Illustration: Kevin Howdeshell/kevincredible.com
It’s always nice to write poems in praise of Rocky Mountain peaks and their orange and blue Denver Broncos’ colored sunsets. It’s nice for everybody back East, and down South, and in the Midwest and Texas to imagine us out here sprinting through purple glacial meadows, riding buffaloes bareback, and sipping Colorado sunshine by the pint.
But the truth is, for us city dwellers, those summit-topping days and epic rides that end in picture-perfect mountain towns really don’t happen nearly enough. Most afternoons we are lucky to even get out for a jog around the park. And it’s only thanks to dear old Henry Meryweather and America’s “City Beautiful” movement of the 1890s that Denver even has such beautiful parks.
It was Meryweather’s original design for City Park, envisioned as a kind of Central Park of the West, combined with a national quest for creating urban utopias that was sweeping the nation just before the turn of the last century, that first made way for all those lawns and trees and lakes to be planned and planted and built, and for the Natural History Museum and Denver Zoo to come into existence. That set the precedent for Washington, Cheesman and eventually Cranmer Park as well, and for a century now the entire city has been better for it.
Combined or alone, those parks certainly cover a lot of real estate. And with housing prices what they are along Monaco Parkway east of City Park (where Denver’s Governor John Hickenlooper lives and where present mayoral Candidates James Mejia and Chris Romer grew up), or in the Old South Gaylord neighborhood west of Washington Park, or anywhere around Cranmer or along 7th Avenue south of Cheesman, there’s no way a city today could ever raise the money to replicate even one of those projects.
Sure the parks have helped drive their local markets, and helped keep each neighborhood’s real estate rate pretty much recession-proof, but creating an urban upgrade on that kind of scale would never occur in this day and age. You’d have an easier time convincing voters that all that sweet-smelling smoke in the air at the next Widespread Panic show is strictly for medical use (I rest my case).
The truth of the matter is, unless you actually live in a mountain town, most days those beautiful (and still very white-capped!) mounds to the west just serve as a stunning backdrop to life. The average Elwayville resident spends a lot more of his week daydreaming about the high alpine than he does really enjoying its fresh-aired fruits. Which is one more reason why we’re so blessed to have those parks, because of the immediate contact—albeit manicured—with nature that they represent.
John Muir once wrote that, “In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world.” And with their geese and squirrels and presently blooming lilac bushes, I like to think of those parks as “wildness lite.” It’s on those great expanses of green grass where you can track down an incoming Frisbee whizzing from over your shoulder, nap beneath a tree or just stare out at all the beautiful bodies outdoors in motion and go somewhere far inside your head—all while being no more than a few blocks or miles from your house.
I wouldn’t go so far as to label that “hope” inducing, ala Muir’s stance on wildness, but it sure feels a hell of a lot better than sitting around the house. And my memories of soccer practice in the goose shit and rain at City Park growing up, the Pink Floyd laser light shows at the Planetarium, or learning how to sail a Laser sailboat on Washington Park lake are sure a lot clearer than any day I ever spent indoors playing Dungeons and Dragons (that’s right, I claimed it), or watching reruns of Starsky & Hutch.
In fact, for better and for worse, some of the clearest memories of my life are based in City Park—getting my finger bit by an ostrich at the zoo, or getting mugged by the Thatcher Fountain while walking home from high school both obviously getting registered in the “worse” department, while seeing Ted Shred, the first snowboarder I ever saw onscreen in a Dick Barrymore film at the old Phipps Auditorium that is now an Imax, or having my wedding reception upstairs in the museum near the polar bear and wolf dioramas, coming in under the heading of “better,” and “best.”
Of course there are dozens of parks I’m not even beginning to name—as big as Observatory or Crestmoor with its little sloping hills and tennis courts, or as small as W.H. Ferguson at 23rd and Dexter, which reduces Muir’s vision of wildness down to a playground and flower-strewn postage stamp. There are the parks named after foreign cities, or the little lakes they house which most out-of-staters see as nothing more than grand ponds, or named places or presidents that I imagine each have some special hold on the people who come to visit them, occupying a little acre of pastoral headspace.
I know that just crossing Colorado Boulevard and walking under the trees at the entrance of City Park, or clicking the dog’s leash for a Washington Park walk, makes me feel as if I am entering a better place. My heart seems to grow, and I smile and nod at the same people I probably cursed and saluted in traffic. I feel the breeze come through me until it becomes my breath, and I am swept up by a sense of community, space and place, as if someone had planned for so many of us to be so happy together all at once.
Of course they did. And of all the things I love about Denver, from my own range of memories to the timeless natural beauty to the way the seasons smell, the ideas that built those parks are one of the things that I love the best. •
Read excerpts from Peter Kray’s upcoming novel, The God of Skiing, at shredwhiteandblue.com.
