by BK Loren
Silas’s findings add more. He flips through paperwork, then reads aloud, “Better’n 17 percent a them stores stand empty. Look at this chart. We been on a steady decline in retail success since 1998.”
“How can the city think we need more new stores?” asks Celia.
Sadly, we all know the answer. Cities east of the Mississippi have a much better chance at fending off excess commercial development than we do because, in general, eastern cities gain their greatest revenue from property taxes. In the West, it’s retail taxes that hum the number. City officials are bound to respond more favorably to commercial developers who actually bring in revenue than to citizens who drop very little cash into city coffers.
We also learn that keeping a grassroots group together takes a lot of work. It’s pretty easy to sign a piece of paper saying we all oppose the development. But it’s another matter for people who have never had reason to talk to one another to sit together in one room and focus on a common goal. A typical meeting goes like this: Cherry has recently resigned from her job because her colleagues were “too abrupt” with her. One of them, she says, actually said to her, “Shut up!”
“I mean, I don’t have to take that, do I?”
Everyone shakes their heads, no.
“I’m divorced. I have two kids.”
“You did the right thing.”
I place my hand on Cherry’s hand and smile. “Okay. Do you think we should tape the fliers to the doors, or just tuck them?”
“Because, that woman, my coworker, she had it out for me. I’m good at what I do. I’m a good worker. Aren’t I?”
“Yes.”
She pauses. I begin to speak.
“And I’m bringing up two boys. I’m divorced. Bringing them up alone.”
Oh, no, I missed again. The others are tremendously patient. “Yes,” the whole group says, in harmony.
“Because, you know, he doesn’t give them tough love and I do, and they don’t like it much, but it’s better, don’t you think it’s better?”
“Oh, yes. Tough love,” someone replies.
Cherry pauses again. I know I have to speak, speak now, say something, anything, except “Shut up!” which is oh-so-perched on my taste buds, but I swallow it and say, “Do you think we should use tape?”
Cherry looks lost. She takes a deep breath as if to talk again, and John jumps right in. “Tape, yes, good. Tape!”
One issue down. How many to go?
The meetings go on like this, month after month. While discovering our strengths, we learn everyone’s foibles. We find that Celia is detail oriented, and—good for her—she can take notes and do research. But occasionally, she asks things like, “Where will we put the letters?”
“What’s that?”
“The letters to city council. Should they go right or left of the fliers on the table?”
I’m quick to respond. “Either.”
“Or maybe behind?”
“No,” Donna says. “Not behind. They’ll be harder to reach.”
“They’ll have to reach over the fliers?” I ask.
“Yes,” says Donna.
Celia relaxes visibly.
Rita, on the other hand, comes to meeting after meeting and barely breathes a sentence. She’s our accountant, does a great job, and keeps her conversations to the financial report. But soon, she finds her forum. Within a few weeks, we’re all getting weekly e-mail updates on her health, her husband’s health, the health of the dog, who is incontinent, but has medication to control the problem. Her notes trigger an electronic deluge of e-mails about divorce and tough love and dinner recipes.
I try to keep the group on track, but I feel awkward—even intimidated. I don’t fit. I don’t have a day job or a motorized vehicle, and I am by nature introverted. Each week I give a little pep talk: “We just have to hang in there, folks. We’ll win this thing. We will.” As I speak, I’m wondering what I’ve done with the letters I collected last week—did I deliver them, or are they waterlogged in the pocket of my raincoat—and the petitions? I can’t recall, and, oh my, is there anyone out there who’s good at keeping things organized?
From my lips to God’s ears.
“Look, I don’t mind being the big fat bitch of the group . . .” This was Renee’s self-introduction at our third meeting. “If it gets the job done, so be it.” Renee owns a successful ad agency and, ironically, was instrumental in developing the Omni Hotel, one of the most controversial commercial sites along Colorado’s Front Range. “Sound hypocritical?” she asked. “Well, that project was consistent with the Land Use Plan. I’m not against development. I’m against silencing citizens’ voices.”
