roanoke.com Real Politics / Preston Bryant

Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

Breckenridge, Colo. -- Some 2,000 miles westward and more than five times that many feet skyward is a place where the mind is cleared, the soul is cleansed, and evidence abounds of a Creator of all things great and small.

In Colorado, way up high, the air is crisp and clean and clear. Thin, too.

It’s so crisp and clean and clear that at dawn you can nearly count the trees on the farthest mountain ridge. And you know just how thin it is when you set out on 25-mile bike rides more than 10,000 feet toward the clouds. You also feel it on five-mile hikes climbing 1,000 feet or more up Peak 9 in the heart of – where else? – Summit County.

Rafting more than a dozen miles down the Arkansas River, spilling over big drops between high canyon walls of reddish brown, you tend to realize in a whole new way your own insignificance. The timeless river that’s cut so deeply over so long through such ageless rock is a reminder that we’re but mere visitors on an incredibly brief stay.

The serenity of the Rocky Mountains, though, as spectacular as it is, never lets you get too far away from Virginia. The clearer your mind – and the longer the bike ride or hike or river trip – the more you think of home and all that’s there. And there’s also the inevitable comparisons between the place you’re experiencing now and the place you’ve experienced for so long.

The big differences between Colorado and Virginia are, to a great extent, altitude, and, to a certain extent, attitude. And you can see how one shapes the other.

The buena vistas seen when hiking in the Rockies are not dissimilar from those seen when climbing the Peaks of Otter in Bedford County. The rolling mid-ridges are the same dark green and the valleys below are the same impressionistic pastels. The big and small rocks in the Blue River are no more water-smoothed than those in the Maury or Cow Pasture or Rappahannock. And when you get right down to it, the rugged beauty of most any Colorado pass can certainly be matched by Goshen’s.

Colorado’s natural resources are what bring millions of visitors to the state each year. And those same resources have been responsible for a good deal of the state’s hard-hat economy. Mineral mines, abandoned and active, are as much a part of Colorado’s history and landscape as the hearty pines that grow above them.

In this respect, Colorado and Virginia are very much alike. Our own natural resources – whether the Blue Ridge Mountains or the Chesapeake Bay or the historic rivers that connect them – are likewise at the center of both the soft and hard components of our economy.

But there’s a difference to be found in the way each state’s open-air character defines the character of its residents. It’s the lay of Colorado’s land – much more distinctly than the lay of Virginia’s – that has so shaped the people who live on it. It’s Colorado’s big-sky expanse that seems so responsible for the attitudes of the people who first settled and still carry on there. Coloradoans have a let-live freedom about them, one that’s surely rooted in the high peaks and broad plains that historically have kept neighbors far apart and therefore necessitated a great amount of self-reliance.

Virginians, on the other hand, are less cowboy and more genteel. It’s probably our flat water and softly rolling hills that have made us that way.

All of this is not to say, however, that Coloradoans and Virginians live in completely different worlds. Truly, despite the terrain differences, so much is the same, especially in our worlds of politics and policy.

The Denver Post, for example, has been filled with articles on the battles between conservationists and developers. There’s a $2 billion bond referendum on an upcoming ballot to fund infrastructure projects (for water, not transportation) that has wed anti-taxers with environmentalists. Colorado’s state budget crunch has – get this – forced the closure of a lot of DMV offices. University administrators are bucking government officials over affirmative action. And state Democrats, who are in the minority in both houses of the General Assembly, are trying to figure out how to regain some semblance of power.

A lot of this, though, is distant thought when out in the mountains among big rocks and long rivers, where what’s truly significant overwhelms all that simply isn’t.

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