Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  Not long after she’d started dating John, who besides being a carpenter, a gun collector, and an Alabaman is also the devout son of an Episcopal priest, Molly found Christ in John’s little mountain church, a tiny yellow building with a red door, pastored by two “Canon 9” priests, laymen authorized to serve in their congregation alone—an Old West way of doing things that was a point of faith and satisfaction for both Molly and John.

  She read her Bible with eyes for the way that “blood moves.” Once she called to say that the fourth chapter of Exodus was weighing on her mind, a difficult passage in which God decides for a moment to kill Moses, for no apparent reason. “There’s a number of different stories from my life that are like that,” she told me. She meant moments when she could feel she’d fallen from some kind of grace, periods of no safety and no explanations. “When you’re either hiding from God, or have been seen, or are on the radar screen, or are being chased.” She was fascinated by the thought that God was entitled to kill you at any time.

  And yet she was more or less at peace with the Lord. It’s the “less,” I think, that kept us friends; we liked to talk about God and we both knew that’s a conversation without many conclusions. We shared a belief that words are unstable, that learning to read is a process you can never be done with, because the words are always changing.

  Which is why I was surprised when I learned that Molly had decided to run for district attorney, a job that requires subtlety of thought in service of black-and-white convictions. After she’d returned home she’d earned a law degree at Boulder, like her father before her and his father before him. Through just a few years of private practice, she established a name as “the Christian lawyer” of Chaffee County, a woman to whom other women who’d been beaten or raped or robbed by their boyfriends or their brothers or their fathers could go for help, even if they didn’t have any money. Molly took satisfaction in fighting for them and maybe pleasure in knocking their abusers around a courtroom. Her liberalism became Christian, and her Christianity was gentle and yet thick with the blood of scripture: the darkest passages of the prophets to which she’d always been drawn, even when she was a college girl back in New England.

  She represented mostly poor people who had trouble paying her and sometimes simply did not. There was some money on both sides of Molly’s family, but they didn’t spend it. They didn’t need to; Molly made a living, and they were proud of having little. Since the building boom had quieted, John was staying home to raise their son, Sam. They didn’t have a television, but they were going to buy a new horse. This seemed like a suitable arrangement all around; I imagined that it would last for a lifetime.

  Instead Molly ran. As a Republican, campaigning on horseback in Frontier Days parades. Molly was, of course, very progun, a reputation useful to a woman of five feet and three inches practicing law amid men who until they learned better called her sweetie-pie.

  A jail commander in her district arranged as a fund-raiser for her a shoot-out in a fake old Western town, with “cowboy and tactical shooters.” This fiction was not of Molly’s creation; the Old West shooting range, with “bad guys” hiding behind buildings, mixed in among civilians, is something of a fad now, considered a good place to take the family. There’s an element of morality to the necessary decisions about which targets to fire on that is said to be good for women and children.

  It was that morality, the judgment of the God in whom at some level she’d always believed, that made Molly run for district attorney, run and win in a four-county district bigger than several eastern states and so sparsely populated that the town to which she and John had moved, Salida—population 5,504 and dropping—was considered an urban center.

  After she won her election I decided to go to Colorado to see her, my friend born again in the mountains that I’d abandoned. I never consciously quit my mountain religion, but over the years I’ve gone back to Colorado less and less frequently. I don’t climb rocks anymore, I distrust snakes of all kinds, and I’ve forgotten which wildflowers one can eat, except for the buttery blue-white blossoms of the columbine, the state flower that gives its name to the most notorious high school in America. All that remains of that Colorado to me is the land itself. Not in a geological sense, or in any fog of sentiment, but as an insoluble equation. The cliffs might as well be x’s and the quaking aspens y’s and the cold sharp creeks slicing through alpine tundra something entirely incomprehensible: history written in a language of unfixed variables.

