Country Life ...More Than It Seems

       The other day a dreamer in South Florida spotted my home for sale ad on the Internet. He asked if I would do a rent to own deal.

       I explained at this time I need more walking away money and cannot do a deal like that.

      I suggested he look  into the USDA Rural Development program.  They offer loans on low price properties in rural areas like this.  If you found a home for $20,000 and could buy it through them a mortgage would be around $140 a month.  A librarian came into town and her husband was in school still so they bought their house that way.

       However, I also urged him not to move here if is wife is a major source for income  as this is part of the Empty Quarter, if you are familiar with the Nine Nations of North America.  Population is sparse and widely scattered. I can my correspondent wanting to get away from all the people, which is partly why I came down here. However jobs are very sparse and in this small declining towns the locals are fighting over diminishing resources and outsiders are not always welcome unless they have outside income like retirement or have an over the road trucking job.

       Good jobs are reserved for locals. Outsiders  might have drive 30 miles to get that job, more gas and wear and tear on the car. Even locals have to look far and wide for jobs.

      I like rural life.  I do like the slower pace ....usually...and lower traffic and two lane roads that  often seem empty around here.  But while it looks nice from the outside, once you get inside you can see it is pretty competitive and sometimes desperate.  I am death on drugs...but illegal drug usage is higher in rural areas.  Despite Colorado having spectacular scenery - not down here on the plains - and wonderful cultural activities like opera, dance, drama (Denver's performing arts draws more patrons every year than the professional sports teams) the citizens have to turn to marijuana to dull their minds from the trauma of their  perceived boredom in our post modern world.

       I downshifted like this Florida man wants to do, moving my family to another small Colorado town years ago when I bought a rural weekly newspaper.  Looking back, it was a mistake. I went back to the big city after my wife became paralyzed from m.s. and there I found the resources to keep everything together until the girls got through high school and into college.

      With the nation still in depression economically, it is not so easy to just pick up and move around as it was in my youth, and I moved my family a lot.

      There are some books out there like Small Town Bound and books on how to best prepare yourself for coping with the challenges of life in small towns. Another time, when I moved to Seward, Neb. back in the early '80s the only job I could hustle up was part time news (20 hours) reporter for a weekly at $4.25 an hour.  The only other job I was offered was selling life insurance for $600 a month.  We befriended some people who had left Chicago and were trying to work their way back slowly across the country.  She found a job with a local clothing store - this was before the WalMart invasion - and though she did bookkeeping they classified her as sales so they only had to pay her three bucks an hour.

       I now live on Social Security and can afford to live in the country if I choose because the cost of living is so low.  (Because I went back to the big city after my wife became ill and had a good high wage job for 14 years that got my SS payments up from what they would have been when I was self employed in the rural country.)  

      It is good to feel called to live a rural life...but just be more aware of what its all about.  Not trying to discourage you, but enlighten you a little.  And remember, a positive attitude and strong will and some luck can overcome the challenges I have outlined.

     If I had read Gene Logsdon's books decades ago I might have done it right.  He has a vision of an America in which everyone lives on a small land holding, growing their own food.  And operating a home based cottage business for supplemental cash income. His dream of a nation of cottage farmers is a healthy one. But is more suited to the Midwest and East Coast and South rather than the arid west, except where there are pockets of irrigation. .

     But in a way that is how France envisioned it being.  More agricultural and non-tech, and that fell behind in the mechanized, highly organized modern Western national business model.

     People are now trapped in a subtly brutal post modern world.  It is easy to see how one can drive by bucolic fields of grains and cows and want to be a part of that.  But many would not last long.  Logsdon enjoys the simple pleasures of country life, watching the birds and bees and cows and sheep at play.
   
     Amish farmer David Kline captures this simply life in his journal Great Possessions.

     But whether you are in the city or the country, the truth is someone has to work...hard.    

 

Something Large, Still Unidentified....

     I still don't know what it really was.
     It was something huge, mysterious and still unidentified.
     This was back when I owned a weekly newspaper on the Colorado plains. A daughter was asleep in the
back seat of the car.  It was after dusk and a full moon was in the sky, so it was probably on the
night of the full moon, or very close to it, in September 1991.

