Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  Calmness is one reason why he has such influence in the community. He’s short and slight, with owlish glasses, and he seems as comfortable talking to women as to men. “It’s like Don looks you in the eyes and the rest of the world disappears,” one local tells me. Faith in Don’s judgment is all but absolute. People sometimes telephone him at two o’clock in the morning, describe their symptoms, and ask if they should go to the small clinic in Naturita, or call an ambulance for the two-hour trip to the nearest hospital. Occasionally they show up at his house. A few years ago, a Mexican immigrant family had an eight-year-old son who was sick; twice they visited a clinic in another community, where they were told that the boy was dehydrated. But the child didn’t improve, and finally all eight family members showed up one evening in Don’s driveway. He did a quick evaluation—the boy’s belly was distended and felt hot to the touch. He told the parents to take him to the emergency room. They went to the nearest hospital, in Montrose, where the staff diagnosed severe brucellosis and immediately evacuated the boy on a plane to Denver. He spent two weeks in the ICU before making a complete recovery. One of the Denver doctors told Don that the boy would have died if they had waited any longer to get him to a hospital.

  At the Apothecary Shoppe, Don never wears a white coat. He often takes people’s blood pressure, and he gives injections; if it has to be done in the backside, he escorts the customer into the bathroom for privacy. Elderly folks refer to him as “Dr. Don,” although he has no medical degree and discourages people from using this title. He doesn’t wear a name tag. “I wear old Levis,” he says. “People want to talk to somebody who looks like them, talks like them, is part of the community. I know a lot of pharmacists wear a coat because it makes you look more professional. But it’s different here.” He would rather be known as a druggist. “A druggist is the guy who repairs your watch and your glasses,” he explains. “A pharmacist is the guy who works at Walmart.”

  He keeps repair tools behind the counter, and he uses them almost as frequently as he complains about Walmart, insurance companies, and Medicare Part D. Since 2006, the program has provided prescription drug coverage for the elderly and disabled, ensuring that millions of people get their medication. But it’s also had the unintended effect of driving rural pharmacies out of business. Instead of establishing a national formulary with standard drug prices, the way many countries do, the U.S. government allows private insurance plans to negotiate with drug providers. Big chains and mail-order pharmacies receive much better rates than independent stores, because of volume. Within the first two years of the program, more than five hundred rural pharmacies went out of business. Don gives the example of a local customer who needs Humira for rheumatoid arthritis. The insurance company reimburses $1,721.83 for a month’s supply, but Don pays $1,765.23 for the drug. “I lose $43.40 every time I fill it, once a month,” he says. The mail-order pharmacies get a better wholesale rate, but Don’s customer doesn’t like using them; he worries about missing a delivery, and he wants to be able to ask a pharmacist questions face-to-face. “I like the guy,” Don says. “So I keep doing it.” Since Part D went into effect, Don’s margins have grown so small that on three occasions he has had to put his savings into the Apothecary Shoppe in order to keep the doors open.

  He is, by the strictest definition, a bad businessman. The pharmacy phone rings; he speaks in friendly tones for five minutes; he hangs up and says, “She sweet-talked me and then she asked me to charge something.” The request was for diapers: the answer was yes. He tapes a receipt to the inside wall above his counter whenever something is bought on credit. “This one said he was covered by insurance, but it wasn’t,” he explains, pointing at a receipt. “This one said he’ll be in on Tuesday. This one is a patient who was going on an extended vacation.” He counts them off: twenty-three receipts. “The majority of these just don’t have the money,” he says. Each year he usually writes off between $10,000 and $20,000 in bad credit, and he estimates that in total he is owed around $300,000. His annual salary is $65,000. Over the course of many days in the Apothecary Shoppe, I’ve never seen a customer walk in whom Don doesn’t know by name.

  “It’s just a cost of doing business in a small town,” he says. “I don’t know how you can look your neighbor in the eye and say, ‘I know you’re having a tough time, but I can’t help you and your kid can’t get well.’ It’s the number one reason drugstores go under. That was the first lesson in accounting when I was in college.”

