Journey to the Middle of Nowhere

You could live forever without knowing the secret lives of your next door neighbors, let alone the lives of people in a tiny town three hours west of Denver. That is, until you discover they somehow know you. This is how I ended up in the wilds of Colorado, tramping around streets that haven’t changed since horse and buggy days, peering through the locked gates of condemned ghost towns.

If you drive west on I-70, past luxurious ski resorts and between red clay mountains, around forgotten mining towns and down highway exits only locals follow, you’ll eventually find yourself in a town that lives in centuries past, present, and future. This is New Castle, Colorado. This little town once huddled meekly in the valley but is now spreading boldly to the foot of the mountains, with the multi-colored roofs of new housing developments stretching out over the meadows where elk used to roam. Hundreds of families have already moved in, and across the street from the home where my cousin’s family lives, a foundation and a pile of dirt mark the future existence of yet another family. The houses are shiny, with that new carpet smell, designer colors against an earthen background. Black roads to nowhere circle the development, the asphalt so fresh that pebbles of it speckle the concrete shoulders. And yet, just over the ridge, the old mining town sits, unaware that behind its back it has sprouted a suburbia of children who are already forgetting its history.

My cousin’s family is a mix of people who know Colorado inside and out and who have been seeking out their lost history for many years, and children who are growing and whose interest lies in jewelry and video games and television. This isn’t to say these kids don’t embody a little of the spirit of the woods in them. When they aren’t playing video games they’re doing archery and practicing rifle shooting and fencing. I don’t think you can grow up on ten acres of backwoods Colorado and not absorb some of the mountains. The kids now live in a standard, two-story suburban home, and although they’ve had to give up their horses and pigs, they still have the two dogs and one very neurotic parrot.

The miracle of this trip is that through my two cousins I have discovered their mother, a great aunt of mine who, before she took on her husband’s English surname, sported the very familiar last name Mignone. Great Auntie isn’t doing so well, however, being 83 years old and recovering from a recent heart attack. It’s unfortunate that a medical disaster alerted me to the fact that I even have a long lost family, but the good news is that I was able to visit before things got worse.

Great Auntie has a caretaker during the day for when one of her daughters is at work. Her caretaker is a New Castle original, or at least as original as you can be in an aging town. She gave us a tour of her home, built in the 1800s as two homes that were later joined by carving a hole in the walls between them. “This is a shotgun entrance,” she remarks, “because when you come in the front door you can see all the way out through the back door.” The implication here, then, is that you come home in the evenings with your shotgun cocked and ready. The house sports unusual angles in every room and in the ceiling lines, furnishings as old as time itself, and the history of the owner’s late husband, a physicist and artist. Strange, Picasso-esque paintings of abstract heads smoking pipes and girls with flowers adorn one room. Next to a door are two tall bookshelves of novels and academic texts with tattered spines and dusty pages, everything from the Hardy Boys collection to theories of relativity. Through the back door is a sitting room turned sewing room (why sit when you can sew?), a tangle of lace caught in a machine, and a far closet through which one can glimpse an army of hanging blazers with patched elbows and suits in varying shades of blue, brown, and gray. The caretaker’s bed rises high above the hardwood floors, evading the drafts that crept under doors back when the house was built, and that probably still visit even today. Outside the bedroom bay window is the fury of a liberated and unkempt garden. Vines spill from an old claw foot tub and apple blossoms burst from an overgrown tree. Flowers creep out of discarded tires, wind their way around a lopsided chicken shed, and fill the underside of a sky blue pickup truck that has since faded to a powdery azure. I picked through the backyard, snapping photos of this world lost in time and place, far off the highway where the cars zip by in a whirl of dust, crumbled glass, and disregard.

Two doors down from this home that Great Auntie’s caretaker lives in is the town museum itself, a house not much bigger than hers in which reside perfectly preserved relics of the town’s history, all donated by residents long deceased. There are ancient typewriters and cameras that fan open like accordions, adding machines with bright red and green buttons, sepia toned photographs of schoolhouses and mining operations, newspaper clippings with dog-eared corners, knitting, cougar pelts, and a life-size Indian mannequin with long, black braids. In the back room are rusty farm implements and a painstakingly arranged period kitchen with a glazed turquoise stove and table settings adorned with blue flowers. The centerpiece of the room is an enormous key collection that hangs on both walls. The caretaker explains that this collection was donated by a town resident who had saved the keys for over eighty years. These keys are the kind you find on a jailer’s ring, long, tarnished rods of metal with a jagged tooth or two hanging off the end of each. Old padlocks and key chains dangle between the many clusters of keys on each wooden board. Like a miniature forgotten Smithsonian, the building was possibly full of priceless artifacts, yet the town, small and changing as it was, had no one with the time to keep the doors open to the public.

