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Sometimes my other literary efforts demand that I give Colorado some character. That is heavy work. What character can you give a state that is hell-bent on establishing a generic American landscape of big-box retailers, limited-access freeways, outlet malls, fast-foot strips, condo collections and cookie-cutter houses?
But people pay for creativity, not honesty, and so I can employ a rhetorical trick and pretend that Colorado has a soul and a heart, and that you can find the soul at San Luis and the heart at Leadville.
Leadville and San Luis are a good pair in this regard. San Luis is the state's oldest town, and it was founded in 1851 by farmers moving north. It's still rather pastoral.
Leadville is heavy industry set two miles above sea level. It was for many years our state's wickedest city (it hasn't been that long since the Pioneer Club closed), and it was founded by miners moving west.
Two streams of migration and two approaches to the landscape, as reflected in the farmer's shovel and the miner's pick on our state seal.
Granted, neither town sits along the Front Range, where the majority of Colorado lives, but you can't cover everything with a literary device like personification, and if it did become necessary to assign a body part to the source of the Brown Cloud, I'm sure I could think of something.
Our Colorado soul, San Luis, seemed in good condition when I visited as last summer was winding down. We stayed in an old convent, now converted to a bed and breakfast. Raised a Baptist, I found the convent exotic and fascinating, but the lapsed Catholics said it felt kind of creepy.
We were there to learn about San Luis's efforts to
acquire La Sierra
-- the huge Taylor Ranch east of
town. We even got to visit part of the ranch.
For that tour, I boarded a car driven by Felix Romero, the ultimate Colorado native -- he owns and operates the R&R Market in San Luis, which was founded in 1857 by his great-great-grandfather and has been in the family ever since.
There were three other passengers, and I was the only one not fluent in Colorado's unofficial language. So it took me a while to catch on that we were pretty much lost on the back roads of Costilla County.
Felix, this is going to be major scandal if I ever
get out of here to write about this,
I finally
interjected.
Gringo turista kidnapped and taken for a ride?
he
asked.
No, that the town of San Luis wants the Taylor Ranch,
and one of its leading citizens can't even find the
place,
I replied.
Eventually we got there, though, and Colorado's soul seems to be in good shape.
But the state's heart is about to stop pumping. Leadville's last operating mine, the Asarco Black Cloud, is closing down.
Leadville's silver boom in 1879 made Denver into a city -- Leadville capital built mansions on Capitol Hill and the city's first substantial retail center. Leadville helped build the fortunes of Marshall Field and the Guggenheim family.
Over the years, while other mining camps either decayed or tried the Aspen route, Leadville steadfastly continued to mine. It offered a gritty reality -- if you saw two guys waving guns at each other on a Saturday night on East Second Street, you took cover because this wasn't some show for the tourists.
But Climax began shutting down in 1981, and now the Black Cloud is closing, and central Colorado no longer pulses to Leadville's cadence.
Leadville is now more or less a bedroom town for the resort belt along Interstate 70. That's an awful fate for what was once Colorado's second-largest city, and as someone who cherished rough-and-tumble ramshackle Leadville during the Shining Times, I've given considerable thought to how to save Colorado's heart.
Close Tennessee and Frémont passes. Blocking these arteries would keep the virulent I-70 pathogens from spreading to Leadville and points south, and this would certainly discourage commuters from settling in Leadville.
If the resorts needed hired help, they could pay wages sufficient for their workers to live nearby. And our state department of transportation, always strapped for money, could save the high cost of maintaining these two snowy crossings. It's a win for everybody.
Unfortunately, my sensible proposals never catch on in Colorado, and we'll have to try something else. The servant commuter population will grow -- they might even ride the train to work someday -- and eventually the EPA will certify Leadville as lead-free.
In which case, change the name to something modern and appropriate, like SouthVail or SummitWest, and forget there ever was a Leadville -- it was just too damned rough and honest to fit into modern Colorado, anyway.
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