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I spent several years in this part of Colorado, right after I dropped out of college in my hometown of Greeley for the second time. In 1974, Martha and I were hired to run the weekly Middle Park Times in Kremmling. It was part of a chain, owned by Bob Sweeney of Craig, and at the time he also owned the Summit County Journal in Breckenridge. Given the nature of rural newspapering -- you're always running out of something that you can't buy in your little town, like typewriter ribbons or Kodak D-76 developer for black-and-white film -- I got to know some of the Journal staff and eventually, some other people in Summit County.
Kremmling, at least back in those days, was a major culture shock for a bookish kid who'd spent most of his life in a college town -- a kid who had certain romantic notions about the Old West.
Kremmling was a cowtown where ranch-hands came in on Saturday night. I was a sawmill town with real-live lumberjacks cavorting on Saturday night. It was also a mining town in those days, because Amax was boring the Henderson Tunnel, and Kremmling was the closest town to the west portal.
So it could be a pretty lively place, and I'll never
forget the time, just weeks after we arrived, that Martha
and I were eating dinner at the Hoof and Horn -- an
establishment that featured a stuffed-and-mounted
two-headed calf on the wall -- when we heard the bartender
shout Down everybody. She's got a gun.
I wondered if this was just somebody's idea of a
practical joke aimed at tenderfoot newcomers like us, but
when I looked around, I saw everyone diving under their
tables, and I figured When in Rome, do as the
Romans.
The next Monday, I learned that the woman with
the gun worked for us at the paper, and that she'd seen
some other woman eying her boyfriend. Kremmling may have
been a backwater in some respects, but its women certainly
were liberated.
Another time I was sitting in the pool hall on a Sunday night during hunting season. One hunter was acting obnoxious. The bartender told him to tone it down, and when that didn't happen, he was evicted. He told us we would be sorry. He walked across the street, grabbed a .30-30 out of his pickup, and put six or seven rounds through the front window of the pool hall. By then I had learned to move quickly whenever a bartender shouted a warning about guns.
I could go on with such tales, such as gunfight between Stan and Shirley Watt with her in the ranch house and him forted up in the bunkhouse, both with deer rifles, or the time Carolyn Stone shot her husband in the butt one frosty morning because he wouldn't get up and build the fire -- she did, however, haul him to the doctor in town, albeit in the back of the ranch pickup when it was 35 below zero.
The best description I ever heard of life in Kremmling
came at a town board meeting one night. Walt Forster, a
retired rancher, had spent about twenty minutes complaining
about the quality of the town's water, concluding with
I've drunk out of sheep tracks that tasted
better.
Jim Ward, a trustee who later ran for mayor
unsuccessfully, looked across the table and said, very
calmly, Walt, you're really lucky.
Forster asked how the hell he could be considered lucky when he had to drink water like Kremmling's.
Because,
Jim said, if you lived any closer to
civilization, they'd have to put you away.
I suspect that's actually true of a lot of us -- we're just not built to live much closer to civilization.
Compared to Grand County in those days, Summit County looked like an oasis of enlightenment. It had mellow hippie cross-country skiers, not just redneck snowmobilers, and it had a recycling program, a progressive day-care center, even a few Democrats in public office.
So I was kind of excited in late 1977 when I was offered
the job of editing the Summit County Journal for John and
Jean Lannan. But just kind of
excited. In Kremmling,
we had sold out to the competition. We had been employees
of a corporation we owned, and in those days, you could pay
into the unemployment insurance fund, and then draw on it
when the time came.
I was looking forward to a Kremmling winter of unemployment checks, chopping firewood and writing a novel when I got a call one afternoon from John Lannan, the Journal's publisher. Julie McCabe, his editor, had just quit, and his psychiatrist had told him that a few months of idleness in a warm place like San Diego was vital for his mental health, and what was I doing and could I start yesterday at the Journal.
I explained that I was drawing unemployment. I had listed myself as a newspaper editor because there were only four newspapers in that unemployment office district, and three of them would not have hired me under any circumstances. Lannan owned the fourth one, and he threatened to list the Journal editorship with the state job service, which meant I'd have had to take the job or lose those nice checks that were going to support me in a winter of sloth.
