Farm or travel? That’s been the choice I’ve made every summer for the last decade or so. The two options are basically mutually exclusive, or as I’ve often said: “Farming is the opposite of traveling.” This year I picked the first one, and I spent the agricultural season in Paonia, a small town on Colorado’s Western Slope.

The Western Slope takes up a third of Colorado’s area, but contains only 10% of its human population, though also 70% of its water [citation]. All of the region is within the greater Colorado River Basin, and so is part of that system’s ongoing water crisis (more on that later). Paonia is located in the valley of the North Fork of the Gunnison River, which flows into the Gunnison, is joined by the Uncompahgre in the town of Delta, and then merges with the Colorado River in the city of Grand Junction. The Gunnison also carves out the spectacular Black Canyon, which you can visit in the National Park of the same name.

The region is high desert, and is ecologically part of the Southwest rather than the eastern part of that state, where the grasses of the Great Plains lap up on the foothills of the Rockies, and where the population centers of Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, etc., sprawl. The landscape is made up of windswept mesas and arid “badlands” cut through by narrow, Cottonwood-filled canyons or wide verdant river valleys, in which the roads also run, often following preceding rail corridors. Ever present, now marching along the horizon, now looming near, are the sawtoothed ridges of various mountain ranges, threaded by passes with hairpin switchbacks and no guardrails (the better for plows to push off snow in the winter).

Oak, Juniper and Piñon woodlands cloak their slopes in succession from foothill to treeline, with Aspen colonies at higher elevation. Thrust out westward from the Rockies like a long tongue is the Grand Mesa, the largest flat-topped mountain in the world (!), and the backdrop to my summer.

The most prominent geological feature in my daily life was Mount Lamborn, which is locally referred to just as “Lamborn” or sometimes “the Lamborn.” Whenever I raised my head from transplanting or weeding, it’s what I saw.

The distinctive white mark over half-way up is alternately likened to a lamb, buffalo or llama. Some people associate “lamb” with the peak’s name, but that actually comes from Robert H. Lamborn (1835-1895), a railroad man who is euphemistically described as an “anthropologist” because he acquired colonial and “prehistoric” (read “indigenous”) objects now displayed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art [citation]. Other people associate “buffalo” with the Ute name for the peak, “White Buffalo Mountain,” though they might not have been referring to the mark, since white buffaloes are otherwise held sacred as well.

Speaking of the Utes, they held the Western Slope until 1880, when the US broke an 1868 treaty with them and drove them out to Utah and the southernmost part of Colorado. Whites had already been invading after gold was discovered, and when Utes resisted efforts by missionaries to force them to adopt Christianity and agriculture, federal troops were called in. The Ute Removal Act of 1880 stole twelve million acres. The Colorado Governor at the time, Frederick Walker Pitkin (1837-1886) was an adamant proponent of “Indian removal” and he is honored with the name, “Pitkin Mesa,” the location of the farm I worked on.

1880 is a rather late date for such a large-scale theft. California, for example, though further west, had already been over-run for decades at that point. This is really only four generations in the past. Not ancient history by any means, and the crime still felt fresh to me. Fresh enough that the complaints of North Fork Valley residents about “newcomers” from the Front Range sounded shrill in my ears.

Paonia is on that list of groovy rural locales like Asheville in North Carolina, Twisp in Washington, Williams in Oregon, Grass Valley in California (and everywhere in Vermont?) that attract denizens of the hippie and primitive skills crowds, and more recently the remote-work professionals. The result is a sprinkling of earnest agriculturalists, forager/hunter/roadkill scavengers, and well-heeled New Age devotees mixing with old school ranchers, farmers and church folk. Though in the case of Paonia, the hippie influence dates back fifty years now, so they’re arguably “old school” too. The town is also distinguished as the birthplace, childhood home and gravesite of famed psychonaut Terence McKenna, who was traditional by no one’s definition, and as the headquarters of the High Country News, one of the nation’s premier environmental publications. So it’s still a place in an increasingly placeless society.

Paonia and the whole valley are famous for fruit. Stone fruit like peaches, apricots and cherries are big crops, as well as apples and plums. Big B’s is a famous orchard which distributes their hard and soft cider regionally. I’d often stop in on my Friday to buy a half gallon of freshly pressed juice, and start drinking it right out of the container as I walked out. So delicious! I also dehydrated a bunch of fruit for future enjoyment. I foraged wild Saskatoons and Buffalo Berries to dry whole and also processed many peaches and plums into fruit leather. I have enough to last me through next year’s fruit season, wherever I end up being then.