  2

  I FLEW INTO DENVER the night before Easter. A belt of snowmelt mist hid the mountains west of the city, but the sky above was clear indigo, and the moon, rising full from the east, was solid yellow, the color of an Easter egg. I drove west into the mountains. Past the band of mist they rose up sharp, sudden, and dressed in white right down to their ankles. Highway 285 was a winder; when it swung to the right a glowing cross half the height of a small mountain lit the way ahead in pixilated glory, white neon strung to telephone poles climbing a shallow gully. Within a mile of the cross, its light was brighter than the moon’s. But once I’d left it behind, it cast no glow backward across the hills, so I pulled over, let my eyes adjust, turned off the headlights, and tried driving by moonlight, just to see if I could. This was a terrible idea. Thank god for the drunks weaving down from the mountains for pre-Easter good times in suburbs like Lakewood and Aurora. One set of lights carousing along the road was enough to shake me free of my mountain mysticism and set me into the appropriate position: hunched over the wheel, anxious, and looking for a motel to sleep in.

  Then I spotted Sweet Fanny Adams: a motel and bar across a bridge and guarded by two huskies. I banged on a window while they growled, until a woman came out and slapped them and rented me a room and called over to the bar to tell them to turn on the grill and cook me some food. The main action at the bar was the no-name band: banjo, mandolin, electric guitar. Very drunk bluegrass on a stage six inches high beneath a ceiling low enough for Billy Bird, the guitarist, to plant his hands flat above him and arch his back like a bow between songs. There were three very pretty girls at the bar, half a dozen jolly women, a mob of men in muddy boots. Many of the people at the bar seemed to live on the grounds, in various degrees of permanence, some on regular visits to the motel next door, some “Section-Eighting,” some holed up in the cabins that were vestiges of the resort complex Sweet Fanny Adams had once been, before state regulators discovered that its previous owners piped drinking water in from the pond beside the highway, a practice that resulted in an outbreak of giardia (“beaver fever”), and six years of closure, collapsed roofs, coyote dens, and an opportunity for Karen and Andy Smart to buy the bar and begin rehabilitation. “Sweet Fanny Adams,” Karen told me, was just a polite way for the British to say, “sweet fuck all,” which is another way of saying a thing is not worth a damn.

  At the back of the bar the chef, an enormous brown-skinned man named Michael, held court, almost literally; he had lifted 66 percent of the bar’s flirtiest women off the ground, a blonde in a white blouse slung over his shoulder, and a brunette dressed all in black hoisted high by an arm of solid muscle wrapped beneath her ass. When he put the women down, Michael told me he was a “city boy in the blood,” born and raised in Virginia Beach, lately of Atlanta, Georgia. Then he’d moved here and gotten hooked one morning when he heard noises outside the door of his cabin. “So I grabbed my gun an’ shit and I was like, ‘What the fuck and you better not be fuckin’ with me,’ and I swung open my door and there was three elks. Male elks, and they got this shit on their horns, and the fuckers is rubbin’ it off on my porch, and I was like, ‘Dammmn.’”

  The shit, Michael learned, was felt, and the fact of three bull elks shedding theirs at his front door was enough to make him turn his back on urban living forever.

  “Now, the one thing is, as you may have noticed, I am black. Which makes me something like the sixth one of us. You from New Yo
rk? Notice I say ‘us.’” He nodded and swung a glance around the all-white bar, landing back on me, whom he gave an eyebrow, as if by virtue of being from New York, I too was a black man in Park County. “But,” he said, “six to nine months, and that shit don’t matter. It takes some adjusting. It does. But six to nine months, and you gonna be country.”

  A big woman named Cindy walked by in a cloud of patchouli, and Michael scratched her on the back and Cindy purred. The band claimed to be wrapping it up, which would prove to be untrue, but at the sign of an end to the evening, Cindy demanded a song for her birthday. Billy Bird, the guitarist, agreed; Cindy chose “Needle and the Damage Done,” by Neil Young.