A few weeks later, Kate joined. Kate had, of all things, a flip chart and the facilitation skills to use it. After a few weeks with Kate and chart, tough love and recipes were distant echoes.
The following meeting, Kate arrived with a box of sample T-shirts and news that a local company had cut us a deal for a custom design. At the same time we learned that Wild Oats and REI had agreed to let us set up booths in their stores. Indeed, we were becoming a real community force, even without breathing a word to city council.
After a few press interviews a reporter said, off record, “You know, the developer hates you guys. I mean, he actually used the word hate.” I smiled. Hate’s a strong word, and it gave us strength. We celebrated every attack as a coup. The press we received incited others citizens to contact us. Soon we had a venture capitalist and pro bono attorney working with us. Our constituency grew. Our recognition snowballed.
Still, it was no open-and-shut case. While the elected officials who would determine the “case” were not supposed to have ex parte conversations with the developer, there was no way to monitor that. When John’s Motown band played at the local Rotary Club, for instance, he watched the developer and several city councilors twist and turn on the dance floor together. Meanwhile, we sat at our monthly meetings eating finger sandwiches and imagining how slick the developer’s presentation would be at the hearing and how feeble ours might seem in comparison.
That’s when the obvious became clear: If we were really going to make a difference, we had to quit fighting against something and begin fighting for something. If you build it, they will come. And if it’s a strip mall you build, well, they’ll come to that. But if it’s a place that incites pride and involvement in your community, they’ll also come to that. We envisioned a nature and cultural center, maybe a historical orchard—something to encourage people to stay here, rather than using our town as a stepping-stone to someplace else.
Kate and Renee had organized a good bit of fundraising—local garage sales that contributed profits, a bird walk on the land for a small donation, some straightforward requests for contributions. Renee and I had created a paid-subscription newsletter. Through these efforts, we’d garnered some revenue. “So, let’s hire an architect,” I said.
Shortly after the newspaper reported our plans, we received a phone call from the landowner’s attorney. He said the landowner had been following our work in the news and was interested in meeting with us.
The call threw us into fear. We’d been told by opponents that we were stepping on the landowner’s rights, that if his profits were diminished by our efforts, he could sue us. Our attorney assured us this was not possible and offered to accompany us to the meeting. “Too aggressive,” Kate said. “We’ll bring you in later if there’s a need.”
The day of the meeting arrives. Renee drives. We pull onto the dirt road and travel through walnut groves and cottonwoods, past grazing horses and stables. A man with gray hair almost down to his waist greets us at the fence, introduces himself as Oliver. He’s smoking a filterless Camel. “Reason I brought you here today,” he says, and just then a small plane flies overhead, propeller slapping the air. Oliver looks up. “Christ, I had my fill a helicopters in ’Nam, right. Can’t stand that sound, right.”
He ducks into the house, and we follow. The place is empt
y. No furniture, curtains, lamps, rugs—nothing. Greasy pizza boxes are scattered like lily pads that we must step over on the way to Oliver’s room: a cubicle with a sleeping bag and computer. Along the top of the monitor are a dozen or so stickers of endangered wildlife. Peregrine, otter, whale. Along the bottom are stickers of atomic bombs in various stages of detonation.
“So, anyway,” Oliver continues, but then stops abruptly. Across the street from the property sits a miniature golf course. In it, there’s a volcano that spews real fire when someone scores. As we speak, a kid lands a hole-in-one, the volcano roars, and Oliver takes cover. He doesn’t dive to the ground or anything, but a stormy look brims in his eyes and he hunches over. “To put that thing there—it’s an insult to the men who fought for this country. Sounds like mortar fire, right. Nights I wake up sweating, right.”
Oliver hops from one subject to the next without shifting gears or turning on the blinker, from Vietnam to childhood in a puff of smoke. “Yeah, me and my best buddy Henry, we built that thing way back when.”