So off to Breckenridge and Summit County I went, not exactly thrilled to be working, but pleased to get a little closer to civilization and a little farther away from that snowmobile outback of Kremmling. Plus, the Journal office was right next door to one of the great bars of the American West, the Gold Pan.
My memories of the place are rather hazy. I recall that
one lunchtime in April, the french fries came out a
pleasant golden color, rather than the previous murky
brown. Somebody asked the waitress what was going on, she
went back to the kitchen, and came back to announce Ski
season's over, so they changed the grease.
And there was a regular on the bar side named
Snortin' Horton.
Every time the song Cocaine came on
the jukebox, he jumped up on the bar and shouted Stand
up everybody, that's the national anthem.
The problem was that I had this image of Summit County as a wine-and-cheese Volvo zone. So I thought people would be amused by a column I wrote about coping with snowmobiles -- you could dig traps with thin snow roofs under their runs, or persuade Summit Recycling to offer bounties for those hefty aluminum engine blocks, or disable them at a distance with some Army-surplus .30-06 armor-piercing ammunition.
Some people did think it was funny, I suppose, but unbeknownst to me, there was a large resident population of snowmobilers in Summit County. Also, the state snowmobile club was holding its convention that weekend at Dillon Reservoir. Among the featured events, as it turned out, was a bonfire fueled by that week's edition of the Journal.
By the time I got to work on Monday, Lannan had already told the Rotary Club that I was fired, and I'd have known that even if the rumor mill hadn't told me. When you walk into work when everybody knows you've been fired, you're invisible. Nobody talks to you, conversations go right around you, and if you speak, no one hears you.
John Lannan came in, and on his way back to his office
said Quillen, I need to talk to you.
I followed
back, and before he could say much of anything, I said
Let's get this over fast, so I can file for unemployment
and have time left to do some chores at home today.
I think that non-plussed him so much that by the end of our conversation, he was asking how long I planned to stay at the Journal. But every month or so, he threatened to fire me, and I wasn't a good fit for a resort-town newspaper. Once a snowplow tipped over on Main Street, and we ran a picture of it on the front page. Immediately there was a call from Lucinda at the Breckenridge Resort Association, complaining that publicity like that hurt the town because people would think the streets were really slick if big snowplow trucks slid and tipped on them.
That happened to be what happened, I told her, and it was our job to report what happened, rather than concern ourselves with helping the fabrications of the ski industry -- you know, where there's always a foot of fresh powder on the slopes with a 10-foot base and the snow is still falling, but the roads are clear and dry. Lucinda threatened to have me fired.
It didn't seem all that threatening, given my attitude problems, but when I mentioned it to my colleagues, we came up with a way to deal with Lucinda.
We were always getting letters from prisoners who wanted someone to correspond with them. So one of the women on the staff wrote passionate responses to half a dozen of these poor fellows, all of whom had written that the would be getting out within the next six months or so, and signed them with Lucinda's name and address.
We never heard from her again. I'm kind of worried that no one else has, either, but on the other hand, people do need to be taught not to mess with the press.
The monthly threats to fire me were getting kind of old, and one of these days the publisher might be serious, so when I saw an ad one Sunday in the Denver Post for a managing editor for a small daily in Salida, I responded. And I got the job. After my short career on the fast lane in Summit County, a backwater looked rather attractive.
So I haven't been in Summit County much since then. I spent five years at the Mountain Mail, saw that it was my fate to be poor and live in the middle of nowhere, and realized that I didn't need to put up with an employer to do that. So I quit to free-lance.
And about a dozen years ago, I was sitting in the Green Parrot bar in Buena Vista on a raw March afternoon, and I looked out the window and saw a Copper Mountain bus disgorging its slaves. Egad, I thought, I moved a hundred miles to get away from this, and it's invading our valley. And I thought our valley would be safe -- after all, our river ran orange every now and again, the place was pockmarked with Superfund sites, and no self-respecting upscale couple would want to raise little Jasons and Jennifers in that environment.
