One of my favorite photographs hangs in the Counselor area of our office, right behind my coworker’s desk. Its a favorite of mine not because of the grandeur or spectacle, but for the meaning the people in the photograph have.
Read MoreAquilegia
It sits about five miles east of the Rocky Mountain Front, on what used to be the edge of the high plains. Well removed from the bustle of Colorado’s largest city, it’s surrounded by homes and features that most of my contemporaries who grew up in suburban America in the 1990s would find familiar, maybe even comforting. Visually, there’s not much out of the ordinary when you look at it; it’s a building that looks like countless other high schools across the country. There’s no big sign, no arrow pointing at it, nothing that would draw your attention. And yet, we all know the name of this place, even those of us who grew up in states thousands of miles removed from it.
In an average travel season, I’ll visit well over 100 high schools across the United States. After a few travel seasons, they all start to blur together a bit. Sure, you’ll have your standouts - who could forget visiting a high school that has three seniors in its graduating class - but most of them fall into a cookie-cutter template and pattern. Scheduling a visit here, at least on the surface, was no different. The staff are as helpful as anywhere else. The students have the same stunningly fantastic diversity of interests, stories, hopes, and dreams. It is, for all intents and purposes, a normal high school in the Denver suburbs.
I was born in August of 1993, and grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, NY. Distance-wise, a long way from the suburbs of Denver, to be sure, but culturally not so different. I enjoyed the same safe, fostering community so many of the students there do. When April 20, 1999 appeared on the calendar, I was not yet six, and was just finishing kindergarten. At that age, and in that time, you didn’t hear about what happened on the news. Today, it’s not uncommon for kindergartners to wander around with cellphones; I wouldn’t get my first phone until nearly a decade later. We were too young to comprehend what had happened, and nobody was going to go out of their way to explain it to us. Too young. It wouldn’t be until several years later, approaching high school, that we learned about a place called Columbine.
The first time I heard the name Columbine was shortly after April 16, 2007, in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting. I was just finishing Eighth grade, and remember covering the topic briefly in journal assignments for my English class. We were discussing the abhorrent, unspeakable nature of what had occurred in Virginia, when our teacher mentioned the Columbine incident as a point of reference. While unquestionably more mature and more capable of processing the event, it’s still a big ask of a 13 year-old. A strange by-product of learning about and understanding an event is your state of mind and frame of reference at the time, and how it colors your view for years after. We learned that the Columbine victims were high-school aged, most between the ages of 15 and 18. To a 13 year-old, students of that age were very much seen as older, more mature, almost “adults” in a very naive sense. More on this later.
We didn’t talk about Columbine - or any other school shootings - throughout my time in high school very much. In fact, the years I spent at 1180 Delaware Avenue (2007-2011) were some of the “quietest” in recent memory, at least in terms of number of annual incidents. To be sure, they were happening - 13 alone in the year I graduated - but they were so far removed from our comfortable and privileged existence at one of Buffalo’s finest private schools. College was a different story. Incident rates began to climb. Sandy Hook happened in my sophomore year, opening up a new chapter of unspeakable horror on the general public. It was, for a time, harder to tune the incidents out, as media coverage ramped up drastically around each event, each time accompanied by the same debate, on repeat, about what to do, and how to confront the problem. Today, events seem to happen with such frequency that it’s easy to become emotionally numb to the news of "yet another school shooting.” If you step back and think about that statement critically for a moment, you may realize how far into the darkness we’ve wandered.
I started working for the university in the summer of 2015, and found myself back in the high school environment much sooner than I ever expected to be. From September to November, it’s not uncommon for me to visit four to six high schools, five days a week. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I’m sure I was thinking about the events that continued to happen, and those that had happened before. My contact was still limited; I had never experienced an active shooter incident myself, and God-willing never will. I was older, but even at 22, I don’t think I had fully grasped the reality and depth of so many of the situations. Five travel seasons, and a healthy dose of personal growth, has left me with a much-adjusted perspective at 26.
