If I Was The Kind Of Person Who Wrote Love Letters To States, This Is What I’d Say

If I Was The Kind Of Person Who Wrote Love Letters To States, This Is What I’d Say

I came back home to Iowa. I came back to Grinnell College. I came back to the friends and landscapes and towns that had filled up the years since I was four and found myself moved to the Midwest.

And yet, something wasn’t the same.

I came back knowing what a petroglyph looked like and how to run a straight and steady transect. I came back with memories of the Grand Canyon in the rain and the sweeping rock walls of Taawa Park. I came back remembering the feel of monsoon water on my shoulders and mountain grit deep down in my skin.

It didn’t take long for me to work out that what had changed wasn’t this place I had always called home. Nope, it was me: between Bill Williams Mountain and Sycamore Canyon, between my first surveys and leaving Arizona, I’d become a little bit different.

I’d never been somewhere that let me get to know myself in the way that the KNF did. As days passed and the summer lengthened, little things—insights about me, about where I was going and who I wanted to be when I got there—started making themselves known. There were no dramatic moments of sudden enlightenment, no lightning strike illuminations; it was just small bits coalescing, pieces working themselves out slowly in the quiet spaces of the KNF.

I started off this project with a justification for why I was taking an internship in an area in which I had absolutely no expertise in a far off state with unknown people—I said: I’m a Spanish major and I’m a writer, but I’m also a nineteen year old kid figuring out what it is I want to do with my life.

Still a Spanish major and still a writer, I may not have myself or my life figured out, but after the KNF, I do have some fairly good ideas about where it is I want to be going. I know that the outdoors—beautiful, harsh—is always going to be one of my first loves; I know that relationships with friends can lead to some of the most fulfilling (and fun!) experiences; I know I’ve got a lusting to wander at home, abroad, and everywhere in between; I know that writing is one of the things that makes me the happiest, the most content.

In other words, I owe the KNF a pretty big one.

I need to say thank you, Arizona: thank you for breaking my heart, for making me fall in love in the first place, for making my misanthropic, cynical and angst-ridden self incandescently happy for two long summer months. I think I’m always going to feel like I left a little bit of me behind in the KNF, no matter where I am or who I’ve become.

Because I think you and I both know, Arizona, that this is really just the beginning.

Photos: 1. First monsoon at Parson's Creek 2. Southern Arizona views 3. Havasu Falls 4. Arizona sunset (photo credit: Neil)