Clearly we had to fight back to protect our backward way of life, and that's part of how our little magazine, Colorado Central, came to be. But fighting the I-70 corridor and its wide swath of generification is a lot like fighting gravity. You can do it for a while, but it takes a lot of energy, and you know you'll run out someday.
Which brings us to what you do, and so many other land trusts do -- try to preserve something of our backward rural way of life. It isn't always an easy life, and it shouldn't be, but it has its rewards.
Back in the 1970s, when valleys started to get cut up
into 35-acre ranchettes and particle-board condos were
sprouting like mushrooms, there was talk of transferable
development rights.
Under that theory, a county
government might figure out the area's capacity, divide it
proportionately, and then landowners could buy, sell, or
trade to get the rights they needed for development.
That never went anywhere, partly because it involved too much government to suit most Westerners. Conservation easements have worked to reduce rural development. They succeed because this is a market economy, and they involve a willing buyer and a willing seller.
They're also a good deal for taxpayers. I've read several studies about the costs of typical rural development in lots that range from two to forty acres. The exact number varies, but typically, local government -- county, school, fire-protection district, and the like -- gets only 70 cents in revenue for every dollar it spends to service these developments.
Thus a fiscally prudent board of county commissioners might start using every spare dollar on conservation easements, for it will decrease the tax burden down the road.
But conservation easements aren't just about saving tax money. Many of them are also about saving agriculture. Now, agriculture contributes only about four percent of Colorado's gross economic output, and it consumes about 85 percent of the state's water. In our high desert state, the lack of water helps to reduce growth -- so the more that gets consumed on hay fields, the less there is for new cookie-cutter developments in Douglas County and the smaller the margin of Republican voters.
Indeed, I have nothing against wasting water.
It's about the only way we peons can keep it from going to
new big boxes, strip malls, off-ramp franchise zones, and
similar blessings of civilization.
But mostly, conservation easements are about open space.
Before I go further about what a good job they do, I need
to state my one major qualm about them. They're
forever,
or as close to forever as our legal system
can devise. In ways, that's a form of generational
arrogance. We're saying now that we know the best
disposition of a parcel of land for the rest of time, and I
don't think any of us is smart enough to know that.
I did mention that concern once to Paul Snyder of Westcliffe, an attorney who handles legal affairs for the San Isabel Trust. He said he agreed with me, since at heart we're both Jeffersonians who question whether any generation has the right to bind another. But, he pointed out, we do the best we can, and we must trust that posterity will know how to handle what we left them.
So now back to open space. There are people, like my
friend Ken Wright of Durango, who argue that development
is forever,
and thus we must stop it on behalf of
posterity.
I don't know how you could live in Colorado and think that way. Our mountains and prairies are full of abandoned mines, ghost towns, decaying railroad grades, washed-out wagon roads, vacant farmsteads, empty irrigation works, all returning to a state of nature. It may take a while, but our scars on the landscape do heal. In 150 years, there are big chunks of Colorado that have gone from wilderness to industry to something pretty close to wilderness -- depending on how pristinely you define wilderness.
And here I want to point out that I'm not a big fan of wilderness. It's not that I oppose it, or would want to fight a wilderness designation. It's just that I don't like to visit wilderness. It's boring. It's just rocks and trees. I like old mines, old railroad grades, old cabins, prospect holes, flumes, tailings piles, windmills, corrals. I like speculating about why something was built where it was, and where a ditch or wagon road might have gone. Since wilderness, by definition, is a place where the hand of humankind has left nothing, I try to stay out of it.
Indeed, I think wilderness would be better protected and more wild if more people felt that way, and respected it by staying out of it.
This brings up some paradoxes that we all must recognize, and try to address, if we care about open space, wilderness, wildlife and the other things that make Colorado fit to live in.
We can start with something I call the Roderick Nash Contradiction. Nash is the author of Wilderness and the American Mind, and it's a fine book. I heard him speak in Gunnison about a dozen years ago, and soon I was troubled.
He talked about his comfortable home in Santa Barbara, where he kept a boat that could take him on multi-day trips up and down the West Coast. He also had a ski chalet in Crested Butte. And he traveled all over the world to speak.
