A while later, I see the young woman clipping out the arrest listing with a pair of scissors. She doesn’t seem embarrassed when I ask why she wants it. “This way if I’m ever stupid enough to think about taking him back, I’ll look at this,” she says. “I’ll keep it in my scrapbook.” (Eventually, all charges were dropped, and they divorced.)
At the store, Don never discusses somebody’s situation with another person, but he frequently mentions his own problems. Twenty years ago, Kretha was diagnosed with a rare form of spina bifida, and the disease has progressed to the point where she rarely leaves home. For a year the family was unable to get medical insurance, because of her pre-existing condition. Their oldest son flies F-16s for the air force, but their daughter has struggled to find steady work because of alcoholism. After she had difficulties caring for her son, Gavin, Don and Kretha took custody of the boy. Don often mentions such issues to a customer. “If I’m dealing with somebody who has an alcoholic in the family, it helps for them to know about my daughter,” he says. “You can’t hide anything in a small town. You can’t pretend that your family is perfect. My daughter is not perfect, but she’s trying.” He continues, “Almost all druggists in a small town will tell you the same thing. You are part and parcel of the community. Nobody’s better, nobody’s worse. We’re all the same.”
In Nucla, Wednesday is bowling league night. The local alley shut down to the public long ago, because there are so few people left, but the facility opens twice a week for community leagues. The alley was built in 1962 and all its equipment is original, with an exuberant use of steel that you don’t see anymore: long, shiny Brunswick ball racks, dining tables with heavy flared legs. A fifty-year-old Coca-Cola clock hangs on the wall, its hands frozen at a couple of minutes after six. Score cards advertise businesses that have been dead for decades: Miracle Roofing and Insulation, Sir Speedy Instant Printing Center (“Instant Copies While You Wait!”). Don is the league president, and he certifies the lanes every year. He took a course in Montrose in order to be licensed to use a bowling-lane micrometer.
He is always getting certified in order to fulfill some local need. He has taken courses in CPR, and he’s licensed to use an electric defibrillator. He has a pyrotechnics display license. He performs regular state inspections on many of the small clinic medicine dispensaries within a hundred-mile radius. He has a pilot’s license, and he flies a fifty-year-old Cessna, which he occasionally uses to travel to an inspection. When he heard about a course in California for a certain type of hormone therapy, he flew out and attended two days of classes; and now he compounds medicine for four transgendered patients who live in various parts of the West. He finds this interesting. The patients telephone every three months to order their drugs; he chats and commiserates with them about their hassles with Medicare, which makes it all but impossible for somebody to switch from M to F.
On Friday nights in autumn he announces the Nucla High football games. They play eight-man ball, although if a bigger school comes to town they switch with every possession: when Nucla is on offense, it’s eight-on-eight, but when the other team has the ball it becomes eleven-on-eleven. This is so each side can practice running its offense. Occasionally somebody gets confused, and Don’s voice rings over the loudspeakers: “There’s eleven white guys and eight blue guys, and that won’t work.” The football might not be first-rate but the names are a novelist’s dream. Nucla has Seth Knob, Chad Stoner, and Seldon Riddle. Dove Creek has a player named Tommy Fury. Blanding has Talon Jack and Sterling Black, Tecohda Tom and Herschel Todachinnie. Shilo Stanley, Terrance Tate, Dillon Daves: if alliteration ever needs an offensive line, recruiting should begin around the Colorado-Utah border.
The Nucla coach is Jim Epright, who is also the principal of the local elementary school. When I visit his office, we chat for a while and he tells me that he grew up in Nucla, moved away for a number of years, and then returned. “Why I came back was that this town took care of me,” he says. “In the tough times in my life, there were people here who saw me through it. That’s something I can be proud of, as far as being part of this community.”
I ask him what he means by tough times. He is a big man with a friendly red face and cool blue eyes. He hesitates for a moment, and then he looks directly at me.
“My mom shot my dad at point-blank range,” he says. “He was coming home drunk, and she told him not to come in the house, and he did. He came through the door and she shot him. I was standing ten feet away. And my two brothers were in the next room. Dad was taken out on the Flight for Life, and Mom was taken to jail. You don’t have social services in a place like this. I took my brothers to the Ray Motel, and we stayed there a week before I started running out of money.”
Here in his office we are surrounded by children’s artwork and poems. He continues the story: at the age of fourteen, he moved into the home of “a nice lady who helped other strays”; she supported him while he finished high school. On the weekends he worked in a gas station. He became perhaps the best baseball player Nucla has ever produced, winning a Division I college scholarship. He went off to school and lasted less than half a year: all of his money blown on partying. “I let a lot of people down,” he says.
