January 1, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Uncategorized
World enters brand-new era quietly
It was a scream heard around the world, but it wasn’t the
scream the world had expected at the dawn of 2000.
When all the machines seemed to work perfectly, global crisis
management officials were reduced – or elevated, perhaps – to
talking about the first bouncing baby boy born at 12:15 a.m. local
time on the island of Guam.
The newest human life on U.S. soil reminded Guam and the
waiting world that the wonders of the flesh still trump the
mysteries of the megabyte, from the South Pacific to the South
Bronx.
“The mother and baby are doing fine,” said a bemused U.S. Y2K
czar John Koskinen to an international television audience, after
first announcing that a worldwide “scouring” for disasters related
to the year 2000 changeover had turned up a handful of items that
wouldn’t make the front page of a kindergarten newsletter.
“Good changeover!’
And wherever people gathered – as midnight moved from
Australia west to Alaska – it was rarely hard to find a tether
linking them back to Colorado. Reaching these people almost
instantly by telephone was a measure of just how interconnected
the world had become.
“Good changeover!” said Mark Vollmer, formerly of Louisville
in Boulder County, now living north of Sydney, Australia. Vollmer
and his family were among the world’s first to experience 1999
becoming 2000 and see that their preparations – extra fuel for
their barbecue – weren’t immediately necessary.
The Vollmers watched Sydney’s $3.5 million fireworks display
on television and played in a field behind their house with
sparklers.
“We seemed to whiz right along,” Vollmer said before finally
going to bed.
As the new millennium finally reached Denver hours later,
Marshall Emm sat down in front of his ham radio and sent midnight
greetings by the old fashioned method of a telegraph key, the New
Year’s Eve tradition of U.S. amateur radio fans. Tapping away with
one of the oldest forms of worldwide communication, Emm learned
that the newest forms of worldwide communication were still
working just fine.
“Infrastructure holding’
New York City cops mugged for ubiquitous TV cameras and kept
their riot batons holstered.
The decided lack of global glitches served to pump up the
volume at street and harbor parties from Sydney to Giza, Egypt.
Russians added an extra toast to their parties when longtime
President Boris Yeltsin announced his resignation in favor of new
blood for the next millennium, and dancers in New Delhi seemed to
bounce a little higher when worries about a hijacked Indian
Airlines plane dissipated with the passengers’ safe release.
Fireworks flashed and crackled worldwide – and electric
lights still glowed – as hundreds of millions of people celebrated
a new century.
“The infrastructure is holding,” said Lisa Pellegrin,
spokeswoman for the International Y2K Cooperation Center in
Washington, where United Nations-funded technicians are monitoring
conditions in 106 countries.
Celebration was relative, of course, with a fourth of
humanity struggling to survive, according to a new United Nations
report, on less than $1 a day.
“Here we can’t talk about fireworks,” said Father Gaston
Muyombo, formerly of central Denver’s Saint Louis Parish, now
serving people in Central Africa’s war-torn Congo.
“What we are doing here is just a matter of survival,”
Muyombo said.
For those who could celebrate, among the happiest were
families united.
In Mexico, Karina Azanza Morales, Colorado’s trade
representative, drove from her office in Guadalajara to join her
parents and other relatives at the family home in Leon. They
feasted Friday night and rejoiced at recent birth of a niece. Then
they broke out the grapes. During each of the last 12 seconds of
1999, they ate one grape, until the final moment. “A Mexican
tradition,” Karina explained. “For good luck.”
In Moscow, school principal Tatiana Yurovskaia waited to hear
from her son in San Francisco. They’d toured Colorado together,
staying in the mountains, but now were depending on telephone
connections. And when the phone rang, the news was amazing. “He
asked me, “What is going on?'” Yurovskaia said. “I said, “I have
no idea.’ He told me: “The Russian president resigned.’ I’d heard
nothing. There was nothing on television. Later I heard a radio
report. I learned about Russia’s president resigning from California!”
In the Middle East, former Denver resident Arlynn Nellhaus
drove her white sedan through Jerusalem to the Mount of Olives. A
few Christians awaited midnight there watching for Jesus Christ.
Yet political fervor over the possible return of Golan Heights
land to Syria overshadowed the move from one century to the next,
Nellhaus said. “We’re so involved in political stuff here that we
can hardly think about it.”
Chilly celebration
On the shores of the winter pack ice at Hudson’s Bay, Canada,
the town famous for dancing with polar bears worried far more
about a blizzard than any Y2K shocks. On Christmas Day, Churchill
Mayor Michael Spence reported, the icy town of 1,200 suffered 80
mph winds and evacuated 200 people to the town hall.
For New Year’s Eve, everyone fired up their snowmobiles and
went back to the town center for an all-night party, with
musicians brought in on the railroad – owned by a Denver-based
company – since there’s no road to get there.
In the United States, widespread partying was tempered
somewhat by duty and sheer exhaustion. Millions like Bryan Sanchez
worked overtime on millennial preparedness. Sanchez runs a north
Denver baking factory that is part of a worldwide network
supplying hamburger buns to McDonald’s. Early in the day, he
checked the company voice mail and heard messages from Japan to
Italy to Florida that buns were still flying off the global conveyors.
After midnight, Sanchez drove his newly washed Chrysler down
to the Denver plant to flick on the lights and machines to make
sure everything worked. Since there were no problems elsewhere in
the world, the extra buns in the Denver freezer wouldn’t be needed
as a global backup.
In some countries, leaders downplayed celebrations.
In Caracas, Venezuela, one woman was simply too sad to
celebrate. Displaced by recent mudslides, which claimed more than
30,000 lives, she encountered Dan Spicer, a Denver-based
lawyer-turned-relief workers, outside the Hilton Hotel.
She gazed at him in total dismay, Spicer said. “It’s not
important to celebrate the millennium,” she told him, “when so
many poor people are suffering here.”
All day Friday, encouraging reports bolstered faith in
technology.
And in Senegal, Dr. Khalifa Cisse, in Bargny on the outskirts
of Dakar, figured computers will be crucial for Africa’s future.
“New modern technology can help us to satisfy our needs and to
develop our knowledge and try to increase our position in life,”
Cisse said.
At the same time, people everywhere also voiced anxieties
that technology and a technological way of living threaten
humanity and nature in the 21st century.
In affluent Western societies, “even human beings have become
machines,” said Naseem Seher, 65, in Lahore, Pakistan. Her son
Masood runs a Concordia trekking business out of Buena Vista, and
she enjoys the United States when she visits each year. But
Westerners will have to acknowledge “a different approach towards
life” that she sees as stronger in non-Western societies – one
that emphasizes “the human touch, the human being.”
Visiting her grandmother in high-tech Shanghai, China,
University of Colorado engineering graduate student Bi Xu, 24,
gazed up at new shiny skyscrapers – more glass and steel closer
and taller than anything she’s seen in the United States.
China’s booming financial capital feels “scary … too
modernized,” Xu said. Yet opportunities abound there, and Xu
figured her career – like her family – will straddle Colorado and
China. Nature is dying, warned Israeli scientist Reuven Yosef,
along the Red Sea near Elat, where he’s restoring habitat for
migrating birds. Yosef was in Colorado last year seeking funding
for his project; he’d helped with conversion of the Rocky Mountain
Arsenal to an urban wildlife refuge. “We must have our environment
intact for humans to survive,” Yosef said before climbing a desert
mountain to welcome the new century with his wife.
Hopes remained high nonetheless.
“Maybe this next century can start with more peaceful
attitudes,” Dr. Andrey Vasiliev said in St. Petersburg, Russia,
before heading to a park with his wife, children and a stash of
Chinese fireworks. “I would suppose we can be assured of another
century.”
November 7, 1999 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Human Rights, Security
Code Talkers WWII heroes get late recognition
WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. – For the first time in half a century,
the Navajo Code Talkers find themselves standing at the edge of
the limelight.
Researchers seek them for interviews. Schools invite them to
speak. Hollywood producers want to film action movies about them.
All the attention is linked to a longtime secret: the Code
Talkers’ use of Dine, the complex, tonal Navajo language, to help
the United States win World War II.
As boys in U.S. government-run boarding schools, the Code
Talkers would be punished for speaking Navajo. But when the war
flared, the government that banned their unique language suddenly
valued it as the base for a code to flummox the Japanese. The
Marines enlisted 420 Navajos, many of them teenagers, for combat
communications.
A code was developed using Navajo words to represent each
English letter. The Navajos also borrowed from nature for military
terms, translating battleships as “whales,” fighter jets as
“hummingbirds,” bombers as “buzzards,” bombs as “eggs.”
For years, only military historians knew much about the
special mission in which Code Talkers transmitted thousands of
messages on World War II’s bloodiest beaches, from Guadalcanal to
Iwo Jima. U.S. officials long failed to recognize this unusual
cross-cultural service.
Now in their 70s, with etched, weary faces, the men are
unsure what to make of the recent sudden attention. Some are
ambivalent.
“We just think it’s kind of late,” said their leader Sam
Billison, 74, president of the Navajo Code Talkers’ Association
and a member of the Navajo Tribal Council. Shaking his head in the
doorway of his one-story home, Billison noted that one Hollywood
thriller in the works may use Anglo actors to play the leading
Code Talker roles.
Surviving Code Talkers, in recent interviews, tried to convey
their experience, starting with their move to assimilate in the
modern world, then later to conserve the Navajo language for the
future. Many are still physically active, chopping trees,
attending political meetings. Going into the 21st century, the men
are an emblem for Native Americans – struggling for survival
within the nation they served, the nation that has all but
obliterated their world.
From boarding schools to battlefields
The story began when the Code Talkers were boys, sent out from
round cedar-log hogans across the Navajo reservation. It’s a high
desert land, a fourth the size of Colorado, where blue skies
blanket natural wonders from the blood-red buttes of the Monument
Valley to echoing Canyon de Chelly.
Their parents herded sheep and grew corn. There was no
electricity or running water.
Many parents wanted their sons to be educated at boarding
schools the U.S. government had established around reservations.
“Son, you should go to school,” Billison recalled his mother
saying every morning. “She used to say: “Look at the way we live.
Look at the hogan. Look, we don’t have any car. We don’t have
anything. I don’t want you to grow up and be like this. … I
don’t want you to live the way we are living now.'” Sheep prices
were falling. Anglo cattlemen encroached on their land.
Thomas Begay, 73, remembers his father telling him: “I want
you to be like that white man over there in that suit and tie. I
want you to be in that position,” he said. “Never again will my
family live off livestock.”
But boarding school often was brutal.
Administrators changed Navajo names to Christian ones. They
forbade the students from speaking Navajo. Transgressors were
punished – grounded, ordered to write sentences over and over,
humiliated as teachers washed their mouths out with soap.
“They’d line us up, march us around,” said Wilford Buck, 73,
who attended a school near Ship-rock, N.M. “You missed your
parents. You wanted to see your parents.”
The idea of Navajo-based code took hold in 1942. Philip
Johnston, who grew up on the reservation as the son of a
missionary, suggested to military leaders that Navajos might give
the United States an advantage in sending secure battlefield
messages.
U.S. recruiters set up on the reservation. Thousands of
Navajos volunteered to fight, eager for off-reservation work. The
Marines chose 420 who seemed particularly bright to be Code
Talkers.
After breezing through basic training, they worked secretly
in military classrooms in California. The initial code they
memorized included 26 Navajo words – one for each English letter.
There were 211 other words for military phenomena. Observation
planes became “owls.” Submarines were “iron fish.” Grenades were
“potatoes.”
At the time, U.S. troops relied on complicated combinations
of numbers and letters that they changed daily. Still, Japanese
cryptographers were cracking U.S. codes regularly – learning what
troop movements to expect.
At Guadalcanal, a U.S. colonel grumbled that it took 21/2
hours to send and decode a single message.
In a test, Navajo Code Talkers relayed that same message in
minutes.
From then on, the Navajos were considered essential. Or at
least their code was. Security guards assigned to each Code Talker
reportedly had orders to execute them if necessary to keep them
out of Japanese hands.
First on beaches and in foxholes
The Navajos were among the first Americans crawling on the
bloody beaches at Saipan, Tarawa, Guam, Iwo Jima, Okinawa – flash
points in the South Pacific.
Attached to invading ground units, they lugged M-1 rifles or
carbines and 2-foot-tall radios. In their warrior tradition, many
also carried pouches of sacred corn pollen, arrowheads and
feathers for protection. They knew that medicine men and their
elders were praying back on the reservation.
At war, the Code Talkers prayed, too, calling on Navajo holy
people.
“Anywhere. In the foxhole. To survive,” said Jimmy Begay, 76,
who still wears the handmade necklace he clutched during the war.
“That’s what my grandfather told me: “When you go, if you get
stuck, say the prayers,'” Begay said. “Then I’d feel all right.”
On the steamy islands, prompt radio communication was crucial
for troops to receive effective artillery and bombing support. One
Code Talker would be given a message written in English to
translate into code. Another Code Talker would read it into the
radio. Other Code Talkers on command boats would receive the code
and translate it back into English.
An island named Iwo Jima
One island Code Talkers know too well is Iwo Jima, where
fighting in 1945 left 6,000 Americans and 22,000 Japanese dead.
Iwo Jima was a Japanese stronghold. Before the U.S. invasion,
bombers blistered the island for 72 days. Yet Japanese troops
retained their hold, massed in tunnels.
That’s when Thomas Begay and his unit approached, in a
rocking iron boat. They leapt into waves, he recounted, and fought
their way forward under heavy fire.
Other boats “were all torn to pieces,” Begay said. “There
were bodies. … I was numb. You know, you came to some places
where you got so scared you didn’t have feelings.”
As for Billison, he worked at first on the flagship offshore
with commanders. “We saw the machines – tanks, weasels – bogged
down on the beach.” Then he was ordered to join the invasion.
At night, climbing down the rope ladder on the side of the
ship, he remembered hesitating. Was his training sufficient, he
wondered, “to save myself?” He made himself move on into a boat
and then into the deep, black, sandy morass.
“You couldn’t walk, you couldn’t run, because of that sand.