When I was assigned the Denver trip this fall, I knew I’d be visiting Columbine; it’s always been a school that’s been a strong performer for MSU. I knew that it would feel a bit strange visiting - how could it not? The name was seared into the collective consciousness as a benchmark, a turning point. I visited in early October, a busy time of year for a high school student by any measure. It was at this particular visit, and for several days after, that I think the full reality of the horror that had unfolded in April 1999 hit me. To be clear, I have not and will never pretend to understand the horror that those students, or any other student who has been involved in a mass shooting incident experiences. But for someone who has enjoyed a comfortable, privileged, and trauma-free life, it was a sobering realization.
I talked to a room of about 20 students for 45 minutes, comprised mostly of juniors and seniors. None of them were alive in 1999. Almost none of them have any tangible connection to the incident. They’re regular high school students, and have the same worries, hopes, trials, and tribulations as their peers at thousands of schools across the nation. The place itself is a normally-functioning high school; it has to be. The people lost on that day in April had to be remembered and honored, but life had to go on. For many, moving forward was the only way to heal. Looking around that exceedingly normal classroom, at those everyday high school students, really underscored one thing for me that I hadn’t understood fully.
I mentioned earlier how the age and mindset we hold when learning about an event colors our perception of it. I had, for years, envisioned the victims as older students, because that’s what they were to me when it happened. I’m now ten years their senior, and to look as a 26 year-old at a room full of students no older than 17 underscored how young those students lost in 1999 really were. How many things they hadn’t experienced yet; how many things I myself had gone on to experience that they never would. How painfully similar they were to the students sitting in front of me at that very moment, who are still so incredibly young, and have so much in front of them. As someone who doesn’t yet have children, it has been relatively easy to subconsciously disassociate with the horror of the death of students at the hands of a killer. It was in that moment that the collective experiences and interactions I had had with five years-worth of college-bound students brought that comfortable ignorance crashing down. It stayed on my mind with me for the rest of the day, for the rest of my trip in Colorado, and through the rest of this travel season.
I don’t have the answers, and I won’t pretend to. I don’t know how to stop these events. I don’t know the best way to have the conversations, the best way to help those who are lost, or the best way to help those who remain. Pouring my own thoughts and reflections onto this page was the best way for me to process what I’ve been sitting on for over a month. I know that the conversation that needs to happen is going to be a painful one for our country, and it’s been met with resistance every single time. 110 school shootings occurred in 2018. 2019 has seen 67 as of my writing this.
To have the conversation will be painful, but to not have it will prove fatal.
-MH
"I Guess He'd Rather Be In Colorado"
On occasion, it’s interesting to examine the alternative track your life could have taken, had you ended up somewhere else. Now, make no mistake: there’s absolutely nowhere else I’d rather be at this point in my life than where I am right now. Colorado, however, has always presented me with these opportunities every time I visit. You see, Colorado was the place where I first fell in love with the Rockies, and where I made up my mind that one day, some day, I was going to live out here.
One of the interesting things about the longer trips we take for our office is how immersed you get in the day-to-day happenings of the city you’re in. Two weeks in Denver, running from one school to another, really exposes you to all different aspects of life in the region - both good and bad. It’s not a vacation by any stretch of the imagination, and the Denver schedule is nothing to sneeze at, with five to six high school visits daily, and college fairs or receptions most evenings. It’s a fundamentally different experience that really gives you a bit of a taste of what living in the area might really be like. The last time I was able to spend this much time in the area was about a decade ago, in the summer of 2009.
At that point in my life, I was dead-set on going to school to become a volcanologist, little awkward nerd that I was (am). We figured that the summer heading into Junior year of high school was a good time to visit colleges, so we spent about a week in Colorado. The area had been on my radar for a few years at that point, after a visit to Denver in 2006 for a school trip. We ended up visiting three schools: Boulder, Mines (in Golden), and the University of Denver. Along the way, we zig-zagged across the Front Range, exploring places like Evergreen, Estes Park, Georgetown, and more. For a kid who grew up in the forested flatlands around the Great Lakes, the experience was nearly indescribable. The biggest mountains I’d ever seen were the rolling, forested peaks of the Adirondacks in New York, and the Appalachians in the Virginias. To see rugged cliff faces towering thousands of feet above the railroad tracks (yes, of course we had to stop and see the trains, are you surprised?) or to see fresh snow in June at 11,000 feet was amazing, and cemented a feeling that had been growing for many years, since that visit in 2006, and a trip through Yellowstone in 2007. Here was a place so fundamentally different from what I had experienced, a place so big, and clean, and full of opportunity and promise in a way that the Eastern states had never felt for me.
