State by State

by Matt Weiland

  I asked how the day laborers regarded the rest of us with easy lives. He said: “Sometimes they think that this can’t go on, that those rich people’s money will run out. The ones at the corner would like to be like them and have their money.”

  Once upon a time, California’s missionaries dreamed of saved souls and slave labor. Perhaps some souls have in fact been saved to enjoy their lives in leisure. As for others such as Alex, they maintain me in my middle-class salvation.

  California’s traffic creeps and farts. Alex stands on the corner. And not far from Mi-wuk Village (closer even than that well-recommended Pine-crest Lake), one can walk a trail high over the Stanislaus River, which is sometimes a transparent brown with many whirlpools through which the rock can be seen; and at other times the river is white with rapids. The morning smells like pine and honey; and the reality of Freeway California is curtained behind many evergreen hands drooping down into sweet-smelling ferns that have refused to relinquish summer. A cedar log, rotting into orange powder, is moist to the touch; deer dung is turning back into dirt and has already taken on dirt’s clean smell.

  Sitting beneath an overhang of Sierra rock, listening to the river, I believe in John Muir’s wild California. Flying from Sacramento to Los Angeles, I look out the scratched oval window and rejoice at the lack of human spoor in the mountains below me. In the redwood forests near the Oregon border and the foggy flower-meadows around Point Reyes, my illusion of tranquil purity is restored. I love my darling California so much that I would believe in any sweetness.

  COLORADO

  CAPITAL Denver

  ENTERED UNION 1876 (38th)

  ORIGIN OF NAME From the Spanish for “ruddy” or “red”

  NICKNAME Centennial State

  MOTTO Nil sine Numine (“Nothing without Providence”)

  RESIDENTS Coloradan or Coloradoan

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 7

  STATE BIRD lark bunting

  STATE FLOWER Rocky Mountain columbine

  STATE TREE Colorado blue spruce

  STATE SONG “Where the Columbines Grow”

  LAND AREA 103,717 sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Park Co., 30 mi. NW of Pikes Peak

  POPULATION 4,665,177

  WHITE 82.8%

  BLACK 3.8%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 1.0%

  ASIAN 2.2%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 17.1%

  UNDER 18 25.6%

  65 AND OVER 9.7%

  MEDIAN AGE 34.3

  COLORADO

  Benjamin Kunkel

  Of all the boxy Western states, Colorado and Wyoming are the boxiest—almost perfect rectangles—and when I was a kid and wanted an idea of my state I could do no better than to picture a box of Neapolitan ice cream. Just as a block of such ice cream is divided into three equal portions of strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla, Colorado consists of a high semi-arid plateau in the western third of the state; the heaped summits of the southern Rockies in the center; and in the east the plains rolling away toward Kansas. It’s mostly the mountainous central part of the state, however, that people have in mind when they think of the place, and as it happens it was there in the real Coloradan part of Colorado that I grew up. At first we lived in a cabin my parents had built up Salt Creek, outside the town of Eagle, with the help of other long-haired recent transplants—it was part of that movement of hippies “back to the land.” And once I was of an age to walk around the world unattended, I don’t believe I had any trouble understanding why my parents had been drawn to this land in particular, or why adults should pronounce the word Colorado with a certain inflection of romance and pride.

  The mountain to one side of Salt Creek fanned up in sheets of sun-scoured red sandstone dotted with pinion and juniper trees; sometimes, in a patch of overlapping snow and shadow, you saw a cactus too. The mountain opposite was a different world entirely, since it faced north and conserved its water in the shade: a somber looming mass thick with spruce and fir. The first of the beautiful ordinary things I remember are the creek gabbling away in its bed and the smell of rained-on sage bringing out an unsuspected sweetness from the land: thoughts of water in a dry place. But the thinness and dryness of the air on clear days—as of something brittle that would never break—was also thrilling, and what I liked doing on days like that was to clamber up the red mountain, which always offered some new place to be discovered among its troughs of brilliant dirt and tilted spines.