The only way you could move ahead was to crawl on all fours.”
A Japanese fighter plane roared overhead. Bullets and mortars
rained down from Mount Suribachi.
“You knew they were targeting everybody,” Billison said.
Jimmy Begay was there, too, crawling through the black sand.
“They’d pin you down,” Jimmy Begay said. “Can’t go no more.
Then you’d send a message to bring in a bomb. Anything.”
The coded messages moved, flawlessly, more than 800 of them
during the first 48 hours, according to military records. And this
time, the Japanese couldn’t crack the code. Maj. Howard Conner,
signal officer for the 5th Marine Division in the battle, was
quoted later as saying, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines
would never have taken Iwo Jima.”
Most Code Talkers came home from that ordeal and the war.
Today, an estimated 190 of the 420 who served are still alive.
Many prefer not to talk about what happened.
“When you are out there, you don’t feel it that much,” Buck
said. “Afterward, that’s when it gets you. People being shot at.
The real thing. Not just pictures made in Hollywood. People being
shot at and dying. Later on, it scares you.”
Forgotten by nation they fought for
After the war, the Navajos went home on buses.
Elders arranged purification rituals – a four-day “Enemy Way”
ceremony – designed to get each man’s mind off the war. Jimmy
Begay remembers a medicine man bathing him in yucca soap, then
rolling him in white corn meal to dry. The elders chanted prayers.
They “took the shield off,” Begay said, “a shield that protects
you during the war.”
Begay felt “a sort of cool feeling inside me,” he said, “and
I started to cry. It was a strong prayer. Then I felt all right.
No anger. … They told me: “Now you don’t have to have fear
again.'” Many returning warriors faced poverty. The economic boom
that made the United States the world’s richest nation was
bypassing the Code Talkers and their people. To this day, income
on this semi-sovereign reservation lags far behind the U.S.
average. According to federal figures, the average income here is
about $71 a week.
And many warriors found themselves confronted with
indignities. Some weren’t allowed to vote. Some had to travel far
and haggle for medical treatment they needed. As recently as the
early 1990s, Thomas Begay said, he had trouble obtaining a
passport, with State Department officials questioning his
citizenship.
The Code Talker mission was declassified in 1968. Yet it
wasn’t until 1982 that President Reagan formally acknowledged the
courageous service, proclaiming Aug. 14 Code Talkers Day.
Before that, people who saw them marching in Veterans Day
parades often had no idea what they’d done.
Nevertheless, Code Talkers on the reservation remained loyal
to the United States. Many devoted their lives to federal programs
that encouraged assimilation into mainstream U.S. society.
Buck worked construction projects. Among those who earned
college degrees, Billison became a principal, teacher and
superintendent, and served for years on Navajo governing councils.
Thomas Begay at first trained young mechanics and clerks. Later he
ran the Navajo branch of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“What was in my mind when I came back was: There is a better
life out there beyond the Navajo reservation in urban centers,”
Begay said.
His advice to a new generation echoed that of his father
before the war: “Be like those white folks. Have a job. Earn a
living.”
The civil rights movement hadn’t begun. Assimilation was the
only option, said John Echo Hawk, a Pawnee who grew up in Navajo
country and now directs the Boulder-based Native American Rights
Fund.
“But in the last generation, Indians have fought back,” Echo
Hawk said. “They’ve used the courts and politics to try to get
more control over their lives.”
New mission: Preserving language
The Code Talkers, too, grew concerned about modern culture
diluting their Navajo culture and language.
After he retired, Thomas Begay noticed that “the language was
being lost.”
And that gave him pause. In the Marines, he wanted “to prove
that I can be as good as anyone else.” Now he drives to schools
around the reservation where he and his wife sing traditional
Navajo songs.
He wants “to identify as being a Navajo,” he said. “Not
somebody else.”
Buck voiced similar sentiments. “If we don’t teach the little
kids the language, I don’t know how long we’ll survive.”
Billison for years has tried to improve Navajo instruction in
schools.
But U.S. television shapes children’s thinking. Families
flip-flop between jobs in U.S. cities and communal connections at
home.
Wary of appearing in Hollywood limelight
The Code Talkers weigh grinding poverty and the erosion of
their culture against the potential benefits of fame.
They’ve shared their war experiences recently in schools as
far away as Dallas. And Hollywood’s action movies in the works
certainly could amplify their efforts.
On the other hand, “it’s people making money off this for
themselves,” Guy Clauschee, 72, said.
“They’ll make a lot of money. And they’ll add some more
action, like in John Wayne,” Jimmy Begay said after a morning’s
work cutting wood for the winter. “I don’t care much for all that.
That’s why I don’t talk too much.”
A movie cameraman approached him recently, asking Begay how
he felt about fighting for his country. Later, Begay chuckled at
how he taunted the cameraman: “”We don’t have a country,'” he’d
said. “”You guys have it all now. We have a reservation.'” One of
the movies, “Windtalkers,” to be directed by John Woo and
distributed by MGM, will be filmed in Hawaii next summer, with
Nicolas Cage as the star, said Michael Dellheim of the New Mexico
film office.
Code Talker veterans sent a letter telling Cage “that to use
Anglos to portray Navajo Code Talkers is not the right thing to
do, and we object to it,” Billison said.
Another project won approval after Code Talkers reviewed a
script. “Whisper the Wind” boasts a $30 million budget and Gale
Anne Hurd, who produced “Armageddon,” “Aliens,” and the
“Terminator” movies. The deal included money for the Code Talkers
association. Researchers say they’re filming a documentary to be
released along with the movie.
The Hollywood action adds grist at the Code Talkers’ monthly
meetings, where they sip coffee and attend to honoring dead
colleagues.
The limelight could be nice, they concede. They want their
children to value tradition.
Navajo “is the most powerful and sacred language,” Billison
said. “We found out.”
July 4, 1999 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Environment
PURGATOIRE CANYON – Footprints provide evidence of a
brontosaurus herd advancing as a sharp-toed predator prowled.
Cave art depicts succulent deer.
Adobe church ruins – a tombstone honors a girl named
“”Lucita” – slump where Spanish-speaking homesteaders once
mourned.
Here in Colorado’s vast Purgatoire Canyon lies a rare natural
gallery, mostly untouched by tourists and fossil-hunters, where
history’s actors seemingly just stepped out for lunch.
What has kept this obscure cleft in the southern Colorado
prairie pristine is partly ruggedness. But it’s also largely the
result of an unlikely landlord, the U.S. Army, pursuing a fresh
preservation strategy: No advertisements. No official
designation as “”wilderness.” No “”public education” about
artifacts and ruins. No easy access.
That preservation strategy wins local support and stands out
abruptly at a time when other canyons around the booming West
are quickly overrun and spoiled.
Now the unusual preservation of the Purgatoire may be about
to end as mainstream land management agencies eye the wildlife
and untrammeled terrain.
Another branch of the federal government – the U.S. Forest
Service – is leaning on the Army to allow easier access to this
canyon for “”multiple use” recreation.
“”It’s public land,” said Bill Bass, regional forest
supervisor. Yet Bass concedes the dilemma taking shape here “”is
a tough one.”
The land in question is semi-arid, covering 500 square miles
– half the size of Rhode Island – in southeastern Colorado east
of Trinidad. A river the color of weak coffee and cream, the
Purgatoire winds down from the 14,000-foot Sangre de Cristo
Mountains, carving a wide canyon through red sandstone cliffs,
before meeting the Arkansas River 80 miles later near Las
Animas. At its deepest, the canyon plunges 1,500 feet below an
undulating rim.
Ranchers controlled all the land here until the early 1980s.
Army moved in
Then, in 1983, the U.S. Army took a 380-square-mile portion,
opened a massive tank and fighter jet training area, and
basically locked it up. They named it the Pinon Canyon Maneuver
Site.
Locals grumbled as tanks rolled onto the tall prairie
grasses, home to songbirds and foxes, for war games. Apache
helicopters would flatten grasses where Apache Indians once
hunted. Swooping F-4 fighters would screech across cliffs as if
in a video game.
Some ranchers thought nature could suffer no worse fate than
to be owned by the Army.
Turns out, 16 years later, the Purgatoire got a pretty good
deal.
The Army kept people out. Signs on barbed wire that read
“”Military Reservation” in red letters, posted where troops
with guns sometimes crouch in the distance, carry clout that
“”No Trespassing” placards lack.
No cattle graze on the Army land. And Army officers spend
more than $500,000 a year, by their calculation, on the
environmental equivalent of luxury health spa care: fencing off
106 archaeological and historic sites, making inventories of
cave art, re-seeding areas where tanks tread, teaching troops
that any artifact they find has scientific value if left in place.
That’s a more comprehensive program than public land managers
from other agencies say they can afford.
Wildlife increasing
Army officials point proudly at growing populations of
antelope, deer, elk, coyotes, foxes, bobcats, rattlesnakes,
mountain lions, bighorn sheep, bears, eagles, hawks, owls and
more.
“”I had to eat crow,” said rancher Willard Louden, who first
went to Washington, D.C., to fight against the Army takeover,
then went back a decade later and testified to lawmakers again,
this time with a different story.
“”I told them that I felt the Army was doing a darn good
job,” 74-year-old Louden said the other day at his home in
Branson.
The Army grants access to about 300 hunters a year. But
Thomas Warren, the Army’s director of environmental compliance
and management, isn’t doing anything to publicize the place.
“”Not my management purpose,” Warren said. “”The more use it
gets, the more it’s going to get degraded.”
Army top brass now view this property as a model for how the
Army can take care of training land elsewhere, Warren said.
“”People in uniform are just as environmentally sensitive as
the rest of the public,” he said.
Legend holds that Indians slaughtered Spanish explorers in the
Purgatoire. The explorers had been sent to the edges of Spain’s
New World empire that bisected what is now Colorado along the
Arkansas River. Historians say reports of Spaniards dying
somewhere out here, without the comforts of clergy, led to
naming of the river: El Rio de Las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio
(The River of the Lost Souls in Purgatory).
French trappers later translated that to “”Purgatoire” – the
name on maps today.
Among locals, it’s known as Picket Wire Canyon.
A 6-foot-7-inch Vietnam War veteran, Warren recently
clambered down cliffs, pinon twigs cracking and loose rock
crumbling beneath his boots, to show what this country is like.
Flies swarmed. Temperatures topped 90 degrees.
Rattlesnakes thrive here – Warren delights in warning
visitors to watch out when they get out of their trucks.
He’d been up all night assisting in military war games,
playing the role of a nationalist villain eluding troops that
were supposed to secure an area and catch him. That’s in
addition to this day duty, pistol at his side, keeping tabs on
what the Army now refers to as its environmental and cultural
assets.
Warren stopped at a 30-foot-wide Dakota sandstone panel about
halfway down the canyon. There, an artist had pecked in pictures
of deer, elk, bighorn sheep, fish, birds. Warren’s archaeology
staff believes the pictures are 1,200 years old.
In the middle of the artist’s procession stands a man.
Tendrils from his fingers link him to the creatures. It suggests
“”the interconnectivity of man and wildlife. That’s why I like
it,” Warren said.
Few soldiers-in-training see this site or hundreds like it
located on the sides of the canyon, Warren said. War games stop
one-quarter mile back from the canyon rim to avoid any mishaps.
Above the rim, he incorporates the 106 fenced-off areas,
including a 19th-century stagecoach stop, into training
scenarios as “”minefields” or “”contaminated areas” to keep
soldiers away.
A few dozen scholars have worked on Army-owned parts of the
Purgatoire. Their reports are not always as readily available as
museum directors would like.
“”But it does help preserve,” said Loretta Martin at
Trinidad State College. “”I would hate to see people go out
there.”
Today, the protected canyon is attracting attention from
agencies that manage public-access land – agencies under
pressure from Colorado’s spreading urban population.
The U.S. Forest Service has acquired 23 square miles along
the Purgatoire River – a great opportunity, district ranger
Thomas Peters said. Located along the canyon floor, this land
contains the church ruins and cemetery, an abandoned ranch, more
than 1,000 rock art sites, and a quarter-mile of dinosaur tracks
that University of Colorado paleontologist Martin Lockley calls
“”the Jurassic Santa Fe Trail.”
The Forest Service spent $25,000 last year constructing
limestone jetties meant to keep the shifting river from washing
away dinosaur tracks. Now the agency proposes to do more:
improve a 3.2-mile road into the canyon, install a permanent
toilet, post informational signs, set up a small parking lot.
La Junta business leaders in the past have promoted the
dinosaur tracks as a tourist attraction. State Division of
Wildlife officials say they’re interested in purchasing
Purgatoire ranchland.
Recently, seven Forest Service staffers rode into Purgatoire
Canyon on horses and watered them by the dinosaur tracks. A
fresh track from a motorbike, in the canyon illegally, curved
between pizza-size brontosaurus footprints.
“”Why open it up?” Peters said, sitting on the riverbank
with his feet in the silty water. “”Bottom line is: There’s no
good reason not to. … It’s going to be managed for multiple
use. These are public lands. People ought to be able to enjoy
their public lands.”
Forest Service entry logs show a growing number of mountain
bikers and hikers visiting the canyon after making a steep
descent.
The other legal way for people to reach Forest Service land
here is on guided four-wheel-drive tours. The Forest Service
leads 16 a year, no more than 20 people at a time. But to do
this, rangers rely on the Army’s good graces, calling a training
site supervisor and asking permission to use their “”limited
administrative access.” Therein lies the rub between the two
branches of government – and two different approaches for
managing public land.
The Forest Service wants the Army to grant unlimited access,
and allow road improvements, for recreational use of the canyon.
Aside from entering across Army land, the only other routes to
the canyon floor are too steep for any vehicle, Peters said. Or
the routes require crossing private land – which ranchers oppose.
So the whole Forest Service plan hinges on Army cooperation.
“”I wouldn’t want to commercialize it,” Bass, the regional
forest supervisor, said of the “”multiple use” proposal.
“”There is some truth” in the notion that the Army’s
hard-nosed stewardship is good for the Purgatoire, Bass said.
And future tours still would be guided, he said.
