A Mountain in My Back Yard
Listen to Sun Dance
Western Expanse
At twenty-seven, on our first real vacation, I casually wished for a mountain in the backyard. A year later, a moving van carried us west, and we woke one morning in Utah surrounded by snow-capped peaks — the improbable made ordinary. Life, vocation, and time kept moving us across wide western spaces, until eventually retirement opened a quieter frontier: creativity.
While experimenting with music software, a small melody leapt upward — not climbing carefully, but vaulting into space. It felt like standing on the plains and suddenly seeing mountains rise. That sound became the heart of the piece: expanse first, then height, then the intimate life within the high country — flowers, birds, hidden valleys. Not conquest, not arrival, but presence.
Lewis and Clark believed the Rockies were a single barrier. Instead they found range after range, the land arguing with their expectations. The West was not a promise of ease but an unfolding reality, sustained by people like Sacagawea and shadowed by consequences no one yet understood. Eventually the rivers ran downhill toward the Pacific — not an ending, but another beginning.
Living among mountains taught me something different from triumph. I was not meant to stand on the summit but within the range, lifted simply by being there. Perhaps our role in this vast universe is not to master it but to notice it — to let beauty and scale register somewhere, even briefly, in a conscious mind.
I did not create the land or the music. Both were already there, sounding. Prairie and peak, quiet valley and sudden ascent, miles of nothing resolving into unexpected glory. The expanse asked nothing of me except stillness — long enough to perceive, long enough to say:
Yes. I see.
