There was once a small cluster of lonely mailboxes, clinging precariously to a post, just off-center at a crossroads in the Colorado high plains. The last vestige of an old town that no longer exists, the mailboxes once linked the scattered holdouts of dry-land farms with the known world. Now only the crossroads mark the location, forming a large “X”.

In another time, I was a child growing up at “The Old Silsbee Place” or as my father liked to refer to our farm, “The Poor Farm”.  At 10 years old, I was still too young to help Dad farm. Dad would teach me when I turned 11 years old how to drive a farm truck or plow fields atop a multi-ton farm tractor. But for the time, and an eternal but brief summer, I was free. I could roam what seemed to be endless pastures, hunting for arrow heads left by Native Americans countless years before, pretending to be one of the first settlers in the 1880s to tame the land.

One day, I found my father’s bicycle in an old shed. With faded red paint baked by many summer suns and preserved by bitter winters, it was a fascinating relic and a vehicle to explore past the farmhouse. Pumping countless breaths into its tires with a vertical air pump, up and down, down and up, I finally had a faithful steed to explore unknown territory. With a small push, a little skip, and a Pony Express style mount, this 10 year old was aboard an adult bike for the first time. . .and out of control! I practiced and wobbled on that bike until I could stay upright, once only narrowly missing the back of a grain truck that Dad parked in front of the house.

My next step was now WHERE to go?! After driving my mother crazy with how bored I was and finally begging to “go get the mail”, she gave me orders to “just go!” The farm was 23 miles north of town and surrounded by cattle pasture or plowed fields of wheat, millet or rye. With the closest farm neighbor 2 miles away and the next another 2 miles on a wide and flat plain, I was not going to go too far or get very lost. I just had to pedal a 1/4 mile up the farm drive to the main gravel road and another 1 ½ miles to the mailboxes. Not a problem.

As I started out, I turned to my mixed collie and German Shepard dog, Brownie, as a loyal companion and protector. He looked like a long, lean, light brown wolf that might eat you alive. Grown men in pickup trucks would drive into the farm yard and not get out upon seeing the dog rise and come closer. Little did they know that he was the most placid, timid, and possibly sleepy dog to dominate only his shadow. A total push over. But today, he was my barely trained, feral, wolf dog companion.

But there were hazards to this intrepid journey. Farmers often drove at high speeds on the long and straight country roads that had no speed signs. Their speeds on those roads were possibly challenges to existing land speed records with little attention to what else might be on the roads, like a small boy wobbling on a big bicycle. On roads that really demanded that cars drive 35 miles per hour, speeds near 60 miles per hour were the norm. The wide expanses of fields and pastures allowed you to see a flat, unbroken horizon, where the trucks could be seen easily by the flashes of light off their windshields and the long dry dust plumes that trailed behind in their wake. The drivers were accustomed to wandering cattle, antelope or even slow-moving farm equipment taking up the entire road on the other side of a blind hill, but not a bicycle with a boy whose feet could barely stay on the pedals when at the bottom of the cycle.

However, the challenge I had not counted on came silently from below; gravel. Deep gravel that was even deeper between the tracks made in the road. In the rainy season or after a really strong summer shower, roads without gravel turned to slick, muddy, devourers of autos. Sometimes the roads would be so muddy that 4×4 pickups would bog down to the axles. Thick gravel, taken from the many dry river beds in the area, was the answer. Over time it would gather on the side of roads and cause hazards, sometimes deadly, to those who hugged a shoulder when passing another vehicle. On my bike, I was a gonner on the shoulders and had to labor on the rest of the road. Pushing with all my strength and weight on the down cycle of a pedal, using the rising pedal as an up elevator, I gained confidence and speed down the long stretch of road toward the mailboxes.

Finally, at the mailboxes themselves, my family’s mailbox door opened with a “creeek” and I reached inside for the bounty it might bring. There might be boxes, long and flat, from a craft club that my Mother subscribed to for passing time in the winter. Maybe I would receive a letter from my school pen pal, Philman Phong of Philadelphia! Usually there were bills from farm and grain stores, my Dad’s Successful Farming magazine or Mom’s Country Living magazine. Whatever the mail was, it linked our small farm to somebody, somewhere, that was not part of an isolated life.

Before starting my trek home, I paused. The mailboxes, the crossroads they stood at, and I were silent and small in the middle of a land that stretched out flat and often unbroken for miles. The always constant breeze would subside to an uneasy quiet, only to be interrupted by meadowlarks or mourning doves calling. Then the whispering breeze would rise with a light gust and a sound like invisible ruffling flags. Silent yet noisy, the breeze telling secrets that could not be understood but you strained to hear anyway. The warmth of the sun competed with the wind to caress your face and arms. The wind won when a gust tugged at my red and white striped t-shirt.

An old building across the road, now shade for grazing cows, was all that remained of the town of Shaw. Thirty years earlier the small town was alive with a grocery store, a dance hall, gas station, and maybe a pool hall. Instead of the mailboxes, there stood a post office. But now only the dilapidated rough frame of the dance hall building stood, the rest having fallen to wind, winter, and age. And across the road, a windowless farmhouse stood as a mysterious sentinel. Old Lilac bushes and ragged tulips survived but were losing the battle to native grasses returning the land to its beginnings. Dappled sunlight filtered through the holes in the farmhouse roof.  After years of no use, “The Mason Place” still keep its name, like so many lonely farms left to the elements over the decades or even a century, retaining the identity of those who once gave it life.

Decades later when I return to that crossroads, the mailboxes are long gone, as are the farm families who used them. The remnants of Shaw have faded away to only simple concrete foundations. The nearby farmhouse is only a memory, having been removed and the land planted to wheat crops. The farm from my own childhood, abandoned for many years but now called “The OLD Silsbee Place”, is undergoing its own march to be reclaimed by the land; in an old weathered shed there is a bleached red bicycle.

Where once the mailboxes were a reminder for what was, my own memory is now the witness to those places and the memories of those who came before me. We often don’t realize that time, and life, are fleeting. Our society changes quickly now, constantly remaking everything, so that change itself becomes the focus of life. At a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, I once witnessed change at a slower pace and hopefully took away an appreciation that life is a story, a tapestry. Life is also about keeping what has value, maybe dusting it off, and passing it along for somebody else to discover. We come to metaphorical crossroads all the time and need to choose what we value, which direction to follow. As a boy, I set out for a destination when the trek along the way was the point. Still is, whichever path you choose when arriving at a crossroads.

~ Mason