  Settlers originally came to this remote place because they desired an alternative to capitalism. During the 1890s, a group called the Colorado Co-operative Colony hoped to build a utopian community in the region. Its Declaration of Principles complained bitterly about market-oriented competition: “Believing that under the present competitive system only the strong and cunning can ‘succeed,’ rendering it almost impossible for an honest man or woman to make a comfortable living, and that a co-operative system, if properly carried out, will give the best opportunity to develop all that is good and noble in humanity.” (The history of the colony and its values is described in a 2001 dissertation by Pamela J. Clark at the University of Wyoming.)

  At the end of the nineteenth century, socialist communities weren’t uncommon in the West. Karl Marx had identified the urban working class as most promising for communism, but in America it was often remote regions that became the site of cooperative and socialist ventures. This was partly because of the Desert Land Act of 1877, which offered land at low prices if settlers could find a way to irrigate. Group efforts were necessary to build water systems, and many early communities organized themselves along principles of shared labor. The Mormons were particularly successful—some of their projects in Utah became models for the rest of the West. But most other communities weren’t religious; it was far more common to be influenced by the ideas of intellectuals like Marx or Robert Owen. Anaheim, California, was settled through a cooperative water venture, as was nearby Riverside. Others failed but left idealistic names on the map: Equality, Freeland, Altruria.

  The Colorado Co-operative Colony chose a desolate region known as Tabeguache Park. It was dry as a bone, but the San Miguel River ran at an elevation only three hundred feet lower, and settlers surveyed the route for an eighteen-mile-long irrigation ditch. Members started digging in 1895. They sold shares all across the country; there were Colorado Co-operative Colony clubs in Brooklyn, Chicago, St. Paul, and Denver. They published a newspaper called The Altrurian, which often used the word “comrade” and theorized about cooperation and socialism. They planned to do away with debt, interest, and rent; they banned gambling and the sale of liquor. They dreamed a glorious future: “If a small colony of outlaws and refugees could build Rome and maintain the state for twelve hundred years, who could guess what a well-organized colony of intelligent Americans may accomplish.”

  Within a year they held their first purge. Ten members were expelled for being too communistic; The Altrurian reported that the ditch would be shared, but other property would remain private. During that early period, no matter how bad it got, the newspaper continued to produce a dogged stream of aphorisms. (“Communism may be co-operation, but co-operation is not necessarily communism.”) By the winter of 1898, settlers were running out of food. The next year half the board resigned. (“Competition is a product of Hell; Co-operation will make a paradise of earth.”) In 1901, the secretary revealed that the colony was bankrupt. A former president committed suicide. (“So long as you think of yourself alone, you cannot be a good cooperator.”)

  At last, they abandoned the system of shared labor and contracted out to private work crews. In 1904, water finally flowed through the completed ditch; six years later they decided on the name Nucla, after “nucleus.” The socialist dreams were never realized, but the irrigation canal continues to function today. And there’s still a Colorado Cooperative Company, which employs a full-time “ditch rider” to monitor the system. His name is Dean Naslund, and his father wor
ked on the ditch, and so did his grandfather. Like most Nucla residents, Naslund doesn’t talk about his ancestors in terms of their sociopolitical theories. (“They called him Daddy Joe. He kinda cowboyed. He liked to hop around. Maybe play cards all week sometimes and then work a little.”) A local board oversees the water system, but shares are private and disputes can be angry; the founding spirit of cooperation sometimes seems to have evaporated in this dry climate. “Whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting,” Naslund tells me. “I’ve had a few people get hit with shovels.”

