The Karr family moves to Colorado, on what Karr describes as a whim. They have been driving to the World’s Fair, in Seattle, when the beauty of the Colorado landscape outside their car window strikes their mother. She makes their father stop driving, telling him that she has been inspired as a painter; as Karr tells it, the family then purchases a mountainside cabin more or less immediately. It is with Karr’s mother’s inherited money that they buy and furnish this cabin. It is also because of her money that they have been able to take this road trip in the first place. The money and the road trip together have created a rift between the Karr family and their Leechfield neighbors, almost as much as Karr’s mother’s psychosis has: “I’d never known a family to set off for points further west than the Alamo or further east then the crayfish festival in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana” (181).   

Karr and her sister are themselves amazed by the varied and mountainous Colorado landscape, which is the opposite of the flat swampy landscape that they have known. They take up horseback riding at a nearby stable, and together explore this landscape.