“The volcano?”
I follow his line of sight, and my eyes light on a tree house nestled in a tangle of branches.
“Still there,” he says.
He stares for a while, then exhales. “You know, homeless people could set up camp on this land, right.” No blinker, new topic. “Got nothin’ against ’em. Got homeless buddies, right. But if they come here and start cookin’ Top Ramen on Coleman stoves, well, it’s a fire hazard.” He drops his cigarette onto the plywood floor and crushes it out with his boot. “Yeh, I’m the past of this land. You guys’re the future.” The volcano blows again. Oliver’s eyes glaze.
On the drive home, I’m convinced that Oliver was siding with us.
“Oh, right,” says Renee. “He’s going to nix the retail deal and donate his land.” I consider it. He’s got the long hair, the Woodstock gaze. Renee and Kate laugh and laugh. They help me see that Oliver is just one more quirky character in our cast of players. I guess I have a bit of a Woodstock gaze myself.
For the next few weeks, our group is a mess. We’re nervous about whatever it was Oliver wanted from us, and there’s a new topic on the table. The city has plans to house a sex offenders’ rehab center nearby. Folks are up in arms.
“We need to move on. Let them build the damn Target.”
“You want to quit now?”
“This sex offenders thing’s more important.”
“Look, nobody wants a sex offenders’ rehab in their backyard, but they have to be built somewhere,” says Billy, one half of the gay couple.
“Well, to those of us who have families . . .” says John.
“You suggesting I don’t have a family?”
“Oh, don’t hit me with your liberal bullshit. You guys are immoral.”
“Immoral? You’re the closed-minded bigot, but we’re immoral?”
I would love to say that just then, the phone rang and the director of open space acquisitions said, “Hey, Oliver’s donating a portion of land, and we’re hoping to buy the rest, with your help.” But that would be implausible.
Except, it’s what happened. Okay, she didn’t call during that meeting, but the rest is true. Just when we’d sunk to name-calling, the city was ready to work with us on our terms.
A week later we trudge over to Celia’s. There are apologies, but most people agree it’s time to quit. We’ve won the biggest battle.
Then Rita, who rarely speaks, says, “I can’t believe we’ve come this far just to turn our power over to the city.” She says it softly, and for a moment, it stuns us all silent.
“Well,” says Renee, eventually, “I’ll put out another newsletter.”
“I’ll contact the architect,” says Celia.
An energy slowly fills the room. I can’t help but smile.
Before I stepped out of my house that cold morning three years ago, I might have told you “community” was some kind of Up with People fantasy—like-minded folks sharing a Norman Rockwell moment. Now I think community has little to do with like minds. It has to do with very differently minded people finding a way to get along because we all live in, are connected to, and share a sense of place.
When I hear the coyotes howl at night, all the people in this room hear the same thing. Maybe one of us is making dinner, the other one just rising to go to the graveyard shift. At the same time in our different lives, we stop; we listen. We feel the migrations of birds that pass through here, see the coming of summer on the wings of swallows, and ready ourselves for winter when the herons depart and the bald eagles return. In these moments, a sense of community crashes through our suburban walls.
If I tried to say what made our mongrel group a success, I couldn’t pinpoint any one thing. It was as if we were working together to create one sculpture so big that, as we were working, we couldn’t see it for what it was. One person chiseled here, another chiseled there until, one day, we stepped back and saw something beginning to take form: our own community. There was no unveiling, no ceremony. But each tap of the sculptor’s mallet—the support of a business, the help of an attorney, some economic research—helped shape our little corner of the world into something we intended.
Working together like this, we won our fight against unnecessary development. Now we have to work toward forming the community center we want in its place. In the process, we’ll learn even more about one another, and maybe dislike each other more, which means our fondness will also grow. It’s November, and as we leave our meeting, Silas starts soliciting help to set up his next Christmas display.
