Essay by Lynda La Rocca
Mountain Life – November 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
I WAS ORIGINALLY going to call this essay “Swan Song for the Stupid Zone.” But no such luck.
Regular Colorado Central readers already know that a “Stupid Zone,” (a term coined by the bearded half of Colorado Central’s publishing team) refers to a floodplain, an avalanche chute, those spanking new housing developments surrounding certain international jetports, and similar sites where people low on long-range planning skills put down roots so that they can spend the rest of their lives whining about floods, snowslides, and the recurrent roar of jet engines.
For the past several years, my personal variation on the Stupid Zone was a house on U.S. Highway 24, which regularly drew to our door numerous strangers demanding everything from bathroom and telephone privileges to directions on driving to the summit of Mount Massive.
In September, when my husband Steve and I moved to Twin Lakes, a tiny, unincorporated village on the southern fringes of Lake County, I thought I was kissing the Stupid Zone good-bye.
This had been a particularly tough year in the Zone in that our first annual, “How-do-I-get-to-Aspen?” question came from a rather rushed (and subsequently, rather peeved) lady attempting to drive over Independence Pass in January.
At the same time, however, I’d actually felt the curse of the Stupid Zone lift — albeit briefly — when a woman came to our door waving a $20 bill. She had originally appeared there weeks earlier to request our help in searching for her husband. He had simply moved out of walkie-talkie range while fishing along the Arkansas River, but she had been convinced that he had either slipped on a rock and drowned, or collapsed from a heart attack .
“That happened one day after our 38th anniversary,” she explained upon her return, eyes brimming with tears. “I thought, ‘He’s gone,’ but we were together for so long and those were good years … So please, take this money and have dinner on us.”
Of course, we didn’t take the money. But this kind woman was the only person, in all our time in the Zone, who had ever even tried to thank us.
I desperately conjured her image when some ranchers converged in our front yard after several dozen Longhorns staged a successful breakout from the surrounding pasture. I counted two pickup trucks, an ATV, a third pickup pulling a huge horse trailer, two dogs, four horses, and five humans — all in our yard, which we wouldn’t have minded if even one of those humans had so much as asked permission to either congregate or park there. Even a friendly wave would have elevated them in my estimation.
When Bill, who lives a couple of miles south of our old place (see the October, 2000 issue of Colorado Central for Bill’s maiden descent into the Stupid Zone), confronted one of these wranglers about the dangers posed by Longhorns wandering in the vicinity of his property and his children, he was told the entire area was “open range — cattle can go anywhere they want to around here.” Hey, genius: Open grazing on public lands ended in the 1930s. Not for nothing do we call it the Stupid Zone.
THINGS GOT EVEN STRANGER one blustery March afternoon when I glanced out at our back yard and saw a young woman, wearing only a loosely belted, gray-and-white bathrobe with a T-shirt underneath, dashing about in hot pursuit of a honey-colored puppy.
Of course, I got Steve (“You’re not going to believe this!”) and we watched her repeatedly perform what looked like an ancient religious ritual, kneeling on the ground, forehead pressed to the earth, arms outstretched.
With each repetition, the little dog pranced closer, but never close enough for those outstretched arms to grab it.
When visions of our own beloved psycho dog’s puppyhood finally flooded our brains, we offered the woman a handful of Milk Bones. Moments later, pooch tucked securely beneath her arm, the woman returned to her car, which she’d left on the side of the highway and which now had a county sheriff’s vehicle parked behind it.
We never did find out how the pup got loose to begin with, nor why the woman was in her bathrobe at 1:45 p.m. (although I suspect she worked from her home!)
Then there was the Aspen resident who stopped to ask who lives at the ranch next door. “Why?” Steve wanted to know.
“Because I just saw my canoe over there,” this guy explained, referring to a red canoe that has been lying upside-down beside a ranch pond for as long as I can remember.
“That’s my canoe,” he insisted. “It was stolen.” “When?” Steve asked.
“Five years ago,” the guy replied. “But I’d know that canoe anywhere.” Yeah, I felt like saying, and that Porsche you’re driving looks exactly like the one that disappeared from our summer home a few years back.
SO IT WAS with tremendous relief that we moved into this beautiful house at Twin Lakes. What more could I ask for? The views are spectacular, the birds are flocking to our feeders, and our nearest neighbors are dead; this property practically abuts the Twin Lakes cemetery. Our (unpaved) driveway branches off from an (unpaved) road almost a half-mile from the highway.
No Stupid Zone here, I triumphantly tell Steve. Nobody’s going to climb onto this porch to get the ultimate high country snapshot. No one’s going to bang on this door at 8 a.m., then yell at me because they don’t like the directions I give them.
The gods laugh at such certitude. A few weeks ago, during the height of the fall color, a car crunched up our long, private driveway and stopped next to our door. A woman stuck her head out the driver’s side window. “We saw those unusual, red aspens from the highway and followed the road up here,” she told us, all smiles. “Can we take a picture?”
Be our guest. Everyone else is.
Lynda La Rocca now writes from the south side of Mt. Elbert, rather than the east side. She has hopes that the seasonal closure of Independence Pass will give her more time to write.
