Sanctuary
Michael Bell, 8/31/24
We live in a place that is a sanctuary,
a consecrated outdoor space
where we take refuge and shelter,
not to escape from Nature,
but to clutch into her
warm embrace.
Many now are drawn here to flee a
country that seemingly has lost community,
basic civility, its sense of common decency,
and just being plain old-fashioned neighborly.
That at least is the story we here
proudly have written of ourselves,
likely underestimating the rest,
congratulating ourselves as the
best.
Yet lest we forget, Crested Butte’s town
website provides a helpful History,
which upfront in sentence two
acknowledges that this area was
originally
aboriginal,
the sanctum of the Ute Indians.
That second sentence sums up their
entire history, written by the victors
over a predecessor people,
vanquished,
vanished,
erased from this place.
Not so the early Anglo-Saxon coal miners,
followed by Greeks, Slovenians,
Italians, and Croatians, a community
of immigrants who came not to play,
but to work in a company town.
Despite the Jokerville Mine exploding
in January 1884, killing sixty-three,
and strikes with little success in
1891, 1913, and 1927, when wages were cut,
they worked and stayed.
Six percent of coal miners died from
the misnamed Spanish Flu—so-called
because neutral Spain’s press
did not suppress or censor in war
its global progress—after the first
recorded case at an Army base in Kansas.
Gunnison fared better than the rest by
locking down, preemptively quarantining
voluntarily—or else—any
entering or returning.
One hundred years later in an election year
conducted amid anti-science smears,
it was déjà vu, with our undervalued
Public Health Director holding fast
in the face of death threats and
letters from the indicted Texas A.G.,
ordering visitors to Go home,
and strongly encouraging non-resident
owners the same for the demonstrated
greater good.
COVID-19 changed a lot
not only everywhere else, but here:
people had to stay home,
people had to work,
and what better place to do both
than here in our sacred site,
where beleaguered educators
continued to toil and deliver
with no housing they could afford,
meanwhile wasting time warding
off the book banners also around,
who prefer anonymity to transparency
in the words they want me not
to see.
Once discovered you could have it all,
live in our remote Paradise
while working remotely,
the cute and historic cabins
were history, giving way to
huge homes on large lots
with spectacular views,
not permanently occupied,
except by the puzzled wildlife
in whose own sanctuary
we increasingly
encroach.
So even here we are not
immune from pandemics,
the entitled superrich displacing
the miserable mere millionaires,
bridges that break and displace,
no place to live, no place to hide,
a ton of trouble which we abide.
More than ever the world
is on the move, for the same things
that moved our immigrant forebears,
and now more, as our angry Mother
implores us to not ignore her but to
heal and restore.
We decry insecure borders while
on the lookout for scarce workers,
don’t see obvious connections,
and are glad when we find them
though they speak a different tongue.
Too many hedge fund managers,
not enough real workers—
literally, we have come full circle.
Our sanctuary remains but is changing,
as it always has, and always will,
but if lucky enough and with some pluck—
it took a fifty-year village
uprising to save Red Lady—
we may manage not to preside
over its complete demise.
After all, the tales told by the
tailings could not foresee mines
abandoned and replaced by
bikes and skis.
There is no guarantee how long
this haven lasts just as there is no
inevitability to imperfect democracy.
Those who know and love this land,
the ranchers and farmers and hunters,
understand that the climate’s changed.
We can go on permanent vacation
and bury our heads in the sand,
or do something, take a stand, for this
glorious, hallowed land.
Michael Bell is a retired disability attorney. Since 2017 he has lived in CB South to be near grandchildren Dylan & Naomi, to engage with GVC3, play pickleball, and write.