But he emphasized: “”If they (Army officials) hold off the
access, I don’t think that’s right.”
Yet the Army is doing exactly that.
“”I’m not giving it to them,” Warren said. “”The area that
they want, we train on.”
“A salvage operation’
The dangers of opening up the Purgatoire can be seen up a
side canyon, along Trinchera Creek.
On a ledge about 200 feet up, Colorado College archaeologist
Mike Nowak and a team of students were excavating a prehistoric
home site – on State Land Trust property. Access isn’t controlled.
Nowak found that pot hunters had hacked crude holes into the
cave where he planned to excavate for several years.
Now his research is “”a salvage operation,” said Nowak, an
expert on ancient Indians in the region. “”I’m working against
the clock in the sense that I’m afraid pot hunters are going to
come in here, if I’m not here, and really go to town.”
Indians probably lived in this cave on and off for centuries,
he said. It’s an ideal site for investigating how they lived in
tune with a fragile environment.
The holes hacked by pot hunters messed up layers of history
beneath the cave floor. Nowak gazed in dismay at heaps of dirt
shoveled out from the cave, slumping down toward Trinchera Creek.
One of his students, Bonnie Bagley of the University of New
Mexico, picked up a stone grinding tool, arrowheads and raptor
teeth from those heaps.
Context lost
Pot hunters focused on finding collectible shards render
artifacts like these useless, Nowak explained, because the
objects are pulled out of context. Archaeologists value them as
they lie buried, in relation to other objects.
Pot hunters “”are just doing something that is fun to them,”
Nowak said. “”If they knew what damage they are really doing,
they might not do it.”
Faced with growing western cities and the waning of cowboy
culture, more and more people out here on what feels like a last
frontier are intrigued with the possibilities of hard-nosed
stewardship.
The La Junta Chamber of Commerce, while keen to promote
economic development, prefers a strategy that can “”keep it (the
Purgatoire Canyon) a pristine area,” said chamber President
Cheryl Freidenberger.
She said she “”doesn’t hear the grumbling” about Army
ownership from ranchers anymore.
February 14, 1999 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Human Rights, Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
CUCUNA, Guatemala -“Oh, Osveli. My little one. Where have
you gone?”
Isolated in mountains where they’ve cultivated corn patches
for centuries, Mayan farmers chant for a fallen 15-year-old boy
– killed in Colorado as an illegal immigrant when a smuggler’s
van crashed Dec. 23.
They carry the boy in a donated steel coffin to a ridge crest
where they’ll pray for nine days – beneath the sun and the stars
– before decorating Osveli’s tomb with a cross.
Cristobal, Osveli’s father, opens the coffin, peeks at the
disfigured face. And villagers pack in what Osveli would need
for a journey.
Carefully folded clothes. A blanket. New black walking boots.
Even as fathers, mothers and sisters mourn, anxious young men,
soles of their own boots worn thin, talk nervously about the
journeys they intend to make.
“We need money to live,” said Osveli’s 23-year-old brother,
Aulio, a father of three.”I will go to the United States soon.”
The circumstances behind the tragedy of Osveli Salas Vasquez –
which was chronicled in The Denver Post a week ago – suggest the
makings of a mass migration from Central American villages.
Consider how, here in Cucuna, Osveli’s death only adds to the
pressure on the people he hoped to support. Just paying debts
Osveli owed means his family must send another son north in
search of work.
A Colorado rancher who brought home the bodies of Osveli and
Raquel Jimenez Aguilar, a second Mayan migrant killed in the
crash, got an intimate view of the situation. Neil Harmon, who
also runs a funeral home, embarked on an odyssey to do what he
and his wife, Judy, felt must be done.
They lost their son in a car crash two decades ago. And when
they saw the unidentified young Mayans in their morgue at
Springfield, they knew that somewhere parents were suffering.
Mayans here responded with incredulous gratitude.”We’ve
never had an American come into our village and do something
like this,” one man said.
And the villagers began confiding to the Harmons how they
want to benefit from the modern world but not get lost in it.
The Harmons returned to Colorado last week with a new
understanding of the migrant workers – a record 5 million of
them illegal – who help drive the U.S. economy.
“We have a responsibility to help these people who have
nothing,” said Harmon, a politically conservative 61-year-old
who serves as deputy coroner and sheriff’s posse member in
southeastern Colorado’s Baca County.”The pressure is really on
now. This matters because America could lose a valuable culture.”
Getting ahead in Guatemala has proven an uphill battle for
impoverished Mayans. They trek long distances from highland
villages to attend school. They migrate on foot across Mexico to
the United States.
The risks seem horrendous by U.S. standards. But Mayans say
they are desperate.
“We need money to buy land,” said Bidal, father of Raquel
Aguilar, after the first funeral the Harmons attended.
Bidal’s wife died a dozen years ago. Raquel and his five
brothers and a sister had to fend for themselves while Bidal
worked plots of land owned by others. They lived in an adobe
shack with no running water or electricity at Aldea La Laguna.
The village lies up a steep hill from another village called
Chejoj, which six months ago received electricity when
government workers extended a power line.
Raquel migrated to the United States and returned with enough
money to buy a small plot of land last year. But his brothers
and sister still seemed to be falling behind. Raquel”wanted
his little brother to go to school and get a career,” Bidal
said. So last fall, Raquel and his boyhood friend, Aniseto
Ramirez Vasquez, set out for Florida again.
As villagers hoisted his coffin off a dusty field and carried
it toward a cemetery, Bidal hung back.”I can’t bear to see him
go into the ground,” he said tearfully.
In the procession, 45-year-old Florenzio, Aniseto’s father,
approached the Harmons. Aniseto was one of 13 illegal immigrants
who survived the van crash on the prairie. It was Aniseto who
broke down, under questioning by U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service agents, and identified the body of his
friend Raquel.
Aniseto is in jail, a federal detention center at Englewood,
as a witness in the federal case against the smugglers who drove
the van. Then Aniseto faces deportation.
“Will he be able to stay there and work?” Florenzio asked.
“Or will they send him home? To stay and work, that would be
the best that could happen. We are poor. We have no money.”
The Harmons assured Florenzio that a priest would visit
Aniseto in prison.
Then Israel Roblero approached Harmon hopefully about working
in Colorado.”One of these days I may see you there,” he said.
Harmon paused a few seconds before replying.”Well, I’ll be
glad to see you.”
Some immigration experts believe economic integration across
the Americas will lead to more and more Mayan villagers
migrating to the United States for work.
Hurricane destruction of crops last fall added to the pressure
on indigenous farmers, confined to the margins of Central
American society. They can’t get ahead without leaving their
villages, said Tracy Ehlers, a University of Denver anthropology
professor who has worked in Guatemala since 1976.
“There are no opportunities for kids,” Ehlers said.”They
have to take their lives in their hands and go north.”
A U.S.-orchestrated coup here in 1954 led to decades of
Guatemalan civil war and a legacy of poverty. The conditions
have led desperate Guatemalans into smuggling cocaine and
growing opium for Mexican mobsters.
“Are we responsible for this in any way? Yeah. No doubt about
it,” said Robert Carlsen, a University of Colorado professor
who recently published a book about a highland Mayan community.
“We’ve contributed to the destabilization that makes it so that
(Mayans) can’t exist in their own villages. We put the generals
in power. The cocaine consumers are in the United States.”
And the U.S. economy benefits from cheap migrant labor,
Carlsen added.”Where would we be without them?”
U.S. immigration officials are watching for signs of a mass
migration. In December, most of the 2,400 migrants stopped along
the southwestern U.S. border came from Central America, said
Greg Gagne, INS spokesman in Washington, D.C. Many were
indigenous people who find little opportunity at home.
“We recognize that the potential is there,” Gagne said.
“We have contingency plans that deal with augmenting our
resources along the border. … Certainly, on a human level, we
have empathy for these individuals. But our job requires us to
enforce the law. And we do.”
After Raquel’s funeral, reaching Osveli’s village proved
difficult for Harmon.
The road to Cucuna turned into a steep trail, too rough for
four-wheel-drive. Harmon set out on a mule.
Osveli’s brother Aulio and other men already had hauled the
300-pound casket up the steep, 3-mile, twisting trail to Cucuna.
Harmon followed them into the clouds where, at an altitude of
about 9,000 feet, villagers look down on Chiapas, Mexico, to the
west.
Men trek down there, sneak across the Mexican border and work
on small coffee plantations. They earn about $3.50 a day.
Osveli got tired of that and left. And died.
When Harmon arrived, the villagers, who speak mostly in Mam,
were mourning.
They invited him into an adobe house, across from the
thatch-roof adobe where Osveli lived. The closed coffin was on
display, candles flickering around it. Women arranged lilies
they picked below in the valley by the Coatan River.
Cristobal, Osveli’s 57-year-old father, spoke to Harmon through
a translator.
“Thank you for bringing my son back to his home. I am content
now that my son is home.”
Into the night, as villagers grieved in the candlelight, nine
young men gathered more closely around Harmon.
“We can’t do anything,” Santos Hernandez confided in a
quavering voice, tears in his eyes.”We work all the time. We
have to go to make it, to make it here. To stay we would have to
work the land better using fertilizers. But we don’t have the
money to get fertilizers. We can’t do anything. We all want to
go to the United States.”
Hurricanes last fall wiped out most of Cucuna’s corn. A bit
that was salvaged was stored in the rafters above where Osveli’s
body lay in the coffin.
The next day, the young men told Harmon how Osveli had
borrowed 8,000 quetzales (more than $1,000) from a woman in
Tacana, the electrified town 5 miles below in the valley.
It was money he needed to pay guides and make it to Florida,
where he hoped to join his sister, Irma. He planned to earn
enough money to pay off the debt and more. But robbers took the
money in Mexico.
When Osveli set out a second time with his brother, Noe,
the family already owed the debt from his first try.
“”So that is why now I must go,” Osveli’s brother Aulio said.
The death raised concerns about dangers of the long journey
north – which Mayan migrants make mostly on foot.
A 23-year-old villager, Jaime Rodrigo Perez, confessed that
Osveli’s death leaves him”a little afraid” about leaving home
for the United States. He described an uneasy tension between
young men and village elders who never felt they had to leave
home.
“We have to go for money. Here, we can’t earn it,” Perez
said.”Our parents say: “Don’t leave. It’s far. Why leave?’ But
we need to live better. We try to explain to our parents. They
are content only when we return. And then, they thank us.”
The Harmons say they never thought much about migrant workers
until the accident near their ranch. Now they’re convinced that
technical assistance delivered directly to Central American
villagers, and compassion toward migrants in the United States,
could help improve a complex, intertwined situation.
In Cucuna, Neil Harmon asked villagers what they would buy –
if village debts were paid – with any extra money their children
might earn in the United States.
A water pump, they said. Elders said a gasoline-powered pump
might help them move water hundreds of feet up from the valley
floor below during dry seasons. And a pump could move greater
volumes of water from side streams when they run full.
Harmon nodded. What else?
Electricity, they said. A farmer across the valley in another
hillside village had a solar-powered light. Cucuna villagers
looked out at it every night.
And how did he get it?
His son had worked in the U.S. and brought the solar panel
home.
Today, just about every ambitious Mayan in Cucuna has Neil
Harmon’s address on the Colorado prairie near Springfield.
“No, I won’t be surprised to see them knocking on my door,”
Harmon said, heading home past the mist-shrouded tops of
volcanoes.”And I wonder, will I welcome them then? I don’t
know. … But we’re going to try to help.”
February 6, 1999 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Human Rights, Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
Coloradans help Guatemalan clan
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala – A Colorado rancher and his wife
walked solemnly into a world of grief this week – bringing the
bodies of two illegal immigrants home.
The fathers of the two Guatemalans were waiting for Neil and
Judy Harmon at a mortuary. Anguish etched on their faces, they
are Mayan farmers who journeyed for more than seven hours from
Guatemala’s impoverished highlands to the capital.
Their sons – 15-year-old Osveli Salas Vasquez and 22-year-old
Raquel Jimenez Aguilar – died near the Harmons’ ranch in
southeastern Colorado – victims of unscrupulous smugglers.
“I was trying to convince him not to go,” Aguilar’s father,
Bidal, lamented. “But he saw that the situation here wasn’t
getting any better. He went to support his little brothers and
sister.”
The Guatemalans gazed with awe at the Harmons, who also run a
funeral home near their ranch in Springfield, where they had
taken care of the bodies since the crash Dec. 23 of a van packed
with illegal immigrants.
The Harmons couldn’t ignore the tragedy – two decades ago,
they lost their own son in a car crash. And the more they tried
to do the right thing, the deeper they ventured into Central
America’s woes.
The villagers who raised Raquel and Osveli are desperate.
A U.S.-backed coup here in 1954 led to decades of Guatemalan
civil war, which brought guerrillas and government soldiers into
the highlands and erased more than 400 Mayan villages. War gave
way in the mid-1990s to lawlessness and pockets of extreme
poverty. Then last fall, hurricanes hammered Central America,
worsening the poverty by destroying coffee plantations where
Mayan villagers sometimes found work.
So village elders had little choice but to wave adios to their
young shining stars last fall. Osveli and his 19-year-old
brother, Noe, left from Canton Cucuna, near Tacana, and Raquel
from Aldea La Laguna, near Cuilco.
They hiked down from their native land of towering volcanoes
and joined the exodus of tens of millions of people moving from
poor countries to rich ones. Raquel, Osveli and Noe hired
“coyotes,” smugglers who spirited them through Mexico and into
the Arizona desert. There they met other smugglers, who drove
them in van along a notorious smuggling route – one that INS
agents say brings at least 1,300 illegal immigrants a month
through Colorado. But these smugglers pushed too hard. On a
frigid patch of prairie west of Springfield, the van crashed.
Raquel died instantly of head injuries. Osveli died soon after,
also of head injuries, at Southeast Colorado Hospital.
The bodies lay unidentified in Springfield for more than a week.
