Looking Back: Closer than you think

Anyone who moves here from somewhere else often resorts to trying to describe the long distances between towns but comes up empty handed. Years ago, when my husband and I first moved to the area, our families back east would try and designate the location in their limited knowledge, so the words remote and isolated would seem to crop up fairly often. It definitely feels like far sometimes, but we would never describe it as remote.
In the heavily populated Eastern seaboard, as well as the Midwest, communities are usually within a couple of miles of each other, with bigger urban centers no more than an hour away. The words describing a location far away from everything else, yet within driving distance, were not used often, unless it was in reference to finding a place thousands of miles from
home to get away from it all. A remote desert island or an isolated mountain region comes to mind.
The mileage between towns in our counties seemed vast when we were little. We didn’t think of the people in all of these communities of neighbors. It wasn’t until we moved to a place that home range included anywhere within two hours, that we realized the perception of distance often defines how far away it feels. A recent plane crash reported to be in the “remote” section of Garfield county, on the Utah line, was spotted from the road, and close enough for passers-by to walk over to the wreckage.
These days with such high levels of communication, (cell phones, computers, Blackberries), almost nowhere seems really distant from anywhere else. The meaning of the word remote must be taken with a grain of salt. Perception again, is everything.
Driving back from visiting family and friends in the Front Range, once you start through Glenwood Canyon, you feel as if you have made it back home already. The almost two more hours of driving is nothing, really.
Picking up family and friends from the airport in Hayden is always a rude awakening, as you drive 10 minutes down the road to Craig, and inevitably someone calls out from the back seat, “Are we there yet?”

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