Western Civilization

Ghost Towns Of The West

By Michael Conniff, 1-24-06

We live in a small pocket of civilization here in the Roaring Fork Valley—an outpost where if things go wrong you can end up dead or worse in a ghost town. Worse would be cut off or otherwise rendered incapable of communicating with other living souls, a kind of purgatory or a living death. But more on that later.

I was forced by circumstances untold to leave the valley with some family cargo, a brother headed for the VA Hospital in Grand Junction.

“We call in Junction,� I told him, as if that made me special for knowing that. “It’s sunny there all the time, 300 days a year, and warm too. Things are cheap in Junction.�

If you live within a lift line of Aspen, as we do with difficulty, you never stop thinking about what things cost. My brother asked for some toothpaste last week and handed over a dollar for a tube that cost two. My Better Half never told him because he had other things on his mind, like sleeping and walking. When we left for Junction it was hours before daylight and he was out like a light even before we hit the Interstate.

It was lonely out there for a while, just driving into wide open spaces, the way we assume the West used to be before it was won. But there was something else to be seen wherever you looked in the darkness beyond the dots of light in your rearview mirror and the other ones on the other side of the Interstate coming your way. Everywhere you looked, on either side of the highway, you could see hard lit-up rods coming right out of the earth that looked like missiles in search of a silo and a fail-safe stopgap to go with it. I knew what they were of course—the natural gas and/or oil wells that are turning Rifle, Parachute, Silt, and so on into places of true significance in the global economy.

On my radio show someone who works up there told me that they flat-out stop drilling during periods of elk migration, and I consider that a righteous thing to (not) do. But that doesn’t mean the drills just up and go away until drilling resumes. They are iconic, lit up like that as though someone might hit them, the way totem polls used to be and maybe still are, and the wells have meaning beyond anything I can hope to grasp. There is evidence everywhere that at the very least they are very good for the economy. More on that later, too.

We found the VA Hospital easily enough after getting off at Horizon and following 12th Street to get to North. VA Hospitals are so big you can fear for you life in them. In Salt Lake City, for example, I took a wrong turn and ended up in a building with endless corridors below the ground and when you used the elevator as an escape hatch you found another floor with more corridors and no people. I would love to see how you Mountain Adventurers would have fared in the VA Hospital in Salt Lake with two matches and a compass but no GPS.

I don’t mean to say the hospitals are inhuman because they are anything but. You see people who have given a limb or a meaningful life in service to our country, and they are attended with great respect by people who seem to know a hero when they see one. You can usually tell by a baseball cap where they served and who they are, at least as far as that goes. On the wall in both VA Hospitals there are plaques that commemorate the veterans of Pearl Harbor, and Desert Storm, and Vietnam and the two Great Wars, and so on, but my brother missed out on all of that because he served in the Army between wars.

“Would you enlist now,� I asked him in the halls of the VA, “knowing where you would end up?�

“Yes,� he said because it was an easy call.

It took a while to get him settled. They asked him about a Living Will but he already had one from Salt Lake. They asked him about organ donation and he said yes to that to. They have him something to make him feel better and he found all 72 of their cable channels with some delight because in the Salt Lake VA there wasn’t even ESPN. On the Fox News Channel, we watched President Bush speak to a crowd that for once wasn’t all soldiers at Kansas State University, not all that far from Junction. All politics aside, I noted the President spent some time talking about the importance of exercise to keeping him sound of mind and body, something I mention to people in my family with so much frequency they hate me for it.

In the VA Hospitals, nobody calls it exercise: they call it rehabilitation.

I left my brother in good hands with people who really care about him and the rest of those in his new unit. It made me feel good about him and good about our country. The next day they told me The Wound Team would be coming round like a S.W.A.T. Team to have a look at an infection on his leg that was killing him day and night. I knew that in the future my brother would be all right, despite his wound, because we live in that kind of country. You can find a kind of greatness at a VA Hospital and you don’t have to look far to find it.

I said my goodbye to him and left to return to my own selfishly narcissistic life. I luxuriated in a Borders book store with magazines I couldn’t afford, and then I bought a fleece jacket for $5 at Old Navy and an iPod FM converter for $22 for my better half at Circuit City. (I did not make the literary connection between the VA Hospital and Old Navy because the price was so low.) I took the long way out of town—at least if felt that way—and every mile or so there was this huge ad for Halliburton saying that all you had to do was show up at 32nd and D and you were almost sure of a good-paying job or better. I wondered what Halliburton was doing way out here in no man’s land, but then I had also wondered what they were doing in Iraq, and I still haven’t gotten an answer to that one.

I made it all the way home only to find that we in the valley were still cut off from the world because of a fiber cut someplace else that had cut our access to the Web in half. There was no hope in site, at least no in the near-term. Each of us would be left to our own devices, left to wonder what we were missing online. Despite the hardship, I felt good about my brother, my country, my Halliburton, and possibly even myself. Every one of us was doing what could to make a go of things in places where there was no place left to go.

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