People & Places
A Leicester lad in Denver
Having moved to Colorado in 1981, expat Tom Walker reflects on how his life changed after leaving the Midlands
Culture shock wasn't a problem when we first moved to the United States in July of 1981. For me the biggest shock was the weather. We had gone from the Midlands of England to Boston, and when we got off the plane, it was 99°F and 99 per cent relative humidity. It's easy to say I had never experienced anything like that before in my life. My family moved to Denver after an engineering firm recruited my dad to work for them in the then-booming oil business.
For a short time we had been planning to move to Calgary, Canada, but once it was changed to Denver, things moved pretty fast. Since my mom is American, I had grown up with the influences of my grandparents and uncle, and heard all their stories, so I had a wide-eyed view of what America must be like. In fact, my sister and I were very excited and saw it as a grand adventure, although obviously we were sad to leave our school friends behind. I was 11 at the time and, looking back, I think it was a good age to make the transition as it means I've been mostly assimilated.
My mom had grown up in a town outside of Boston, and we stayed with a high school friend of hers for the first two weeks we were in the US before heading on to Denver. Those first few months in Denver were very hectic, and memorable. We were in an apartment that my dad's company had ready for us. It was summer holidays for kids and, again, it was very hot compared to what I'd previously known. Denver is known for having well over 300 days of sunshine per year, and in all my travels around the US since I've been here I have never really been anywhere that would make me not want to come home to Colorado.
In those first months, we saw a tornado a few miles from our apartment balcony, mountains unlike anything I had seen, we went to shopping malls and amusement parks; all new and wonderous things for a kid from a village near Leicester.
We moved into a huge house with a back garden that didn't yet have a fence up. The garden backed onto hills with tall grass and scrub oak, and where pronghorn antelope and coyotes lived. In our first winter in the US there was a blizzard – which people still talk about today – that left four feet of snow on the roads and made a drift to the top of our garage. Since school was already out for the holidays, my sister and I spent our time digging paths and tunnels in it, and throwing snowballs.
Since then, I have moved around the areas in and around Denver, but I have never left. I went to junior high and high school here. It was easy enough to find one or two friends right off the bat after we moved into our house – one kid my age lived right across the street. At school it was both good and bad to be something of a novelty, although I do still sometimes wonder what finishing school in England would have been like. I went to university at the University of Colorado in Boulder. My only knowledge of Boulder prior to that was from watching 'Mork and Mindy' as a kid, and I can say that the show wasn't perhaps the best representation of the town. It was a great place to go to school, one of the nicest campuses anywhere, with majestic foothills on the west side of town, and the real mountains less than an hour away.
People in Colorado tend to be more active and participate in outdoor sports and hobbies than elsewhere in the US. There are often articles and colorful charts published that talk about fitness, excercise or obesity in the US, and Colorado is consistently the shown as the healthiest/thinnest/most active state. I don't know how we would rank against other countries. I think people in England tend to walk a lot more (or used to anyway), but that may come down to the distances and scale of everything here versus there. There's good reason for the healthy status of Colorado – you won't find more accessible, gorgeous terrain anyway this close to civilisation. We have the mountains, sand dunes, lakes, valleys, canyons, waterfalls, ski resorts, and parks made from giant rock formations.
For a time I had a hobby of taking my four-wheel-drive truck up into the foothills and mountains with friends in their trucks to explore old forest roads and mine trails that you could only find on detailed topographic maps. Often the reward for these slow moving and technically challenging trips was scenery that most people would never see. I have driven to the very spine of the Continental Divide at 13,250 feet, and hiked up to a point that gave you a 360-degree view of mountains and valleys.
Colorado is a haven for tourists, but most of them stick to the roads that their rental car or recreational vehicle can manage, so places that we made it to were often empty of crowds and relatively unspoiled, unless there was an old skeletal ruin of a mine or mountain town to explore. There are also other advantages to being so close to nature. Only a few miles from my house is a concert amphitheatre called 'Red Rocks' that has two massive red sandstone monoliths that define the shape of the venue. Bands that play there are often in as much awe of the setting as the fans are of the bands.
Now – 26 years after moving here – I still miss my family and friends in England, but I look forward to when I can take the time to go and visit. I was just over in Britain this August for the wedding of one of my cousins, which was good because I could see almost all of my family in one place. It happened to be Dorset, and the weather was beautiful (in fact, much hotter than I ever remember it being). The one downside to visiting from the US at the moment is the exchange rate. With the dollar as weak as it is currently, it's expensive for me to visit, but on the other hand people coming from Britain can enjoy our already cheap cost of living for even less money.
My past couple of trips to England have proven to me that the US – at least Colorado – is an inexpensive place to live. It seemed to me that most goods and services in England cost the same in pounds as they do here in dollars, not to mention the price of our petrol is around 40 pence per litre.
I work for an engineering firm in a skyscraper made of green mirrored glass in downtown Denver, but in around half an hour I can be in the foothills of the Rockies, or I could drive to the top of a 14,000-foot mountain in less than two hours, if the weather is good. We just had the turning of the aspen leaves here, which sets the mountain valleys and canyons alight with all shades of reds and golds for thousands and thousands of acres every autumn. Of course, the downside is that now we all get to rake up those leaves in our gardens.
I would love to spend an extended amount of time back in England, to travel around the isles and visit all the people I know. However, I honestly do not think I will ever move away from Colorado for good.