Getting older, with — or without? — The National

I first heard The National's newest album, Laugh Track, on the day last month when my wife, Tina, and I finally set foot in our new house, thousands of miles from where we'd always lived.

It was not the first time the group's music had scored some notable point along the arc of my adult life. In fact, that serendipity had come to feel more like a constant. In my 20s and 30s, The National had served as grumpy but avuncular mentors, five men a decade or so older than me who had endured the mystery, injury and wonder of growing up, then written songs that suggested I too would get by, no matter how gray the dawns seemed. Now freshly 40 and having spent much of the last decade engaged in a sort of purposeful wandering, I was finally on the threshold of an exciting and anxious-making next phase: an actual house we would make a home.

For the better part of a decade (all our marriage, really), Tina and I have longed to leave the easy climes of the East Coast, to resettle among the savage peaks of Colorado or Wyoming. We have nibbled around the edges for years, living in a van on the West's vast reserves of public land and spending a summer atop a cave in South Dakota. The fierce real estate market, obdurate family ties and sheer fear, though, kept us anchored to all we'd ever known.

But early this summer, along the Continental Divide Trail from Canada, we spotted just what we'd been looking for online, a cabin wedged among Colorado's Rockies at nearly 9,000 feet. We made an offer without seeing it, emptied