  “That song is depressing as shit,” Billy said. “Why the fuck you want that for your birthday?” I couldn’t hear Cindy’s answer, but I could imagine: Her birthday, she’d cry if she wanted to. She was from Florida, she’d told me, and this was her first birthday apart from her relatives. But now, she’d said, Sweet Fuck All was her family.

  A tall bony man with very tan skin and hair almost exactly the same color leaned over and nibbled Cindy’s ear. Cindy and the tan man, not quite a stranger and not yet a lover, danced close at the front of the bar, in front of a photo mural of a mountain stream. Billy Bird strummed his guitar, channeling Young’s high lonesome falsetto as he wound his way toward the lines that set the fade-out scene for the modern Western screening in the romantic mind of every late-stage hippie revivalist and original mountain exile—Joe, the bartender, come to Colorado ten years ago because “there was nowhere else to go,” Tom, the mandolin player, come to Colorado thirty years ago after fleeing LA with fifty dollars, enough to steam him overland until he came to a standstill, he’d tell me when the band was done, right here. Sweet Fuck All, roughly speaking.

  The moral of this particular story is that the story is already over: Mistakes were made, we are living after the fact, the mountains for some people are not so much a promised land as a place to which to retreat, after the little wars of individual lives have been fought, lost, and run away from. Thirty thousand people live in Bailey, up and down the highway from the bar, in homes spliced into ravines invisible from the road, as forbidding as medieval castles with their drawbridges drawn. Other than the bar, an antique from a vanishing Colorado the day it opened, there is no common ground. Just the memory of what they left behind.

  Billy Bird got his voice high and nasal to fit the mood, “the damage done,” and the setting sun. Cindy began to grind.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Easter Sunday, I woke up late and drank coffee at the bar and started driving toward Salida, past Shawnee and Slaughterhouse Gulch and Grouse Mountain and Split Rock. I drove past the ruins of smelters and the cemeteries of the rich and the poor, the resort impresarios and the true pioneers of this land: waiters and dishwashers and cooks, porters and bellhops and shoeshine boys, many of whom shared on their stones the surname “West”; not because they were related but because that’s where they’d gone. These mountains are a landscape that invites metaphor and then grinds the mind down to literal cartography.

  The ruins of the West are deceptive. Its ghost towns and its mineshafts and its weed-choked railroads, even its boarded-up mountain getaways, lure us out of time as if they were suffused with incense and seen through dim stained glass. And yet, look again at the nineteenth-century cabin with its caved-in beams; the one-room stucco jail with a hand-painted sign dulled by sun; the wagon wheel planted like a turnip in the front yard of some “rustic” construction, freshly built according to specifications acquired from Log Home Living magazine (circulation 132,000): They are the scars of economies built on getting what you can and getting out, the proof that failure—the touchstone of history—is as constant and even sharper here than it is back east, or out on the coast, or down south, or wherever the ghosts we imagine in these material traces fled from in search of a new story they thought they’d find on land that was never meant for living. The frontier, as a state of mind, is forever being born again in America. As a fact, “frontier,” a government designation for counties inhabited by fewer than twenty people per square mile, is not doing badly either; the high plains are pouring what population they had westward, into the foothills and over the mountains, where they swell into new boomtowns like Phoenix and Reno and Colorado Springs. They leave foundations for a new cult of ruins, granaries slowly crumbling and football fields filling with weeds and even fast-food outposts darkened, Golden Arches good for nothing but plinking with .22s.

  At ten thousand feet I came to Kenosha Pass, on which ground John C. Frémont was reputed to have stood sometime during the 1840s, looking out on South Park—the very same of Cartman and Kyle fame—and declared, “This will be an empire.” But Harold Warren, a ninety-five-year-old veteran of the Colorado Mounted Rangers, the historian of Park County (every rural county must have one; they are more essential than poets or idiots), reports this to be untrue, adding that Frémont’s only documented visit to the park was in flight from a battle between the Arapaho and Ute, very few of whom remain on this piece of land.