Some authorities called for cremating or burying the illegal
immigrants in Springfield. But Neil Harmon, who also serves as
the deputy Baca County coroner and a member of the sheriff’s
posse, wouldn’t do that. In 1980, the Harmons’ 19-year-old son,
Bo, died on that same prairie when a tractor-trailer mowed
through his prized bronze-colored Camaro.
“It’s bad enough losing a child,” Harmon said recently at
the wheel of his white pickup. “But for the families that sent
those boys not to have the bodies back. …”
So he embalmed the bodies carefully. And he waited, checking on
them at the end of each day.
“These boys need to go home.”
***
The tragedy of Osveli, Noe and Raquel began with basic education
and ambition.
They grew up in villages where elders speak mostly in Mam – a
language spoken before Spaniards arrived in America. No
electricity. No running water. The villagers harvest just enough
maize and beans to survive. But the boys went to school in
accordance with new Guatemalan laws. They learned to speak
Spanish and write a bit. In the Vasquez family, Osveli was the
youngest of twelve, said his 57-year-old father, Cristobal Salas
Perez. “My last boy.”
Rugged, nearly impassable terrain separates Osveli’s village
from Raquel’s. The two never met before reaching the United
States.
Raquel had worked briefly in Florida before and saved enough
money to dream about buying a bit of land near his home,
building a house and getting married. He returned from Florida
in February 1998 to check on his father, five younger brothers
and a sister. Their mother, Rosenda, died 12 years ago.
The children were barely managing to eat, said 47-year-old
Bidal. “That’s why Raquel left again, to help the family
survive.”
Getting into the United States was an ordeal.
After the journey through Mexico, U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service agents caught Raquel trying to cross the
border illegally near Nogales on Dec. 8. They entered his
fingerprints into a computer database and sent him back across
the border. On his second try, Raquel made it. He sneaked to
orange groves near Chandler Heights, Arizona, a well-known
staging ground for smuggling across the United States.
Osveli and Noe fared better at first. But the desert route
they took left cactus spikes embedded in Osveli’s right hand and
arm.
Laying low in the orange groves, they met other immigrants,
all hungry and exhausted, and haggled with smugglers for rides.
Much of what happened next is described in a federal affidavit,
based on interviews with crash survivors, that prosecutors in
Denver filed for their case against smugglers.
Investigators believe 13 illegal immigrants jammed into the
ill-fated van. They paid $250 to $700 each for transportation to
labor compounds in Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida.
The smugglers suspected of transporting Osveli, Raquel, Noe
and the others were illegal immigrants themselves: Alberto
Velasquez of Guatemala and Beltran Morales Roblero of Mexico.
Other than front seats for the driver and his assistant, there
was one seat. Most of the immigrants huddled on the floor. And
in the frigid darkness of Dec. 23, the van was speeding along
U.S. 160, which runs east from Trinidad. INS agents say they
can’t afford to patrol the long, empty highway.
The accident occurred about 6:30 a.m., 8 miles west of
Pritchett, where the highway curves sharply to the north. Over
the last two decades, more than a dozen vehicles have crashed at
the turn.
The driver hit the brakes and skidded. The van apparently
flipped and rolled.
The immigrants wore no seat belts. Some, including Noe, were
dozing. The impact hurled them around the metal interior. Some
were ejected through shattered windows. The van’s roof crumpled.
At the back of the van, Raquel slumped, face down and
lifeless, his skull crushed.
Six survivors, cut and bruised, staggered away from the
wreckage. One man threw away a driver’s license that INS
investigators later found in a clump of grass. As the sun rose,
the survivors trudged across the prairie toward three grain
elevators visible in the distance. A Colorado Public Service
utility crew picked them up and drove to the scene of the crash,
then radioed for help.
At the Southeast Colorado Hospital in Springfield, a doctor
pronounced Osveli dead. Nurses called for an airlift to Denver
for his brother, Noe, who was unconscious with neck injuries.
“This disturbed me terribly,” said nurse Marilyn Chenoweth.
The immigrants she treated “looked like a bunch of kids.”
Meanwhile, Neil Harmon, in his capacity as deputy coroner, went
to the scene and retrieved Raquel’s body. And Noe woke up
clueless in Denver.
Doctors at Denver Health Medical Center had stabilized him and
put his neck in a brace. Several teeth were bashed in, leaving
raw nerves exposed. A nurse told him he’d been in an accident.
All Noe knew was that his little brother Osveli wasn’t with him.
***
At the INS regional detention center in Aurora, agents pressed
the crash survivors for evidence, anything. They got nothing for
days.
Then one of the survivors, another Guatemalan, broke down and
identified Raquel Jimenez Aguilar. He gave the name of a cousin
in North Carolina.
Around Christmas, Noe was released, somehow, from the Denver
Health Medical Center. His discharge papers indicate nurses
checked him out on Dec. 26, with instructions to seek further
treatment. Noe went to the Denver Rescue Mission in a taxi
sent from the hospital, shelter director Paul Anderson said.
That was home for a week. Noe barely spoke, shelter workers
said. He couldn’t eat, though he was starving, with the nerves
of his broken teeth exposed.
And Noe might still be at that shelter today were it not for
the Corica family of southeast Aurora.
On the snowy evening of Jan. 2, Carmine Corica, his wife,
Razz, and Gaby, their 12-year-old daughter, who wanted to help
homeless people, arrived at the shelter for a stint as volunteer
kitchen workers.
A Sun Microsystems technician, 37-year-old Razz Corica once
was an illegal immigrant herself, smuggled across the Mexican
border with her mother. Once, after INS agents raided the
Chicago plastics factory where her mother worked, she was nearly
deported. An agent took pity on the mother and her daughter and
offered to sponsor them as future citizens.
At the homeless shelter in Denver, Razz remembered all this
when she noticed Noe gazing down, looking lost, as she tried to
hand him a green chile burrito.
He sat down alone and couldn’t eat it. The Coricas decided to
sit down next to him.
He told them he’d been in an accident. “He said: “I’m on my
way to Florida to meet my sister,”’ Razz recalled. “I said:
“You’re in Colorado.’ He took that in. He said: “How far is that
from Florida?”’
Another homeless man showed them a crinkled newspaper story
about an accident in Springfield. The bodies hadn’t been
identified.
From that moment, the Coricas made the case their mission.
“I put my arms around him and said: “We’re going to help you
find your family,”’ Razz said.
Noe had little to offer. The telephone numbers to reach his
sister Irma in Florida had been lost. That night, Razz worked
her computer and phones, focusing on “Ejido Miscun,” the name
of a village in Chiapas, Mexico, that Noe mentioned – a village
where his other sister, Mercedes, might have access to a public
telephone.
Razz reached an operator in Mexico City who gave her an area
code for southern Mexico. Razz dialed a number randomly,
reaching a servant, and arranged to call back 15 minutes later
for an area code for Ejido Miscun. Using that code, she dialed
randomly again, reaching a nurse. And the nurse gave her a
number for a public telephone facility close to Ejido Miscun.
Razz reached an operator, who said she would have Noe and
Osveli’s sister Mercedes by the telephone that evening.
At last the connection was made.
The Coricas got more phone numbers and information they needed
to help Noe.
They’d taken Noe into their two-story, three-bedroom home.
They rented him a Bruce Lee video.
Carmine Corica persuaded Noe to drive with him to Springfield
in early January to try to find out about his brother. Noe was
terrified that police would arrest him.
Inside Neil Harmon’s funeral home morgue, Noe gazed at the two
bodies silently for more than 10 minutes. He and Corica got
back in the car. That’s when Noe broke down.
Corica still recalls those wails word for word. “My poor
little brother. Now I’ll never see him again. He’s dead. And I
was supposed to protect him.”
Corica called the Harmons later to identify the body.
Neil Harmon rarely has felt so relieved. “I’ve never had a
body this long in 17 years,” he said later in Springfield.
“You think, who is this kid? How do I get him back? He needs to
go back to his family. And am I going to be able to show him
when I get him back?”
The Harmons began collecting money to send the bodies home.
“After losing Bo, it really became important to us to get
these bodies home,” Judy Harmon said. “We’re Christians. We
like to go the extra mile.”
They received contributions from four prairie churches. Baca
County social services officials kicked in $2,000. Denver City
Councilwoman Debbie Ortega persuaded American Airlines to ship
the bodies for free. Illegal immigrants where Osveli and
Raquel’s relatives work scraped together more than $1,000. And
in the end, the Harmons contributed $2,500 of their own money.
They hired Funeraria Latina of west Denver to handle paperwork
with the Guatemalan consulate in Los Angeles.
Meantime, Carmine Corica had rented a car and was driving Noe
on to his destination – a labor compound in Florida.
Reunited with his sister, Noe has managed to elude INS agents,
who are eager to find him as a witness to the crash.
The Coricas are confident they did the right thing.
“I believe U.S. actions in Latin America over the last 200
years are deplorable,” Razz said. “All those governments they
propped up at the expense of the peasant population. … If this
is what I get put in jail for, it’s a noble cause.”
***
This weekend, the Harmons are traveling with the fathers and
cousins of Osveli and Raquel back into their villages. Families
in the villages plan funerals based on a fusion of Catholic and
indigenous rites.
The journey, with gray steel caskets in tow, is a long one on
rugged roads. Logistical preparations began Thursday when the
bodies arrived, and when Guatemalan Congressman Juan Diaz
Gonzalez intervened to help speed matters with airport
authorities. As president of Guatemala’s Commission on
Indigenous Communities, Gonzalez sees smuggling of undocumented
workers as a growing problem that countries must address
cooperatively – not just with domestic immigration crackdowns.
Impoverished Mayans are making their way to the U.S. “out of
necessity,” said Gonzalez. “It’s survival for them. And the
migration is going to increase rapidly because of the hurricanes
last fall.”
A cooperative approach could eliminate opportunities for
smugglers: Guatemala could open its doors to U.S.
labor-contracting companies that would recruit workers here and
grant them proper eight-month visas up front, Gonzales said.
But mourning, not politics, was the priority in Guatemala City.
The fathers and cousins repeatedly thanked the Harmons.
“We’ve been suffering here. We were far away and couldn’t do
anything when we heard about the deaths,” said Luis Domingos
Vasquez, a cousin of Raquel Aguilar serving as family spokesman.
“The boys were in their country illegally. And for these people
to help. …
“How can we ever repay you? ” he said to the Harmons. “God
will reward you. We are very satisfied and content with what you
have done.”
Osveli’s father, Cristobal, can’t bear to look directly at the
Americans, ashamed because he doesn’t have money to help pay for
a truck to carry his dead son’s casket.
“I want to thank for all your work and sacrifices,” he told
Judy Harmon in a quiet, measured voice. “I am completely
grateful to you.”
The Harmons replied, through an interpreter, that they
understand, a little, because they lost a son once, too.
Guatemalan migrants “are just people, like we are,” Neil
Harmon said. “They are poor, hardworking people just trying to
get a job. And I can identify with them.”
October 22, 1998 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Uncategorized
Rough Seas Hinder Collection Efforts
CABO PULMO, Mexico – Ocean Journey divers Tuesday plunged
into emerald blue waters, but they weren’t collecting fish, as
planned, for Denver’s new $93 million aquarium.
Instead, they were surveying an underwater reef for future
projects.
On Wednesday, they spent most of the day packing. And today,
the Colorado’s Ocean Journey crew will drive north up Mexico’s
Baja Peninsula, cutting short an expedition that was supposed to
gather thousands of colorful fish.
“”Disappointing,” Rich Lerner, Ocean Journey’s curator of
fishes, said of collection efforts this week. “”We’ll probably
have to purchase a little more” than previously planned – at up
to $400 a fish, he said.
By the end of this month, Ocean Journey biologists had hoped
to collect 3,500 of the 8,500 fish that the Mexican government
has allowed them to collect from the Sea of Cortez. That goal
proved elusive. Late-season hurricanes churned up waves, and
divers said that they couldn’t see far enough under water. Waves
also washed away cube-shaped cages loaded with Moorish idol fish
caught last week.
“”We’ll come back down here numerous times,” Lerner said.
“”But probably not this year. There are plenty of things for us
to do back at the ranch to get the aquarium ready.”
The aquarium is scheduled to open early next summer.
Meanwhile, Ocean Journey officials said they’ll nurture their
partnership with the caretakers of the 17,000-acre underwater
Cabo Pulmo National Marine Park.
Park Director Pepe Murrieta wants to build a small aquarium
along the shore where collectors could store fish. Murrieta said
fish might breed in the aquarium and that Mexican university
students could work at the facility.
Lerner said it sounded great. “”Sometimes you need to spend
some money that you may not recoup monetarily,” he said. “”It’s
a good tradeoff.”
Another possibility is teaching some Ocean Journey staffers
to speak Spanish. Only one of the biologists here this week
could speak any Spanish.
On Tuesday, Ocean Journey divers set out to inspect a reef
just outside the park boundaries, where they hope to collect
fish when the currents have cleared.
Three Ocean Journey “”aquarists” – Jenny Jeffers, Colleen
McCann and Libby Vincent – hooked up air tanks and plunged along
the anchor rope. About 30 feet underwater, they swam north along
a coral reef, silvery bubbles rising toward a cloudless blue sky.
They followed the reef toward an underwater canyon that drops
down 4,000 feet. They could see only 30 feet ahead of their
masks – less than half the normal visibility at this time of year.
“”The fish seem to be hiding today,” Jeffers said later.
January 11, 1998 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Africa, Human Rights, Immigrants, Migration
Dia’s family devastated by his death
DIORBIVOL, Senegal – “Baba?” cries 3-year-old Amadou,
clinging to his visiting uncle Abdourahmane’s right leg, dark
eyes shining with hope.
Daddy?
Little Amadou is bewildered by the soft sobbing among adults
he hears in this hot windy village at the edge of Africa’s
Sahara Desert. He’s never met his quiet, coffee-colored father.
They were supposed to meet this year. Yet now when Amadou asks
about Daddy, the sobbing gets louder.
Nobody can bear to tell Amadou the truth: His father –
38-year-old Oumar Dia – is dead. A gas station clerk shot him
one November night as he waited at a bus stop after work, half a
world away in Denver, Colo.
