"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.”
The relativity of time is never lost on us. Entire lives were lead in the space between the immigration officer’s words as he evaluated our paperwork. Yet blink once and two perfect weeks pass by in a second.
We showed up at Joe and Sarah’s house in Evergreen expecting to spend a day or two recharging our batteries and hanging out with a some friends we knew only from the internet. A day or two became a week or two, July became August, and friends became family. We still don’t know how it happened. Evergreen is a mile above sea level, so failed recipes, bad hangovers and broken down motorcycles were forgiven. Can the passing of time can be blamed on the elevation too? Or was it the weed?
When we arrived, there were already four extra people staying at the house. Blake from Los Angeles, Fauser who was moving from Chicago to LA, and our friends Stef and Jerimiah who are travelling across the country in fixed up vintage trailer.
Over the next two weeks three more people showed up. A beautiful girl named Karolina flew in from LA and stuck around for a week. This adorable little moon child named Lindsay drove up from Nashville with her two cats. She’d ask your birthday within minutes of meeting you then tell you all about your star sign and life path. For the last couple days a soft-spoken guy named Steven was there sleeping on the couch, telling us about life as a dad in Vermont.
A rotating cast of characters from Evergreen, Denver and Golden were constantly coming and going. There was Thomas, this kid from Kansas city that took us shooting guns and patiently explained every step; and Robby, an Alabama transplant who has seen Bigfoot and could hunt you dinner with a homemade slingshot.
Joe, Sarah and their roommate Mitch welcomed everyone with open arms, a giant back deck, and weed that would put you in a coma for 4 hours if you even looked at it.
If I had to guess, I’d say a total of four days were spent deciding what to eat for dinner. Imagine ten people who are kind of broke and really stoned trying to meal plan together. Imagine that every night for two weeks. The only thing we could ever agree on quickly was to go out for a ride. We rode hundreds of miles on those motorcycles and it never felt like enough. It was the thread that tied together that house and Colorado offered every type of road to run down. We rode through mountains, dirt, rain in every direction. We broke down, a few times, making the most of our time on the roadside. That's when you know you're among friends, you can be content just sitting with one another, staying busy with dumb shit like vandalism, sharpie tattoos and braiding each other's hair.
We spent a lot of time talking about music, the records that formed us, shaped us and got us to where we are now. How we first started travelling to see bands that wouldn't come to our small hometowns, how we learned the names of cities from song lyrics. It's no coincidence that all these kids that grew up on the same records, thousands of miles from one another, would all end up in the same living room fifteen years later. Fauser would say, "we're cut from the same cloth". These people felt like home, and when you don't have a home, that means everything.
Between the people and that scenery, Evergreen was the one of the hardest places to leave but we couldn't stay still much longer. We only have so much time in the northern states and we knew we had to move on. We had Wyoming on our minds and great friends waiting in Cody.