  So it wasn’t necessary to grow up and go away to recognize the beauty of the place, something anyone can see, native or not, visiting or having come to stay. A friend from New York took a road trip with me, one fall, through the San Juan Mountains, down along the Million Dollar Highway, and remarked one afternoon when we’d stopped the car to get out and look: “Your state kicks the ass of anybody else’s state.” The opinion is arguable, but not on a clear day in the San Juans when the leaves have turned.

  Jean Stafford, probably the best writer Colorado has so far produced, described the state’s atmosphere better than anyone: “The violent violet peaks stood out against a sky of cruel, infuriated blue, and the snows at timberline shone like sun-struck mirrors.” In the same story, a red canoe gleams “in the pure light like a bright, immaculate wound.” I don’t know why this language of hurt should attach to alpine Colorado, or why, in the best-known version of the traditional song, the man of constant sorrow (“I seen trouble all my days”) should be bound for Colorado (“where I was born and partly raised”). Unless I do know why: The pure light and gin-clear air can’t be matched by your life. They will only put a hurt look into your eyes, whether you stay or go.

  Not that nowhere else in America has clear light and thin air—but unlike other such places Colorado isn’t frigidly cold, or bone dry, and most of its tall mountains aren’t even overwhelming. The peaks of the southern Rockies generally start from so high a base that they don’t tower away from you; their summits are almost companionable, in spite of their location in the sky. This means that alpine Colorado doesn’t repel or begrudge habitation in the way of most alpine places; and faces of red sandstone flood many a cold valley with a fictitious sensation of warmth. The warmth can be quite real, too, in a state as far south as Virginia, at least until the sun passes behind a cloud and leaves the air, with no memory for scent, moisture, or temperature, as cold as if the sun had never shone.

  The combination of thin air and thick geology is a lesson in the brevity and virtual unreality of our own time, and may even supply the reason why so many schools of American Buddhists have established centers and retreats here. Of course the shopping malls strung along the highways and the stack-a-shack condos (as I remember my father calling them when they first appeared in the Eagle Valley) propose their own lesson in nonattachment, being so recently built beneath durable mountains, and never built to last.

  For as long as I can remember I have had a sense of the shallowness and impermanence of American settlement in Colorado. My father comes from Oregon, my mother from Massachusetts, and they met as undergraduates at the University of Colorado, where my father had gone on a skiing scholarship and my mother had gone, I think, because unlike her siblings she didn’t want to become a banker or remain a Catholic. They settled up Salt Creek in 1971, and, in a reversal of the more usual order, my father’s parents followed them there. My parents’ friends were amateur beekeepers, gardeners, cabinet makers, guitarists, and our more immediate neighbors likewise seemed to be making things up as they went along. One had a field full of junk cars, many children, and a drinking problem; he was always driving off the road. Another ran the local airfield and kept a mountain lion for a pet; when he and his wife divorced later on, she married an arms dealer and moved to Istanbul.

  There was nothing else I knew—we didn’t have a TV—but even so I could tell our life was new and rare and unsponsored by tradition. Perhaps I sensed how far from north shore Massachusetts my mother felt, living in a narrow mountain valley and raising three kids in a cabin heated by a
stove; when she took me fishing and I caught a fish, she had no idea what to do with it. Everything was improvisation, with the thrill and risk the word implies. My father the former English major, with no training as a land surveyor, started a surveying company when he and his partner both chipped in $20 to open a bank account. And life up Salt Creek acquired a real enough frontier air on at least those occasions when a pack rat ventured out from the wall in the living room and my father picked up his .22 rifle to shoot it, a practice that could be unsettling to guests but which mostly impressed me as a display of good aim. No doubt precisely because we lived eight miles from town, and the town of Eagle was so rudimentary in those days, my parents didn’t want us to grow up uncivilized, and not only insisted that we wear pants to the dinner table but drilled us there in good manners.

  I never thought we would stay up Salt Creek forever. It was plainly in the nature of mountain valleys, with their gray abandoned barns and garden plots being reabsorbed into the land, that you left them one day. And yet when we moved away to the enormous metropolis of Glenwood Springs (population 5,000), I felt the loss of my red mountain more intensely, it seems, than any loss since, never mind the compensatory facts of having a bike and a town to ride it in.