Now in tiny Diorbivol, the full meaning of Dia’s death is
starting to sink in: A bit of wanton barbarism in Denver
threatens the very survival of his village. Like villagers
across Africa, and much of the developing world, Dia’s people
depend increasingly on their migrant sons.
They sent Dia into the growing wave of tens of millions of
sons and daughters migrating from poorer nations to richer ones
to make better lives for themselves and their families back
home. And Dia became one of the newest of such immigrants in the
United States, where just about everybody has an ancestor who
came from someplace else – Ireland, Italy, Germany, Mexico. It
is a phenomenon that has defined our country.
Here in Africa, the situation resembles that of American farm
boys leaving the heartland for city lights. Young Africans go
far to get money at gateways to the global economy. They scrub,
lift, sell – any kind of job – in Dia’s case cleaning at a Hyatt
hotel. They send home money and sustain the places of their
heart – the familial villages where two-thirds of Africa’s 700
million people live.
The Denver Post decided to go to Dia’s village to investigate
the impact of his death on the people he was supporting. A month
after the murder, you can already measure the difference here in
Diorbivol. The rice supply is running out. The water pump that
used to irrigate rice paddies doesn’t work, and nobody’s in a
position to diagnose the problem, let alone pay for fuel. Eyes
and noses of the sick are left to run. Children no longer can
aspire to attend high school. Dia’s family must forget about a
solar panel that would let them turn on a light at night.
This wasn’t the first tragedy the family endured. In 1989,
they were driven from their village in Mauritania by the Moors
in a massive land grab. The conflict has racial overtones
because the lighter-skinned Moors still enslave dark-skinned
Mauritanians without land.
Now in this village where the Dia family resettled along the
Senegal River, Dia’s grieving relatives slump on straw mats
beneath the acacia tree that grows in their compound of cement
houses and adobe huts. A pale blue-and-yellow mosque towers over
the survivors: his widow, Mariam, veiled in black; his frail
father, Barka, tears seeping through slits of his nearly blind
eyes; his mother, Aissata, lines on her face etching in what
feels like too much of an endless struggle.
“Since Oumar died, we cannot live normally,” says
80-year-old Barka, clutching empty bottles of the glaucoma
medicine he needs to save him from blindness. “All what Oumar
had done in the United States, we saw it here. Everything we
needed to lead a good life came from Dia – health, shelter,
food.”
Now the family must decide what to do. Justice is one thing.
But they’re more concerned about simply managing to live.
They’ll send out other sons to try to take Dia’s place. And
they’ll pray.
“Alhamdoulilahi (Thanks be to God),” they say, bowing
repeatedly in respect at the rising and setting of the sun and
the moon and the stars.
The wooden casket sitting behind the mosque here has a splintered
hole in one end. This is the casket that carried Dia’s body
home, accompanied by Mohamadou Cisse, one of Dia’s friends in
Denver. The villagers received it, pulled out the body, and
buried Dia lovingly in the cemetery overlooking the Senegal
River. Dia’s freshly turned grave isn’t marked. The villagers
can’t afford that. But they welcomed Dia back, eulogizing him as
a hero slain while doing his duty for the village.
The villagers understand all too well: Dia bridged a gap that
is wider than the oceans.
Until he was 30, he lived the life of a subsistence farmer.
He was born and grew up in Rouji Aoudi, Mauritania, a squat
adobe village half a day’s hike from here on the northern side
of the Senegal River. He liked to wrestle, sometimes tussling
with other boys to the beat of a drum in parched, dusty yards.
At age 7, he began school, hiking 3 miles and crossing the
river to Senegal, then climbing up through eroding gullies to a
village called Poste. A teacher in a one-room concrete building
taught French, bits of geography and history. At 12, his
education was finished, because his parents had no money to send
him away for high school. So he did what boys do across this
Pulaar-speaking region: herded goats, fished from pirogues in
the murky green river, tended green shoots of maize and millet,
savored the strong sweet tea that women prepare after dusk.
But then, one day in May 1989, everything changed.
Khaki-clad Mauritanian soldiers approached his village. The
fertile floodplain around Rouji Aoudi is one of the few parts of
Mauritania with the potential for large-scale development. In
1989, indiscriminate attacks on Pulaar-speaking people flared
into a brutal campaign that forced out more than 70,000
landowners – persecution that human-rights groups describe as a
Bosnia that the rich world ignored.
When the soldiers arrived, most of the villagers, including
Dia’s family, fled, paddling pirogues across the river to
Senegal. Dia and a half-dozen other men never made it.
The soldiers caught them and arrested them. They marched them
20 miles along the river at gunpoint to what Dia later would
describe as “a military labor camp” at Mbagne. Moorish
authorities have jailed hundreds of Pulaar-speaking people as
political prisoners, and other dark-skinned Mauritanians are
condemned to work as indentured slaves.
The soldiers put Dia and the others to work tilling hard soil
and hauling rocks. Apparently, the Moors believed rocks near
Mbagne contained iron. They used the prisoners as miners. In the
camp, soldiers fed Dia very little.
Others fared worse. In Rouji Aoudi, soldiers gang-raped a
local beauty named Djeneba Baidy. As refugees tell the story,
her parents rescued her one night, led her to the river, sent
her away in a pirogue to Senegal. She took shelter with Dia’s
uncle, Djiby, in Diorbivol. When the soldiers found she was
gone, they threatened to kill the parents if Djeneba wasn’t
returned. Resigned, Djeneba’s brother Adama crossed the river to
collect his sister at Djiby’s house in Diorbivol. The two headed
back to Rouji Aoudi. As they were approaching the village,
soldiers with machine guns opened fire, mowed them down and left
them dying in the dirt.
After two months, the soldiers released Dia and other
prisoners, and ordered them out of Mauritania across the Senegal
River. Dia searched for his family at the Thilogne refugee camp.
When he found them eventually at a camp near Matam, his parents
looked defeated and old. He stayed with them for a few weeks.
But he knew, without asking, there was only one thing to do.
The ethnic cleansing in Mauritania forced Dia to leave rural
Africa for a fundamentally different world.
He squeezed into a 16-seat Car Rapide bus and set out for
Dakar, Senegal’s capital. It was a 12-hour drive down a pocked
two-lane blacktop road that curls across the threshold between
traditional and modern. The closer Dia got to Dakar, the busier
life became. There were more cars, and they moved faster.
Streetside stacks of watermelons for sale grew higher. There
were more merchants, and their voices grew more and more
aggressive. There were power lines and factories of all sorts
making tissues and phosphates and battery acid.
In Dakar, Dia shared a room with a cousin in the crowded slum
of Pikine. He worked shining shoes, lugging a box of rags and
polish. He charged about 20 cents a shine. He saved up enough to
travel, by train and bus, to Abidjan, capital of Ivory Coast,
and later to Libreville, capital of oil-rich Gabon. In these
cities, Dia bought and sold costume jewelry, stringing the
necklaces enticingly across his long, slender fingers and
smiling so that maybe pedestrians would stop.
In this new, busy city world, family life fit in on the side.
On one brief visit to Diorbivol, Dia married Mariam. On
another visit, he rejoiced at the birth of a daughter. Two years
later, Mariam gave birth to another daughter. Dia told her he
also wanted a son. And he wanted to stay with the family. But
the family needed money. Life was tearing Dia apart.
He left again, vowing to return one day and keep their
fractured family together. He promised Mariam he wouldn’t be
like his oldest brother, who went to France 25 years ago and
never came home.
Yet living up to that promise – a promise made by millions of
African men – became incredibly hard. Between 1970 and 1990,
economies crashed and jobs disappeared across Africa, where 270
million people live on less than $1 a day. Conflicts flared from
Kano to Kinshasa. An old bailout option for West Africans in
former French colonies – migrating to Paris – was closed off
under tough new immigration rules.
Dia grew desperate. And on June 3, 1994, he boarded his first
airplane, the Air Afrique flight to New York, where his cousin
Sileye Gaye was living in a basement in Brooklyn. Dia had
embarked on the heart-driven struggle that led millions of
immigrants from around the world into better lives in America.
Almost as soon as he landed at Kennedy International Airport,
he felt a new “time is money” ethic sweeping him up like a
desert wind.
He hailed a cab, and gave Gaye’s address on Dean Street. When
the cab arrived, Gaye emerged from the two-bedroom basement. Dia
got out, said: “America, it’s not like what you hear once you
arrive. It’s harder.”
Gaye knew what he meant. Sometimes Gaye missed Africa so much
he stayed awake all night thinking. If only there were more jobs
at home.
At first, the two worked together as street vendors. “Seven
to seven,” they would say, referring to their 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
routine.
They’d hurry, hurry, catch the A or C train to Manhattan.
There, at a wholesale warehouse, they’d buy discounted
merchandise – Tommy Hilfiger knockoffs, watches – then haul the
stuff back to Brooklyn to sell on the streets.
It was anxious work, complicated by neighborhood gangsters.
When street vendors started packing guns for protection, police
told them: You fight, you both go to jail. Some vendors still
carried bats to scare off gangsters. “We never worked like this
before,” Gaye said, referring to the long hours and the danger.
At night, they retreated to the basement, ate together and
prayed to Allah. After praying, Dia would sit for a few minutes
stroking his red prayer beads contemplatively.
“Alhamdoulilahi,” he would whisper. Thanks be to God.
Meanwhile, across the world, Dia’s mother, Aissata, was
praying, too, in her crumbling adobe hut. Aissata thought about
her son even when she was sleeping. She missed him. Yet facing a
severe drought, she relied on the money he sent to buy rice and
oil.
“In ancient times, there used to be everything here in the
forest,” she explained to her villagers when they asked about
Dia. “Everything we needed was right here. Man did not need to
go away to get things for the family. But now that the wars have
destroyed everything, man is obliged to go abroad to find things
for the family. Many of our fields have been confiscated.”
Here’s the real tragedy of Oumar Dia’s life: Starting in
1996, he was actually managing to make his miracle – the
American miracle – happen the way it’s supposed to. He found a
better job in New York, running a trash compactor for a
janitorial company. Remembering his imprisonment in Mauritania,
he also filed two applications for political asylum.
“The situation in Mauritania has not improved, and I still
fear returning there,” Dia wrote. In the United States, he
sought “protection and relief from the atrocities I have
suffered.”
He seldom took time off work. One day he made an exception.
He rode the ferry from the southern tip of Manhattan to the
Statue of Liberty. He came back smiling.
And in July 1996, after two years in New York City, he
boarded a Greyhound bus for Colorado. He’d heard that a growing
number of West African immigrants earned good money there, and
that Colorado was cheaper than New York. Africans said they felt
less racial tension than in New York.
In Denver, he shared a third-floor apartment off East Colfax
Avenue with fellow Africans. He found work as a janitor at the
Hyatt hotel Downtown. He wore a white uniform and earned $6.50
an hour. And he enrolled in an English class at Emily Griffith
Opportunity School. He took copious notes.
“I am tired” and “She is lonely” are two sentences he
wrote in a workbook.
On Nov. 12, 1996, his application for political asylum was
approved. Dia cried. He celebrated over dinner and fruit juice
with friends. For an African migrant, asylum status means you
can at least think of visiting home without worrying about not
being able to get back into the United States.
And Dia was thinking a lot about his family in Diorbivol. He
sent back $200 a month. He figured out how to phone home through
an expensive and tedious process.
Once a month, he dialed the number of a shop run by Abdul
N’Diaye in Orefonde, a town near Diorbivol. Dia would tell
whoever answered to send somebody to Diorbivol to tell Mariam
Dia that her husband in America would try to call the next day
and to be by the phone in Orefonde. She would walk there, two
hours each way. Sometimes, when Dia couldn’t get off work at the
Hyatt, she waited all day for a call from the United States that
never came.
But when they did connect, Mariam’s heart leapt at the
sensation of hearing Dia’s voice.
“How are the children?” he would say. “The family? What is
lacking there?”
They made plans. They relied on Mamadou Gaye, Dia’s cousin
who lived in Dakar, to relay goods and transfer money. There are
no banks, not even a power line, in Diorbivol. When Amadou was
sick with an open sore on his stomach, Gaye brought the boy to
Dakar for medical treatment.
For the future, Dia envisioned a solar panel on his family’s
roof so his children could see at night. He wanted to help fix
the machine that pumped water up from the river to irrigate rice
paddies. He thought about maybe moving Mariam and the children
to Dakar, where schools were better – maybe even flying them to
Colorado. On the night before he was killed, he telephoned Gaye
in Brooklyn and said he was missing his family too much. This
system of living apart made no sense to him.
“I want to bring them out here,” he told Gaye. “They’d be
safer.”
More than anything, Dia wanted to meet Amadou, his son who
was born after he left for the United States. Now that he had
papers, he promised Mariam he would visit this coming summer, no
matter what. He set aside some money he usually sent home to buy
a plane ticket.
“That’s why this year we couldn’t have new clothes,” Mariam
tells me.
He would get to know his children at last. Then it all fell
apart.
Maybe it was Dia’s determination to see his son Amadou that
explains why he didn’t fight back that night Nov. 18.
He’d just finished work at the Hyatt, was sitting on a 17th
Street bus bench waiting for the last No. 20 bus, which was due
to come by at 11:49 p.m. Jeannie VanVelkinburgh, a single mother
he’d never seen before, joined him waiting by the bench.
Denver police reports describe what happened next. About
11:40, Nathan Thill, a 19-year-old who called himself a
supremacist skinhead, and a friend, with a few beers inside
them, approached the bus bench. They saw Dia. They taunted him
and called him racist names. Finally, they knocked his cap off,
onto the pavement.
VanVelkinburgh reached and picked up the cap. As she was
handing it back to Dia, at 11:46, one of the men opened fire. He
pumped three bullets into Dia’s upper chest and neck. Then, as
VanVelkinburgh turned trying to flee, the killer fired another
bullet into her back that left her paralyzed. Thill later
confessed to the killing. He said he targeted Dia “because he
was black” and didn’t belong in America.
At 12:15 a.m. in the Denver Health Medical Center emergency
room, Dr. Brad Post pronounced Dia dead.