And I thought Who is this guy to be telling me how to
tread lightly on the planet? He destroys more of the ozone
layer in a week than I will in a lifetime.
I think we
all must be very careful not to be telling people how to
live in ways that we're not willing to live ourselves.
It's like Phyllis Schafley. She used to fly all over the
country telling women that they ought to stay home. As the
saying goes, actions speak louder than words,
and we
ought to be sure that we walk our talk. If we can't, we'd
better change one or the other.
Another outdoor issue is the Publisher Problem. Since I
am one, I know it intimately. For some reason, people like
to read about great undiscovered places,
whether
they're towns (Salida made Outside's top twenty list of
hidden gems last year, but I'm sure that we will soon fall
out of fashion) or spas or fishing holes.
Since readers like to see these stories, magazines like
to publish them. And free-lance writers -- I'm one of
those, too -- like to do some paying work. So we rack our
brains to come up with those undiscovered
places,
which are thereby publicized. Whatever made them
distinctive soon vanishes with the ensuing invasion,
because tourists generally prefer the familiar MacDonald's
to the local Gold Pan, the predictable Holiday Inn to the
unknown funky old hotel down by where the railroad station
used to be.
The discovered place becomes any place, and the process moves to yet another undiscovered place. It's sort of like strip mining, and you keep thinking that eventually we'll run out of undiscovered places to exploit, be they quaint towns or waterfalls.
As a writer and as a magazine publisher, I've tried to avoid that. I learned my lesson the hard way, the personal way.
Back in 1978, I was newly arrived in Salida as managing
editor of the local daily, and Earned that one of my duties
was assembling the annual special edition for tourists,
Summer Fun.
So I extolled the diverse attractions of this area, giving great attention to the places that I liked myself, to those that my colleagues enjoyed, to spots I heard other local people talking about.
Summer Fun
came out at the end of May, and by the
middle of July, I was about as popular as an IRS auditor
among those very people.
The publisher wondered why I had to mention Xxxxx Creek
as a spot where brookies teemed. It was
shoulder-to-shoulder fishermen last weekend,
he
complained. I could barely find a place to cast from,
and the creek has been fished out anyway. It'll take me
years to find another place as nice as Xxxxx Creek
was.
A friend in town moaned that the Xxxxx Trail, a scenic
delight which had been his favorite getaway because he had
the whole place to himself, now looked like the marching
route for a mass migration of Boulderites in backpacks.
You'd have a better chance of finding some peace and
solitude if you went to a Aurora,
he growled.
When I ventured to my own favorite camping spot, a secluded little glen just off the Xxxxx Road, I discovered it had three tents, two pickup campers, several Winnebagos, lots of trash and no firewood.
Since the place had always been empty in years before, I
inquired of one of the campers. He pulled out a copy of
Summer Fun
and showed me my very own words, about
how there was this wonderful camping spot about four miles
up the Xxxxx Road from Xxxxx, which offered a tumbling
creek, superlative views, etc.
I learned my lesson. That was the last time I ever tried
full disclosure.
Every year thereafter, I polled my
friends and the newspaper staff as to whether they had any
favorite haunts in the nearby mountains.
Those places were of course omitted. It's not that I had anything against serving the public, but we gave our visitors ample information about dozens of attractions. It only seemed fair that we reserve a few for ourselves.
This is not limited to Salida. Some years later, I had written an article for a mountain magazine which must remain nameless.
The editor had some questions. As we were talking, I mentioned Xxxxx Pass as possibly worth an article someday.
Oh no,
he said. That's one of my favorite
places, and as long as I'm here, there won't be word one
about it in this magazine. We're keeping that to ourselves,
and I'd sure appreciate it if you never wrote about Xxxxx
Pass for anyone else.
I said I understood perfectly, and I've kept my word.
But I despair every time I see yet another guidebook or
magazine promising to tell us about special undiscovered
hidden places.
