Rocky Mountain High

Coming Home to a Place He'd Never Been

Music is a thing as difficult to understand as where the water rushing past in a stream came from. Did each drop come from a different corner of the world? How does it inspire different things on different days? I know where I’m from, though not where I belong, but is this water from somewhere like I am? Music is as difficult to grasp as water.

I have never understood much in music, although I am beginning to understand more about where a writer may have been when they wrote a song. But one song that has always spoken to me is “Rocky Mountain High” by John Denver. It is a sonic embodiment of the call that a landscape and an experience can have on a soul. “He was born in the summer of his 27th year, coming home to a place he’d never been before,” he sings, and as it is the summer and I am 27 years old and finally contemplating how to be intentional with my life in order to find my place, it moves me ever so slightly more than it used to when I would listen in years gone by. I don’t want to pretend this is some sort of self-aggrandizing prophecy, but rather I want to share why a song that means so much to me means so much to me, not just because it’s attached to good memories but because it is a song about finding the beauty in life, and how that may be one of the highest purposes in any life.

As I write, I am sitting beside a very quickly moving, very cold river in Frisco, CO (yes that was a few weeks ago, the process took some time). I came here last minute because I feel ever so slightly adrift and this place always clears my head. There are lots of trees, mountains and green things. I will try to not describe it further because letting your mind paint the picture is so much more beautiful than me showing you this magical place.

The line “Coming home to a place he’d never been before,” has stuck with me for years and grown in meaning. It speaks of relief and sadness at the same time. Coming home is something that everyone is meant to do, it’s doing the thing that you always wanted to do, the thing that finally makes you feel like you. But it also implies that this home is a place that you only just got to, implying that a lot of fear kept you from doing the thing that made you feel at home for many years. But the next line is “He left yesterday behind him, might say he was born again,” and frankly, that wraps that problem up pretty nicely. Our hero might have waited a little long to do the thing that brought him home, but once he did it, he never looked back. 

To me, the song when taken as a whole describes an attitude of wonder and appreciation for the world that John Denver saw. Yes, it is an ode to a beautiful place, but it is also an explanation of the elusive whole-picture view of life that is common for people to get when they see something exceptionally moving. To me, it articulates a desire to appreciate today, and to appreciate a life lived on your own terms. Oddly enough, I think this was inspired in John by going to the mountains, and coming to the mountains has inspired something similar in me, something deeply personal that I hope I am conveying.

At this point, it has just hit me that as I type the lyrics, a part of the impact may be lost. Many of you may know these lyrics and are singing them instead of purely reading them. I do hope so because music has a way of conveying emotional states in ways that spoken or written words struggle to describe. We cry when listening to a heartbreak song but are less apt to when reading about a heart wrenching loveloss. But that’s what makes this song and so many others so spectacular; when reading the written lyrics, there are still good stories there on the page, but it feels slightly disjointed. Some might say that some lyrics have an element of nonsense, but when all other elements of a song are mixed in with the lyrics, not only a story, but an experience, a look through the eyes of the artist, begins and can’t be undone. The lyrics to “Rocky Mountain High” are a series of one-liners about liking the mountains, but when the song is listened to, not just read, a story about a person finally following their deepest dream is unignorable. There is something about the melodies and combination of instrumentals that tell a story words never could. 

I could go on for many pages about lines such as “He’d be a poorer man if he never saw an eagle fly,” “Lost a friend but kept the memory,” or “His sight has turned inside himself to try and understand..” but I am working on saying more with less. And what I’m saying is very simple; the song “Rocky Mountain High” has always spoken to me, and I believe that it has done so because John Denver, while writing, was seeing similar beauty in the world and in himself to the beauty I see. When a song, any song, speaks to a person, I think it’s probably because their emotional makeup has similarities to that of the songwriter because that artist called on those emotions to create the song that someone is connecting with so deeply. It is also interesting to observe that John Denver wrote and sang this song, which I imagine is why you can feel the passion and emotion when he sings it. He saw beauty and he did a rare thing; he conveyed a message that I am able to really, actually connect with and I am able to be at home in a place I’ve never been before.

Photo by Zachary Kyra-Derksen on Unsplash