Life has an uncanny ability to present some interesting twists and turns along the way. Not long after this trip, a state school in Montana landed on my radar almost accidentally, and the rest is history. Montana stole my heart, and I made a home in the Northern Rockies over the course of four years in college. In an interesting twist, it was Montana State that made my return trips to Colorado over the years possible, first for a documentary on women’s fertility, then for recruitment trips as a counselor. In fact, this job has taken me to the places of Colorado I had longed to visit for so many years: the high mountain towns of Aspen, Telluride, Ouray, Silverton, Durango, and many more. This particular trip to Denver, however, was special. It was a new travel territory for me, which came with its own excitement and challenges. It also gave me a chance to revisit those old memories from a new, matured perspective.
Walking through the campuses in Boulder, Golden, and Denver was incredibly refreshing. You’d think that college campuses wouldn’t seem all that unique after living and working on one for eight years. These ones, however, hold a special place in my heart. Being able to look around the arboretum at DU, or Pearl Street in Boulder and see those places my mom and I had experienced for the first time all those years ago provided many things to reflect on. Ten years isn’t a massive chunk of time by most measurements, but the growth that happens in people from 16 to 26 is (hopefully) immeasurable. To see students who are just entering this phase in their own lives, and the creation of their own experiences on these campuses was also touching. I see and live experiences like that every day, but to see them away from “home base” in Bozeman strikes a bit of a different and more poignant chord. Having opportunities to visit some of the old places we had explored, like Georgetown and Evergreen, was also a positive experience. Being able to think back to those earlier emotions, and what it felt like to experience them for the first time, left me feeling refreshed and with a new sense of clarity.
Ultimately, two weeks in Denver both exhausted and rejuvenated me. By the time I dragged myself onto a Delta flight to Anchorage by way of Seattle, I was ready to be back in my own bed; the trip is a marathon by any standard. That being said, the opportunity to re-visit an earlier chapter in my life, and experience the place through new eyes, was one I wouldn’t have traded for anything. Until next time, Colorado.
-MH
I Guess He’d Rather Be In Colorado - John Denver
On Life's Turns
For those of us lucky enough to live in Southwest Montana, there’s no shortage of outdoor adventure locations awaiting exploration. That’s why, if you tell anybody who lives here you’re going to spend a day in Yellowstone in August, you’ll get at least a few raised eyebrows and a lot of responses that inevitably involve the word “really?” See, summer is Yellowstone’s most popular season, with hordes of tourists visiting non-stop from June through September. Roads are busy, boardwalks cramped, shops overrun. It’s not exactly a Bozemanite’s definition of summer fun. Most of us prefer to visit in the off-season, when we essentially have the place to ourselves. But for me, there’s a special connection to America’s first national park that is best appreciated in the summer months.
My first encounter with Yellowstone occurred 12 years ago, in late July and early August of 2007. I took a two week trip through Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and on to Seattle with my grandmother. The trip was a birthday present for me that year, and a graduation gift prior to starting high school. In retrospect, I had a shocking amount of exploratory freedom on that trip, and it’s a small miracle I didn’t end up boiled in a thermal pool or falling off a cliff into the canyon. Yellowstone had been on my mind for at least two years at that point, after a middle school trip to Denver for a science bowl competition (I was the coolest kid in middle school). At the time, I was planning to study geology when I got to college, and Yellowstone had captured my imagination with all of its surreal landscapes.
