"I live in the town of Creede, Colo., the place where Terence and Julia nearly encounter Terence’s mother. It is a town of 600 souls, and the Rio Grande dominates the landscape, cutting a valley along the base of a big horseshoe of 12,000 foot mountains that make up our stretch of the Continental Divide.
I’ve been watching the surface of that river for 20 years now, and there is a kind of magic for me in that mercury sheen it gives off as the sun goes down, the way it seems to contain every single color, and none. If I am having a particularly bad day, stuck in some kind of worry loop, I’ll catch a glimpse of that shimmer through the windshield, or even in the rearview mirror, and my whole body relaxes, my worries dissolve. I am catapulted back to the present and the present is a good place to be.
If I were a different kind of person, I might call it seeing God. I know for sure that I am seeing something that my logical brain doesn’t have the tools to understand. In any case, I am grateful for it, and thought Terence might need a bit of it too."
