Review by Clint Driscoll
Mountain Life – September 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
Fool’s Gold: Lives, Loves and Misadventures in the Four Corners Country
by Rob Schultheis
Published in 2000 by the Lyons Press
ISBN: 1-58574-136-1
I FIRST BECAME ACQUAINTED with the writings of Rob Schultheis in a freebie magazine called Inside Outside Southwest, published in Durango and distributed in the Four Corners area. Schultheis was a regular contributor of outdoor articles and had — the last time I saw the magazine before its demise — a column called “Moron of the Mountains” in which he described himself as a hopeless seratonin junkie surviving near Telluride.
Schultheis regularly pilloried the powers that be, whether local, federal, or economic, with a sharp wit and a playfulness of language. For example, he hoped the Four Corners area would never become a New Age power center like Sedona for then “the shiitake is gonna hit the fan.”
The magazine was a bit schizoid, though. It covered outdoor activities and pursuits in the region, and much of the writing had an edgy tone, disparaging mountain sport wannabes who only talk the talk while concentrating on environmental concerns, growth worries, gentrification and simple lifestyles all spiced with the poetic rants of Art Goodtimes. However the advertising was weighted toward microbreweries, spewt ads, reggae concerts, tattoos, local rock radio, high-end sporting goods, custom log home contractors, second home furniture stores and guided fly fishing — that is, everything that makes life good for the moneyed Tenderfeet and Trustafarians festering in this state.
A critical reader might consider Schultheis’s writing for that magazine a hypocritical act. After all, what right does Schultheis, a transplanted Easterner, have to complain about the radical changes happening in the Western Edens when he was part of the trend?
Well, so what? The man is a fine observer of the modern scene, able to see the lie behind the promo, and he has a deep understanding of, and appreciation for, the region in which he lives.
And the man can write. He has a talent for turning a phrase that can force a belly laugh. He can recreate the chaos of a storm on a bare-rock, knife-edged ledge, and succinctly summarize a part of the human condition. Which is why Fool’s Gold: Lives, Loves and Misadventures in the Four Corners Country, is a welcome addition to the regional writing of Colorado.
A jacket blurb proclaims Schultheis as the next Ed Abbey. That may be stretching it, but Schultheis can produce the same biting, cut-to-the-bone invective Abbey was so famous for. His descriptions of rambling in the San Juans and in the slot canyons of the slickrock country are first-rate.
But this is no Desert Solitaire, and it wasn’t meant to be. Perhaps a more apt comparison would be if John Nichols wrote a series of essays chronicling the changes that happened in Taos over the last thirty years, instead of the novel Nirvana Blues. Such a work would read very much like Fool’s Gold.
The most entertaining — and the most heartbreaking — essays in this collection are the stories of Telluride’s change from working town to resort. Beginning with the cocaine-fueled, mushroom-warped, big money, real estate boom days, Schultheis takes the reader on a journey to modern times. Fool’s Gold is worth it if only one piece is read: the tale of modern Telluride (and a whole lot of other good Colorado towns) in a nutshell, or should I say a capsule?
Even if you don’t buy the book, amble into a bookstore and read the essay, “Cabin Fever.” In a few hundred words, Schultheis portrays the absurd ruination of what was once a town with a soul, loaded with individuals, characters, idiots and lunatics. What the early boom brought was big money, heavy drugs, and a load of sub-humans with as much sense of community as a boar grizzly.
If “Cabin Fever” signals the beginning of the end, “Killers of the Dream” illustrates its conclusion, when the developers — “Developers are to the Rockies as Serbs are to Kosovo” — sanitized the country.
In the besieged Telluride of the 1980s — when the developers drove up prices and drove out the riff-raff — even the wildlife wasn’t safe. Schultheis relates the story of a Texas developer and gentleman hunter who blew away a bull elk who lived among horses in a pasture near town. The elk had become a town icon. Although the animal wasn’t tame, it was accustomed to human presence, and the local children often hiked to the pasture where, when they whistled, the bull would emerge from the timber to look back at them. After the developer had aimed his rifle over the posted pasture fence and dropped the elk, he proudly drove into town with the trophy head strapped to the front of his SUV. When a group of children saw the spectacle they walked away but one girl turned, flipped the Texan off and yelled, “You killed our elk, you fat m—-f—-!”
This happened in a town where a mother bear was killed for raiding Dumpsters in town. Her cubs were left to die, chased by dogs and town marshals. Schultheis relates that no one seemed to care, in fact the bears’ deaths were absolutely correct to the newcomer’s way of thinking. The lack of outrage prompted Schultheis to believe that there should have been an on-the-scene television report relaying the exact moment “when a Mountain Town cut its own heart out and so casually threw it away.”
OF COURSE in the land of Stegner’s geography of hope, the backcountry can rejuvenate a soul. Schultheis is a master nature writer. He can bring to mind the awesome power of mountain weather, the danger and, at the same time, absolute exhilaration of a solo walk over an isolated high pass. In the deep, brooding washes and slot canyons of Utah, driftwood piles remind the walker of distant but possible flood danger and hoodoo voices call rational men by name. A late season raft trip becomes a trek from hell, not unlike Bogart’s adventure in “African Queen.”
Despite the tenderfeet with too much money, the dirt pimps, the hucksters, and the absentee trophy homeowners, life can be good according to Schultheis — especially a life lived in a house full of books, with a pair of skis, a raft, and a snow shovel.
Yet there is a melancholy to the New West which is captured here. I know that Schultheis, and anyone who reads and empathizes with the essays in Fool’s Gold, will always hear behind the howl of winter winds, the blast of mountain thunder, the flow of rivers, the whisper of hoodoo voices, and the faint echo of a heartfelt cry; “You killed our elk, you fat m—-f—-!”
— Clint Driscoll