On our way to Seattle, we drove out of Yellowstone via the west entrance and up U.S. 191 through the Gallatin Canyon. About 90 miles from the park, 191 intersects with Interstate 90, which we took all the way out to Seattle. At that intersection, you’ll find a little town named Belgrade, a bedroom community about eight miles down 90 from the regional hub, Bozeman. By most measurements, Bozeman is a pretty small American city, with a population of about 60,000 in the surrounding area. I’d heard the name in a few made-for-tv Yellowstone docs (again, really cool kid), but hadn’t given it much of a thought. It hadn’t really registered on my list of places to see, and quickly faded from memory.
Fast-forward a few years to the midpoint of my time in high school. It’s that time in your life when your guidance counselor and parent begin to really push the college search process, and you start getting inundated with mail from different schools. At this point, Yellowstone and geology were still at the top of my list. Schools in Colorado and Utah were my first choices, with a career at the United States Geologic Survey and Yellowstone Volcano Observatory glimmering in the distance. It all seemed to make perfect sense, except for one small problem: my woefully inadequate abilities in math, chemistry, and biology. The first two are especially important in the field of geology and volcanology, and so my counselor, in the gentle but firm way that they do, had some conversations with me about what other fields might be of interest. Was there anything else that I was really passionate about? The only thing that really came to mind was film making and photography, both of which had filled a bit of a niche hobby role for me since starting high school. Armed with a theoretically viable academic alternative, we began to re-examine schools on my list.
One of the first things we did was to cull any schools that just didn’t make sense anymore. Colorado School of Mines in Golden? Phenomenal place, and a beautiful campus (I still have a hat I got on a campus visit. Still cool, right?). But for anyone not planning on entering the earth science disciplines, it didn’t make much sense. Around this same time, I had started receiving publications and email from some random state university in Montana (thanks, ACT!). I’d never heard of Montana State University, but the name of the town it was located in - Bozeman - vaguely rang a bell. Hadn’t we been close to there in 2007? We were ready to write them off the list too, as their claim to fame on all their publications was their status as a “top-tier research university” offering majors in the STEM fields. Again, great options, but not really what I was looking for anymore. Closer examination of the materials, however, revealed something I had missed on my first read-through; an undergraduate film and photography program, with a graduate program in science and natural history film making. Huh.
MSU inevitably ended up at the top of my list by the time senior year rolled around. It was the size I was looking for, in a college town, in the Rockies, and close to Yellowstone. It checked literally all of the boxes. I applied to eight schools that year, but really only cared about my application to one. Once I was admitted, I was lucky enough to benefit from parents who were supportive of my choice and had planned with college savings, which let me attend a school outside of New York. I was something of an odd man out among my classmates; we ran the gamut from prestigious Ivy League schools down to smaller state colleges, but almost everyone stayed west of the Mississippi. If I recall correctly, my closest classmate was roughly 1,200 miles away. Oh, and did I mention we never did a campus visit to MSU? Timing just wasn’t on our side senior year. In August of 2011, after what felt like the slowest months of my life at the time, we packed up my things and headed out to Bozeman.
While I had been to Yellowstone four years previously, my parents and brother never had been, so we flew into Jackson and did a compressed “greatest hits” version of the Grand Teton and Yellowstone tour for a few days prior to driving up to Bozeman and moving in to campus for freshman year. It was refreshing to visit the place after what had felt like a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and to share it with other people close to me who never had. Coincidentally, this trip also lined up with my birthday again. It was a stressful and emotional time, since I was the first kid to go off to college, but a good one nevertheless. Once we wrapped up the trip, we unpacked a few boxes into a cinder block-walled room on the MSU campus; the place I was going to call home for the next nine-ish months. It wasn’t until we got to this moment - this inflection point - when my parents and brother were leaving, that I really felt the gravity of my decision; I was going to school 2,000 miles from home in a community that I had never visited and where I knew nobody. I’d never been one to be homesick up until that point, but boy did I feel it during those first few weeks. And if you’re thinking that the suburban kid from Western New York stuck out in Montana like a sore thumb, yes, you’d be correct. But I wasn’t alone.