Is that Oumar?” comes the voice of 3-year-old Amadou in
Diorbivol, mid-December, two weeks before Ramadan.
He has glimpsed a framed photo of Dia that village elders are
passing around as they look over condolence letters I delivered
from Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, Dia’s classmates and dozens
of other people in Colorado.
The elders are sitting on the floor of a 12-by-14-foot room.
They nod as a visiting graduate student I hired slowly
translates Webb’s letter into the local Pulaar.
Afterward, the elders make public speeches of thanks to Webb,
President Clinton and the thousands of Coloradans who attended
public anti-hate rallies after the slaying. The killing was a
tragedy for which people of Denver “should be embarrassed,”
Barka Dia allows. Yet the sympathetic way Denver leaders dealt
with Dia’s death – from paying to send Dia’s body to Diorbivol
to prosecution of the crime – leaves the villagers heartened.
“We consider Americans to be the leading people in the
world,” Barka Dia says.
Yet here in this village, where people have virtually
nothing, nearly every family has delivered me a meal to eat. And
the elders have given me a goat – enough meat to feed a family
here for several days. This African village – with such marginal
prospects for the 21st century – is a cradle of basic human
virtues.
The elders tell me villagers have accepted Dia’s death as fate.
Fate is the standard explanation African villagers settle on
when their migrant sons are slain far away. Of the thousands of
Africans who set out from Senegal’s old slave port of Dakar, at
least 40 were murdered in New York over the past five years,
government officials told me. Most were gypsy cabdrivers,
serving dangerous neighborhoods that other cabdrivers avoid. In
each case, villagers mourned. Yet village elders won’t hesitate
to send out more sons to America, government officials said,
because the murders were fate and the villagers have no better
option.
Now in Diorbivol, Dia’s people explain intently that they’re
struggling to move beyond their grief. But there’s so much to
do. For example, the broken water pump. Nobody can afford to fix
it, let alone pay for the fuel to run it. The rice paddies are
drying up, and food supplies are dwindling. Store-bought rice in
Orefonde costs too much. Then there are sick villagers with
runny noses and watery eyes.
Amadou squirms insistently in the arms of his sisters –
5-year-old Djeneba and 7-year-old Makai. The girls remember
their father. They are fine-boned, gentle, content to be quiet,
the way Oumar appears in videos taken before the murder. They
like to play by the river, scooping mud from the banks, molding
it into pirogues and cows. If American children come to
Diorbivol, Makai informs me, “I will take them down to the
river to play.”
As Amadou squirms, Barka Dia, draped in blue robes, clears
his throat, then lays out concerns that are far more pressing
here than the abstract concept of justice. He points at the
children. Makai should be starting school, but the teacher
appointed to work in Diorbivol hasn’t shown up. The family can’t
afford to send the children away to school.
“I am 80 years old now,” he says as the villagers fall
silent. His left hand shakes, still clutching those empty
bottles of glaucoma medicine that he needs.
“As you can see, I cannot work, I cannot do anything,” he
says. “I was always waiting for Oumar to give me things. What
we are eating now was given to us by Oumar. Everything we have
now came from Oumar. And he’s got these three children, two
daughters and one son. These children cannot live if you in the
United States don’t help us.”
The only silent adult on this day is 27-year-old Mariam Dia,
Dia’s widow. Tall and slender, downturned face shrouded in
purple, she’s following a tradition of mourning in seclusion and
silence for three months. But she makes an exception on behalf
of her children.
“If I had the means, I would send my children to study
abroad,” she says. “The men who are responsible for Dia’s
death, I pray to God they may help us, so that we can raise the
children in the best way.”
She pauses for a moment, thinking of the long road from
Mauritania to murder, and how her family in Africa fits into the
modern world. She sighs.
“The best place for the children,” she says resolutely,
“would be the United States.”
DONATIONS
Friends of Oumar Dia, local Muslims and Dia’s employers at
the Downtown Denver Hyatt Regency Hotel have been collecting
money since Dia was killed Nov. 18. The goal is to provide for
Dia’s family, said John Schafer, general manager at the hotel.
So far, more than $20,000 has been raised.
Donations can be made to:
MEMORIAL FUND FOR OUMAR DIA,
c/o Norwest Bank,
1740 Broadway, MS 8671,
Denver 80274;
attn: PERSONAL BANKING.
For more information, contact John Schafer, general
manager, Hyatt Regency Denver, 1750 Welton St., Denver 80202.
Telephone: (303)295-1234.
June 26, 1996 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Environment, Water
River gets new life, but demands pile up
After diverting, damming, draining and dumping on the South
Platte River for decades, Coloradans now dream of turning the
weary waterway into a beauty.
“”There’s something about a river system that seems to tug at
your heart and soul,” said Max Dodson, assistant regional
director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who has
paddled his raft down dozens of Western rivers.
But the South Platte tugs different people in different
directions. Designing the river of the future – from mountain
headwaters through the prairie and into Nebraska – means
figuring out how to balance clashing priorities.
The metro area’s booming population loves the South Platte as
a lifestyle amenity, with plenty of water rippling through
mountain and urban parks that are staging grounds for boating
and fishing forays. Denver leaders plan riverfrontapartments and
a massive entertainment complex.
Bird-watchers, hunters and government biologists want to
groom the South Platte as a wildlife preserve, home to
white-tailed deer and songbirds. Instead of landscaping, they
want cottonwoods preserved to house wood ducks and herons.
Rather than expanding paved trails for roller skaters, they want
restricted access and signs that urge skaters to be quiet.
A third contingent would harness the river as a water supply
for tomorrow’s suburbs and golf courses. The 2.5 million
population of Colorado’s South Platte River Basin is expected to
top 3.5 million by 2020, and the Denver Water Board says
existing water supplies will no longer meet demands by 2013.
But more upriver reservoirs to sustain new development would
mean less water for parks and wildlife habitat. Farmers
downriver from Denver may hold water rights that keep some water
flowing, but developers have the money to buy those water rights.
While forces for recreation, wildlife habitat and urban
growth tussle, others see hope in managing the South Platte more
efficiently. Water engineers are working on new ways of storing
South Platte water underground, reducing the need for big
reservoirs. Others envision filtering even the slimiest sewer
water until it’s clean enough to drink.
Yet even as new technology raises hopes for the future, the
question remains: Can a relatively feeble river satisfy everyone
at once?
On a grassy riverbank in the South Platte’s Elevenmile Canyon,
Prince Dunn and his family found a paradise where the phone
doesn’t ring, money doesn’t matter and smog doesn’t clog the air.
Getting there requires less than an hour’s drive in their
blue van from Colorado Springs. The Dunns plan to recharge along
the South Platte for the rest of their lives.
“”We like the open spaces,” said Dunn, 58, a former military
contractor from the Washington, D.C., area who now works at
Falcon Air Force Base. He cradled his camera with a contented
sigh.
As the South Platte splashed over rocks, Dunn’s 6-year-old
son, Colin, cast a fishing line into a promising pool. Every few
minutes, the boy yelled “”I got one!” and tugged optimistically
on a slack line.
Dunn’s wife, Dianna, sat in the golden grass reading a
mystery called “”Riding Shotgun” while dogs Rose and Jessica
ran in a meadow.
“”This is perfection,” Dianna said.
For now, at least.
A mile down the canyon, the Dunns glimpsed the future. More
than 100 vehicles rumbled up the washboard road through
Elevenmile Canyon that morning.
U.S. Forest Service rangers estimate that the 30,000 people
who visited the canyon last year will increase over the next
decade to 70,000.
And not all will crave the tranquility so important to the
Dunns. Forest Service officials were shocked by a survey they
conducted that found a majority of visitors in Elevenmile Canyon
prefer crowds to quiet. More people mean more fun, those
surveyed said.
As the Dunns fished, beagles and terriers, old men and
children climbed out of cars. Rock climbers wearing neon-green
harnesses headed for the granite boulders towering over the
river. A woman in a lavender bikini oiled herself and reclined
in happy submission to the sun.
Above the canyon, it’s getting harder to keep fishermen happy
as they float around Elevenmile and Spinney Mountain reservoirs
on canvas-covered rubber boats, casting their lines and sipping
cans of beer.
“”Fishermen are catching maybe a fourth of what they caught
12 years ago,” said Dave Spencer, the area’s state ranger, with
20 years of experience on the job. “”They’re not as happy to be
here. Their nerves are on edge.”
Rangers are looking for ways to accommodate more people.
They’ve already built a $300,000 shower and laundry complex
at Elevenmile Reservoir, which has attracted women and children
who once stayed home while their husbands went fishing.
Ultimately, more people will mean more rules along the river,
rangers said.
At Elevenmile Canyon, there’s a plan to pave the riverside
road to reduce erosion that could clog the river with gravel.
There’s also a plan to close the last three miles of the
canyon road, as well as three campgrounds in the canyon ruined
by vandals. In the future, access to the river is likely to be
limited, initially on a first-come, first-served basis.
Eventually, rangers suggest higher entry fees – entering
Elevenmile Canyon now costs $3 – and maybe a permit system.
All this is fine with the Dunns. Anything to help preserve
Elevenmile Canyon as a quiet place for fishing and a family
retreat.
“”No ice cream vendors,” said Prince, who serves on the
citizens advisory committee for the Pikes Peak Area Council of
Governments and advocates a radical remedy that would defy the
forces shaping the future of Colorado and its beleaguered Front
Range river.
“”My answer is: Stop the growth,” he said. “”You just stop
the urban development.”
The tenacity of a pheasant hen along a stretch of the South
Platte near Sterling amazed state wildlife biologist Warren
Snyder.
He watched as the bird tried to raise chicks. The first time,
a coyote discovered the nest and ate the eggs.
Then the pheasant built a new nest in a riverside alfalfa
field. This time, the eggs hatched. But a farmer’s combine mowed
through the nest and killed the tiny chicks.
The persistent hen tried again. It built another nest and
laid more eggs. This time, the chicks survived.
In Snyder’s mind, South Platte birds like that pheasant
symbolize the river’s natural resilience. He and hundreds of
other government biologists want to take advantage of that
quality. By nurturing the South Platte, they plan to create a
riparian corridor lusher than at any time in the river’s history.
Wildlife advocates envision turtles the size of manhole covers
swimming in the shadows of factories, wood ducks proliferating
at edges of farmers’ fields.
The vision extends from mountainous upriver stretches – where
federal rangers propose a protective “”wild and scenic”
designation – through a series of river corridor parks on the
prairie ending near Nebraska at Tamarack Ranch.
There’s been progress toward this vision: The Colorado
Division of Wildlife owns or operates nearly one-fifth of the
riverbed through the state as a preserve. And there’s growing
public support for wildlife habitat.
Hunters concerned that vanishing habitat threatens birds are
taking action through organizations such as Pheasants Forever.
The group, for example, pays for studies that provide data for
taking better care of birds.
Also, growing numbers of city folks flock to the river
corridor east of Denver to watch birds and take pictures. One
million Coloradans count themselves as bird-watchers, according
to local bird-watching clubs. They comb the river corridor
looking for birds they haven’t spotted before. Looking ahead,
a group of prairie residents is trying to protect about 15,000
acres along the river near Orchard as wildlife habitat.
In 1993, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed a
Centennial National Wildlife Refuge in the area. Locals opposed
that plan, suspicious of federal control. Now the locals are
trying to do much the same thing themselves. In January, they
created a land trust to prevent riverside development that might
hurt wildlife.
Preserving wildlife will require more of the expertise that
biologists like Snyder and his partner Tom Remington provide.
After all, the South Platte in its natural state barely
supported trees, let alone wood ducks and deer. The wildlife
habitat that biologists envision would be mostly a man-made
creation, requiring constant monitoring to measure and adjust
changes.
Tromping along a side channel near Sterling this spring,
Snyder and Remington extolled the benefits of floods. If new
dams are built upriver, flooding would be less likely.
Massive floods before the Platte was dammed scoured away most
cottonwoods. But biologists have found that a small flood
encourages growth of cottonwood trees, which serve as homes for
birds.
“”That’s regeneration,” Snyder marveled, touching a tiny
green cottonwood seedling. A blue heron flapped down the river.
A wood duck shot up from a bank. Three quail rustled in the
bushes.
On state-owned land, and on private land owned by cooperative
farmers, Snyder and Remington are trying to help nature along by
planting thousands of sorghum plants and plum trees as cover for
birds. Their bird counts show that this strategy works. Bird
densities on state-run preserves are twice what they find in
heavily farmed areas along the South Platte.
None of the biologists’ work will matter if the South Platte
continues to be contained and tamed as a water-supply system.
Vast stretches of downriver habitat could dry up within a few
years.
Yet the South Platte still is the lifeline for 2.5 million
people. The Denver Water Board predicts a water shortage of
100,000 acre-feet a year by 2045 if no new dams are built. (An
acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, enough to supply an urban
family of four for a year.)
Plans for recreation and wildlife habitat “”are all to the
good if we have ways of keeping water in the stream,” said Ed
Pokorney, planning director for the board. “”But to what extent
are we to import water from the Colorado River Basin so that we
can maintain the South Platte? The metro area is going to need
more and more water. Well, where is that water going to come
from?”
Nobody has a proven solution. But water engineers are
experimenting with new technology to use the South Platte more
efficiently.
One scheme is underground water storage. The engineers
foresee fields of wells up to 2,500 feet deep in aquifers
beneath the metro area, connected through a network of pipes to
surface water in the South Platte and to water delivery systems
for households.
The idea is to refill the aquifers in wet years, when spring
snowmelts send more water down the South Platte than farmers and
reservoirs can handle. In dry years, the aquifers would supply
water.
So far, Douglas and Arapahoe counties, which rely on aquifers
to provide water for new housing developments and businesses,
lead the way in aquifer storage.
On a windblown bluff south of Highlands Ranch recently, water
consultant Courtney Hemenway parked his pickup and lifted the
lid off a cement bunker. Below it, a pipe went down 1,500 feet
into an aquifer.
Hemenway climbed down a ladder into the bunker. He gripped a
metal wheel with both hands and turned it. Instead of sucking
water out of the aquifer, the well began pumping water from the
South Platte River back into the aquifer for storage.
