So much can happen in the span of 16 years. Take my own life, for example: In the summer of 1997, I was only 23 years old, living in the small mountain town of Durango in southwestern Colorado. Largely without direction, recently graduated from college, and reeling from a break up, I woke up one morning, loaded my black lab-golden retriever mix, Mable, and the few possessions I had into my beat-up Subaru wagon, and just drove off. Away. I had no idea where I was going or where my life might lead.

Sixteen years and some months later, an assignment in Gateway (200 miles northwest of Durango) afforded me an opportunity to return, seeking long overdue perspective on my past and present vis-à-vis this town. Thomas Wolfe famously wrote that “You can’t go home again,” but I lean toward Bob Dylan’s take on the subject in his song, “Mississippi”: “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.” Paul Theroux, though, perhaps said it best. Regarding those places we revisit, Theroux writes in Dark Star Safari, “You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back.”

So true. Today as I tour Durango, so much has changed. The natural food co-op where I worked for a spell seems tired somehow, so much less vital than I recall. The ranch where I baled hay has grown considerably, its roadside placard now trumpeting the grass-fed, “locavore,” farm-to-fork phenomenon that was so quietly in style here even before the national trend. The house where I once lived, that sheltered so many young people coming and going, momentarily marooned between college and the next stages of their lives, is still surrounded by towering pines and scrub jays, but is now a family’s home by the looks of its basketball hoop and kids’ bikes laid across the lawn. The nearby saloon where my housemates and I passed winter nights is now abandoned and in decay, so reminiscent of the burned down bar in Richard Hugo’s “Death of the Kapowsin Tavern,” a poem I remember reading regularly back then.

Still, for me of course, what’s changed most significantly is myself. Like Hugo, “I can’t ridge” any of the past or its remains “back again from char” – which is a good thing. Walking streets I once walked, contemplating scenes previously so meaningful to me, and viewing Durango at dusk from its highest vantage point, it occurs to me again how life itself is synonymous with change, and just how many great things have graced my own life (friends, family, career, and home) since I was last here.

This time as I leave Durango, headed north on I-550 along severely steep mountain passes toward Silverton, Ouray, and ultimately, Grand Junction and my return flight to Seattle, there’s no need to look back. Lava-bright aspens light the mountainsides along roads with no guardrails and drop-offs so sudden that the only option is to look ahead, and, just for a moment as I pause for a roadside photo, at my phone for a perfectly timed message from my wife: “Drive safely,” she writes, “I can’t wait for you to be home.”