Highway 72 snaked along the canyon floor beside Coal Creek. I pulled off at a turnout, stepped from my vehicle, and picked my way down the rocky embankment. Cars and trucks whizzed by above me, but the gush of tumbling water drowned the roar of their engines and the whine of their tires. A wellshaped creekside boulder offered me a seat. I breathed deep of the clear air, raised my face to the mid-April, midday sun. The first honest-to-goodness warmth I had felt since early October, since the sun had climbed high enough to clear the summits which towered overhead. My longest winter was coming to an end.

Unlike other Front Range drainages, Coal Creek runs full for only a couple of months. Its headwaters in Copperdale, Crescent Park, and the eastern slopes of Starr Peak and Thorodin Mountain include no reservoir. When all the snow has melted in its tributary draws, and when Colorado’s early summer rains have waned, Coal Creek slows to a trickle.

On that day, however, it roiled in mountain fresh glory. Water fanned across smooth chunks of granite and dressed their flanks in curtains of cascade. Bubbles shot to the surface in churning, tannic pools, then drifted apart and burst. Side-pocket eddies lapped the streambed’s gravel fringe, undulating to the beat of an underwater drum.

The winter from which I was struggling to emerge, the one I hoped would mark the end of an infamous year, had dragged on like no other. Since moving to Colorado, I have always visited warmer climes for at least a few weeks sometime between December and March. But not last year. For the first time in more than four decades - my entire adulthood - the pandemic of 2020 forced me to stay put for a complete cycle of seasons, 14 months and counting.

Yet as much as I appreciated my previous opportunities to travel - as an adjunct to my work, to visit family and friends, to explore places new and different a full year of hunkering down, and especially the recent winter, altered my perspective on all that to and fro. I found myself reluctant to “go back to normal,” to “get back out there.” Perhaps the limitations on social exposure suited my innate introversion and ingrained it even deeper. Or maybe the experience showed me how much time and energy I frittered away with busyness. All I know is I did not miss the stress which accompanies stimulation. Sheltering in place grew comfortable. It did not make me more productive or better informed, but neither did it diminish the value of each day, repetitive though they may have been.

Coal Creek, however, reminded me that sitting still is a luxury equal to that of movement. Spring run-off from the surrounding slopes of scree and ponderosa was going to find its way down sooner or later, inertia notwithstanding.

Layers of sound belied my first impression of a singular din. Slip, slap, and splash emanated from distinct sources, both upstream and down. Nowhere did the water rest, except briefly in chambers of narrow egress, walled in by huddled metamorphics: layered schist, wavy gneiss, milky quartzite. Everywhere else it scampered in an aerated hurry, like a regiment of soldiers on a downhill march, like a caravan of refugees on the run. Its course diverted every few feet, forever stopping and starting, yet its descent was never in doubt.

I asked myself, how do I experience tumult like that experienced by Coal Creek’s rushing flow? Do I curse my fate when knocked down again and again? Exasperated, do I cry, “Just give me a straight and steady path!” Or do I revel in the joyride of rapids, shouting in laughter, “Wait up! I’m coming!” as I scramble to my feet after each fall?

The jagged palisades looming aloft - Crescent Mountain to the north, Blue Mountain to the south - reminded me that the same presence which enfolds can also entrap. The walls I build may keep me safe from whatever lies beyond, but they keep me ignorant as well. And alone. They preclude possibilities of discovery and discourse.

Above the peaks, ragged puffs of white drifted across a powder blue scrim. Their vantage encompassed not only the canyon, but what lay to either side. They beckoned me upward to share their vision. I rose from my reverie, assured that every winter ends, and every spring Coal Creek will run. Even the spring of 2021.