Howdy

A travel essay from New Mexico

At nine thousand feet the air is thin enough to hear yourself think for the first time in years.

I had driven all day through the canyon past the fry bread women and the water gentleman who watched me punch on the bread and laughed, past the Pueblo that held a thousand years of sorrow in its mud walls and its silences, past Taos with its galleries and its noise, up into the Carson National Forest where the spruce trees grew so tall and serious they seemed to be listening for something I had not yet said.

I parked and walked the final loop alone.

Chipmunks raced ahead of me like small anxieties I had not been able to outpace all year. A turkey walked beside me for a while, unbothered, the way certain companions are unbothered, the way I have always wanted to be. Dogs called out from somewhere in the trees. Campers waved. The mountain held its breath.

Then at the top of a rise in the road I saw him coming.

Gray-haired. Lean. Late seventies at a generous estimate. Walking with music I could not hear and a stick worn smooth by years of this, hat in hand, the very picture of a man who had already made every peace worth making.

Before I could speak he gestured toward me and said:

Howdy.

Just that. As if we had agreed on it. As if the whole mountain had been waiting for someone to say the obvious thing.

My echo was that of his younger self.

We shared a smile and followed our feet in opposite directions, and I did not look back because some moments are complete the way a door is complete when it closes, not with finality but with the soft click of a thing that has found its place.

I returned to my campsite. The scent of spruce rode along a gentle breeze that rolled down the mountain as if it had somewhere to be and was in no hurry.

I sat under a blue spruce and read the last mass market copy of a book I had not planned to buy and did not need to finish tonight and could not put down.

The camper behind me had too much space for one person.

I had known this since Covington. I had known it at Caddo Lake and Palo Duro and the Rio Grande and Taos Pueblo and every campfire I had eaten alone beside not because I was lonely but because loneliness and solitude are not the same country and I was finally learning the difference.

Something in me had started, an emotion like longing or like longing’s quieter cousin, not homesickness because I felt at home here, but the particular ache of missing people you love while being exactly where you need to be.

These are not contradictions.

I had been a man of action. Task-oriented. Goal-driven. A list-maker and an early riser and a person who believed that stillness was something you earned by finishing everything first.

But I had not finished everything. I would not finish everything. The list would outlive me if I let it, and I was learning, here at nine thousand feet in the thin sweet air of the Carson National Forest, to let it.

My reading glasses were found. All of them. Wildly different styles, belonging to no particular version of me, suggesting instead that I was several versions simultaneously and had stopped apologizing for it.

My clothes were mostly thrifted. Piecemeal armor.

And I was finding, in the last light of a day that had given me more than I deserved, a new comfort in this skin.

The stars came out slowly, impatient for the sun to finish, hovering at the edge of visibility the way good things hover when they know you need them but won’t force the moment.

I watched them arrive.

I thought about the old man. The hat in his hand. The stick worn smooth. The music I could not hear.

He gave me a glimpse into how I may yet live.

Not perfectly. Not without ache. Not in some cleaned-up version of the story where everything resolves and everyone is satisfied and the drive home is easy.

But like that.

Walking with music. Hat in hand. Worn smooth by years of this.

Speaking first.

Howdy.

As if we had agreed on it. As if the mountain were listening. As if the answer had been waiting at the top of the rise the whole time, patient as spruce, simple as a greeting, free.

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Ferdinand Dispersed Campground, Carson National Forest Angel Fire, New Mexico, 9,000 feet July 11, 2026

Photo by Stephanie Klepacki on Unsplash