Hemenway can move more than 480 gallons of water a minute
into the aquifer through this well. He has supervised
retrofitting of four other wells in the area for two-way flows.
It’s possible to store “”as much water as we want” in
aquifers, says Lee Rozaklis, coordinator of a state task force
that has been brainstorming water supply problems since 1989,
when federal officials blocked the proposed Two Forks dam along
the South Platte. The dam would have supplied water for the
metro area.
The aquifer approach has complications. New reservoirs would
be necessary to hold river water until it could be pumped into
aquifers. The amount of water that can be stored is limited by
the number of wells drilled. Also, there’s still the issue of
changing downstream flows by diverting water from the South
Platte.
Another way water suppliers hope to reduce reliance on the
South Platte is by recycling – purifying sewer water until it’s
drinkable.
Denver and EPA officials teamed up in the 1980s to build a
$40 million laboratory, located along the river at Denver’s
northern edge, to test water-recycling technology. After the
treatment, sewer water was cleaner than water coming out of taps
in Denver. It could work on a large scale, officials concluded.
Water board plans call for recycling up to a fifth of the
total metro-area water shortfall envisioned for 2045.
But recycling, like aquifer storage, diverts water from the
river. Today, about 35,000 acre-feet a year of treated sewer
water gushes back into the South Platte at the north edge of
Denver. Federal wildlife agencies may require Denver to maintain
that flow.
Coloradans share their water predicament. Booming Western cities
from Boise to Bend face growing demands on rivers for
recreation, wildlife habitat and water supplies.
But nobody is demanding quite so much from a single, small
waterway.
“”We’re asking one very small river to provide recreation,
habitat, water, and it’s not much of a river to do all that,”
Pokorney, the Denver Water Board’s planning director, said with
a sigh.
“”Can we sustain this? I’ll tell you this: If people don’t
work together, we’ll be in dead straits.”
December 3, 1995 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Uncategorized
On her way down from Evergreen during the snowstorm last week,
Randi Murray’s Suburban utility vehicle slid out of control on
the icy road, missed a turn and smashed a Geo Prizm.
“”I can’t believe I just hurt somebody,” Murray said,
surveying the wreckage.
But State Trooper Brenda Leffler, writing Murray a ticket for
careless driving, wasn’t surprised.
When winter driving gets tough, drivers of tough vehicles
crash.
That’s long been the suspicion about people steering
four-wheel-drive Cherokees, Troopers, Explorers, Suburbans,
Jimmys, 4Runners, Blazers and other so-called “”utility”
vehicles.
Now there’s evidence.
More than 40 percent of winter accidents along Interstate 70
this year involved drivers of utility vehicles, according to a
review of hundreds of accident reports at Colorado’s Department
of Transportation.
By Colorado dealers’ estimates, utilities represent no more
than 25 percent of vehicles sold. The records suggest that many
of those crashing are driven by visiting skiers or newcomers to
the state who have yet to grasp the physics of snow.
The problem lies less in the vehicle itself than with drivers
seduced by advertising and image into thinking that their
machines are invulnerable because they’re heavier and have
four-wheel drive.
Most four-wheel-drive vehicles can maneuver better than
other vehicles on ice and snow. Unfortunately, they can’t stop
any quicker on an icy road than the average gas-saving Honda
Civic. And the weight sits up front, so the back end tends to
slide out, police say.
Any skier with a sedan has seen it. Behind you, as you crawl
up the snowy interstate, the headlights of a four-wheel drive
behemoth loom bigger and closer. The driver blows by, churning
out plumess of ice and gravel.
A few miles later, the machine rests belly-up in a ditch.
You wave politely.
In Washington, Brian O’Neill is deeply concerned. O’Neill
heads the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the main
advocacy group for insurance companies.
“”We’re giving average motorists technology that isn’t likely
to help them at all,” said O’Neill.
“”People are obsessed with the notion that utility vehicles
give them freedom that they otherwise wouldn’t have. It’s a
myth.”
And as more people buy sport utility vehicles, the drivers of
smaller cars suffer.
“”Little cars are nothing,” Rebecca Jensen said after her
Prizm was smashed by the Suburban driven by Murray, whose
Colorado license dates to July 1993. The Prizm’s horn wailed,
stuck. Acid fumes wafted from the battery. Jensen knew she’d
survived when she felt the pain in her broken arm. Her lips
puffed up like the air bags that probably saved her life.
No doubt, utility vehicles are technological marvels, made to
endure rough terrain. Four-wheel drive lets a driver accelerate
on snow like a cheetah, and advertisements play that up.
In one television commercial, a Chevy Blazer cuts deftly down
a snowfield through ski slalom gates. In another, a GMC Jimmy
effortlessly crashes through a driveway snow drift, kicking
white powder in the face of a neighbor trying to dig out his
puny sedan.
Studies indicate that most utility drivers are urban
commuters, who routinely hurry. They pilot their vehicles
primarily through traffic, heading to the office or mall, not on
remote rutted roads. Southwest Plaza, not southwestern deserts.
“”People get going too fast in these vehicles,” said Capt.
Larry Tolar, spokesman for the Colorado State Patrol.
“”We refer to the drivers as stupid to the power of four.”
Consider what happened along Interstate 70 from Kansas to
Utah during March, this year’s snowiest month.
Most of the accidents occurred between Denver and Grand
Junction – the main road to mountain resorts. Of 513 reported
accidents, 223 involved utility vehicles. That’s 43 percent.
Colorado car dealers say utilities account for 15 percent to 25
percent of new vehicles sold. One of the worst pileups
occurred on Saturday, March 25. That afternoon, the highway
hummed with drivers headed down Vail Pass toward Vail to ski,
relax in saunas, meet friends for dinner or saunter through
Vail’s glittering shops.
Then the blizzard hit. Before they reached Vail, many drivers
spun out. They plowed into ditches. They flipped into
snowfields. They bashed into bumpers. Their vehicles littered
icy I-70 like a toddler’s scattered toys. State troopers
couldn’t begin to handle the mess.
Rescuers concentrated on injuries, and tried to clear
wreckage as fast as they could.
Fifty-eight drivers filed reports describing their accidents,
of which 18 (31 percent) involved utilities. Of those 18
drivers, 11 had out of state licenses or had received their
Colorado licenses recently. (Eight, or 44 percent, had
out-of-state driver’s licenses, while three, or 16 percent, had
obtained Colorado licenses after January 1994.)
A typical report came from Richard Van Vuren of Grand
Junction, the driver of a red and silver Ford Bronco II XLT.
He’d moved to Colorado from Kansas and had his Colorado license
for about a year.
“”… I hit a large solid ice. I downshifted immediately to
second gear and pumped my brakes. I lost control trying to avoid
vehicles ahead. After safely clearing three vehicles, I slid
into the back of a car …”
The vehicles crashing are Detroit’s hottest products. One in
every 10 new vehicles sold in America is a utility. That’s
nearly triple the market share a decade ago. Ford Explorers lead
the pack, entering the domestic fleet at the rate of 45 vehicles
an hour.
In the Rocky Mountain West, America’s fastest-growing region,
car salesmen smile broadly when they spot on their lots
newcomers like Parker resident Steve Shanklin, who drove his
Buick Regal up from Houston when he was hired by the Promise
Keepers religious campaign.
“”My friends told me I need to make sure at least one of my
cars here has four-wheel drive,” Shanklin said recently, eyeing
a Jeep Grand Cherokee that cost $38,000.
“”It’d be safer. The first snowstorm was really a wake-up
call for me. I didn’t feel confident driving to work.”
What sells four-wheel drive, marketers say, is the cachet of
freedom, the implicit promise that you can go anywhere in style.
Before 1980, four-wheel drive meant boxy Jeeps, which were
about as comfortable as a coal mining cart. If you wanted
comfort, you bought a sedan. Problem is, Cadillacs can’t climb a
rocky desert canyon.
So automakers combined ruggedness with leather upholstery,
power steering, cushy suspension and compact disk players.
Buying a Ford Explorer “”connotes no compromises on the part
of the consumer,” Ford spokesman David Reuter said.
“”You get the space. You get the safety of being up high. You
can go off the road. You get just as many luxuries as in any car
on the market.
“”It puts your mind at ease in bad weather. You know that you
can get out of just about any bad weather instance without
getting stuck, without getting stranded.”
Colorado law enforcers say the sales pitch is part of the
problem. They view utilities as the vehicular equivalent of the
mountain bike that suddenly turns mild Mr. Peepers into Evel
Knievel.
For example, State Patrol Sgt. Gary Morehead recalls one
weekend blizzard near Eagle. His radio crackled out word of a
serious accident near Vail. It was a top priority emergency.
Morehead immediately floored his State Patrol Bronco, zooming
down the snow-packed interstate.
“”I was absolutely pushing my limit because we had this
serious accident,” said Morehead, who’s trained to take
calculated risks as head of the patrol’s motorcycle team.
In the blowing snow, his blue and red lights flashed and
police sirens wailed. The Bronco’s speedometer pushed 60 mph.
As Morehead gripped the steering wheel and listened for radio
updates on the accident, he glanced in his rear view mirror and
noticed a whirl of white snow storming toward him like a
Tasmanian devil. It was a Toyota sport utility.
The man driving it blew past Morehead as if he were a pylon.
“”He actually passed me!” Morehead says, still incredulous
at such audacity. “”I’m sorry, but that was ridiculous. I had to
go stop that individual. I needed to get to the accident. But if
I’d have allowed that guy to continue, he would have caused yet
another accident.”
Morehead said he believes television ads inspire drivers to
go fast in snow. “”Some of these ads showing utilities crashing
through snowdrifts are pretty remarkable.”
Automakers bristle at the suggestion that they are
responsible. “”We wouldn’t condone any type of advertising that
promotes behavior of that sort in our vehicles,” Reuter said.
“”Accident figures have a lot more to do with the driver than
to a particular vehicle.”
But the crashing adds to a growing list of concerns about
America’s love for utilities.
“”This is in effect becoming an aggressive vehicle that
punishes people in smaller vehicles,” said O’Neill at the
Insurance Institute of Highway Safety.
The utilities are heavy and consume lots of gas. (As a favor
to Detroit, Congress recently froze mileage standards for
utilities.) In contrast, the latest fuel-efficient car designs
use lightweight materials. O’Neill and others are concerned that
people who might normally buy fuel-efficient cars may be
discouraged from doing so out of fear of being crashed into by a
utility vehicle.
“”We need to keep some balance in the size of our passenger
vehicle fleet,” O’Neill said. “”While big is good for safety,
to a point, we don’t want the fleet to get any bigger and
heavier because that puts everybody in smaller vehicles at
greater risk.
“”These vehicles are much stiffer than passenger cars.
Stiffness is not good for occupant safety. And stiffness makes
these vehicles particularly aggressive when they are involved in
collisions with other vehicles.”
Out on the highways, Trooper Brenda Leffler confessed that
her patience is starting to wear thin. After checking on
Jensen, calling for an ambulance, and handing Murray the
careless-driving ticket, she sped off to I-70, where another
four-wheel-drive vehicle had flipped.
“”You go to lots of accidents, and about all the vehicles are
four-wheel drive, and often they’re the drivers at fault,”
Leffler said.
“”You start to get a little grumpy.”
November 12, 1995 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Environment
TELLURIDE – Roudy Roudebush moseys along as if he were America’s
last cowboy – 10-gallon black hat, red shirt, leather chaps,
worn boots with spurs – leading New Yorkers on horseback into
what he calls his “”Butch Cassidy meadow.” It was in this
aspen-framed paradise, Roudebush tells visitors, that Cassidy’s
Wild Bunch outlaws hid their horses when they robbed Telluride’s
bank.
Elk wander through the warm golden grass. The New Yorkers
pull out cameras.
Then they’ll tell Roudebush how lucky he is to be a cowboy
beneath blue Western skies and snow-dusted peaks.
Well, Roudebush has a secret: “”I ain’t no cowboy.”
Not only that, but privately he confides that Butch Cassidy
didn’t really hide his horses here when he held up Telluride’s
bank. (“”The meadow looks like the kind of place where you would
hide horses.”) He admits that the elk are practically tame,
guided by his voice into his clients’ path.
Worth $65,000 an acre, the meadow belongs to Goldman Sachs,
the world’s biggest investment company. Roudebush and the elk
are merely amenities.
As Roudebush puts it: “”We can give you appearances.”
Appearances are worth more than gold for wealthy new land
owners, in love with a mythical West, who are forcing out
workers and real ranching families. By driving up land values,
the new owners hasten the demise of the same Old West
communities they covet.Their takeover is political, economic and
aesthetic. And nothing is stopping it.
Nowhere have the effects been so sweeping as here on this
Rhode Island-sized swath of the San Juan Mountains around
Telluride, Rico, Norwood, Ridgway and Ouray.
In San Miguel County alone, $250 million worth of ranchland
was sold in the past seven years. That’s nearly one $100,000
sale per day. As a result, more than 40 percent of San Miguel
and Ouray County landowners live outside Colorado, according to
state and county tax records.
Many of the new owners could be called “”nostalgia ranchers”
– people attracted to the idea of ranching. In contrast, real
ranchers in Colorado rely on the marginal business of running
cattle and growing hay to support families.
A few years ago, nostalgia ranchers might have bought
mansions near Aspen or Vail. But now those areas are too
crowded; nostalgia ranchers typically want 75 acres or more.
They order peeled-log houses and ponds that conform to a
fixed image of the 19th century frontier as portrayed in movies
and ads. The paragon of this fakery is a custom squeak built
into fashion designer Ralph Lauren’s door. Lauren had carpenters
make sure the new door squeaked, like in movies, to add a whiff
of “”Gunsmoke” at his 13,000-acre ranch on the magnificent
Dallas Divide between Telluride and Ridgway. The squeak heralded
a wave of like-minded enthusiasts, who are following in Lauren’s
footsteps to sparsely populated areas across the West.
