This is one of my favorite places because it is Home. Not the barn in the foreground (affordable housing, perhaps?). I mean the bigger Place that is shown and, I think, captured in its glory: The Animas Valley north of Durango. This picture was made in early November, I think, just after a storm had rolled through, outside of my friends’ house. I stay here when I’m visiting.

That, alone, makes this particular picture special to me. Also, the aesthetics: The way the blonde strips on the structure’s walls match the grass and dried cattails behind it. The prayer flags flapping in the wind, giving motion. The special quality of evening, post-storm light, something that exists only in autumn or winter, when the sun is low in the sky. The lightpost on the left side, providing some sort of balance.

It’s also somewhat timeless. Despite the fact that it’s in the Animas Valley, which has been built up and changed dramatically in the last few decades, this photo could have been taken ten years ago or forty years ago and would have looked mostly the same. This is one of only a small handful of views in the Valley with that quality.

Mostly, though, what I like about this photo and this place is the backdrop of Hermosa Mountain, the distinctive red-rock face of which is partially obscured by snow and clouds. This was the backdrop of much of my life.

I was born a couple miles down the road, behind the photographer, at what is now a CDOT office, I think. It used to be Community Hospital, though. I don’t know when it stopped being a hospital, but I do know it was a medical facility up until the late 1990s, at least. I remember accompanying my father there in 1998 for his radiation treatments. I remember the thing they put on his head and the map of the tumors invading his brain and the futility of it all.

I was born less than three weeks after the big flood of 1970, when the Animas River backed up behind the glacial moraine like it were an earthen dam, turning the pastures and fields into a vast reservoir, a silvery mirror reflecting the gray sky and the ridges on either side. Surely the wetlands behind the barn would have been filled with water then, and maybe even the barn itself got a bit soggy at its base.

The waters spread across the Valley like that because of the way it was formed, by glaciers scraping down mountains and rock like a massive bulldozer, rendering the six-mile stretch from Trimble Lane to the 32nd Street Bridge virtually flat, with only 15 feet or so of elevation drop. The River runs slow through sandy soil, winding back on itself like a snake.

My grandparents’ farm was a couple miles north of this picture, stretching from the top of the ridge down to the River. They had dairy cows out in the pasture and a corn field and raspberries and sheep, a hay barn and alfalfa and apple orchards. We played in the ditches and the slough and fished in the River. And Hermosa Mountain stood sentinel all the while. And now, when I round the bend coming out of Durango and see the layered face of it, I feel the warmth and comfort, the regret and sadness, and all those things that Home entails. And that’s why this is one of my favorite places.