I appreciated about Paonia its lack of any chain stores. No McDonald’s. No Starbucks. No Dollar General. And unlike most small towns in the US interior, a downtown without a single empty storefront. I’d park on the main street to do some shopping and wouldn’t bother to lock my truck or even roll up my windows. People say hi on the sidewalk whether or not they know each other and hold the door open for the next person; definitely a congenial environment.

Of course, I’m white and was dressed to fit in (baseball cap, sleeveless t-shirt, work pants) so I didn’t stand out. But my friend who twice brought black out-of-town guests around suffered some graceless interactions. Sure, there’s plenty of Latinos in the valley given how agricultural the it is, but they (“they”) have their own communities and don’t hang out much in downtown Paonia. Fwiw I heard more than one person talk admiringly about how hard “the Mexicans” work, which was much appreciated since, it was claimed, “nobody [nobody white, by implication] wants to work anymore.” (A tired old myth.) In any given year, roughly 50% of the US agricultural work force is undocumented foreign-born, with a further percentage being above-the-table non-citizens with proper paperwork (an H-2A work visa).

What the “nobody wants to work anymore” people apparently forget is that most agricultural work is seasonal, obviously, and for that reason impractical for covering rent, bills and other expenses that are year-round. I mean, duh. Of course farming ends up depending on people who are only in the country part time. Yes, I personally get away with that schedule, but my lifestyle is highly atypical because I generally manage to avoid rent. My work arrangement in Paonia this year included housing at no monetary cost to me. I’m fortunate to have sufficient agricultural knowledge and skills that I can angle for such deals, and privileged enough to know people who can offer them which, again, is atypical. Although I must mention that I’m not as young as I once was (having been born on the 25^th anniversary of D-Day) so my most energetic and productive years are behind me.

As ICE raids ratcheted up around the US, the Western Slope was not untouched. I heard about “round-ups” in Montrose. A “sobriety stop” was set up outside Ridgway one day, but tellingly at the end of the work day, not bar close. The target was brown laborers not drunks. As I watched videos of anti-ICE pushback in Los Angeles and other cities, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to spend next summer in a little farm town somewhere. Positive energies are rising to oppose the fascist wave, and I want to be part of that resistance in places where it’s active.

The Western Slope is conservative AF. This is the region that put Lauren Boebert in Congress. As a gay man, I didn’t feel safe sometimes. From what I gleaned through Grindr, most queer men there are in the closet, which does weird things to people over time. Around midsummer I realized I wasn’t immune to that myself, if I wasn’t careful. I grew up in Nebraska so I understand right wing attitudes. I don’t respect them. Quite the opposite, I find them abhorrent. There’s been far too much willingness (which is to say, any at all) to compromise with such attitudes from political “moderates” on Team D. Unfortunately, history has played out this way before, where “centrists”—being unwilling to question capitalism like those to their left do—will throw in with the fascists. We’re seeing it again here. It’s sickening and infuriating.

Meanwhile, never in the forefront of the news it seems, is the continuing debasement of the more-than-human world. Colorado, as a western state, is on the front line of multiple ecological crises.

Cows

Cows are ubiquitous, from the valley pastures to the mountain meadows and everywhere in between. As in other Western states, the public lands are suffering grievous abuse. Cow pies on trails are the least of it; worse are the degradation of streams and riparian areas, the wiping out of vegetation, the compaction of the ground, the killing of predators, the endless barbed wire, etc. Few people are aware that animal agriculture is the most widespread purveyor of violence on ecology in the West. Most of the land west of the Rockies is simply too arid to support cows without significant harm and if our society was sensible we’d drastically reduce or stop it, at least on public lands, which comprise only 1.6% of all forage for beef. In other words, wildlife habitat is being annihilated for an utterly insignificant portion of the industry. It’s obscene, yet defended as “heritage” (an increasingly right-wing coded word). Plus, 20-25% of all beef is wasted annually in the US, meaning we are currently over-producing it. That’s one-in-five to one-in-four cows per year that are raised and killed for nothing.

Neither corporate political party has ever been a true environmental champion of public lands (though the best president might have been… Nixon??), but under the current administration, the assault from ranching is about to get worse. According to the Western Watersheds Project, “a new federal “Beef Industry Plan” reveals how the administration intends to expand grazing, weaken oversight, and lock in subsidies that keep cattle on failing western public lands.” Read their whole explanation of this egregious grab, and also their article about how the government shut-down is making matters worse: “When the Watchdogs Are Furloughed, the Cows Roam Free.”

I’ll doubtless be returning to the subject of public lands grazing in future essays, not only because it’s a horror show, but also for what it symbolizes. For now suffice it to say that in Colorado, it’s a bad scene.

Coal

Train tracks run through Paonia and it’s such a small town that not all of the crossings have gates. Some are just marked with stop signs, so if you’re stupid, there’s nothing stopping you from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There’s something refreshing about the freedom and responsibility of that.

