Cheap Land Colorado

From Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of “In these dispatches, [Conover] invites readers to ride shotgun along an unraveling edge of the American West, where sepia-toned myths about making a fresh start collide with modern modes of alienation, volatility, and exile.... In a nation whose edges have come to define its center, this is essential reading.”--Jessica Bruder, author of In May 2017, Ted Conover went to Colorado to explore firsthand a rural way of life that is about living cheaply, on your own land--and keeping clear of the mainstream. The failed subdivisions of the enormous San Luis Valley make this possible. Five-acre lots on the high prairie can be had for five thousand dollars, sometimes less.;; Conover volunteered for a local group trying to prevent homelessness during the bitter winters. He encountered an unexpected diversity: veterans with PTSD, families homeschooling, addicts young and old, gay people, people of color, lovers of guns and marijuana, people with social anxiety--most of them spurning charity and aiming, and sometimes failing, to be self-sufficient. And more than a few predicting they’ll be the last ones standing when society collapses.; Conover bought his own five acres and immersed himself for parts of four years in the often contentious culture of the far margins. He found many who dislike the government but depend on its subsidies; who love their space but nevertheless find themselves in each other’s business; who are generous but wary of thieves; who endure squalor but appreciate beauty. In their struggles to survive and get along, they tell us about an America riven by difference where the edges speak more and more loudly to the mainstream....

Autorentext
TED CONOVER is the author of several books, including Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and National Geographic. He is a professor at, and the former director of, New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Leseprobe
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Cheap Land Colorado

We come for the scale of it.

—Linda Gregerson, “Sleeping Bear”

These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraph and kerosene and coal stoves—they’re good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on ’em.

—Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winterb

My first experience of the San Luis Valley came on a family car trip when I was eleven. We stayed on the paved roads, but even that was impressive. The Great Sand Dunes National Monument, now Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, looked like fake scenery from a movie until we were in it. I was amazed by its origin story: grains of sand blown from one side of this huge expanse, about the size of New Jersey, had formed gigantic dunes on the other. The San Juan mountains to the west hold the remains of an enormous ancient supervolcano whose eruption was possibly the largest explosion in the earth’s geologic history.

When you grow up in a beautiful place that seems to lose some beauty to settlement (i.e., development) every year, you treasure the unchanged. The San Luis Valley still looks much as it did one hundred, or even two hundred, years ago. Blanca Peak, at 14,345 feet the fourth highest summit in the Rockies, overlooks a vast openness. Blanca, named for the snow that covers its summit most of the year, is visible from almost everywhere in the valley and is considered sacred by the Navajo. The range Blanca presides over, the Sangre de Cristos, forms the valley’s eastern side. Nestled up against the range just north of Blanca are the amazing sand dunes. The valley tapers to a close down in New Mexico, a little north of Taos. It is not hard to picture the Indigenous people who carved images into rocks near the rivers, or the Hispanic people who established Colorado’s oldest town, San Luis, and a still working system of communal irrigation in the southeastern corner, or a pioneer wagon train. Pronghorn antelope still roam, as do feral horses and the occasional mountain lion.

It’s also not hard to see a through line between the homesteaders of the nineteenth century and the people who move out there today. The land is no longer free, but it is some of the cheapest in the United States. In many respects, a person could live in this vast, empty space like the pioneers did on the Great Plains, except you’d have a truck instead of a wagon and mule, and some solar panels, possibly even a weak cellphone signal. And legal weed. By selling or bartering weed and picking up seasonal labor, you might even get by without having a job, though if you have no income, things can get tricky, especially when winter comes around. It would be extremely difficult to live completely off the land, especially out on the open prairie.

I left Colorado for college, and again for grad school, and finally for New York and my city-loving wife. But on my office wall hangs my last Colorado license plate, from 1990. Family kept me coming back on visits, and often I would meet up with old friends. One of these was Jay, whose family had a cozy A-frame cabin in Fairplay, Colorado, about an hour and a half from Denver in another high basin, this one called South Park. Mocked as a backwater by the animated TV series, South Park is a great foil to the busy, popular Interstate 70 corridor that leads to ski areas like Copper Mountain and Vail. It is windy, mostly treeless, and sparsely populated. Jay’s family A-frame was in trees at the valley’s edge, but it got famously cold there in the winter (and often even in the summer). We did a lot of cross-country skiing in the backcountry and joined up with friends for parties there, starting in high school and continuing for many New Year’s Eves after.

In 2016 a Denver magazine called 5280 asked me to write about South Park. Jay and I reconvened there for a few days. The “park” is very wide, and we wanted to visit areas we’d never seen before. A local offered directions to one particularly remote area, musing that “once you’re on 53, you will swear you’ll never find your way back.” We headed there the next afternoon and found a place nearly devoid of people that was overlaid with dirt roads from a moribund 1970s subdivision that had never taken off, just as in the San Luis Valley. This area, a few months before, had made the news as the home of a disturbed man named Robert Dear who had attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing three people and injuring eight. The New York Times ran a photo of the little trailer he lived in on five acres. The trailer was surrounded by snow and miles of empty space, the very picture of isolation and desolation. I thought, What would it be like to live out there? What would drive you to it? Who would you get to know? How would you manage?

We saw some isolated trailers and shacks and assumed a handful of people were living off-grid. We heard from a teacher in Fairplay that some of the kids from that area had parents with pretty extreme religious views, which had created friction with the school district. We knew that the local sheriff’s department had recently had shoot-ups with white supremacists in remote parts of South Park. We had to pause, as we drove around, to wait for a herd of bison to finish crossing the dirt road we were on, leap over a fallen gate on the far side, and move into an empty field. We kept looking for a cowboy who might have sent them on their way, but they seemed to be on their own.

Denver and New York are complex urba…