  Nucla has a reputation as a tough town. It boomed in the 1950s and 1960s, when the region’s uranium mining and processing took off. But the uranium market collapsed after the Three Mile Island accident of 1979, and the population continues to drop in Nucla and its sister town of Naturita, which is four miles away. Apart from ranching, the only stable jobs are in the local power plant, a nearby coal mine, and the school system, and there aren’t enough positions to go around. In both these towns, the per capita income is less than $14,000 a year, a little higher than half the state figure, and only 8 percent of the population holds a college degree. The school board recently decided to switch to a four-day school week, because of lack of funds. There’s only one restaurant in Nucla, one hamburger joint in Naturita, and one bar for both towns. It’s called the 141 Saloon, named after the state highway that passes through Naturita. On a Thursday night I’m the only customer, and the bartender tells me that she just bought a three-bedroom house in Nucla for $53,000. That’s a mortgage of $250 a month. Her name is Casey.

  “Only problem is that the siding is asbestos,” she says.

  “Is that a big problem?”

  “It’s not a problem as long as you don’t touch it. Asbestos lasts forever.” She leans on the wooden bar. “What’ll it be?”

  “What do you have on tap?”

  She smiles and says, “Only thing we got on tap is Jägermeister.”

  By the time Don Colcord was eight years old, he knew that he wanted to be a druggist. He grew up in Uravan, a mining town not far from Nucla, and his mother was a clerk in the pharmacy. After school, Don would spend hours in the store, where he liked to watch the druggist at work. As a teenager he began breaking into the place. Along with some friends, he stole beer, Playboys, and condoms. (“The condoms went to waste.”) Uravan was a small community, and it didn’t take long for the boys to get caught. They weren’t allowed to pay back the damages; instead they had to work them off at twenty-five cents an hour. “We had to sweep the store, and stock shelves, and do things like that. Everybody knew why you were there. It was probably the best thing that happened to me.”

  Around the same time, Don was looking for something in the room that he shared with his brother Jim, and he happened to find a magazine hidden under the bed. It featured photographs of naked men. Many years later, Don would marvel at how a kid living in remote Colorado in the mid-1960s could acquire such a magazine, but this wasn’t what went through his mind at the time. He simply thought it was strangest thing he’d ever seen.

  “Is this yours?” he said to Jim, when his brother came home.

  “Yes,” said Jim, who didn’t seem embarrassed. He took the magazine back, and neither of them mentioned it again.

  Jim was three years older than Don, and he had gotten all the size in the family. He was six foot three and well built, but he had no interest in sports or hunting. Don played baseball and practiced at the rifle range, while Jim liked to go fishing. He spent a great deal of time by himself. In high school he became an excellent student, and he loved being on the debate team. He was a constant source of disappointment to his father, who nagged at Jim to behave like a normal boy. In 1972, a couple of years after Jim left for college, he sent his family a letter explaining that he was gay and that he knew his father would never accept it. He asked them not to look for him; he was leaving Colorado for good. And for the next twelve years nobody heard from Jim.

  At the age of eighteen, Don married his high school girlfriend, Kretha, and they lived together in Boulder while he was studying. Eventually, they settled in Nucla and opened the Apothecary Shoppe. In 1983, Don’s father died, and one of the first things his widow did was hire a private investigator. The detective found Jim in Chicago, where he was a clerk in the county court. He said he’d had a feeling that something had happened back home.

  The following year, Jim made a four-day visit to Nucla. He went for long drives with his mother, who told him that she had always known he was gay, and that she was sorry she hadn’t been able to change his father’s attitude. In the evenings, Jim and Don sat up late talking. One night, Jim told Don that he had been infected with HIV, and that his doctor said he was likely to develop full-blown AIDS. Jim told Don where he wanted his ashes scattered. And he asked him to visit Chicago, where Jim lived with his longtime boyfriend.

  That year, they talked every week on the phone. But whenever the topic of a Chicago visit came up, there was always a reason Don couldn’t go. He was too busy at the store; his son and daughter had school activities. Kretha tried to persuade him to make the trip, but he never did.

