I’ve begun to suspect there actually is something in the Colorado air that sharpens my mind a little bit. For one thing, the summer climate is drier than in New England. Humidity tends to make people sluggish, which is certainly not ideal for creativity. Just as at home I feel sharper and more productive in October than in August, the dry, sunny, often cool Colorado air makes it easier to think. And there’s a certain scent in the air: wildflowers and sage. There’s even a sound I associate specifically with Aspen nights: the clip-clop of horses, since a horse-drawn wagon passes by our condo every night ferrying tourists around town.

Besides, I know for a fact it’s not just me. Aspen hosts all kinds of creative and intellectual events. It has the yearly Aspen Summer Words writers’ conference, which I attended last year, and also the yearly Aspen Ideas Festival and the Summer Music Festival. One afternoon a couple of years ago, I was running near the conference center just after lunch during the Aspen Ideas Festival. It was apparently a time when a lot of the conference participants take a break; thanks to the oversized laminated name tags they all wear, I eventually determined that within a one-mile stretch of the running path I’d passed a Supreme Court judge, a former secretary of state, three professors who are household names, a university president, and the director of a well-known think tank. It was a cerebral place to be running.

Unlike when I was a child or a teen, I can’t exactly leverage this rich source of creativity for maximum output anymore. When I was sixteen, I could spend hours sitting on a park bench writing; now family needs take precedence, and I’m lucky if I can find an hour a day for creative pursuits. But it happened again last week. I’d brought a reasonable amount of work with me, and to my surprise I did most of it, and I enjoyed the hours I spent working.

For whatever reason, the muses still call louder than ever once I cross the Continental Divide. Maybe it’s the vacation mindset. Maybe it’s the thinner air sharpening my thought process. Maybe it’s entirely the power of suggestion. Whatever the explanation, I try hard to capture as much of the creative spirit as I can while I’m there, and bottle it the only way I know how – with notes and drafts – and bring it home. Back to my real life, it’s not always easy to maintain the creative juices. We can’t be on vacation all the time. So, just as with the other benefits of vacation – relaxation, good exercise habits, more positive personal relationships -- we take the best of what we develop while we’re away and try hard to make it work for us at home.