By George Sibley
Mike’s reminder that this issue marks the end of the 20th anniversary of Colorado Central sent me to a couple closets here in Gunnison, to look for my copy of the first issue, to remind me why Ed and Martha Quillen, who had already done enough time in the media world to know better, decided to start this publication.
To my consternation and frustration, I couldn’t find it. I found a couple beer boxes with issues number 91 up to the present, but my first 92 Colorado Centrals are stuck away somewhere else. I’ll undoubtedly come across them when I’m looking for something else I can’t find when I want it, but not today.
Then I remembered that this magazine, so attuned to the cultural past in so many ways, was also very much up to snuff on the technological future, and virtually from the start had electronic archives. So I dusted off my pants (I’ve got to clean out those closets one of these years) and was able to find most of that first issue with a few clicks of the mouse.
The Quillens cowrote a long essay explaining why they wanted to create a new magazine. The immediate stimulus seemed to have been yet another article listing Salida or the Upper Ark as the next great place to move to for those trying, as it were, to stay ahead of the sprawl. They saw a choice: “We can sit back and allow the national media to define us and our landscape, with predictable consequences – consider what happened to Santa Fe after Esquire devoted a cover story to that small, idyllic place in 1979. Or we can use the same tools to define ourselves and our region, to refine and cultivate our own visions of life in Central Colorado, so that we can preserve and enhance those qualities that make this a unique and special place.”
That launched what has now become a twenty-year effort of defining “ourselves and our region.” This is not an easy thing to do, especially in the West, where resisting definition as this or that is an attribute of rugged individualism. In my own experiences with that effort – extensive, and not just in this magazine – I realized that you can spend a lot of time and effort defining yourself and your region in terms of what you are not. It’s harder to get at what you are. Thus, the first issue had a relatively unobjective article by Ed criticizing a land trade that would enable the city of Salida to expand its golf course to 18 holes, and a good piece of objective journalism by Martha reporting on a plan by a woman, infected in a dream, to build a 400-foot pyramid in the San Luis Valley. In both cases, similar concerns were espoused, by Ed in the Salida situation and by the people of the San Luis Valley to Martha in the other. These things are not who we are or what we are about. The greatest fear in both situations was that the new “development” would bring too many of the wrong kind of people to the region. For example, the expanded golf course would bring too many yuppies with too much money; the pyramid, too many spiritual extremists and gawking tourists. Not “us” – whatever and whomever “we” are.
Defining the region geographically was a little easier; it was all mountain valleys and the mountains separating them. From that first article: “All of Chaffee, Lake, Custer, and Saguache counties, as well as Park County from Kenosha and Wilkinson passes westward, Fremont County west of Parkdale, and the eastern fringe of the Gunnison Country. This area extends from Leadville and Fairplay on the north, to Crestone on the south, and from Gunnison on the west to Westcliffe and Texas Creek in the east.” This essentially defines some or all of the “headwaters region” of several of the rivers so important to the entire Southwest and lower Midwest – the Arkansas, South Platte and Colorado Rivers, and the Rio Grande. We were working in a different way to define and articulate the “headwaters region” over at Western State with the Headwaters Project, but we had considerable overlap in territory and mission, and the Quillens were frequent participants at the Headwaters Conferences at the college.
They observed that “even though (Central Colorado’s) population is dispersed, the communities have much in common – they’re not in the resort belt, but they’re facing a new real estate boom. All around, there’s a feeling that something is happening here to cause rapid change and widespread confusion.” Again, defining the area as “not in the resort belt” is saying as much about what we are not as what we are, but they went on to note that “we have much in common. History, scenery, recreation, Victorian architecture and a new prosperity – these are what we should share.”
Their mission was to do what could be done to move the region and its people toward “an interesting, diverse population sharing our ‘sense of place,’ working in a diversified local economy where we have recreation and lone eagles, but also an honest rural economy which includes some ranching, logging, farming and mining.” They hoped to further that mission with Colorado Central through 1) providing an overview of the region, with in-depth coverage of the region’s issues and a forum for inhabitants; 2) building a sense of community and connectedness across 8,000 square miles of rugged mountain terrain; and 3) getting “a handle on the changes in the New West” that were impacting our region.
The question at 20 years is how well has the magazine stuck to those founding goals, and addressed those concerns? Through its two publishers – the Quillens for the first 14 years, and now Mike Rosso – the publication has consistently picked and pecked away at defining the region in some important ways. Practically every issue has at least one article detailing some historical place or event. Most issues seem to profile one of the region’s growing number of artists and musicians, looking at the present, past and future through their eyes. New and old businesses are profiled. Regular and irregular writers from around the region give diverse perspectives on events and issues that cover a lot of the cultural spectrum of the region. If there is any individual or group in the region – barring those with the sensibilities and self-definition of a Unabomber or a Koch Brother – who feels that Colorado Central is not “their magazine,” I think that is probably something that Mike would try to correct.
I do think the magazine tends toward the liberal/progressive side of the political spectrum, but my own experience at Western, trying to get conservatives to participate in open dialogue at the Headwaters Conferences, seems to carry over to that political discourse in general, even at the national level. When Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin become the conservative mouthpieces, there is a kind of embarrassing meanness to it; I don’t believe that voice is censored from Colorado Central so much as it is just not offered to the magazine. In Washington, for example, “gay marriage” can be an abstract thing used to call up all kinds of nasty images; but down on the ground, it’s less abstract when it’s the two middle-aged women down the street who have lived together for 17 years, or the two guys whose flower garden would get the garden club’s “Yard of the Week” if one of them were just a woman.
So is the task of defining the region and its inhabitants done, to the extent that the things that happen here are, and are only, the things that “we the people of Central Colorado” want to have happen? Well, no, of course not. As the recent Salida election showed, there may be no more agreement across the board on what we want to have happen here than there was 20 years ago. But thanks to Colorado Central, readers in Gunnison and Westcliffe know about Salida’s political traumas and tribulations, and see their reflection in our own communities. The larger “regional community” becomes part of our identity, and it helps smooth out some of the problems as well as potentials that emerge out of local diversity.
Could Colorado Central be doing more to develop a regional identity than it does? I’m not sure what that would be, but it is a question for readers as well as writers to ask, and to look for answers in perceived gaps or lapses in what shows up in the magazine. But for right now, Colorado Central has made the past two decades and our region more comprehensible, not to mention enjoyable. Here’s wishing it another 20. Beyond that, my imagination expires, as probably will I. Will there still be magazines? Will the big trucks still be bringing newsprint to Salida? Or even groceries and gas, for that matter, and all the other things we need to survive here in our ruggedly individualistic dependency? If so, then I expect Colorado Central will still be around helping us figure out what it all means and where it might be going.
