There is a bridge in Clear Creek Canyon on U.S. 6 West about 20 miles from Denver. The highway is a twisting two-lane road that snakes alongside Clear Creek. The road is heavy with cars commuting between Denver and the towns of Black Hawk and Central City or taking the scenic route to Idaho Springs. Mostly the locals use it, with the occasional tourist or someone looking to avoid the busier Interstate 70 mixed in.
As you park and climb the 20 or so feet down the rocks near the bridge, the noise shifts from the sound of rushing cars to the burble of rushing water. Unlike the traffic, you don't hear the water. While its loud enough to smother out every other sound, it fades into a background ambient blur that gradually gets softer until it becomes an afterthought.
It's a remarkably peaceful place -- there's a massive boulder that sits in the stream bed maybe eight feet above the water. It's nearly flat on the side facing you with a 20 degree pitch that's perfect for stretching out on. The rock is granite and flecked with sparkling mica, it's warm from the sun and from there, you can see up Clear Creek to where the stream curves behind a wall of rock, framed by nearly sheer canyon walls punctuated with stands of tall pine trees growing out of impossibly small pockets along the walls. The water cascades toward you as it rushes down the creek bed, leapfrogging rocks and mixing with the air to create foamy breaks dotting the bed. In the spring and summer, wildflowers and grasses blow in the breeze to the side of the creek. You can smell the water as it rushes past and occasionally, a gust of wind is caught on the lip of the canyon and pushes the scent of pines and dry needles down the wall of the canyon and fills the air around you. It's there long enough for you to notice it and then it's gone.
The sky is an almost painfully brilliant blue and for a minute you feel that if you stared at it long enough you'd be able to see through it. But the brilliance is too much and you have to blink your eyes. The view re-emerges; clear and vivid -- a shade of blue you'll swear is the purest blue possible. You look back up the creek bed, the scene changing hundreds of times per second as the water jumps and falls and divides to make its way around a rock and rejoin the downstream flow. You feel the sun on your face and the crispness of the air. When you're there, time slows.
It's 20 miles back to the thick of things, but for that moment in that place, it's thousands of miles to anywhere.
