As the gyre of time turns 2022 into 2023, I’m grateful to have lived for 116* seasons and a full 30 trips around the sun in Western Colorado. A whimsical plan brought me here one summer to pick fruit for Dean and Irene Phillips on F Road in Grand Junction. As fall thickened into winter that first year, my explorations took me higher up into the mountains. Many in Colorado since have been lived at 6,600’ in Eagle. Memories of those first seasons in Colorado still catch my breath.
The road to Grand Junction Colorado from the Pacific Northwest led me through the Utah desert where I slept my first night in red-rock country on a shaded sandstone bench along the Colorado River near Dewey Bridge. Before leaving the alcove, I collected a Kodachrome 64 film cannister of red sand that still sits on my desk. Later, I called that place “the ear” for its’ ability to gather and concentrate sounds far down the river. Some memories are like that, drawing the distant near. I would return downriver into Utah many weekends that summer and countless times over the years.
I washed my hair in the silty river that Saturday morning in June of 1992 before arriving to rendezvous with the Phillips at a farmers’ market. Dean and Irene were kind in taking me in. I slept as a special guest in their open screened porch area at their home below Garfield Mountain rather than in the picker’s bunkhouses. They also owned land on Orchard Mesa outside of Hotchkiss; from a windowless basement below their son, Ron’s home, emerging from that dark, cool basement to the orchard above, to the north was the rise concealing the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, while to the West the Uncompahgre plateau split thundercloud formations that reached from far into New Mexico and Utah toward evergreen Grand Mesa above us, also known as Thunder Mountain. One week I might pick a crop of apples on the orchard astride Grand Mesa, the next I might be sent with the crew before sunrise 60 miles back through Delta on Highway 50 to pick peaches at the F Road property.
Though it has long since become familiarized as terrane accreted into my life the Colorado Plateau was terra incognita to me back then. I told a lot of folks about my plan before leaving the Northwest, which I felt I had scoured thoroughly for someone my age.
I came to Colorado after a liberal arts education capping 16 years of schooling, and four years of free room & board managing residence halls in the housing program at college. There was a social intensity about that job that had burnt me out. It was where I met Dean and Irene’s son, Scott, whom I told of my plan. Like others, he was concerned about moving somewhere where I knew no one else. Scott said what I was describing was Western Colorado. He suggested I just go work for his parents for a summer “and see where it led.” Eventually, I was convinced that going somewhere as a guest was a great way to start. So it was that I headed East from the West Coast to find my West in a new 1992 Subaru Loyale ($9,700 sticker and $240/month payments), the wagon filled with belongings, Fisher E99 XC skis and a Specialize Rockhopper, as well as a box of CDs. “Coming home to a place where I had never been before’” as John Denver sang.
I wanted to build a life. To prove something. Today, I’m still not sure what, exactly. “The Education of a Wandering Man,” Louis Lamour’s biography of a writer’s life had me persuaded that writers should be of the people and the land. Many of my favorite writers—Barry Lopez, Ed Abbey, Ivan Doig, John McPhee seemed to concur. Before college I had enjoyed physical work, and so my choice of manual labor, which was also unusual among my graduated peers. It was also a good fit for the Western Slope. I was escaping the expectations of a profession or career and also what I considered a trap of suburban dystopia where I was raised. I didn’t understand local government or land use yet though I saw and felt it.
Growing up, the edges of Vancouver, Washington were constructed around me, and the speed of their assembly reinforced the sense of disposability. In those years, new families among us continued to move out to wealthier suburbs, the homes they left behind occupied by less tidy neighbors. I watched neighborhoods go to seed. In my time two of our primary grocery stores closed gutting retail centers that chased wealthier suburbs further out. The first grocery store I remember getting Matchbox cars at turned into a huge VCR video rental store. Even where I went to college in Walla Walla, Washington, a new Blue Hills Mall had drawn key merchants off of a gem of a historic main street that has taken a generation to revive. As a child, we visited places in Oregon and Washington, the coast, the mountains that had more character which made me romantic that there might be something more authentic and lasting about rural America.
In Colorado, that first summer each weekend after the Saturday pick was done before noon to protect the soft fruit from the sun, I went shopping for new towns while exploring. It was easy to cover the basic costs of living at odd jobs. You could still earn keep that way then.
The plan, which I repeated many times before leaving the college where I graduated then worked for a while went something like this. I was considering being a writer. All I wanted was a pickup truck, a dog, and a life in a small town at the edge of the wilderness somewhere in the West. Seeking solitude, and to learn from the people and from places, I preferred small towns, as far disconnected as possible. That wasn’t so difficult before cell phones or the Internet. I poured over maps—at the time mostly terrible USFS maps that showed drainages but not contours, and books known as Gazetters which had quadrangles of an entire state for about $16. I also had AAA maps from which I identified places in Montana, Idaho, Nevada and Colorado that seemed to fit the description. This was before you could Google and read reviews and see photos of every stop of a thousand-mile trip. Back then, I rhapsodized about wanting a café where I would become a regular where the waitress new me by name, and knew my order–bacon, eggs and pancakes, which was actually how I found work and a place to rent in my first chosen town in Colorado after picking fruit.