  When Jim died, one of his colleagues telephoned with the news. She sent the ashes in a box, with a copy of his will, some awards from work, and a few photographs. One of the photographs was taken at Wrigley Field, where Jim stands with his boyfriend in front of a “Go Cubs” sign. When Don looked at the photograph, he realized that he knew virtually nothing about his brother. He had seen Jim for all of four days in the past decade; he didn’t even know the boyfriend’s name. And he understood the real reason he hadn’t made a trip to Chicago. “I was angry with myself for not being comfortable in a house where two men were sleeping together,” he says. “I didn’t want to see two men kissing each other. It wouldn’t bother me now, but it did then. I really regret it.”

  Along with his mother and younger sister, Don scattered Jim’s ashes at the juncture of the San Miguel and Dolores rivers. The Dolores flows from the south, where it crosses the great salt dome of Paradox Valley, and the water is saline and has no fish. If you swim there you float as if you were in the ocean, a thousand miles away.

  The last doctor in Naturita died fifteen years ago. There’s a small health clinic, and recently it contracted with a doctor in another part of Colorado to visit two days a week. But the mainstay is Ken Jenks, a physician’s assistant who is on call twenty-four hours a day. Jenks has lived in rural Colorado for a decade, and during that time he has learned that electrical tape is harder to remove from a wound than duct tape. Twice he has had patients suffer cervical neck fractures, drive to the clinic, and walk in, when they should have been immobilized at the scene of the accident. “If they had moved the wrong way, they would have been dead or spending the rest of their lives in a wheelchair,” he says. It’s not unusual for somebody to sign out of the clinic AMA—against medical advice. A couple of times, Jenks has told heart-attack victims that they needed to be evacuated by helicopter, only to have the patients decline because they believed they could get there cheaper. Jenks signed the forms, unhooked the IVs, and the patients got into their pickups to drive the two hours to a hospital. “And they made it,” Jenks says. “So they were right!”

  Jenks grew up in Salt Lake City, but he has spent most of his working life in small towns. “Maybe I can describe it this way,” he says. “I like to play chess. I moved to a small town, and nobody played chess there, but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That’s sort of like living in a small town. It’s a simpler game, but it’s played to a higher level.” Jenks says that he is forced to have “a working relationship” with local methamphetamine users, treating their ailments in confidence. He explains that small towns might have a reputation for being closed-minded, but actually residents often learn to be nonjudgmental, because contact is so intense. “Someday I might be on the side of the road, and the person
who pulls me out is going to be a meth user,” Jenks says. “The circle is much tighter.” He believes there is less gossip than one would assume, simply because so much is already known.

  One morning, a young woman arrives at the Apothecary Shoppe after spending the weekend in jail. She had an argument with her husband, who called the police; Colorado state law requires officers to make an arrest whenever they respond to a domestic dispute. The law is intended to protect women from being coerced into dropping charges, but in this case the husband claimed that he had been attacked. In the drugstore, the woman is approached by a half-dozen people who have read about the arrest in the local newspaper.

  “It’s not what it sounds like,” she tells one elderly woman. “He’s lying about the whole thing, and he’s going to get in trouble for that.”

  “Are you separating?”

  “Yes.”

  They stand at the pharmacy counter. “It’s terrible when I have the criminal element in the store,” Don jokes. The young woman gets a copy of the newspaper from the front of the store, and she reads the police blotter. “You know what else is crap?” she says. “It says here that it’s a second-degree assault, which is a felony. But they dropped it down to a misdemeanor.”

  “I told my friend you didn’t do it.”

  “He said I attacked him with a frying pan. He said I hit him in the arm. If I’d attacked him with a frying pan, I’d a hit him in the head.”

  “Let me tell you what you should do,” the old woman says. She is in her seventies, with curly white hair and a sweet, grandmotherly smile. “Get you some wasp spray,” she says. “It’ll put their eyes out.”

  “I can’t even have Mace, because it’s a weapon.”

  With the wisdom of age, the elderly woman explains that wasp spray is not classified as a weapon and is thus available to people who are out on bail. “It’s better than pepper spray,” she says. “It’ll put their eyes out.”