Fall is my favorite time of year, which is ironic I suppose, because I am a creature of habit. There is no avoiding the seasonal shift in all of its glory. Even the Aspen trees shimmer in a breeze of vibrant applause as if in admiration of their own transformation.
Fall arrives every year for me as a good reminder that it’s important to pause for a moment and consider how you got to where you are, whether it be in the time of the year or the season of your life.
I found myself on top of a mountain trail earlier this month at the peak of a hike I’d taken countless times. From where I stood, trying to catch my breath, I could look back down to where I had been and ahead to the horizon with little effort all at once.
In that moment, the trail I’d been on so many times before, somehow became as beautiful as the path ahead I hadn’t traversed yet. I stood there in a sea of red, orange and yellow while my breath hung heavy enough for me to see on the cool air.
Our Western heritage is kind of like that, easy to forget how beautiful it is when you see it every day and vibrant when it shines like the fall colors. But like that trail I stood on the top of, also meaningful to take in the view, when you look back at where you have come from, it makes where you are now matter just a bit more and offers incentive to take it with you wherever you go.
I am a fourth-generation Durango family and certainly proud of my local heritage. Like the hiking trail I have traversed so many times over the years, I walk the same streets of this community today in the same footprints of my parents and grandparents and my children walk in mine. I find myself reminiscing more of the good ol’ days when Durango and the West in general were a little more wild, but like the leaves that fade from green to gold on the top of mountain trails, so do the streets fade from dirt to pavement. Progress is both the enemy and the comrade all in one.
Until June of 1924, Durango’s bustling streets were trodden in dirt and hitching posts stood where parking meters collect change of another sort today.
One hundred and one years ago, Durango was what we romanticize the West to be today. There is a difference between change and progress. One requires we take into account our surroundings and to take a stand on where we have come from, the other just changes what is at our feet like a magic tablecloth trick, where one moment you are standing in your dusty boots on Main Street and the next you are in dress shoes dining in bump outs.
There is a fine line between paving Main Street and sweeping history under the rug. The Durango I grew up in is disappearing before my eyes. We have turned our town into a storybook version of the mild West. Cowboys are a novelty or at best a convenience when city slickers need someone to show up and get the job done with both grit and guarantee. We have people running the city in big hats while the ranchers with all the cattle are being pushed out of their pastures.
Today, we have permitted gunfight reenactments to reminisce about the outlaws that once roamed the streets. We want what we can’t have and the irony is that we are the ones who got rid of it. In a duel of sorts, the past and the present seem to have taken 10 paces, turned and fired and we are left as the spectators wondering who to try and save?
But there should be room for newcomers and old-timers alike. It’s up to us all to keep Western heritage alive for the future. When you remember the past by telling stories and maintaining local traditions, it keeps the embers burning on the cowboy campfire, hot for the future.
Thinking back to my hike earlier in the month, instead of catching my breath it might be just as well to let it go, an exhale to intermingle with the cool breeze and float away. That way, stories of my history can linger on the breeze and hopefully land on the ears and hearts of newcomers to our community so they can realize the value in saving the heritage of not only Durango but the West as a whole.
I can no more catch and keep where I have been than my hold my own breath no matter how hard I try, but I can embrace progress and respect my heritage in a way that melds the two together. Maybe it’s not so much how the West was won but how we win by celebrating the West.
Jenny Johnston is a fourth generation local family, part-time rodeo announcer and full-time wrangler to two lil’ buckaroos.
