About Platoro

It’s a cold evening in May. I spent the first twenty-three years of my life in Texas, a state where the summer begins in March, where a cold evening means the leaves have all died and a cloud might lurk forward in the night to blanket the land in frost. This weather in May would signal something dramatic: an ice age, a solar flare. May is a hot month, my body learned to know. It’s a hard thing to forget. I never lived in an altered climate but once a year. A summer week I spent since childhood in a cabin. This midyear chill, so normal to Portland where I now live, does not remind me of the difference from Texas, but Colorado I feel.

More images conjure up that cabin than I have room on my hands to count. These things since I was young have taken me back there: crimson paint; sharp blades of rock in the earth; any bridge; the jars with checkered lids that once held grape or strawberry jelly; pecans—and not because they fell there, but because when cracked, their husk releases that crisp gasp of air, that original oxygen of an old world. I think it’s easy to romanticize an isolated land. And that place where my grandparents have spent every summer for four decades, Platoro, the mixture of Spanish “gold” and “silver” to call a town where no one has lived permanently for a century, is certainly isolated. I romanticized it once, the first time I tried to write about Platoro. Was it dying? Has all the world changed? I wanted to know. Like everyone young I was desperate to assign meaning to a place. If it has meaning, now that years have passed I know I’m not wise enough to quite see it. I’m thinking instead about atrophy. I’m thinking about marmots and rainbow trout and stories of cannibalism and the sicknesses that neighbors, my aunt, my grandparents all displayed in the isolation of their cabins. What’s clear is that I’m mostly thinking about family, because if there’s a meaning to a place, it’s generational.

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I don’t know the year my grandparents bought their cabin, but I know they visited Platoro for at least a decade first. I asked my grandmother how they found the place. Her mother read an article, she told me: probably in the fifties. That lady, a great-grandmother I remember as a small woman with set hair and a pink robe, visited the town on her own volition. She lived in Lamar, Colorado, which is about four hours east of Alamosa—the nearest point of civilization to Platoro. It must’ve taken her seven hours all told, and when she returned, she called her daughters, my grandmother one of them, and said like a travel brochure they must go there.

My grandmother obeyed and brought with her, children: my father who grew wild with the place, my two aunts who fell in love in different ways with Platoro. It was a time when families bought a camping tent and joined the other families of the 1960s, becoming vacationeers of the road, the people who drove a thousand miles to see a geyser or the birthplace of a president. America had no churches from another millennium, no stone ruins from the Romans, the Goths, or Catholics. It had something better than Europe: endless distances, that attainment of escape. Platoro meant something those decades ago. It meant that industrialization had not touched everything. It meant that the soul could be reclaimed from car sales and real estate; for just a week it could return to the body as long as there were mountains.