“That’s some hideous shit, man,” says John.
“You were the one who reported us for light pollution?”
“That’s right.”
“I always liked those wiseacres who showed up with myrrh at a baby shower,” says Renee.
“Well that’s just disrespectful,” says Silas.
“So what time you want us to be there?” asks John.
Silas ponders. “About ten o’clock?”
Yeah, we’ll be there.
“Got Tape” update: Shortly after WATCHH thought the Open Space deal was sealed, it fell through. The landowners decided to hold out for retail real estate prices. But WATCHH was successful in keeping the zoning to residential, not retail. A year or so later, the landowners sold to a housing developer. One or two model homes were built, and then the national housing crisis hit. The developer went bankrupt. To this day, nearly a decade after our efforts, the land sits relatively undeveloped. Coyotes still howl there, and the owls we used to listen to still raise owlets in late winter, early spring. Special thanks to Renee Rinehart and Kate Hyatt for cofounding WATCHH with me.
THIS LITTLE PIGGY STAYED HOME
Back when my father was living, he was very against organic foods and all “that hippie shit they stand for.” When he visited my house in late summer, though, he would often reach into the fruit basket on my kitchen table and bite into an organic tomato. Immediately, he got a misty look in his eyes. “These aren’t like those grocery tomatoes,” he told me. Those tomatoes were like Proust’s madeleine, to my father. The taste turned him from a reticent man to a man who told detailed stories of summer days he spent on the Colorado High Plains, working the fields. “I’d eat tomatoes like apples, straight off the vine, half the bushel gone by the time I got back inside. Oh, I caught hell for that!” he said, smiling, licking tomato juice from his lips.
He picked tomato after tomato from the basket, and I watched the law-abiding man I was raised with transform into a young boy walking through fields, disobeying his parents because he just couldn’t help himself—the tomatoes tasted that good.
My father was a military man; in his assessment, I was a hippie. I protested the same wars he believed in. We were often at odds, which is why I treasured those tomatoes; they were one of the few things that kept my father and me connected.
The man who planted these magic tomatoes is Jerry Monroe, the third-generation o
wner of the oldest organic farm in Colorado, the farm to which I belong as a member of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). CSA is a concept founded in Japan by a group of women who shared concerns about increases in food imports, weakening of local economy, the health dangers of pesticides, and the loss of local, independent farmlands. Rather than butt heads with big business, they worked together to form a direct relationship between farmers and individual buyers who sought healthy, locally grown food. This relationship, called teikei in Japanese, translates as “putting the farmers’ face on the food,” an appropriate title for an arrangement created to celebrate that increasingly scarce natural resource, the independent farmer. By way of Europe, the concept of teikei migrated to the United States, landing in 1985 at Indian Line Farm, Massachusetts, where it was dubbed CSA.1
Like my father, I’m a realistic sort. I don’t think it would be fun to work on a farm; I think it would be hard work, too hard for my gym-developed muscles to handle. I am, however, a fierce advocate of CSAs and local produce. I don’t know exactly how I got this way. When I joined my local CSA, my motives were not rooted in political ideology. I had no intention of changing the world, undercutting corporate power, “subverting the dominant paradigm,” strengthening my local economy, or aiding the fight against hunger (all of which are direct benefits of CSAs and supporting local farmers). My intentions when I joined the Monroe Farm were downright selfish. I was tired of grocery shopping. The whole scene got me down. I could go to a natural foods store; I could go to Safeway; I could go to the local hippie co-op. It was all the same. Piles of food stared at me like bodies whose souls had vacated them. I was haunted by the way the red peppers curved at the waist, stretching toward one another longingly, by the way the bananas clung to each other and the Napa cabbage lay so quietly in its frilly bed while its blue-collar cousin, the purple cabbage, sat boldly on the edge of the shelf, ready to topple and take off like a bowling ball if someone passed by too abruptly.
