by Amanda Gipson

My best friend insists that Grand Junction, Colorado—population 58,566 people—is a “middle-little” town. I say any place with three Walmarts, a Sonic that’s actually open, and a Best Buy that’s more than a sun-bleached shell is a metropolis. 

She pointed out the driver’s side window, gesturing to a horse trailer with a lovely roan horse inside. “Do you see horse trailers in actual cities, Amanda?”

 “All the time!” I do, actually, mostly because I only go to cities when lured there by livestock or the promise of a good dessert menu. Okay, I like museums too, and shopping, but in my mind, cities are for visiting. 

 “Alright, bad question.” My friend said. “Grand Junction isn’t a metropolis. It’s middle-little at best. Montrose is more horsey.”

 “Middle-little?”  I demanded, “What’s a mid-sized city to you? Manhattan? Beijing?”

I could never live there. I can’t breathe after a few days in Grand Junction. Montrose—population 19,132 last I checked—is hardly better. It has a Walmart, a Target, and two City Markets (one downtown—if a place has a downtown, why is this even a debate?), and a Safeway. 

She’s technically right, and I’m technically wrong. Google says so. But I know a city when I see it, and I know the sticks when I see it. There is nothing “smallish” about even the less populated Montrose, Colorado.

 “But on Teen Mom: Young and Pregnant Lexi is from Montrose, and—”

 “Teen Mom is not an argument for anything except safe sex!” I cried. “New rule. New rule. Teen Mom may not be invoked in rational debates.”

 “Who said you were rational?            

*          *          * 

I prefer to fly in to Salt Lake when I go visit my best friend. The flight might be longer and more expensive, but it’s routinely less crowded than similar flights to Newark from Denver or back again. The last time I flew home from Salt Lake, the flight crew was trying to entice economy passengers to pay on board to move up into the Economy Plus section. My paid-with-points upgrade snagged me an entire row to myself. 

Chiefly I like the drive because it’s a palette cleanser. By getting off I-70 and go on US-6, I get to stop at the Horse Canyon Rest Area in Utah. It’s near Woodside, a ghost town that was put up for sale for $4 million in 2012. In the 1930s, there was a filling station and café, boosted by the Highway Beautification Act that advertised the town geyser. These days, the geyser is weighed down with rocks and defaced by vandals. The buildings are derelict such that the site was used to film an explosion in Thelma and Louise.

When the railroad moved operations to Helper, Woodside died a slow death. Sometimes, when I’m outside on cracked pavement, I imagine what it must have been like for people to watch their town slowly dying in the shadow of a nuclear power plant because industry moved along.

But then again, I don’t have to imagine at all. I know. In fact, it’s all I know—right down to the routine nuclear alert drills and plastic wrapped pills in the cupboard. I grew up in the shadows of culm banks and crumbling collieries in a part of Pennsylvania that even the rest of Appalachia overlooks.

*          *          *

Cedaredge, Colorado—clear across the Rogers Mesa from Grand Junction—has a post office not too far from an accessible VRBO. When I went there after a six-month absence, the clerk smiled and came around the desk to help me with my box. “You’ve brought clothes to mail home, then?”

I smiled and told her I’d gone to the ARC thrift store in Grand Junction. Somehow, even across the country, I find myself searching for everything that I left behind in Pennsylvania—including the thrift stores in the nearest population center.

She laughed and said, “I always get lost in there.”

I once said I loved the Western Slope of Colorado because it’s so different from Northeastern Pennsylvania. Friends there think I have an accent. They sometimes say it sounds like I’m “singing when I talk.”

I think, somewhat romantically, that if that’s true, it’s only because my voice has been shaped by the rolling hills of northern Appalachia and not the jagged edges of canyons and cliffs.

Colorado might be different in the way the sun falls on my back. It might influence my sartorial leanings away from the black shoes, black tights, black skirt I uniformly rely upon as an adjunct toward brown and pastels—which honestly suit my coloring better. But at its core, the Western Slope and the Top of the ‘80s are really much the same—if you know where to go, if you know where to look, and if you know what you’re seeing: resilience.