He came home to work in the mines, and then he became a maintenance man for the school system. In his thirties, his supervisor encouraged him to try college again, and he went to New Mexico with his family and got a teaching degree. He has worked in the Nucla and Naturita schools for fifteen years. The elementary school now has 150 students for seven grade levels, and they are losing roughly fifteen kids a year. With each lost student, the state funding drops by about $10,000. The schools recently cut their budget by nearly 8 percent. The starting salary for a teacher is less than $29,000.
“The term ‘hanging on by a thread’ comes to mind,” Epright says. The last time he surveyed the school’s students, roughly one-quarter of the children were not living with a biological parent. Many are with grandparents, like Don Colcord’s grandson; some live with other relatives or friends. But Epright says that people find a way, and he is impressed by how well the children handle it. “The nontraditional to us seems traditional,” he says. “We don’t have a foster care system like you’d have in a bigger place.”
During summer school, Epright works without pay. He often mows the school lawn; if there’s painting to be done, he gets a brush. Last year they needed to cut down some tree branches on the campus, and the bid came in at $10,000, so Epright rented a bucket truck and trimmed the trees with his daughter. He’s part of a core group of twenty or so people who seem to hold the community together by volunteering. It’s rare to hear somebody mention local government, which has far less impact; Nucla can’t even get enough candidates to fill their city council. Epright tells me that teachers, school board members, and local business owners like Don are particularly important. “It’s people like that who keep the shallow breathing going,” he says.
When outsiders come to town—loners, drifters—they often find their way to Don. A number of years ago, a man in his seventies named Tim Brick moved to Naturita and rented a mobile home. He placed special orders at the Apothecary Shoppe: echinacea, goldenseal, chamomile teas. He distrusted doctors, and he often had Don check his blood pressure. It was high, and eventually Don convinced him to get on regular medication. Soon he was visiting every four or five days, mostly to talk.
Don referred to him as Mr. Brick. He had no other local friends, and he was cagey about his past, although certain details emerged over time. His birth name had been Penrose Brick—he was a descendant of the Penrose family, which came from Philadelphia and had made a fortune from mining claims around Cripple Creek. But for some reason Mr. Brick had been estranged from all of his relatives for decades. He had changed his first name, and he had spent most of his working life as an auto mechanic.
One day, his mobile home was broken into, and the thieves made off with some stock certificates. Mr. Brick had never used a broker—
to him, they were just as untrustworthy as doctors—so he went to the Apothecary Shoppe for help. Before long, Don was making dozens of trips across Disappointment Valley, driving two hours each way, in order to get documents certified at the bank in Cortez. Eventually, he sorted out Mr. Brick’s finances, but then the older man’s health began to decline. Don managed his care, helping him move out of various residences; on a couple of occasions, Mr. Brick lived at Don’s house for an extended stretch. At the age of ninety-one, Mr. Brick became seriously ill and went to see a doctor in Montrose. The doctor said that prostate cancer had spread to his stomach; with surgery, he might live another six months. Mr. Brick said he had never had surgery and he wasn’t going to start now.
Don spent the next night at the old man’s bedside. At one point in the evening, Mr. Brick was lucid enough for a conversation. “I think you’re dying,” Don said.
“I’m not dying,” Mr. Brick said. “I’m just going to pray now.”
“Well, you better pray pretty hard,” Don said. “But I think you’re dying.” He asked if Mr. Brick needed to see a lawyer. The old man declined; he said his affairs were in order.
Don found a hospice nurse, and within two days Mr. Brick died. Don arranged a funeral Mass, and then he went through boxes of Mr. Brick’s effects. There was a collection of old highway maps, an antique cradle telephone, and a Catholic prayer stand. There were many photographs of naked men. Don found checkbooks under four different aliases. There were letters in Mr. Brick’s handwriting asking friends if they could introduce him to other men who were “of the same type as me.” But he must have lost courage, because those letters were never mailed. Don also found some unopened letters that Mr. Brick’s mother had sent more than half a century ago. One contained a ten-dollar bill and a message begging her son to make contact. The bill dated to the 1940s but it still looked brand-new, and something about that crisp note made Don feel sad. Years ago, he had sensed that Mr. Brick was gay, and that this was the reason he had been estranged from his family, but it wasn’t a conversation they ever had. Don had figured the old man would bring it up if he wanted to talk about it.
In his will, Mr. Brick left more than half a million dollars in cash and stock to the local druggist. After taxes and other expenses, it came to more than $300,000, which was almost exactly what the community owed Don Colcord. But Don didn’t seem to connect these events. He talked about all three subjects—neglecting his dying brother, offering credit to the townspeople, and helping Mr. Brick and receiving his gift—in different conversations that spanned more than a year. He probably wouldn’t have mentioned the money that was owed to him, but somebody in Nucla told me and I asked about it. From my perspective, it was tempting to apply a moral calculus, until they added up to a neat story about redemption and reward in a former utopian community. But Don’s experiences seemed to have taught him that there is something solitary and unknowable about any human life. He saw connections of a different sort: these people and incidents were more like spokes of a wheel. They didn’t touch directly, but each was linked to something bigger, and his role was simply to try to keep the whole thing moving the best he could.
