This Be the Place: A Blue Wall in Leadville

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

There’s this wall in Leadville, Colorado. It’s painted blue, though now the paint is old and peeling. I love to stand before the wall, look at its blueness. I love to photograph myself and my friends there, squinting into the too-bright Rocky Mountain sunlight—as I did with Robert and Julia in 2010 when we first stumbled upon the wall and were enthralled, and took these photos.

The three of us were giddy with the blue, absorbing the blue, trying to live in a world in which blue could be this blue, in this moment, now. Suddenly I got why writers write all those books about the color blue, immersive as a dream. I got how a good blue refuses to be understood.

The wall is, for me and maybe me alone, a holy place. A place of pilgrimage, both full of meaning and void of meaning. I take photos, and the photos hold the memories still. The photos make the wall mean more than memory can, but with meaning, like a fact. No longer in motion, no longer something to which one can return and brush your fingers against (and feel the peeling paint).

Some facts about Leadville: At 10,200 feet, it’s the highest incorporated city in America, surrounded by some of the tallest mountains in the lower 48. In the 19th century, enough silver was extracted there to make it one of the most profitable places in the world. It became a Wild West boomtown: opera house, fortunes made and swindled away, Doc Holliday dealing cards, Oscar Wilde visiting to lecture, a tourist-trap ice castle erected in 1895 during a meltingly warm winter, etc. And now, held there every summer, that 100-mile footrace you might have heard of. Olympians train in the thin atmosphere as clouds sweep over the city. Leadville bears witness to startling, natural landscapes and is contaminated by the tailings and hauntings of mining. So many old mines and tunnels lie beneath Leadville that the surface sometimes collapses, as in 2012 when an old railroad tunnel collapsed beneath Route 24, cutting the city off from the Vail valley.

I was drawn to Leadville again and again in the years I lived in Denver, and I return there whenever I’m near—return to its beauties and contradictions. But I never really know what to do with myself once I’m back. Each time, I return to this blue wall. But each time I have to search for it, never quite recalling its location among Victorian alpine houses and tarpapered shacks. Each time I fear the wall won’t still be there, that it couldn’t be the blue I recall—that surely this is a color found only in nostalgia. Each time, so far, I’ve found it, and each time, again, I’m stunned by the wall’s blueness and the way it remains.

There’s no reason, really, to love this blue wall. It’s just the wall of some seemingly uninhabited shed, propped up against a 19th-century wooden home. I doubt anyone else loves it like I love it. But I’ve been there so many times, with so many people I love, some of them now dead. Maybe the returning makes it a holy place.

Maybe a place like this pursues its meaning. Like when you say love and what you say means less than the actual word means. We love a place or a person, or we say a word, trying to stop time, hold something still. Maybe a place makes meaning how a dream might, in opposition to logic, inventing its own sense with presence.

Once, Cassie and I were in Leadville, and Cassie said “red door,” pointing to a red door. This was a game she played. When she saw a red door, she said “red door,” then beamed her cheek-wide smile because she’d won, though she was the only one playing. The only rule was to be her, witnessing a world one must try to love. In Leadville she said “red door” and turned to me and smiled, as if a smile might escape the face and move beyond meaning. A few minutes later, when we turned a corner and came upon the blue wall, I pointed and said “the blue wall!” She pointed to the blue wall and said again, more gravely, “red door.”

Somewhere, stored in a computer that probably won’t even charge anymore, is a photo of Cassie standing at that blue wall smiling. Cassie died in 2020, the night before her fortieth birthday. It’s hard, after someone has died, to know what one loves in loving them, what that word love might mean. There is too much stillness. Maybe that’s what Elizabeth Bishop means as she concludes her elegy for Lowell, “Sad friend, you cannot change.”

Maybe we borrow meaning with a word, like how a photograph borrows a place, hoping meaning might remain recognizable if we say the word with the right angle of light, seeking something definite in a breath. How the impossible blue of a blue wall couldn’t be the blue of memory, a blue no photograph can contain.

Maybe to make a place holy, you must remember it more than real life allows, with all the truth of a squint, all the grace of peeling paint.

I’d like to look into one of those photographs, past the image, past what the image contains, past memory and regret and all the salt that sticks to the skin, into experience, into a love known true in one moment, undeniable, un-understandable, the kind of thing that splits everything in half. If I could find that photo of Cassie at the blue wall and step inside it and ask her to stay alive in a world where she was loved, maybe then I could finally know what a word means.

I could almost believe holiness is a process of remembering, but then I see the wall again, in all that sunlight, paint peeling, the blue not only the remembered blue, but more blue in the now of being seen, so I can barely stand to stand beside it, holy as it is with the fact of its own meaning.