     We had gone to Pueblo for the day and were headed home after shopping.
     We were near Arlington, which was just a post office at a ranch along Highway 96.  It was Friday and
any people in the surrounding lonesome prairie were likely at a football game in a prairie village
where people cluster under Friday night lights.  I think there was a game in Eads that night.
     As I drove, I noticed a yellow light in the sky to the north. Then I saw a separate red light. My
brain initially processed this as the lights on a low flying B-52 bomber, which used to roam this vast
section of the plains not far off the ground. They would sometimes startle a driver as one of the
huge planes suddenly appeared over them as it moved along.

     When I looked back to see if the lights had moved closer or farther, to determine which way the plane
was going, I suddenly grasped it was something else.  It was a huge cylinder stretching across the
night sky north of the highway.  The two lights were at either end of it.
     Because of the full moon I could clearly make out the skyline of the prairie to the north, toward
distant Karval which was over there somewhere.
     This huge shape was just hanging in the sky.
     Then I noted in my rear view mirrors a bright light was following behind my car, maybe a quarter mile
back.  It was going the same speed as I was.  It was this disturbing light that kept me from stopping
to take a closer look at the huge cylinder thing hanging in the sky.

     Mile after mile I drove along, feeling a little fear, I admit.  And then a railroad berm to keep snow
off the tracks rose up and I lost view of the cylinder. But the bright white light was still tracking
me.
     The headlights of an oncoming  car suddenly appeared on the horizon miles ahead, near Haswell, the
highest point in Kiowa County and from which you could glimpse the distant Rockies before the ground
descended and you lost site of them again until you got much closer to Pueblo.
      When that distant car appeared, the white light behind me suddenly stopped dead in mid air and I
started to move away from it...and the mysterious large object in the sky.

     A few days later I took my story to Gary Rehm, then sheriff of Kiowa County. I knew years earlier he
had spent many nights chasing down cattle mutilation reports through southern Colorado. I expected him
to ridicule me and my tall tale, but he just accepted what I said and told me it was good I had not
stopped.
      He said if I had stopped I would have been shot at with a laser weapon, referring to the rifles that
use a laser beam to zero in on a target.  In his opinion, he said a drug drop was going on.  And if I
had stopped that is why we would have been shot at.
     I don't think he understood the full image of what I had seen. The huge cylinder seemed to be solid.
     But years later I concede it might have been a holographic projection in the sky to scare people away
from what might have been a large truck unloading drugs somewhere on the pasture lands beneath it.
It is unlikely that an interstellar craft would have to send out what might have been a helicopter
with a bright headlight to protect it.

     So I still don't really know what I saw that night. But I still have a visual image of it in my mind.
No, I did not wake up my daughter to take a look. Something like that would have really spooked her
anyway.
     A few years later I was living in suburban Denver and one night while perusing the Internet I came
across several reports, from both the east and west coast, of giant cylindrical craft in the sky that
seemed to be three fourths of a mile long. That seemed to match the description of what I saw.  It was
like one of the cigar shaped craft George Adamski had written about years earlier in his books.
     So I went to the National UFO Reporting Center site, NUFORC, and decided to post what I had seen.
      Though the report was then several years old, it was posted and is part of their data base still, I
assume.

     That is one of the times I have seen something strange in the sky. It was the most dramatic.  Glad
what I saw that particular night has not  repeated on those many dark nights I drove home from Denver
in recent years from Limon to Rocky Ford, another long stretch of very lonely road.

People go and seasons change

        I have not been over to Tank and Tummy the last few days as it will be all different now.

        Marty's little 14 foot trailer out in the country, next to his big house that needs a lot of work, is now empty for good.  Marty passed away more than a week ago and about two weeks after his operation.  We were told the operation went well and he recovered fast, but he remained at the hospital and had turned down chemo.

     He always said when a cancer gets operated on it then spreads like fire. That is how it happened with his late wife. And that is how his played out.  He had been debating not to have the operation and just have a longer life.

