crush

crush (n):

- according to Miriam Webster: "an intense and usually passing infatuation"

- according to Urban Dictionary: "a burning desire to be with someone who you find very attractive and extremely special"

Of the two definitions, I’m in the second one’s camp. I’ve never understood why crushes should be fleeting; to me, there’s nothing necessarily temporal about the feeling they embody of being smitten based on a shallow depth of interaction.

I got my long-standing crush on the state I’m now in the second or third time I visited. My first trip, my parents purport, was when I was four; I remember so much from that epic cross-country road trip (Anasazi ruins in Arizona; big horn sheep, bison, and Old Faithful in Yellowstone; coyotes and gold-mining in California; Canon Beach in Oregon; a Redwood forest; banana slugs in a backyard in Seattle) but nothing specific to New Mexico. The next time I came I was 16; to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, my grandparents decided to bring all their children and grandchildren to Durango, Colorado to spend one July week on a dude ranch (which felt a lot like summer camp for grown-ups and very unlike my grandparents, but we had a good time and my grandparents still enjoy wearing the “fifty years of fission and fusion” t-shirts my aunt made for the event). My mom decided that we should fly into Santa Fe and drive to the ranch so we could see a bit of the place where my grandparents began their marriage. We drove to Los Alamos straight away and visited Bandelier National Monument, which we enjoyed until we reached our next stop—its much more impressive Colorado counterpart, Mesa Verde. I don’t remember whether that short touchdown in New Mexico was enough to breed a crush, but two years later, my next visit certainly was.

I had just graduated from high school and was mentally preparing to head off to college. First, though, I had the immense pleasure of taking one last outing with the outdoor education program that my high school required all freshmen to participate in and that, after loving it myself as a ninth grader, I was thrilled to work for as an instructor over the next three years of high school. Each six-week session, I ran a group of 12 freshmen through trust-building games, low and high ropes courses, caving, bouldering, hiking, and camping. Periodically, the director whisked the small group of instructors away on staff training trips. My first one—a weekend trip to a different part of north Georgia than the one we took freshmen to—had been earlier that year, and my co-instructor and childhood friend Hayden and I had gotten to do all the planning for it. We’d had a great time packing supplies and managing the sophomore instructors who came—and were thus pumped at the opportunity to spend more than a week with them in New Mexico just after we’d graduated. The group of us drove there in two vans, with me somehow managing to be the only girl in mine, which means I suffered a lot of taunting when I had to go to the bathroom every two hours on our three-day camp-and-drive; but it was loving taunting, and I had a van-full of favorite guys by the time we finally arrived in Santa Fe and drove up to 8,000 feet to start a backpacking trip through the Pecos Wilderness in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The hike was phenomenal; for six days, we saw no other humans—only the mountain goats on whose trails we trekked, elk, marmots, and a herd of big horn sheep. We hiked through incredibly varied flora, from alpine-like meadows to conifer forests to the rugged rock of North Truchas Peak, whose small summit we stood on and stared out, learning what it means to be at 13,100 feet. This was in 1995; 53 years earlier, my grandparents had stood in that same spot as 23-and-24-year-old scientists taking a break from their work on the Manhattan Project. From the view I had there, the journey I’d taken to reach it, I deeply understood why they had grown so fond of this state.

The last few days of that trip included a quick visit to Taos (where I’m writing this now) to raft down the Rio Grande—which was slow-flowing and gentle enough that all of us, nine days dirty, immediately rolled out of the rafts and floated downstream in hopes of getting clean—and the return trip. Along the way we passed through the low-rider capital of the state, near which we saw a Fiesta Parade that plays a seminal role in this novella I’ve been trying to sort out. Those encounters were brief, but they intrigued me. A definite crush began to flourish. So when I decided, seven years ago, to quit my job in Boston and move to San Francisco without one, I knew I had to take my time in getting there; I knew I hadn’t yet seen enough of the Southwest, New Mexico in particular. This time I drove to Albuquerque, where I saw Petroglyph National Monument; and to Santa Fe, where I saw the marvelous little Georgia O’Keeffe museum; and to Chaco Canyon, which honestly you need to see for yourself, or at least read my novella to experience :); and past Shiprock; and on into Utah, this country’s other most stunning geography. And by the time my three days in this state were done, I can tell you, my side of the romance was full-fledged.

To honor it, I began building more New Mexico-based scenes into the novella; my character began to really live here. So did a little part of my heart. I still didn’t know this place well; until last month I was still in crush with it: my heart absolutely certain, my brain not knowing—or caring—whether it was right.

It feels good to be smitten—to know that it’s not only in movies that people are swept off their feet. It feels daydreamy to find your feelings of fondness getting grounded in something deep. Crushes make the heart feel good; they make it remember to beat. That they grow substantive is a rare but delicious treat.