Don Colcord’s birthday is the Fourth of July. This is also when Nucla celebrates its annual Water Days, which commemorates the completion of the town’s irrigation system. Each year, there’s a parade down Main Street, and Don announces the floats over a loudspeaker and serves as a judge for the best decoration. The winner receives $75. There’s a water fight with fire hoses, and a barbecue in the local park, where it’s a tradition for a woman to get up onstage and sing “Happy Birthday” to Don. At night he sets off the fireworks, because he’s the only person in town who has been licensed to do so.
This year the weather is perfect. In the evening we drive to the top of Nucla hill, where a giant and slightly crooked N has been laid out in white-painted stones facing the town. Behind us, to the west, the sun is setting behind the slate-blue La Sal Mountains. Don is here with his grandson Gavin, and he comments that today’s parade was the smallest he’s ever seen. This year’s theme is Where the Past Meets the Future, and the fireworks, like most of the events, are sponsored by the Lions Club. When Don joined the Lions Club in 1978, he was the youngest member; three decades later, he is still the youngest member. This weekend he turns fifty-nine. There are only six Lions left, and next year they will decide to close the local chapter.
Some volunteer firemen pull up in a truck, and a couple of ranchers talk idly about hay.
“How’s your water look this year?”
“I think it’s OK.”
“You get your first cutting in?”
“Yep.”
They point out the Nucla ditch in the distance—a long straight line, slightly elevated, with the feathered tops of cottonwood trees tracking the route. One of the firemen is Matt Weimar, whose ancestors were among the original settlers of Nucla, and whose family still runs a ranch. He says that not long ago some kid found an old cap-and-ball pistol near the ditch, sitting on a ledge as if some pioneers had just dropped it yesterday.
Trucks and cars arrive from town and park at the bottom of the hill to watch the show. As darkness falls, the Lions prepare the fireworks in metal tubes, and Don ignites them one by one. They raised $1,700 for the display, which is relatively small. But the setting makes it spectacular: reds and blues and greens exploding all around this high hilltop. After it’s over, we watch the pairs of headlights glide in a neat line back up Main Street, dispersing as drivers turn off toward home. Our attention drifts upward—now that the fireworks and the headlights are gone, the stars seem brilliant, clustered together like the lights of some faraway city. Don passes around a few bottles of beer. “I don’t care if it is a small town, we got good fireworks,” Don says. He sips his beer and gazes up at the Milky Way. “When you see them from here, they look so close together,” he says. “It’s hard to believe they’re millions of miles apart.”
Acknowledgments
This book began when John McPhee took an e-mail I had written about eating rats in southern China and forwarded it to David Remnick. I’m eternally grateful to John for sending it, and to David for reading it.
At The New Yorker, I worked with five editors: Charles Michener, Nick Paumgarten, Dana Goodyear, Amy Davidson, and Willing Davidson. I was very rough when I started, fresh off the Yangtze, and I appreciate everybody’s patience. I’m also grateful for the support of Dorothy Wickenden, and for the magazine’s wonderful long-distance fact-checking.
If you start at my parents’ house in Missouri and search the surrounding two blocks, you will not find a better editor than Doug Hunt. Why keep walking? All of these stories, like all of my books, benefited enormously from Doug’s advice. So much talent so close to home.
Fourteen years, one agent, one publisher, one editor, one publicist: does this happen anymore? I thank William Clark, Tim Duggan, and Jane Beirn for being sources of stability in an industry where so much else has changed.
Ian Johnson and Michael Meyer reviewed many drafts, and they’ve been part of a wonderful community of writers and photographers that I knew in China: Mimi Kuo-Deemer, Travis Klingberg, Mike Goettig, Matt Forney, Mark Leong, Jen Lin-Liu, Craig Simons, David Murphy. Kersten Zhang, Sophie Sun, and Cui Rong helped greatly with research and fact-checking.
To my parents—thank you for opening your home to so many interesting people during my childhood, and for your examples of curiosity and sympathy. To Leslie—for always, always, always understanding what it takes. To Ariel and Natasha—someday you will read this book, and you will realize how much work was done while juggling multiple diaper changes and night feedings, and you will be inspired to care for me in my old age. For that I am deeply grateful.
A television journalist once said to me, “Are you serious? You ate rat on spec?” All I can say is that a writer has to start somewhere.
About the Author
PETER HESSLER is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he serve
d as the Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007, and is also a contributing writer for National Geographic. He is the author of River Town, which won the Kiriyama Prize; Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and, most recently, Country Driving. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting, and he was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011. He lives in Cairo.
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Also by Peter Hessler
Country Driving
Oracle Bones
River Town
Copyright
Cover design by Milan Bozic
All but one of these pieces appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker.
STRANGE STONES. Copyright © 2013 by Peter Hessler. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
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