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That someone went on a destructive rampage in a little mountain town last week came as no real surprise, but it did surprise me that it happened in Granby.
When we lived in Middle Park, from 1974 to 1978, Granby always seemed like the most sensible town in Grand County.
One county town was Grand Lake, then home to Middle
Park's only practicing environmentalist, as well as a mayor
whom I once characterized in print as Grand County's
answer to Idi Amin
-- and he took it as a
compliment.
Also there was the Fraser-Tabernash-Winter Park complex.
Many interesting people hung around the ski resort in those
days before real money and big developers arrived; one was
Rootin' Tootin' Luten,
who was arrested one night
for lying down in the middle of U.S. 40.
We lived in Kremmling, home to Cootie Lusk, who used to bring his horse into the Hoof and Horn bar as a dance partner because, he claimed, no woman would dance with him. There was Fritz Ritschard, who always checked, after each election, to be sure his vote for the Communist candidate was counted.
The general feel of Kremmling might have been best
expressed at a town board meeting one night. Walt Forster,
a retired rancher, spent at least half an hour complaining
about the town's water quality, concluding with I've
drunk out of sheep tracks that tasted better.
In reply, Kremmling Trustee Jim Ward leaned forward and
said Walt, you're really lucky.
How can you say I'm lucky, what with this awful
water?
Walt asked.
Because if you lived any closer to civilization,
they'd put you away,
Jim replied.
The relative eccentricity of the area might also be demonstrated by the aftermath of a domestic dispute on a nearby ranch. A woman kicked her husband out, then forted up in the ranch house. But he had some guns in the bunkhouse. A shoot-out ensued. Sheriff's deputies had to crawl through snow, sagebrush and sharp rocks to break it up.
Two weeks later, though, they were a united couple, presenting their views at a county commissioners' meeting where they took turns swearing loudly and profusely in disapproval of the county's snow-plowing policies.
Granby was the county's commercial hub, and thus I spent a lot of time there selling ads for the Middle Park Times, the weekly newspaper we published in Kremmling, 27 miles away.
The only personal contentions I can remember in Granby
were arguments with newcomers who thought the town's name
was Grandby,
on account of it being in Grand County
near what was known, until 1922, as the Grand River. It was
actually named for Granby Hillyer, a Denver attorney for
the townsite company that worked with David Moffat's
railroad that came through in 1905.
Granted, I got to Middle Park after the Strawberry Lake Festival of 1972, which still had many residents cussing about their concern that the Granby area might be taken over by invading hippies.
But even if Granby seemed like the sanest spot in Grand County, it was still a little mountain town in Colorado, and that indicates a certain degree of anti-social behavior -- after all, if you really liked people, you'd live where there were more of them.
Last weekend, the bulldozer rampage story was playing nationally, often with a sidebar about a similar attack in Alma in 1998. The former mayor of Alma, Roger Ensign, told the Post that the quirky character of mountain towns allows residents to be themselves, guarded from judgment by others, but that same quality can blind them to warning signs.
He hit it dead on. Our little mountain towns often
attract cranks, misfits, anarchists, survivalists -- just
about any sort of humanity that has trouble living closer
to civilization. The Granby witness who said This is the
kind of thing that happens in big cities
was wrong; it
happens in little mountain towns.
Why? Years ago I was writing an article about a ski area
proposed near Twin Lakes, where I asked the late Ken Olsen
Sr. why the residents were fighting so bitterly over Quail
Mountain. People don't move to these little mountain
towns because they love their fellow man,
he said.
In our montane backwaters, we have a social contract,
along the order of I'll put up with your weirdness if
you put up with mine.
In the suburbs, where most
Americans live, the ethic appears to be the wind chimes
on your porch violate the covenants and will have to be
removed, and besides, your lawn is 1/16-inch too
high.
The mountain-town attitude has its costs, as Alma and Granby demonstrated. But I suspect many of us figure it's worth running the risk that one of our ranting neighbors is seriously deranged, in exchange for the reward of not having to care about whether the neighbors approve of our cars, lawns, clothes, pets, politics, hobbies, habits and attitudes.
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