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Rocky Mountain Cheers

By Rob Schultheis

Found in: | Outside | Beyond The Four Corners | Our Towns |

"The gods of the hills are not the gods of the valleys."

- Ethan Allen

"God-dam the Flatlanders anyhow: they live so damn low-down that they think like gophers in their holes. Us mountain people, we're so high up we can see everything, like the highest-flying eagles in the sky."

- Anonymous

Indeed: the air may be thin and the weather dodgy, and sometimes the landscapes of rock and snow may seem a bit severe, Ingmar Bergman-esque, especially during a long dark winter like the last one, but we definitely live in the Promised Land, on the slopes of the Kailashes, the Big Rock Candy Mountains of the world. There's a crystalline clarity here you find nowhere else. I sometimes think that more good ideas and visions come out of the tiny percentage of the human race who lives 7,000 feet or more above sea level than all of the thousands of millions of people who rub elbows in the cities far below, with their dense, cloying, electrical air and artificial horizons that blot out the heavens.

Take Telluride, for instance: this tiny village, for that is what it really is, has produced so much that is important and amazing during its century and a half of existence that, to employ a weary old clich�, "the mind boggles." Nikolai Tessla and alternating current. String Cheese Incident. "Greenbucks."

Climber/explorers extraordinaire Ace Kvale and the late, greatly missed Charlie Fowler. Waterwolf whitewater boats. The Valley Floor Initiative, by far the biggest, most radical Open Space acquisition ever undertaken by a smaller-than-small town. The Telluride Institute's mountain watershed programs. KOTO, the first completely community-funded public radio station in America. And so on and so on, und so weiter, ad infinitum, mirabile dictu, beyond belief and with no apparent limits . . .

The highest commercial airport in America. The highest percentage of votes for Barack Obama of any community in the entire United States (I'm just guessing on this one, but it's probably true). Birthplace of western Colorado's AIDS awareness and outreach program.

Telluride may be an extreme example, but I'll bet that if you took a good look at other way-high Rocky Mountain towns, from Banff to Crestone to Durango, you'd find a lot more of the same: there's something about living at high altitude, away from crowds and clutter, that inspires -well - inspiration, if that makes sense.

I love visiting New York, Los Angeles and all the other madcap adrenalin-fueled centers of "political action," "the arts," "social experimentation" and the like, but frankly I always come away with a vague, gnawing sense of disappointment.

Is that the best you all can do? Well, whatever floats your dinghy. Where I come from, your "earth-shaking" idea would get maybe a C+ for effort and a page three mention in the Watch. You cats have the Hype down pat, but the Real Deal? Fuhgedaboudit.

I sometimes think we're entering the Post-Urban Era, where almost everything really interesting is happening in small towns and villages, especially those in places like the Rockies that have attracted many of the best and brightest city folks and turned them loose with enough space around them to finally realize their awesome potential. The reason we don't hear more about it is because the media empires are still based in cities, and vastly overstate the importance and grandeur of their immediate surroundings, while looking down their miserable, smog-filled noses at what is going on far off in the hinterlands. Fine with me.

Call me a snob or a boneheaded local chauvinist, but as somebody once said, "If it's true, it ain't bragging." This is where it's Happening, like it or not, up here where the rainbows live and there's plenty of room for the craziest, purest, most unlikely ideas to bloom.