Denver

Once, I sat on a mountaintop just west of the city of Denver, Colorado. I had endured several long days of driving, and it was nice to sit in the grass on a quiet, sunny afternoon and look out over the city. My dog, Shadow, romped through a tree-filled meadow that looked more like a park than a wild mountain meadow. As the sun set behind me, I sat in grass and looked out across the High Plains a mile below me. I watched the shadows of the Rockies creep eastward until they covered the city. I sat there as dusk settled on the desert and the lights of the city came on. I sat there while darkness descended on the mountains and the desert below, and I watched as tens of thousands of stars that made up the constellation of Denver sparkled into luminosity like some great heavenly galaxy somehow brought to Earth. The sight was truly mesmerizing.

Far away, tiny points of light in the sky above Denver moved ever so slowly toward the ground, ever so slowly blending with and becoming lost in that maze of lights that was Denver. I knew what those tiny points of light really were. They were the landing lights on jet aircraft delivering planeloads of passengers into the Denver airport (Stapleton, now gone). I, in fact, had flown into that airport, had seen it from the perspective of a passenger riding one of those points of light. Now I was seeing it again from this most extraordinary vantage point.

I can never think of Denver without remembering how beautiful, how awesome, the city looked from that mountaintop, sparkling like a million jewels in the darkness of a warm summer night.