Quietude

Quietude: a state of stillness, calmness, and quiet in a person or place.*

Rural living provides a natural setting of quietude, where people live so that they, themselves, may be imbued with quietude.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s what I’ll try to show you on this website.

Having lived most of a decade in the city of Colorado Springs followed by a year or two in metropolitan Denver, half a year outside of Steamboat Springs where I could snowshoe, cross-country ski, and mountain bike just outside the door, and then a few weeks on the Oregon Trail working my way across Wyoming on a wagon train, the call to return to country life became too clear for me to ignore. After receiving a new job offer in Colorado Springs and finding a place to rent there, I purchased unimproved land off the grid and began life as a parttime pioneer.

For the first five years, I drove back and forth between Colorado Springs and my land almost daily. I put up cross fences, purchased lumber and used hand tools to build a barn, planted hundreds of windbreak seedlings, purchased a heifer and a steer, and moved my horses out to the property. I added a small shed that I built myself (again, with lumber and hand tools), had a well drilled and a generator-powered pump installed. I installed so much tubing for drip irrigation that I got tennis elbow from tightening hose clamps.

The hustle and bustle of city noise and life, along with the job in Colorado Springs, created tension and stress. On the drive to my place after work each day, jarred and jangled nerves relaxed at the half-way point where remaining commuters turned off the road, leaving open fields spreading to the horizon and a broad blue sky above the crest of the next hill. By the time pavement, traffic, powerlines, and people were left behind and I opened my gate, I found my quietude – even if I was there to work on a construction or planting project. In summer, the sweet scent of sand verbena wafted up from beside the stock pond in welcome.

For some months, as evening came on after sunset, I sat on a chunk of old tree trunk out in the field and gazed up at the Hale-Bopp comet with its resplendent green tail, and relaxed in contentment over having accomplished the day’s ranch tasks. Across the fields, horned larks nestled in with their soft tinkling calls of “goodnight.” Now, there’s the pinnacle of Quietude.

A couple of years later, I lost my job and moved into an old mobile home I had bought as inexpensive storage space. There, the dogs and livestock and I shared daily life until I found a new job toward the end of the year. A few years later, I had power run to the property and got a regular house. What used to feel like the middle of nowhere gradually came to feel like simply rural ranch country. But the northwest portion of the naturally pristine horizons that had always provided great photo ops for mountains and sunsets became cluttered with industrial wind turbines and their ever-flashing red lights at night. This year, more have spread eastward, those overly tall edifices stand 20 miles away and more, yet their ungainly heads with interminably blinking red eyes poke above the north and northeastern horizons. Those directions no longer provide opportunities for enjoying a summer sunrise or evening sunset photo op.

Now, here we are a couple of days after I explained to the county commissioners and Xcel Energy representatives that the claim of transmission lines’ snap, crackle, and pop sounds blending in with background noise doesn’t apply here because our ambient “background noise” is almost entirely either silence or birdsong.

*Oxford Languages Dictionary definition