A wave of yearning for
“Colorado as it used to be” has been sweeping the state and I
suspect much of the West. It’s almost enough to make you wish
for a time machine. If only the past were as wonderful as we think
it was.
This nostalgic, backward-looking pose is
particularly evident in the advertising by ski resorts in Colorado.
Those most easily reached from Denver have flourished — which
is another way of saying become crowded. More distant resorts would
like to become just a bit more crowded. Of course, Crested Butte,
Aspen and Steamboat Springs don’t say it like that. They talk
about small-town friendliness and the lack of congestion.
At Winter Park, real estate developer Intrawest caters to this
desire with its proclamation that most of Colorado was once a
“tight-knit group of athletes, artists and artisans …
It’s what Winter Park will always be.”
In
Telluride, the visitor’s bureau director describes that
resort as being “what Colorado was 50 years ago,” a time before
big-box stores in mountain valleys and the building of tunnels that
made it easy to get to them.
In fact, most people are too
young or too recently arrived to actually know “Colorado as it used
to be.” This purported past has more to do with mythology than
nostalgia. It’s King Arthur’s Court without those
annoyingly unkempt serfs in the background, tilling the fields, or
the curs underfoot, snarling for bones.
Colorado and the
West as they used to be were blotted with discomforts and also with
dark thoughts. Bigotry ran rampant. Chinese on the mining frontier
were tolerated only when they made less money than anybody else and
did those jobs that no one else wanted. The rare African-Americans
are remembered on the geographic landscape as “Negro Bill” and
such, although I suspect the original names were different, and
derogatory.
Do we want this part of “Colorado as it used
to be?”
Maybe the “Colorado as it used to be” that people
want is what the first pioneers in this Era of Recreation and
Leisure found in the 1940s to 1970s, when they arrived to take
possession of the old mining towns of Breckenridge, Aspen and
Telluride. The Victorian houses were rotting, their paint peeling,
available for little more than a song. But if you suffered from
appendicitis, the nearest doctor may very well have been hours
away, in the next county.
Colorado during the 1950s and
1960s was thick with sawmills, the sawdust smoldering in
tepee-shaped burners, the smoke lingering on winter mornings,
clamped over mountain valleys like lids. Colorado as it used to be
was air pollution.
Water pollution is also Colorado as it
used to be. The mines were big polluters, of course, but so were
people. Vail was already well on its way to becoming one of those
“congested I-70 resorts,” while, round the corner at the town of
Minturn, privies still hung out above the Eagle River. In Colorado
as it used to be, you hoped the brown thing at the end of the fish
line was a trout.
Colorado in the good old days was often
bad food, terrible coffee and tiny motel rooms with walls so thin
you could hear somebody in the next room snoring. It was
poor-paying jobs and, at least in my youth, five television
channels. Contrary to Intrawest’s “tight-knit group of
athletes, artists and artisans,” it was lots of blue-collar jobs in
the mines, on the ranches or in the woods.
In fact, large
parts of Colorado even today are Colorado as it used to be. Not
much has changed in the little farm towns of the High Plains, just
beyond eyeshot of the Rockies, in 30, 40, even 50 years. Even
mountain valleys have several such places. I lived in some of those
towns. I won’t return.
Yet, I do understand the
attraction of select parts of the past. I love the knotty pine that
was the décor during the golden age of automobile tourism. I
hunger for the big empties of the landscape, miles without a
stoplight, much less a mansion.
But this pining away for
“Colorado as it used to be” is ultimately an illusion. We
don’t truly hunger for the past, but instead yearn to be at
the interface. We want urban amenities on one side and wide-open
spaces on the other, the two linked by little-used roads, and the
real estate within our budgets.
It is a dream as old as
the first suburb. All the rest is marketing and sales.
Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He lives
in the Denver area of Colorado.
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