      Marty was always at T and T convenience store and takeout, as it was his living room.  Last summer I spent several afternoons with him sitting in the lone little booth outside the front window.  And we would watch the world go by and chat with the occasional tourist who dropped in for gas.  We would admire their Cam Am. Though the first time one pulled in Marty said do you see that, and I said yes, referring to the shapely gal who got off the bitch seat.  But Marty had been referring to the tri-wheel bike.

      We would talk to the tourists, ask where they were from and where going as they refueled their vehicle and went in to refuel themselves or empty themselves.  We would congratulate the bow hunters hauling their trophy heads home in the trailer behind their SUV.

       He would usually go home to his trailer the hottest part of the day and sit in front of a fan and rest
to come back around dusk to take up the evening conversation.  If I stopped by at T and T, he would
usually be there, at least one person to anchor the visit and talk.  Craig and old Charley are buddied
up and often drive out to the Keller district to look for deer. Don comes by mid afternoon and then
usually leaves, especially when Marty or Jerry would show up. Jerry comes infrequently and erratically
because he has his cow chores.  In any event, the past months he has been talking about a growing
operation with Tony, in response to Colorado's new recreational smoking law.  But I think Jerry is just kidding while I think Tony is more serious.

       Over the past winter though there were times when all of us would  hung together and have  nice conversation...but now the same stories are being told...and so nothing lasts for ever and seasons come and seasons go and the locals too need to have the outsiders turn over  so they can have new outsiders for amusement as that is the only change they have in their lives.  the ones who come and go while they stay.

       So I suppose I will just spend more evenings here at home, as I did today.  I put on a Coast to Coast show to listen to as I made dinner - I would rather eat my dinners in a timely manner anyway rather than go
visit til 7:30 or 8 and then come home and eat late.  I can see my life unwinding here as the universe
nudges me on to be somewhere else, anywhere else.  That is a trait of the Scotch Irish.  We tend to
move around a lot.  Restless.

      And even though a tourist might think the prairie is all the same. It isn't.  And it is.

      A few years ago I was in the Bureau of Reclamation Office at John Martin Reservoir and I stopped to admire the prairie view outside a window.  A federal employee said I had obviously been here a while. I asked how he knew and he said new comers see the land as flat and do not notice the little undulations and rises that give a piece of the prairie its own unique view. This particular view had a nice low bluff in the middle ground.  Not the Tetons, but something to admire when there is little to admire.

     Each little village in the prairie has its own collection of local characters and eccentrics.  In these parts, Marty was one of them.

    In the end, when he retired, he could not afford the utilities in the home he had raised his family in.  So he hooked up power to the small travel trailer, the same one he had drug up to the campgrounds west of Trinidad a few summers ago when he worked up there to escape the summer heat and earn a few summer dollars as a campground attendant.

     I never saw the inside of it, but someone who had said it was pretty small, with hardly room to turn around in it.  But that was Marty's home.  He lived in it during the scorching heat of summer and during the freezing cold of the prairie winters.

     He had a small fridge and I guess a stove burner, and a radio. He would listen to Texas radio stations all night and the next day would have a new set of knowledge about Texas events, and national events, with a Texas viewpoint.

     I suggested he get a small TV so he could watch games but he said he did not have a ledge big enough to put one on.

    One might call this a Spartan life, but it did not seem so to Marty.  And in the last election he was as ardent a Mitt Romney supporter as anyone. He truly identified with the rugged individualism of the super rich who put so many out of jobs to pocket their wages as asset rejiggering profits.

    Marty was devastated when Mitt lost.  More devastated at having to pay me off three small coffee bets because 'Bama had won, the Dems had retained the Senate, and gained ground in the House.  He did not speak to me for several weeks after that except to rail at me and 'Bama and our treachery.

    As I calmly explained, the presidential contest had been between two shades of darkness, with 'Bama the paler shade, which is why I had signed on with him.

    It was a few weeks after that, about the time he made his annual visit up north to visit a stepson and stay in a real nice house for a few weeks, that Marty started to have pain in his side.

     He thought it was a reaction to him taking too much medication for a stomach ache.  But in the end it turned out to be much worse than that.

    Another one of the prairie characters has moved on, changing into a ghost that now blows along with the breeze, causing ripples of waves in the tall grass, as it moves along.