  Very little of anything remains on this land. It is a dried-out valley, the water rights divided so many times no one could fill a glass much less cover an acre-foot—enough water to cover an acre one foot deep—the basic unit of irrigation and, once upon a time, wealth in the West. On the ridge beneath the pass I pulled over and stared at the valley. Ten thousand feet is not a grand elevation in Colorado, but the plains before me were so vast I felt as if I were atop a fourteener, one of the high peaks you must summit and retreat from before the afternoon storms blow you off the mountain. The only noise was the roar of the wind in my ears, which is really no sound at all, and the hum of a shiny new pickup that raced by; I caught in the corner of my eye the glance of a passenger catching me before he vanished around the bend. Then I watched the truck dwindle to a dot and then nothing as it disappeared into the white plain. I sat for an hour, imagining that the whiteness was darkening, that the sun was unveiling the near-dead soil beneath. Here and there prairie grass stubbled the snow pale yellow like the crests of waves at open sea. The ocean was much on my mind because this once was one, and because it looks as if it still is, and because it is white, and because the whiteness of the whale has been for me the story of Colorado ever since Molly told me to stop reading stories about Indians and mountain men and rock formations and instead to turn to her personal field guide for mountain living, Moby-Dick.

  Wide-open spaces with little water leave us two choices, she told me: Pip or Ahab. Pip, the stowaway who gets lost treading water in a calm ocean and goes insane, or Captain Ahab—also insane—who hunts the whale because it’s the mysterium tremendum, the divine as existential dread. “God may reveal splendor in the mountains,” Molly had told me, “but he is not kind.” What she meant, I realized, was that you must be wary of awe in the mountains; if you’re not, the sun will blind you, the wind will burn you, the midday moon will seduce you into staring at it for so long that you begin babbling.

  There was white and yellow grass and green-black ponderosa rising up to white and blue-black stone. Whiteness bled off the mountain ridges that curled on themselves like dirty smoke drifting into the sky, which was a blue so pale at the horizon that it might have been white, too; much paler, anyway, than the underbelly of the clouds, which were the color of watery charcoal. Their shoulders, though, were only more whiteness, unless you stared long enough at the blue above them and let your mind give way to the colors with which we learn to code the world, the yellow with which we imagine the sun warms us, pale buttercup gold reflected in the tops of the clouds; stare, and you could see as true everything we tell ourselves about “nature” and “beauty” and wilderness serene; blink, and it was white again, emptied of such stories.

  3

  MOLLY GREW UP OUTSIDE of Loveland, a small town, but half her life was spent in Denver, to which her mother had returned after her divorce from Molly
’s father. There Molly’s father’s father, more urban in mind than his son, paid for Molly to take cotillion classes and to wear white gloves when he came visiting. He anticipated that his granddaughter would make her debut at the appropriate age, but Molly had other plans. She was shy, dyslexic, and smarter than everyone around her, a combination that did not make for ordinary socialization. And yet in Denver she joined a group of three girls, all of them blond, very pretty, and very fearless, and with them, for a while, she lived a life that most people don’t come close to until they’ve left home. There is a special wildness available to teenage girls in a big city abutted by canyons. In Colorado camping isn’t just for nature lovers, it’s for the kind of parties that require space, time, and privacy. There were boys with vans, men with motorcycles, people with substances to be bought and sold. The oldest and prettiest and sweetest of the three Denver girls, Susan, trafficked in and partook heavily of this last category. She was not a junkie. She could stop anytime.

  I met Susan that first summer in Colorado. She was dappled light, so beautiful you couldn’t remark otherwise, and no one, not even your girlfriend, would expect you to do so. There was no question of jealousy. Talking with her was like listening to a ballad on a radio station that fades in and out as you drive, sometimes clear and sentimental and tuned perfectly to the passing land, sometimes filled with static, lost, a song played too many times. And then she disappeared.