A running joke in Bozeman these days is that no one is from here. While that’s obviously not true, there are in fact plenty of people here who transplanted from somewhere else. Bozeman and Gallatin County are some of the fastest growing places in the entire country. Roughly half of the MSU freshman class is from out-of-state. It’s a community that really has become a bit of a melting pot, mixing people who’ve lived here all their lives with people who came here looking for something different from where they grew up. It’s also, quite fortunately, a community that by and large is supportive of those people who come here looking. People may grumble about traffic and construction, but the hospitality this community and state are known for is extended to everyone, whether they came from 20 minutes up the highway, or 20 hours across the country. In that sense, then, Bozeman was the perfect place for me to end up going to college. It’s a community that supported and nurtured me through those formative college years, and that I put roots down in with equal gusto. It held on tight and didn’t let go, and I returned that embrace, to the point that when graduation rolled around in 2015, I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. I took a job with the Admissions Office for what I thought would be a year; that was four years ago as of June, and I’m not planning to go anywhere at this point. It was what you might consider a “hard left turn” away from my academic interests in college, but has provided an incredibly rewarding career working with students, many of whom are grappling with their interests and journeys in much the same way I did.
This story then, is what maintains such a strong connection for me with America’s first national park. I don’t think there’s any doubt that I would have visited Yellowstone eventually, even if we hadn’t made it out in 2007. Visiting when I did, however, molded in a very real sense the path I would take through high school, college, and beyond. If Yellowstone hadn’t been front of mind for me, there’s a very good chance I wouldn’t have been looking at schools in the west, and that Bozeman and MSU wouldn’t have registered on my radar. The community I know and love, and the people I’ve had the privilege of connecting with here, have had an indelible effect on my life in an extraordinarily positive way. Now, that’s not to say that I wouldn’t have had similar experiences somewhere else, but I firmly believe the experiences I have had here were meant for me in a way no others could have been. And this is why, each year on or around my birthday, I make a point of spending a day or two in Yellowstone, to say thank you to the place that has, directly and indirectly, given so much to me.
-MH
150 Years
Yesterday, July 20, 2019, marked 50 years since man first walked on the moon. Sheer willpower, dedicated teams consisting of hundreds of thousands of individuals, and cubic dollars made this feat of human engineering possible. I wasn’t there to witness the spectacle 50 years ago, but watching the celebrations and commemorations still brought many emotions to the surface. It also reminded me of another feat of human engineering, one whose 150th anniversary was celebrated just back in May, and whose anniversary celebration I was fortunate enough to witness in person.
Promontory, Utah is one of those places almost every American learns about in school, but precious few actually visit. It occupies a lonely stretch of high desert and range land about 90 driving miles northwest of Salt Lake City. Looking at it on a map, it’s easy to miss; just a few scattered buildings, a parking lot, and a few lines etched out across the ground. It’s an unlikely place to be named the most sacred location in American railroad history. You’ll find grander places in Chicago or New York, or more impressive grades in California and Colorado. Still, Promontory’s position in the history books is unmatched.
When the first transcontinental railroad was completed on May 10, 1869, the trajectory of a nation, a people, and a continent was changed irrevocably. Six long years after ground was officially broken, California was bound to the rest of the recently war-torn country by two narrow and often shoddily-constructed strips of iron and steel. Completion of the line presented what can only amount to a quantum leap in transportation opportunities for westward pioneers. Trips that had taken months in a wagon caravan with no real guarantee of safe arrival could now be completed in a week, a game-changer for pioneers migrating west to newly-opened territories.
The railroad also fundamentally disrupted and destroyed the lives of America’s first peoples. As more settlers migrated westward, they encroached on Native American lands, sparking conflict among those who the land rightfully belonged to, and those who believed it their “manifest destiny” to settle all lands from Atlantic to Pacific. Tensions continued to escalate between the United States and tribes, culminating in the American Indian Wars which did not see real closure until over thirty years after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, stretching into the early 20th century. By that time, the American frontier was officially considered “settled,” and the face of the west had shifted dramatically.
