The picture on my kitchen calendar shows a mountain pass in Colorado. With July at the turn of the page, I also think of patriotic connections with "purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain." The author of "America the Beautiful" had been impressed by the view from Pike's Peak. In addition, a family I know just came home from Colorado, where visiting with grandparents and other relatives is not the only attraction for the annual summer trips.

My uncle and aunt from southern Illinois used to vacation in Colorado, too. Since they lived at a distance, I thought almost anything they did was a notch above ordinary activities and concluded that it must be a privilege to go and see the mountains. Actually, I don't recall many details, except that my uncle took pictures of chipmunks.

My parents had also visited Colorado. My father, a Nebraska native, made a special trip west before heading east to Illinois, where he met my mother. His car didn't make it up Pike's Peak at first, so he got a new fuel pump and tried again. Our family photo albums show him sitting next to a sign for elevation 12,110 feet above sea level.

Pictures from a few years later show both my parents in Colorado. They traveled to the mountains as part of their wedding trip. Mom said that when she first saw the mountains, she didn't realize what she was seeing, because it seemed more like a mist. Up in the mountains, there was snow, although it was summer. She remembers how far down it looked at the sides of the narrow, winding roads. At one place it seemed to her that the water in a stream was flowing uphill.

I've never visited Colorado myself, though I grew up in a bordering state. The closest I came was a weekend trip to the Nebraska Sandhills at about this time of year. I was told that on the way we'd be passing the last grain elevator before ranch country, which put me farther west than I'd ever been before. It was also exciting to cross into Mountain Time, especially since it gave us an extra hour for the Friday evening drive.

Going west has been a major part of American history. Europeans came west across the ocean, and America expanded from east to west. In the 1800s, newspaper publisher Horace Greeley of New York popularized the phrase "Go west, young man," and sponsored a farming colony in Colorado.

I incorporated the westward progression into my thinking at an early age. I didn't take it to mean that I should move farther west; I took it as an affirmation that I was in the right place, in the western part of the Midwest. To me, the western plains were the destination of the American pioneer spirit, of people who didn't stay cooped up in the cities but followed the wagon tracks, braved the hardships of the prairies and endured. And somewhere out there beyond the western horizon, the endless plains came to a magnificent climax in the Rocky Mountains, a symbol of America and the American dream. At least, that was how I imagined it to be.

I had to adjust my thinking when our family moves turned out to be in other direction, but I suppose moving east isn't inherently an un-American activity.

Time showed me unexpected vistas in different places. I climbed sand dunes near Lake Michigan instead of in Colorado and marveled at unusual rock formations near the southern Illinois version of the Garden of the Gods. Once I took a flying leap to the West Coast and saw a few of the mountaintops at least.

The Colorado in my mind remains a mixture of imagination, photographs I’ve seen and information I’ve read. The names are tantalizing, stark and full of mystique: the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Calamity Camp, the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, the Florissant fossil beds, Horsethief Canyon, Rim Rock Drive, the Uncompahgre River. With the original Spanish, "Colo-RAD-o" mellows to "Colo-RAH-do," the river colored red. One trail leads to Exclamation Point.

Sometimes dreams – American or otherwise – don't completely survive the realities, but the mountains should still be there if I ever decide to go.