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Someday I'll master the art of constructing a coherent column after spending too much time on the road. This trip meant crossing the Continental Divide four times and driving 425 miles through some of the emptiest stretches in the Lower 48 -- an expedition to Lander, Wyo., to help High Country News celebrate its 25th anniversary.
The bi-weekly, for people who care about the
West,
has been published in Paonia since 1983. But
Lander is its birthplace, where in 1970 a rancher named Tom
Bell got upset about the invasion of the strip-mine coal
companies.
The infant publication nearly died as Bell pumped money into it to the extent that he lost his ranch.
Its subscribers chipped in to save it then. Today, after a few other near-fatal crises, HCN has a circulation of about 15,000. It's the place where South Dakota ranchers, New Mexico shepherds, Colorado mountain riff-raff, Montana Earth First!ers, Boulder Sierra Clubbers and other varied elements of the Interior West come together to argue about what they care about.
Betsy and Ed Marston, along with dozens of other people who have worked for and with HCN, have built an institution -- the common frame of reference for about a million square miles.
That's an amazing accomplishment, and even more amazing when I think about all the Western magazines which have succumbed in the past 25 years: Merrill Hastings' Colorado, the funky Mountain Gazette, the slick Rocky Mountain, the Sunday Post's Empire. All did some fine work, and they're all gone.
One theory of their demise, which I should credit to George Sibley, who teaches some journalism at Western State in Gunnison, is that the only advertising that can support a slick four-color general-interest Western magazine is real-estate advertising.
Developers want folks to think they can buy 35 acres in paradise, and so the editorial focus moves that way, too. That does not produce an environment conducive to honest writing. Developers want you to think about bugling elk and sparkling trout streams, not giardia and coliform bacteria.
These days, another possible source of revenue for
four-color slick is the outdoor-adventure industry. But
you'll be selling the consumption of expensive outdoor toys
as well as the discovery
of unravaged places. As
soon as you publicize them, they loose their allure to the
Lycra lemmings, and eventually, even in a land as vast as
the American West, you run out of virgin locales.
Again, this isn't a venue for honest journalism which serves the people who live in these places. I know a fellow who writes often for one of these magazines -- a damn good writer of witty and honest articles about mountain life -- and he recently spent a week performing comparisons of bicycle lamps for a consumer feature.
He's got to make a living, and this is the way that slick outdoor-experience magazines consume journalistic talent: whether the $29.95 848-gram light is a better deal than the $38.95 812-gram light.
So I suspect that HCN has thrived precisely because it
isn't slick or colorful, and it lets writers write about
what they care about, rather than stuff that nobody will
care about after next year's models come out. HCN doesn't
try to sell the West
or any part thereof. It can be
as quirky, weird and eccentric as the people, weather and
landscape of the West.
Although the birthday party meant 16 hours on the road, there and back, it was well worth the trouble. I got to see people I don't see often, and to meet many folks I had known only as bylines. Even better, I got into a lively argument about the Bent empire with Maria Mondragon-Valdez of San Luis -- an argument so engaging that I'm tempted to drive down there next week so we can continue it.
Patty Limerick delivered a wonderful speech at the
banquet, in part defending revisionist
historians
from the most recent round of right-thinking assaults.
I've never quite understood why the new Western
history
is even controversial. We can look around at
our place names and our diets and realize that America is
not some entity that started in Boston and marched westward
-- that our West is the result of all kinds of people from
all sorts of places.
It is possible to admire both Thomas Jefferson and Juan Bautista de Anza, to marvel at the military skill of both Sitting Bull and Gen. George Crook, to celebrate both the Old Spanish Trail and the Oregon Trail, even to read the journals of Dominguez and Escalante and of John C. Frémont.
Oh well. We got back home and went to turn on the TV, and discovered that all the Denver stations had switched around their networks.
Judging by the attendant publicity, this should have caused great consternation. But on our cable, nothing is quite where it's supposed to be, anyway. And you should expect confusion from Denver TV stations, anyway. They spent millions promoting their call letters, so that it is permanently engraved in my brain that Channel 7 is KLZ, even it it's been KMGH for years. Ditto for Channel 9 as KBTV instead of KUSA, and Channel 4 as KOA instead of KCNC.
Somehow The Denver Post has stayed in business for a century without changing its name, just as High Country News has managed for 25 years under the same name. Maybe I can figure that out the next time I've got a long drive.
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