Now there is a counter-argument to this. I saw it in the introduction to a book called The Waterfalls of Colorado. The authors anticipated that they would be criticized for attracting the public to places that had previously been rather untrammeled. They explained that by attracting more people to these cascades, they were building a bigger political constituency for their protection. Which brings the question, How much protection would they need if hardly anybody knew about them?
This inspires some mention of a related phenomenon,
which I call the Edward Abbey Conundrum, the result of
Literary Tourism.
Scholars of the tourist industry explain that there are all kinds of tourism: Recreational, like the ski or river-running industry; Heritage, like visiting the museums and old mines of Leadville; Sports, like people coming to Denver for the NBA all-star game or to Gunnison for a youth ice-hockey tournament.
Among these are Literary Tourism. People read a book, like it, and want to visit its setting. Since authors can be creative types, the setting may well be an imaginary landscape, and the closest real equivalent has to find a way to accommodate the visitors who will show up. Thus, back in the days when Bonanza was a hot television show, people showed up in Nevada to see the Ponderosa. Rather than disappoint them, an entrepreneur near Lake Tahoe built a replica and charged tourists to visit it.
This also happened with South Fork from the TV series Dallas. On Prince Edward Island in Canada, you can book an Anne of Green Gables tour. Monterrey, California, may not have had much use for John Steinbeck when he was alive and wrote a novel about a seedy industrial zone, but now people spend millions of dollars every year to see a preserved Cannery Row.
Which brings us to Edward Abbey, who wrote great essays in Desert Solitaire and a fine adventure romp in The Monkey Wrench Gang. Even though Abbey accurately portrayed the southwestern desert as a hard place, his writing still inspired people to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to see it -- and not just look at it, but get out into it.
Now, if only one person visits a given parcel every year, it doesn't matter a lot where she walks or how she answers a call of nature. The land doesn't need much management. But if dozens or hundreds appear every day, then a responsible land manager has to protect the resource.
For the sake of public health, privies need to be
installed, and then maintained and cleaned. Hiking trails
and vehicle routes must be designated and enforced, so as
to protect the rest of the landscape from getting trampled.
Parking areas need to be set up. These things all cost
money, and so user fees
start to sound
reasonable.
In hardly any time, the solitary place celebrated by
Edward Abbey has become a cog in the machine of what he
called Industrial Tourism.
Indeed, I have on
occasion argued that Abbey has done more damage to southern
Utah and northern Arizona than any dozen uranium-mining
companies.
I put this issue before John Nichols once. You won't find his Chamisaville or Milagro on any map of New Mexico, but Rio Arriba villages like Truchas have seen more tourism than they wanted as a result of his trilogy.
Good question,
he said, and there's no answer.
We're writers. That's who we are and what we do. We tell
stories. And we can't predict or control the consequences,
good or bad.
So there's the problem. Even when you make a place sound rather unattractive, as Steinbeck or Abbey did, you can still attract visitors, and the more visitors, the more the place changes -- sometimes that's for the better, but when you were celebrating the place for its harshness, remoteness, and loneliness, the transformation isn't necessarily an improvement.
We have another threat to open space, and the enjoyment
thereof: Our over-reliance on the federal government to
provide it and protect it. We act as though the boundaries
of our sacred public lands
were carved in stone long
ago, rather than largely being the result of
happenstance.
Just about every time I decide to ignore the effect on
my blood pressure and look through the rural real
estate
section of any mountain-town newspaper, I see
locutions like surrounded by public land
or
adjoins national forest.
These add value to property
-- a process carried to an extreme by a developer named Tom
Chapman, who specialized in buying inholdings inside
wilderness areas, threatening to develop them with
helicopter transportation, and then selling out to
high-minded protectors for big money.
Now, why would anybody pay a premium for property on the edge of nowhere? I should note that conservation easements can assist in this elevation of real-state prices -- my Realtor friends tell me that there a lot of well-heeled people who look for rural property with such easements, because there's an assurance that they will never have neighbors nearby. And, they say, public land offers the same assurance. That is, you will never have neighbors.
As motivations go for protecting open space, I can't say I approve of that one. I don't like the idea of people withdrawing from society, and expecting us to protect their fortress.