Americans did not become especially sentimental and protective of their physical achievements until relatively recently. Historic preservation of structures and locations was depressingly lacking through the 1960s. In fact, the loss of another prominent railroad landmark, New York City’s dramatic Penn Station, in 1963 is widely credited with galvanizing the historic preservation community and shifting public perception regarding preservation and history. Promontory itself quickly slipped back into obscurity after the 1869 celebration. A sizable portion of the original line, including the site at Promontory, was actually scrapped in 1942 for the war effort.
Only in 1965 did the location receive protection as a National Historic Site, with tracks and facilities hastily returned in time for the 1969 centennial. A decade later, at the close of the 1970s, the National Parks Service commissioned replicas of the Jupiter and No. 119, the original locomotives seen in the iconic completion photos from 1869. The originals had themselves been lost to time and progress, both scrapped by the early 1900s. Though antiquated and considered “quaint” and obsolete by modern standards, they represent the “high tech” of their age, resplendent in brass appurtenances and bright, colorful paints - a far cry from modern railroading and its ruthless quest toward efficiency.
By the height of the space race, railroads no longer held a prominent place in the minds of most Americans. Once considered glamorous modes of transportation, they could no longer compete with faster airline travel, and the more autonomous automobile. As space flight reached its pinnacle achievement a quarter of a million miles from home, the Northeast’s largest railroad was filing for what was at the time the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Though freight business began to rebound by the 1980s and into today, passenger trains never really did. Today, for most Americans, railroads are interacted with at grade crossings, and then usually not positively - they always seems to show up when one is running late. Still, for some, there’s a deeper connection that takes hold. I happen to be one of those people.
I was born far too late to see steam in revenue service. By the time Neil and Buzz landed on the moon in 1969, mainline steam locomotives in the U.S. had been gone for nearly a decade. Our country experienced what many call the first great wave of mainline steam preservation excursions in the 1980s - and still I missed it. My first interaction with a steam locomotive happened in 1996, when I was three. Hundreds of people in my little town lined the rails to welcome a bit of the past to the present.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a stranger bunch, camped out for hours along deserted railroad mainlines, or poking around dark and dusty corners of museums filled with giants long since silenced. Everyone has a hobby; for me, this is it. I’ve lived in Montana for eight years, enjoying all the region has to offer, both railroad-related and otherwise. Conveniently, Promontory is only about a six hour drive from my house in Bozeman, so when I saw the opportunity for a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I pounced. On May 8th, 2019, I set out for what can only be described as the biggest party in American railroading this side of the century mark.
Utah itself is no stranger to railroads; Union Pacific, one of the companies that built the original transcontinental line, has a sizeable presence in the state. There’s a prominent railroad museum in Ogden, and several shortline and heritage lines can be found scattered throughout the region. I knew I wouldn’t be alone in heading to Utah, but the sheer number of people that showed up for the celebration still boggles the mind - by some counts, over 50,000 people showed up in Promontory and Ogden. For perspective, Golden Spike National Historic Site in Promontory receives around 40,000 visitors annually. Union Pacific also decided to get in on the fun, bringing vintage passenger locomotive No. 844 and freshly-restored “Big Boy” No. 4014, the largest steam locomotive ever built, out for the show. It was an exhausting but exhilarating four days, and for me reaffirmed the awe and admiration I first felt for these marvels of engineering 23 years ago. It also proved that history, and appreciation for it, is still alive and well.
So now we circle back to the present, just over two months later. The fact that two prominent events in history occurred 100 years apart was not lost on me yesterday. In many ways, they share similar situations. Neil Amrstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins set out for a place that’s about as remote as you can get in this corner of our solar neighborhood. For the men who built the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the desolate deserts and plains of the western U.S., nearly devoid of any life, must have felt equally as distant from the comforts of civilization and country. Both were considered the premier technical achievements of their day, and both celebrations left and indelible mark on the people who experienced them, and the people who came after.
One hundred years before the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory, the American frontier did not extend beyond the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. One hundred years later, the first humans walked on a celestial body 250,000 miles from Earth. Where will we be 100 years after that feat of human willpower? I’m not sure, but I hope I’m there to see it.
-M