Come fall, when all the orcharding work was done in Hotchkiss, the aspen leaves around the house turned golden and sounded papery in the breeze. The days remained warm as the edge of cold closed in at dusk. I fell for Colorado then. Alone in that basement in Hotchkiss, exhausted from a day of labor, I read everything I could about the region that I’d just bought from Back of Beyond Books, and poured over maps, planning where to go over the weekend – hiking in Utah red rock country or in the high alpine of the San Juan Mountains. I fell for Colorado’s sunshine in spite of how disturbing extended weeks of sunlight felt for a kid from Portland. Then I fell fully for nights when you could leave open a window and the coolness of the mountains poured in from the valleys hinting of snow after a balmy fall day of goldfinches and pinion jays. I loved that Colorado was a desert pretending to be lush.
All that may explain why after moving to the Eagle River Valley I chose to work outside framing custom homes for five years, then continued in construction management for another ten. Working “bags on” with my hands, I appreciated the turning of the seasons on a job site as a framing carpenter. My wife taught in Eagle County Schools, as she does still. I’m not sure that someone as idealistic as myself, a fruit picker and carpenter marrying a schoolteacher could get a foothold here now only 30 miles from a resort town, even with a bit of down payment assistance like we got from her parents, and that worries me.
Thirty years on, I’m still in Colorado. The Hotchkiss place is still there bearing fruit. Delta County hasn’t changed much. The F-Road property, just outside of Clifton succumbed to its’ last harvest as Witold Rybczynski would call it, becoming a subdivision. Grand Junction is just a whole lot more of what it was then – a geography of nowhere as James Howard Kunstler would call it; a confused bustle of a city sprawling across the desert, set in motion by cycles of extractive industry booms and busts, though now edges of it have become hip like Boulder, more so than it would care to admit. Most of Western Colorado has. I’ve learned a lot about land use and community development, and why communities become “a place,” become special while others don’t. The Western Slope—Delta, Montrose and Gunnison were yet to have a single “big box” retailer and only a few fast-food chains when I arrived. That was something I noted. The blandness of corporate retail has left its marks across many of my special places by now. Traveling down Highway 50 from Grand Junction to Montrose, or through Southern Utah, including Moab (which Edward Abby had already written off as tainted) felt as if it were still in 1950s America that first summer, rural and mostly poor with residents neither angry nor sad about it.
It would be a stretch to call what I’ve cobbled together in this life a career though I’ve been fortunate to be trusted by my fellow citizens enough to be elected five times to serve them. Their trust and my will to learn as much as I could about the role, how the civic realm operated propelled my education. Wandering less now, I am still a student, learning by doing, taught by place, circumstance, opportunity, and a growing web of relationships. I’ve had a role in a lot of changes to my small town and our county, helping shepherd it forward while retaining some of the old character. Many of my peers would prefer things like they found them, as I might feel about the place where I arrived back in 1992. I’m not a NIMBY. I believe in thoughtful change. I Across the West, certainly in Western Colorado, thousands of people have had their own version of my experience from different points in their lives, coming here. Like them, I can’t think of a better place to have experienced so many trips around the sun.
To be accurate to the calendar this should have been written last June except that being a Coloradoan is not a summer matter. Where I lived my first two years in Colorado after picking fruit, you were not considered a local unless you had spent a winter toiling with the locals. So I would be remiss in not pointing out that I spent two years in a town 9,000’ up tucked into the San Juan Mountains. Northern Exposure was on TV. Being in Lake City then was a lot like that except for the moose. When I left Lake City for one year in Alaska*(the four seasons not spent on the Western Slope) in 1994, the Post Office clerk who had lived her life there was incredulous. She said, “I thought you’d be sheriff here someday.” No one has ever given me a higher compliment. In a way, I’ve been trying to live up to that compliment since. It’s been 30 winters since those 300 residents of Lake City accepted me as one of their own as I waited tables, shoveled the school sidewalk, and did handyman work on summer cabins. Since then, I’ve been fortunate to have spent most of those seasons in Eagle where one spring has melted into the others in my mind, just like one morning now melds into the next while working from home in the house I designed and built 20 years ago. I live in a subdivision on a golf course, but the bears, badgers, elk, and the coyote don’t honor our gentrifications. I like it that way.
The Colorado perspective is born in winter. Seasons can be fleeting or return like a madman briefly in other seasons in the high country. What makes winters magic for me still? The sudden rebirth-waking up to a “perfectly” white, untrodden landscape—recalling a world unspoiled, if only appearing so long enough to sip a cup of coffee. The way the afternoon light can last forever, then the day ends suddenly turning us inward. The wonders of a dark sky–one lit mostly by the moon, remind me of our small place in the universe (dwarfing our egos). The sudden change of weather reminds me to not pretend that we succeed by imposing our plans on the day, but by adapting to what is given. I inhabit winter as a time for heroic intake of books, rest, contemplation and reset. There is a day ahead and much we can bring to it.
There is a lot to be concerned about in the world right now. At the post office this past week a neighbor and I opined about the unauthorized uses on the groomed XC ski trails, unleashed dogs, the silly animal control officers shaming owners, we complained about how the cracks in the paved path make for a rough ride sometimes, then we laughed at the silliness of our privilege. We are privileged, for all that means these days. What we in Colorado have to offer a troubled country and world is mostly perspective. It should be a perspective grounded in place, in common-sense, can-do people who work together. Maybe people who do a bit more manual labor, if only shoveling the driveway or exercising more than those elsewhere. This winter’s eve, I’m hewing to that vision that brought me here, that I have something to learn, and maybe there is a chance we can live up to the beauty of what is given to us here.