But as we all know, there are many good reasons for protecting most public lands from development -- maintaining the seclusion of multi-millionaires just doesn't happen to be one of them.
And now we've got the Bush Administration opening up natural-gas leases in areas that had once been quiet -- and areas where the wells once offered drinkable water and the air was fit to breathe. If this meant that our natural gas bills would go down, maybe it would be worth the sacrifice -- but my heating bills sure haven't dropped this winter, and I bet yours haven't either.
Being next to public land doesn't protect you from noise and traffic and methane in the creek. And it may not stay public land these days, either.
There are exchanges, and it is wise to keep your eyes on our State Land Board. The Forest Service might trade the land with the state, and the state might sell it.
In southern Nevada, the federal government has sold thousands of acres of BLM land. By and large, this has been a good thing, or at least tolerable. It enables Las Vegas and other cities in Clark County to grow without having to sprawl around parcels of wasteland. There are provisions to protect wildlife corridors and habitat, and if that area's population is going to increase, this is a reasonable accommodation.
Under the 1998 Southern Nevada Public Lands Act, the proceeds of these sales go to various local agencies, like schools and water districts. But the Bush Administration has proposed changing that -- to put the proceeds into the federal treasury to help reduce the federal deficit.
If they succeed there, they're likely to look at other
places with plenty of public land and a lot of potential
buyers -- like, say, Colorado. They'll talk about the
glories of privatization and an ownership society,
and they'll be cutting deals to replace our open space with
10-acre lots that offer 360-degree panoramic views with
glorious aspen and towering ponderosa. Any money raised
thereby will go to the federal treasury to do what this
administration best likes to do -- make billionaires
richer.
That may be the biggest threat to open space at the moment. The good work of conservation easements will help, but let's face it -- there isn't a lot of private land in most mountain counties.
When I was a kid and complained a lot about nearly everything, my parents and teachers told me that I was obliged to offer solutions, rather than just bitch about things. I'm still not sure they were right, but I will propose a course toward a way to protect our open spaces from the simultaneous threats of being over-used or developed into more sprawl.
Let's start paying attention to our closed spaces
-- our towns. If they were more attractive, people would
spend more time in them. By attractive,
I mean not
only in an sthetic sense, although that can be important,
but in the sense that they attract us. They can offer us
good parks and trails, they can provide pleasant pedestrian
environments so that we'll enjoy walking to the store as
part of our daily routine.
I find it disgusting that we build environments that are accessible only by automobile, thereby sending us to war for oil, and reducing our daily exercise, so that we end up spending money on gyms and exercise machinery and eventually physicians -- much of which we wouldn't need if we just made walking easier and more pleasant.
And if people could enjoy being outside in town, we wouldn't find so much of a need to go to the woods -- and, let's face it, our presence, especially when there are thousands of us on a given weekend, doesn't exactly improve the open space.
This is a big challenge, especially when you consider the sociology of little mountain towns. About 20 years ago, I spent a couple of days in Twin Lakes, that little settlement at the east foot of Independence Pass. I was working on an article about the proposed Quail Mountain ski area nearby, and the residents were sharply divided as to its merits.
Mostly I talked to opponents, one of whom told me that the controversy had threatened the town's only real institution -- the volunteer fire department. The arguments had become so bitter that they had to agree not to talk about Quail Mountain in the firehall, lest the department fall apart and leave Twin Lakes without any fire protection.
Eventually I found a Quail Mountain supporter, the late Ken Olsen Sr. -- his son, Ken Jr., is now a Lake County Commissioner. While talking to him, I marveled at the depth of the controversy and how it was splitting the town.
You've got to realize,
he said, that people
don't move to these little mountain towns because they love
their fellow man.
So there's a certain amount of anti-social self-selection in our communities, which is sometimes manifested by events like the bulldozer rampages in Alma and more recently, Granby.
But it's something we can work toward, and if we do a better job on our closed spaces, we'll have open spaces that we can enjoy all the more -- perhaps just by knowing they're there.
Thank you, and good evening. If there's time, I'll be glad to answer questions, about this, or anything else I've written.
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