  Glenwood Springs is named for the natural hot springs that emerge, smelling of sulfur, near the junction of the Colorado and the Roaring Fork rivers, and as a spa town centered around a huge outdoor pool Glenwood has always attracted more than its share of quacks and people in need of a cure. In 1887, this meant that the gunfighter Doc Holliday repaired to Glenwood when he fell ill with TB; his grave is a local landmark. In Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, a visit to the town revives for a time the failing spirits of lovely, tragic Mrs. Forrester: “Last winter I was with the Dalzells at Glenwood Springs for three weeks,” she says, “and I was surprised at myself. I could dance all night and not feel tired.” From the early 1980s, I recall a high incidence of New Age religion, born-again Christianity, health kicks, diet fads, even spoon-bending. My mother went no further in the direction of Reagan-era self-reinvention than to get a perm and begin doing aerobics, though her connections in the exercise world meant that when the movie Breakin’ (1984) caused me and some friends to develop a mania for break-dancing, she was able to recruit a dance teacher from the community college to give us pale mountain children classes in moonwalking, head-spinning, and the worm.

  Along with the religious fashions and lifestyle improvisation of the adult world, there were also divorces and bankruptcies—and when one of the partners with whom my father had invested in real estate went bankrupt and needed some cash, our family returned to Eagle to take up residence in the vacation house the man had built while he was flush. Our own finances were all right because my father had started a software company in tiny Eagle, of all places; he’d learned to fly a small plane and this enabled him to deal with clients throughout the West. In the fields just below our new house we kept horses and experimented for a time with grazing cattle. My mother began teaching aerobics herself. And when I admired my parents, it was for their adaptability to new circumstances, and when I disapproved of them it was essentially for the same reason: I told myself they didn’t know what they were doing.

  It may have been that I set about convincing them to let me go back east to boarding school because I had the notion that somewhere in America people did things more or less correctly and by the book. And at school in New Hampshire I did meet kids from places like New England, the South, even California, where evidently they had more in the way of traditions and customs than we did in Eagle. These people and their parents knew or pretended to know how to speak and dress, possessed a common store of cultural knowledge, often observed the rites of some religion, and vacationed in the same places year after year. It took me some time to grasp the source of all this assurance: These families belonged to a far more clearly articulated class structure than mine had in Colorado. Then I began to miss the western indifference if not to money then at least to status and prestige. I was far from indifferent to those things myself, and feeling that it sounded better to come from Colorado in general rather than Eagle in particular, “Colorado” became where I said I was from, with the result that after enough repetitions of this claim I was able to convince myself that I really was somehow derived from the state at large.

  To come from Colorado may make you especially aware of what a strange signifier a state is, meaning hardly anything at the same time that it means a great deal. Culturally, economically, and historically, the western plateau and the eastern plains don’t have much in common, and even the mountainous middle section of the state is literally split in two, by the Continental Divide. If such a territory existed in Europe or Asia, the people on the western slope of the mountains would speak one language and the people on the eastern slope another; in South America, they’d at least fly different flags. Even in the western United States, where borders are mostly ruler-straight, the north-south-running state lines (since North America is a continent of north-south-running mountain chains) often fall roughly alongside the spine of the mountains. None of Colorado’s borders, however, corresponds to any natural fact, so that, even more than other states, Colorado has to secure its existence mostly in the mind.

  It’s as difficult to say what the idea of the state is as to deny its existence, though certainly it has something to do with beauty, purity, and independence. To every Coloradan I know, in any case, that romantic place-name Colorado signifies much more than simply that the first Spanish missionaries noticed the red color of a big river flush with spring runoff. Two in particular of the Spanish also noticed one evening while lost in a spring blizzard—or so the legend goes—that the high mountain looming before them was impressed with a cruciform snowfield starkly distinct from the surrounding face of rock, a snowfield so miraculously centered on the northeast face of the peak and so proportional to the cross of the Roman church that the lost Spaniards can hardly be blamed for taking this glimpse of what is still called the Mount of the Holy Cross for a sign that their journey was blessed; and perhaps contemporary Coloradans can likewise be forgiven for loading a mere administrative rectangle with romantic ideas.

