For 20 years, I worked at Men’s Health Magazine. Every January our coverlines would scream New Year, New You as some grinning ectomorph would hold up his shirt, showing off his impossible six-pack.
Envy, guilt, and shame are the big three in year-end commerce. That issue was an annual bestseller, stoking unrealistic hopes in 20 million men around the world. All or just $7.99! But here’s the truth: that issue lightened more wallets than waistlines.
Meanwhile, back at my house, I made my annual New Year’s resolution as well. This year, I would tell my wife, I will accept myself more fully as I am. Her annual eye-roll was as predictable as the ball drop in Times Square.
New Year’s Eve is my least favorite holiday. It’s typically a celebration of excess, and an excuse to blame alcohol when you kiss somebody else’s wife, by mistake, at midnight. Well, I want exclusive rights to kissing my wife. So now that we live in Colorado, we skip the parties, and flip the calendar in a lonely house high above Estes Park, where the winds howl and the snow flies.
If that sounds like a Stephen King novel, you’re not far off. After all, I’m a writer, and my wife is a sensible human being.
Jack Torrance, the protagonist of King’s novel The Shining, had it right when he wrote, and wrote, and wrote, that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
But Jack’s type of play included axes and elevators full of blood. So no thank you. Instead, we cork the alcohol and stare out at the view.
And that’s where I find the perfect antidote to resolutions, the sixpack I don’t have, and New Year’s Eve.
This particular house has been in a friend’s family for decades. Their dad built it to escape his career in the auto industry. All around, there’s evidence of his growing family. The kids who sprout, photo by photo. The Crayola artwork, lovingly framed. The reunion snapshots which now include the living and the dead.
My favorite photos are tucked behind the Rocky Mountain flower guides in the living room. They were taken in the pre-digital era, and their subject is so big it requires two photos taped together.
They show the majestic sweep of the Continental Divide, soaring above the valley below. Above the horizon are the handwritten names of each mountain in the line. Of course, now I have an iPhone app that can tell me all that. But I prefer the physical photos, and each time we go to that house I memorize the peaks.
From south to north, the ridge goes like this: Mummy, Fairchild, Ypsilon, Chiquita, Chapin, Sundance, Stones, Sprague, Tera Tomah, Gabletop, Knobtop, Flattop, Hallet, Otis, and — wait, I got it —Taylor! I study the ridge until I can recite the mountains south to north, and then north to south. It’s my mantra of permanence in a topsy turvy world. Yes, the view was altered by the East Troublesome Fire. But nature bears her scars with patience.
And so I ground myself in that mountain range at the turn of every year. The more my life changes, and the world changes around me, the more this ridge stays the same.
When time’s treadmill delivers a new year, with its inevitable joys and sorrows, I take refuge in a long view. The ridge was beautiful last year, it is beautiful now, and it will be beautiful when I’m not around to look at it.
Happy New year, Everyone. Same as the old year. And I’m at peace with that.
