I have just returned from a week in Fort Collins, Colorado, visiting Sara’s family and sharing in their celebration of Nora’s graduation from Rocky Mountain High School and Ian’s official introduction into adulthood.
The coincidence of the McCance children all attending Rocky Mountain High School and John Denver’s classic song, “Rocky Mountain High” is too great to be ignored. I have been a Denver fan for many years, and this song has always typified Colorado for me. “I have seen it raining fire from the sky” and “climbed cathedral mountains” make it a natural to be the state’s official song. Turns out he wrote the song two years before the high school was constructed in 1973.
Jim and Sara came out here in 1994 when Sara enrolled in a doctoral program in wildlife ecology at Colorado State. They originally lived in an apartment in La Porte, a tiny village on the northwest outskirts of Fort Collins. My wife and I visited them and were immediately enthralled with the foothills environment at the mouth of Cache la Poudre Canyon. After Sara completed her degree, she took a job with a USGS conservation lab on the campus of Denver University. They then moved to Elizabeth, a small town southeast of Denver, on the prairie.
This was a different environment, one that appealed to my lifelong desire to be a cowboy. From their back porch one could see a corral with horses in the foreground, and Pike’s Peak off in the distance. A few years later, 2004, they moved to Lakewood, a pleasant western suburb of Denver, so Sara could be closer to her lab. In 2010 USGS decided to relocate the lab in Fort Collins as part of a larger facility, and the family moved to their present home.
Fort Collins dates back to Civil War days when it was established to protect the Overland Stage Trail, the principal route west prior to the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. It is a prosperous city today, anchoring the north end of the Foothills metropolitan district that runs south through Denver to Pueblo.
One day Sara took me for a long drive up the Cache la Poudre Canyon, on Colorado Route 14, through spectacular scenery. Route 14 winds through the northern Colorado mountains all the way to the village of Walden, before terminating at an intersection with U. S Route 40, near Steamboat Springs. We went as far as Cameron Summit (10,200 feet above sea level), then retraced our route about halfway before turning south on Risk Canyon Road and following it back to La Porte.
Much of the drive we were on the northern edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. We were well above the snow line (perhaps 9,000 feet this time of year) at the summit. It was obvious that snowmelt has greatly affected flow in the river. We saw a few adventurous kayakers and a number of parties in rubber rafts. The Cache la Poudre River is the only federally designated Wild and Scenic river in Colorado. It also is a popular trout fishery. One of Sara’s colleagues is involved in a project attempting to re-introduce native Cutthroat trout into the Cache la Poudre, replacing the non-native brook trout currently there.
Nora’s Commencement program was properly impressive. It was held at Moby Arena, an event center that can squeeze in 8,000 fans for basketball. For this occasion the bleachers were collapsed, providing plenty of room on the main floor for the large graduating class (reported to be 466 strong), as well as the concert band and combined choral groups. The appreciative audience appeared to number three or four thousand.
As Senior Class President, Nora gave the Student Presentation on behalf of her classmates. She was remarkably poised, confident, and completely natural in her presentation, despite claiming to be nervous. I can attest to the fact that her family was nervous enough on her behalf and immensely proud of her afterwards. Nora’s next several weekends will be dominated with graduation parties. She will matriculate at Oregon State University in Corvallis in the Fall, studying Environmental Sciences.
I was pleased that the ceremony recognized each graduate individually, announcing his/her name, and presenting the proper diploma as he/she reached the podium and was prominently featured on the Jumbotron at the center of mid-court. I have attended far too many Commencements where masses of students were simultaneously declared graduated and permitted to transfer their tassels from one side to another.
Monday evening we celebrated Ian’s twenty-first birthday with a dinner at the Union Bar and Soda Shop in “Old Town”, Fort Collins’ historic downtown neighborhood. He is an impressive young man, looking forward to his Senior year at the University of Colorado in Boulder where he is pursuing a degree in Theater in their Fine Arts Program. This summer he will serve as an intern in a local community theater organization, working with middle and high school students on productions of “The Little Mermaid”. As a CU football fan he is excited about the revival of their program under new “Coach Prime” Deion Sanders.
Claire is busy finishing up ninth grade, stressed out studying for her final exams. She is a delightful young lady, full of interest in a wide variety of things and eager to follow in the footsteps of her siblings. Like Nora, she is interested in student government; like Ian she is looking forward to performing in the school musical play this Fall; and all her own, she is a happy member of several choral groups.
I am truly grateful to be able to make a trip of this magnitude at this stage of my life. My return home brought back John Denver for an encore. To paraphrase him, “Gee, it’s great to be back home again. Sometimes this old house seems like a long-lost friend.” So true. People make a house a home; memories preserve it.