Column by Hal Walter
Colorado Central – December 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
I SUPPOSE AT THIS POINT it would be appropriate to mention that — with the writing of this piece — I will have completed 10 years of monthly columns for Colorado Central magazine. That’s 120 columns or essays, averaging 1,200 words or more apiece. It’s not exactly War and Peace, but totaling more than 140,000 words it represents quite a bit of material, which I suppose has been worth the ink and newsprint since Ed and Martha keep publishing it.
When we first started, I never thought that I’d still be writing a monthly piece 10 years later. In this profession you quickly learn that assignments come and go. Editors do too, and sometimes your own focus falters. Publications also fall by the wayside. Once a slick magazine that I’d been courting for some time, Buzzworm, published an article I’d written about the Arkansas River and promptly went defunct. For months I received letters from federal bankruptcy court because I was listed as one of the magazine’s “creditors” since I was never paid the $250 owed for the piece in the final issue.
So really I never had any preconceptions that I’d still be doing this a decade later. In the beginning, I wrote from the perspective of the anti-growth naysayer of development, regularly dissing the real-estate developers and other promoters of scams such as ski areas, privatizing public lands and other bizarre notions of “economic development” and “smart growth.” But one can only do that for so long before becoming weary of the exercise, and soon the column evolved into a collection of writings about my experiences and reflections of life in the Central Colorado region. Along the way I also have shared some of my personal history, insights, beliefs and interactions with the natural world. Sometimes the topics have been difficult to come by.
It turned out I was actually right about much of what I have written, though in retrospect some of these earlier efforts seem somewhat sophomoric. A defunct ski area still looms over the Wet Mountain Valley as a monument to greed. A local group that seemed unable to organize a decent trail cleanup never did wrest control of the Sangre de Cristos from the U.S. Forest Service. The roads actually did go to hell in Custer County and other neighboring counties, primarily because the tax base could not keep pace with the need for services brought on by the growth. A plan to mine mica on Poncha Pass never did pan out, possibly due to the obvious economic realities that I pointed out.
BUT I’VE BEEN WRONG about some things, too. Last week when my 18-month-old son Harrison took a header off the couch, I was really glad to drive him down to the new clinic in Westcliffe, and in very quick order learn that his head was just as hard as his dad’s and that he was just fine. I think I’m glad that in about five years he’ll be attending a new school with a new gym. Westcliffe’s “Learning Circle” seems to be a better educational environment than most day-care centers and I take Harrison there fairly regularly.
To get beyond the issue of child-raising services, last week in Westcliffe I was treated by a chiropractor who worked for the Denver Broncos during their Super Bowl years. I later found a six-pack of Dale’s Pale Ale microbrew in a can at one of the two liquor stores in the Clusterplex. Likewise we now have strong coffee, fresh produce, and a few more interesting people. But you can get fresh locally grown eggs at the feed store, and there’s a meat shop where you can pick your choice of cuts from under a glass counter and they will wrap them in paper.
— All of this in a town with not a single stoplight.
But the real deal for me is that on a recent fine fall day I put Harrison in a backpack and hiked up the rugged Hermit Pass Road to the beaver ponds, where he watched from his perch as I tossed flies to brook trout that were largely unimpressed with my offerings. To me it’s amenities like this that really put the “quality” into “quality of life.”
The irony of course is that despite all the “growth,” a decent living wage is still fairly rare around here. Those of us who didn’t move here with a huge stockpile of money, or a “portfolio of over $250,000” like the clients of my friend who is a local investment manager, have found other ways to adapt to the changing economic landscape. For example, my training and background are in journalism, but I now make the lion’s share of my income doing “small-ag management,” which mostly involves feeding people’s horses.
SPEAKING OF JOURNALISM, much has been made over the last few years about the state of this so-called profession in this country. Those on the right would have you believe the media is a left-wing conspiracy. Those on the left would have you believe major media organizations have right-wing owners, which is actually true. Both sides consistently miss that the real problem with the media is that it has become a marketing tool used by the plutocrats that run this country to shape our belief systems. As someone who actually went to college to study the subject of journalism, this is actually far more alarming than the left-wing/right-wing conspiracy theories. The fact is, whether you get your news from Fox or NPR, you are being sold a bill of goods. I have difficulty buying any of it.
Look up the word “journalism” in a dictionary and you will find definitions relating to the gathering, writing and disseminating of “news,” whatever that means in this day and age of corporate media chains, cable news networks and bloggers. Yet it’s difficult to ignore the root word “journal” which literally means “a personal record of occurrences, experiences, and reflections kept on a regular basis; a diary.”
When I look back on my 10 years of columns in this magazine many of the pieces seem to flow together like a journal. I don’t even remember writing all of them, but the words become familiar with reading. The best thing I can say about this collection is that it is all true. These pieces are my journal-ism. True journalism.
I really don’t know how long I’ll keep doing this. This could be my last column, or I could write 120 more. We’ll just have to see.
Hal Walter writes from his home in the Wet Mountains. His columns are archived at www.coloradocentralmagazine.com, and more of his “true journalism” can be found at www.halwalter.net