By contrast, there’s nothing refreshing about the trains’ cargo, which is coal. Whether it comes from the active mine just a few minutes drive up the into the mountains I don’t know, but more than once a day, these toxic loads rumble through town. For safety reasons (specifically to avoid combustion), coal cars are open topped, which means some amount of dust has been distributed along the steel rails for decades. I wouldn’t want to garden right next to the tracks, that’s for sure.

The regular sound of a train is one of those things that’s easy to stop consciously hearing after you’ve been around it for awhile, and sometimes, when my ears did perk up at the horns—which can be heard throughout the valley because of its natural acoustic qualities—I was reminded of all the times I must have ignored them. One night, close to midnight, after returning from some friends’ yurt, the sound of the train stood out starkly in the otherwise quiet night like a single jagged streak of white on an otherwise empty black canvas. In a rare moment of poetic description, I turned on my laptop and wrote this about 10 minutes:

The train is running through this valley tonight
close enough to hear the rattling on the rails
and the rumble of the engine.
The horn rises above the crickets in the grass
and the frogs in the pond
blaring out from the flats
and echoing on the hills.
The open-topped cars carry coal
—I know from seeing them many times in daylight—
heaped like black sugar in tin cans.
The tracks follow the river
down from the narrows above
and out into the badlands below.
A great robbery in motion
from subterranean seams
to some furnace somewhere
to be belched into the sky,
a sky streaked by the Milky Way
and traversed by the waning moon
between thunderclouds,
a sky where I saw a falling star last night
and made a wish for change.
Once a prophet of “progress”
this machine is now a ghost
of a dying dream.

Water

Drought conditions were prevalent through much of the Southwest this summer. Some of the irrigation ditches in Paonia and the surrounding valley ran dry before the end of the agricultural season. On the farm where I worked, the water was turned off in mid-August because the canal that serves it was no longer flowing. Fortunately, the crops were stout medicinal herbs, most of them perennial—not touchy vegetables—so the majority made it without showing visible signs of stress, though doubtless some stalled out that otherwise would’ve grown more.

The system of ditches in the valley goes back a century. They are unlined, gravity fed, and are sourced through river diversions or from reservoirs. A complicated system of claims dictates where parcels get their water, how often and for how long. As with water rights everywhere in the West, it’s first-come, first-served, use-it-or-lose-it, with the oldest users having priority. Not counting long-standing pre-colonial indigenous use of water of course. Which is incredibly perverse.

Historically, the Colorado River Basin’s flow was heavy in the spring following mountain snowmelt, and then low the rest of the year, fed only by summer rains. After settlers invaded, they quickly found this didn’t work well for agriculture, which depends on water all season, so a vast number of dams and reservoirs were built, across several states, impounding the spring flow to be dispensed more gradually over the summer. These projects continued to be constructed through the middle of the 20^th Century, with some contributing to power generation and human water supplies as well as farming. Lake Powell and Lake Mead, behind the Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams respectively, are famous components.

As a feat of engineering, this system is quite impressive. As a factor affecting ecology, it’s been catastrophic.

• Hundreds of thousands of acres of land were drowned under artificial lakes, wiping out wildlife habitat, vegetation, indigenous cultural sites and natural beauty.
• Halting the springs flood disrupted the reproductive cycles of Cottonwoods and willows, the most common woody species in the river system. Both depended on the spring pulse of water to distribute their seeds, and far fewer seedlings successfully took.
• Falling water tables below dams also adversely affected Cottonwoods, willows and other riparian vegetation, whose roots could no longer reach liquid sustenance.
• Irrigation throughout the entire system that percolates down through fields into the water table and thence back into rivers introduces “salts” to the water (which include calcium, magnesium, potassium, sulfate and bicarbonate in addition to sodium and chloride). This increased salinity affects aquatic life and shoreline vegetation as well as crops downriver and equipment for irrigation, drinking water, etc.
• Riparian areas along the way shrank or dried out as they were no longer being fed sufficient water. That’s less habitat and food for innumerable animals, birds and insects.

As Cottonwoods, willows and other species declined, some of the space was taken up by Tamarisk and Russian Olive trees. These species do not depend on spring floods for reproduction, have deeper roots, are better adapted to drought, and are more tolerant of saline water. So, widespread human disruption of the Colorado River basin fundamentally changed the ecological status so it was less suited to some species (who happened to be native) and more suited to others (who happened to be introduced). The latter species have been villainized as “invasives” which of course is absurd. They did not, like an army, march in and take over. Rather, they opportunistically took advantage of an opening that was made for them by intense, industrial-scale disturbance. (As regular readers will know, I give no credence to the “invasive plant” narrative.)

Wrap-up