  Colorado gains many more residents than it loses every year, especially in and around the cities along the Front Range, at the base of the Rockies, and it would seem that especially since the late 1960s, when the image of California began to darken, Colorado has taken on some of California’s role as an American promised land of natural beauty, affordable real estate, and a brand-new chance. Denver Broncos fans will recall that when the great quarterback John Elway was drafted by Baltimore in 1983, he insisted on being traded to a West Coast team, and then seemed to consider this condition satisfactorily met when he ended up in the landlocked city of Denver: an attitude expressive of the sense that Colorado was somehow a new shore of American possibility. And Colorado—a state, like California, first settled by Americans in a gold rush—has acquired or else always possessed much of the Californian endowment of promise and terror.

  Severance from history is probably the deepest tradition of the state. I was nineteen before I knew to ascribe the thinness of the human presence on the land to the fact that Colorado had rid itself more completely of Indians than any other Western state or territory: no small distinction. Today, in all the large extent of Colorado—eighth biggest of the states—there is only the slightest sliver of a reservation, and Indians, in my childhood, were not the real if marginal presence they are in New Mexico, Arizona, or Montana; they were just gone. My idea of the state—it is still the prevailing idea—was a slide-show succession of prospectors, cattlemen, downhill skiers: romantic individualists. I didn’t know that the tin-pan prospectors had been swiftly replaced by gigantic concerns like the Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation, property of the Rockefellers. The coal strike called against this company by the United Mine Workers in September 1913 came to a head in April of the next year when the National Guard machine-gunned an encampm
ent of striking workers and their families, killing seventeen people, ten of them children: a scandal that ninety years ago would have been the best-known political fact about Colorado. I never heard of the Ludlow Massacre while growing up. The state to this day remains an open-shop.

  People think of early Coloradans as rugged Protestants lighting out for the territory and forget the earlier career of this idea. By 1924 the KKK dominated both parties in the statehouse; the Governor was a Klansman and so was one Senator. The Klan in Colorado, with relatively few blacks or Jews to persecute, directed its energies mostly against Catholics and Orthodox Christians, those Greeks, Italians, Mexicans, and Serbs, in other words, who formed the largest portion of the organized working class. And this would seem to be the ugly side of that feeling of purity the mountain air can inspire in you—that such a beautiful place is especially vulnerable to being spoiled by the presence of the wrong people. Lately the most prominent Coloradan in national politics is the nativist Congressman Tom Tancredo (grandson of two Italian immigrants), who has proposed the deportation of every unauthorized immigrant in the country and floated the idea that in response to any future Islamist terror in the US, the government might do well to “take out” Mecca.

  In the 150 years since the Pike’s Peak gold rush, people have come to Colorado to be among the first ones here. They have settled, by the millions, along the Front Range in order to be alone with nature and with others of their kind. Today at the foot of Pike’s Peak spreads the agglomeration of strip malls and suburbs known as Colorado Springs, North American headquarters of both the Christian Right and (in the suburb of Manitou Springs) the New Age witchcraft movement. And this is only the beginning of the enclave character promoted by the mountains. Besides Buddhists, Wiccans, hippies, and evangelicals, there are also communities consecrated to winter sports and to Mormonism. But what the geography of the mountains really fosters, in present-day America, is a translation of class stratification into literal terms of altitude. The rich live at high altitude, where they enjoy unobstructed views of snow-covered peaks, the cleanly green glitter of aspen trees, and what Fitzgerald (adjusted for inflation) called the consoling proximity of multi-millionaires. With every hundred-foot drop in elevation, property values decline, along with the moisture content of the soil, until a valley has broadened out into a semi-arid scrubland where workers in the so-called service industry plant their trailers among the sagebrush and low tan hills.