In this area, they include entertainment celebrities from
Daryl Hannah to Sylvester Stallone, corporate magnates, Wall
Street dealers and star lawyers. There’s a European mortician in
the Yampa Valley, a millionaire publisher north of Colorado
Springs, Ted Turner in Montana, Sam Donaldson in New Mexico.
One of Lauren’s neighbors, Vince Kontny, the retired
president of Fluor Daniel, the world’s biggest construction
company, shuns modern power lines on his manicured ranch. He
relies on hidden generators and batteries instead.
“”A Marlboro photographer said we’re trying to create a
painting,” Kontny said. “”And that’s right.”
“”It’s that feeling of history,” explains Sandra Carradine,
ex-wife of actor Keith Carradine who left California to run the
opera house in Telluride (pop. 1,896) with support from her
Hollywood friends.
“”People want to be a part of something that existed before.
It helps them feel like they make a difference in the world.”
The new owners preserve scenery. They migrate from New York,
Chicago or Los Angeles, sometimes living only a few weeks per
year in the West.
But their effects are felt every day.
The fierce escalation of land values they trigger drives real
ranchers out of business and prevents working families from ever
owning their own home.
Meanwhile, the nostalgia ranchers take advantage of
agricultural tax breaks designed to help real ranchers survive.
Westerners now must live with, in the language of real estate
ads, “”unique lifestyles” of “”quiet luxury,” which workers
can’t afford any more than they can afford the $740 cowboy hats
in Telluride’s “”Bounty Hunter” shop.
“”Now my dad, he did wear a Stetson, but it was so old,”
mused Melissa Head, who was forced to pump gas in Ouray after
her father died. He wore plain work shoes.
“”My brothers wear caps. These new guys who wear spurs,
they’re drugstore cowboys.”
She and her brothers now are struggling to stay true to their
father – “”God willing” she says, her eyes glistening – by
keeping the family ranch.
Yet only a few ranchers manage to stay, rolling with changes
as Westerners always have, while workers become ever-more
transient.
That is the real story, the consequences, as well-intentioned
elites take a liking to the West.
“”People with money get to determine whose fantasy rules,”
said University of Colorado historian Patty Limerick, who has
led public discussion about the future of the West.
“”The little guy might have an equally powerful vision of the
West. And it’s not that one fantasy is better than another. But
there’s a question of how much you have to subordinate other
people to get your pageant played out.”
The boldest political affront occurred quietly in Mountain
Village, the tony resort between Telluride and Rico, across
Lizard Head Pass from where Roudebush leads horsepacking trips.
For nearly eight years, construction trucks have climbed the
road to Mountain Village, lumbered past the guard booth and
artificial ponds, unloaded stacks of wood, and poured cement.
This year, property owners declared Mountain Village Colorado’s
newest town.
It ranks among the most luxurious towns – surrounded by golf
greens and ski slopes and spas – designed for people accustomed
to swift, doting service.
This is where carpenter Jason Patton has built rich people’s
enormous getaways for nearly a year, on and off, saving his
money for college, sleeping on a couch in a shared apartment for
workers. He’s 20, and still hadn’t saved enough to enroll for
this fall’s semester at Western State College, two hours away in
Gunnison.
Now Patton has learned that he can’t vote, either, thanks to
the new Mountain Village charter.
The charter says that only workers who have lived in the
community for at least 180 consecutive days are eligible to vote.
Yet the charter gives absentee property owners the right to
cast ballots, even though they typically spend even less time in
Mountain Village than seasonal workers.
“”I work hard,” Patton said after a day of pounding nails at
the construction site retired Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf’s new
house.
“”And I deserve to vote, because I work hard. I built part of
this town.”
Workers’ lives here are severely circumscribed. Signs posted
outside Patton’s apartment warn that overnight visitors must
have passes, or their cars will be towed. Some workers want a
village council that would provide affordable conveniences – a
grocery store, for example, or a local garage.
To become a town, Mountain Village developers convened a
group of property owners to write a “”home rule” charter – the
one that disenfranchises seasonal workers. It was approved Feb.
22.
Property owners “”really wanted the people that cared to be
able to vote,” said village manager Kathy Goodwin. Seasonal
workers “”may not … really care… How involved do you get
when you’re only here for four months?”
The charter “”doesn’t in any way discriminate against
(nonseasonal) workers that you keep,” she said.
One Mountain Village resident, 33-year-old Joan May, mailed a
copy of the charter to the American Civil Liberties Union,
complaining that it was unfair.
“”This gives too much power to people who own property,” May
said. “”American government is based on one vote per person.”
The ACLU plans to challenge the charter in court. “”This
certainly rips away power that we take for granted in American
democracy,” said James Joy, head of the Colorado ACLU.
There are benefits to the takeover by wealthy new owners.
They promise to preserve the West, which is struggling to cope
with America’s fastest-growing population. This may be a
practical way to save scenery and habitat for animals and birds.
Lauren will preserve his RRL Ranch from development forever,
his publicists say. Like many other nostalgia ranchers, he hired
local men to run cattle, feed his white horse, paint the
picture-perfect red barn, and maintain the peeled-log fence,
while he runs his fashion empire.
He’s lavished gifts on the nearby town Ridgway, such as a
satellite dish for the school.
Leading intellectuals and some government officials embrace
the new pattern of ownership.
“”Ralph Lauren makes sense,” said Frank Popper of Rutgers
University, who with his wife, Deborah, has proposed a “”Buffalo
Commons.”
The idea, to control development on sparsely populated parts
of the Great Plains and West, still stirs debate more than seven
years after the Poppers proposed it.
“”Lauren is an example of somebody on the 21st century
frontier in which a place that used to be used for ranching
becomes a place of wide-open vistas for recreation and tourism
and retirement and environmental contemplation.”
Even before it was fashionable to preserve the Wild West,
ranches were failing.
They are reincarnated in photos displayed on real estate
storefronts along Telluride’s main street. One real estate
business used to be called “”The Ranch Shop,” offering
ready-made ranches right off the shelf, like hats.
Not far from Lauren’s ranch, Faye and David Wolford worry
that their 100-year-old family ranch soon will be reincarnated
to fit somebody’s fantasy.
Their fences – barbed wire, not peeled logs – need fixing.
Power poles lean precariously. (Nostalgia ranchers in the area
want the San Miguel power company to bury power lines, because
the new owners consider them an eyesore. The Wolfords are
concerned that burying power lines could tear up fields they use
to grow hay.)
In their living room recently, the Wolfords did some
figuring. Calves were selling for 63 cents a pound, down from 85
cents a pound last year, 73-year-old David calculated.
“”You go to Safeway, and they don’t lower their prices,”
Faye said, shaking her head.
For years, Faye worked happily at the Ridgway post office,
and David drove a road grader for the county, to shore up family
finances.
Their two sons have nonranching jobs for the county.
But inheritance taxes, soaring as land values soar, loom like
a snowstorm during calving season. The Wolford children would
have to pay an estimated $150,000 to inherit the ranch. That’s
more than they can afford without selling some land, or agreeing
to conservation easements that the Wolfords oppose on principle.
They don’t want to give up control.
“”There’s something wrong,” Faye said.
David looked on the bright side. “”It’s progress, I guess.
Before, this was just a community.”
The Wolfords leafed through photo albums, laughing wanly as
they contrasted their old pictures with recent changes in the
area.
Faye found a photo from the 1950s showing concrete sidewalks
in Ridgway, just like in big cities. But today those sidewalks
are wooden planks, like on Hollywood sets for Dodge City, built
over the old concrete to make Ridgway seem more Western.
David recalled driving a big yellow road grader, about 25
years ago, when John Wayne was filming “”True Grit.” Wayne rode
by on sawhorse mounted on a moving truck, twirling a pistol and
a rifle, shooting blanks.
“”He wasn’t even on a horse!” David said. “”In the movie, he
looked just like he was riding along.”
At least one rancher, 63-year-old Raymond Snyder, intends to
hold out.
“”We just have to get along as well as we can,” he said over
coffee in the solar-heated dining room at his ranch house near
Norwood, 33 miles down the San Miguel River valley from Telluride.
“”We have to stay on our land as long as we can make a
profit.”
Born along the Utah border in Paradox Valley, Snyder has run
sheep and cattle all his life on thousands of acres stretching
from the mountains to the desert.
He has a rugged face, deep voice and wry sense of humor. His
eyes are sharp enough to spot a ram chasing sheep on the
horizon. He has always adapted to changing conditions, rather
than clinging to some mythical West.
His doors, unlike Lauren’s, swing open without squeaking.
Snyder deeded his land to his sons back in 1978, minimizing
the inheritance tax crunch.
He bought a tractor-trailer rig to round up his cattle since
he can’t find good cowboys.
He served on the San Miguel County Commission, enduring
seemingly endless meetings “”to protect ourselves from all these
new rules.”
He negotiated yearly leases to graze cattle on some of the
neighboring 25,000 acres, owned by developers, who are selling
the land bit by bit to nostalgia ranchers.
“”I can’t blame these people for wanting to come out here and
set up their lifestyles and homes and things,” Snyder said.
“”And Ralph Lauren, he does a lot for Ridgway because he’s got a
lot of money. They support the 4-H. They support this and that.
But with absentee landowners you lose your community’s spirit.”
Snyder spoke of pool halls, a willingness to help neighbors,
a shared love of steak and lamb and potatoes. Norwood citizens
would take care of their needy not only by sharing money, but
also by socializing in the pool halls and, as Snyder’s father
did, sitting with the sick during hard lonely nights.
“”So many times,” Snyder said, “”big money has only been
there to make a buck. The absentee owner just don’t put into a
community what the person who lives there and works there does.”
The wealthy up here export garbage 46 miles down valley to a
dump near Nucla. Workers drive 58 miles to Montrose, because
Montrose has a Safeway, hospital, bowling alley, movies,
Laundromats, among other basic conveniences.
What would you do if a nail punctured your tire deep in the
Telluride box canyon as a snowstorm moved in? On the surface,
Telluride looks and feels enough like other American small towns
that you’d expect to find a friendly mechanic.
Roudebush laughs wildly.
“”It could take months!” he says.
Telluride has become so exclusive that no mechanic can afford
the high rent. Bulldozers last summer leveled the last garage
where mechanics patched tires. Developers wanted more room for
luxury condos.
“”It’s kind of neat,” says Dan Neumann, 38, a painter,
standing by the white sports car he drove from Florida. “”It’s
nice not having all the industrialization.”
Yet the 17-mile drive to the closest mechanic, Joe Kray in
Placerville, means watching out for rockslides, avalanches and
cliffside wrecks.
“”And I don’t fix tires either,” Kray says. Kray owns Joe’s
Garage. A 49-year-old peering up from an engine, he says he’s
hard-pressed to keep up with major repairs.
“”A mechanic would have to charge $90 an hour to run a garage
in Telluride,” he says. “”Attitudes are weird up there. Their
priorities seem to be off.” A couple more miles down valley, at
Placerville Tire and Auto, Gene Wingate finds time to stick on a
patch.
“”That’ll be $12.50,” he says.
By the time Roudebush collected from the New Yorkers and
their friends, his telephone answering machine was blinking
furiously with messages about a Wild West Weekend. Daryl Hannah,
Ricki Lee Jones and others were coming to raise nearly $50,000
for Sandra Carradine’s arts foundation. The money is to maintain
the renovated Sheridan opera house, and cover costs of hosting
underprivileged children from cities and Indian reservations for
weekends with entertainers in Telluride.Wild West Weekend
organizers wanted Roudebush’s horses for security guards to
ride, so that the guards would look like cowboys.
Roudebush rolled his eyes. The last time he lent his horses
to a movie crew, the crew exhausted the horses, filming scenes
over and over without giving the animals enough water.
So Roudebush blew off the phone messages, climbed into his
big old red truck, and went to visit some friends.
He passed the park where workers play soccer in the evenings,
heading up to the Idarado Mine, where Lynn Gray was fixing a
fence.
“”You should bring some New Yorkers up here,” she joked.
“”I’ll let ’em ride around in my backhoe.”
The foreman at the mine, Jerry Albin, had a pained expression.
“”Hurt my leg sumo wrestling,” Albin said, rubbing his calf.
“”Benefit down at the firehouse in Placerville.”
A local firefighter’s daughter, diagnosed with leukemia,
needs expensive medical treatment at out-of-town hospitals. In
one night of sumo wrestling at the firehouse, the volunteer
firefighters raised nearly $1,000. Another benefit is being
organized.
Albin had more bad news.
“”People keep getting shot,” he said.
“”Now who?” asked Roudebush.
“”Kevin O’Brien. Last weekend down by RRL. Guy from Minnesota
thought he was an elk.”
Albin had laid off O’Brien when Idarado closed. O’Brien had
been trying to start a heavy machinery business to support his
wife and two children. He also worked for free as Ridgway’s
emergency medical technician and as a firefighter.
Hunting near Lauren’s land, O’Brien neglected to wear an
orange vest. He was blowing his elk call. So was the hunter from
Minnesota, though O’Brien recognized it as a whistle.
The hunter from Minnesota apparently fired without looking,
Ouray County sheriff’s deputies said. The blast shattered
O’Brien’s left arm.
Workers held fundraisers for the O’Brien family, too.
“”The donations will get us through a few months,” O’Brien’s
wife, Cheryl said, thankfully.
After talking with Albin, Roudebush took a long walk through
Telluride’s gravel alleys, behind buildings, where miners and
cowboys used to walk on their way to dance halls and bars.
Roudebush chatted with a few friends he passed. Then some people
with cowboy hats were waving and calling down to him from an
overlooking porch cafe.
It was the New Yorkers and their friends that Roudebush just
finished leading on horseback. They were waiting for pizza.
“”Hi!” one said brightly.
Roudebush looked up, waved, and then looked away. He put his
hand in his pocket. Under his fingers, their $20 bills felt
warm. He shrugged. “”I’ve got to do something for a living.”
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A journalist and lawyer, Bruce Finley has investigated local, national and international issues with on-site reporting in more than 40 countries. In his position as a staff writer for the Denver Post, he is focusing on environment-related news including water challenges, the oil and gas boom and wildfire.