Past the keys and behind the museum, in a small, hairy fenced lot with tall grasses, is the original town jail. It’s a cubical structure, put together from many uneven beige blocks and a slanted wooden door. Here and there the builders remembered to put in tiny, square portholes for light and ventilation. Inside, the building is dark as a tomb, and only the flash from my camera illuminated the dank space enough to give us a fleeting peek at the misshapen, barred, iron doors of two cells. Out in the yard is a hand-drawn hose cart and a gas pump whose price gauge, with only two digits, is permanently stuck at 49 cents a gallon. My cousin’s 11 year old daughter darted about the small yard, inspecting the inside of the jail and scrutinizing the gas pump and other relics. It reminded me that all you need to do to interest a child in something is to show interest in it yourself. The results are not always immediately obvious, but that spark of interest can be rekindled years later into a lifelong passion. When I was a kid, my father was constantly taking my brother and me to train museums and military plane displays. Terribly bored at the time, I complained bitterly to my mother that we wanted to go to Disneyland and that dad only took us to places that he liked. Twenty years later I am driving the Trans-Canada and skid to a stop in the shoulder gravel and leap out of my car to photograph a bold, blue train chugging along the green horizon of Saskatchewan. Purportedly this is to show my father when I return to California, but I know now that I harbor a covert penchant for the arches of train bridges against mountain backdrops and the wave of an engineer as his train disappears under the highway overpass from which I watch and wave back. Never doubt that your passion can’t change the way someone else views the world.

You may wonder what there is to do for three days in a town like New Castle, once you’ve already visited the town museum, town hall, and your Great Auntie’s caretaker’s backyard. There isn’t a whole lot, although I’m becoming a much better adventurer than I used to be. Traveling alone has that singular itching effect that causes you to leave the house to discover what you think others may never have seen. I stayed with Great Auntie for several hours while the family was out, and found that she didn’t like “Little House on the Prairie” but was perfectly happy watching “Shenandoah” on the Hallmark channel. I promptly fell asleep. When my cousin returned with the caretaker, we left Great Auntie asleep in her recliner (I guess the Hallmark channel works its magic on everyone) and took the two overweight black labs out for a “walk.”

If you leave the safety of the suburbs and travel out to the hills behind downtown, a “walk” instantly turns into a “hike” and you don’t venture out without at least your boots on. We took the dogs into the hills and they romped through the vegetation, hopping over tumbleweed and slaloming around trees. The trail behind the town was sadly dealing with erosion from hikers blazing their own paths, along with the intense rain of what the locals termed the “muddy season.” As we neared the top, two black labs became three and we realized we had picked up a mangy, frizzy haired dog with a look of the wilderness in him. And sure enough, right out of Call of the Wild came his owner, a red-bearded man with a plaid shirt, jeans, and yellowing boots with rubber tan soles. The only indication that we were not in the Yukon were the iPod headphone wires that disappeared into his vest. I was convinced that this was the closest to a real mountain man I would ever meet. He told us that he lived behind Rifle Falls for many years before moving to New Castle. There is in fact, a town called Rifle that is 16 miles west of New Castle. Rifle Falls, however, is in a state park that is itself 16 miles north of the town of Rifle, in a place I affectionately term The Middle of Nowhere™. The Middle of Nowhere™ is actually many different places, and these places can change depending on personal perception and circumstance. Since I had already spent a day in New Castle I had decided that there must be other Middle of Nowheres™ and that New Castle wasn’t so bad since I was going to be there at least until Wednesday afternoon.

Mountain Man asked about our dogs and my cousin discussed them cheerily, even though I was mildly embarrassed about our pudgy suburban pooches around his sleek, sinewy, and rough-edged hound that he said “grew up in the woods behind Rifle Falls.” Wild and roaming is in fact how dogs were meant to live, and Mountain Man’s dog showed all the health and rich color of a dog who grew up free. He pointed out that his dog was in fact the same age as our older dog, whose breathing was labored and who limped occasionally with arthritis and the extra weight she carried. His dog looked more like our 3 year old, running and rolling and traversing the mountainside like a surefooted goat.

Mountain Man lamented the housing developments that had sprouted behind the town, and said that he was moving to Idaho to escape encroaching civilization. “Elk used to roam free in that meadow back there,” he said, “but now it’s all houses.” I wasn’t sure how to respond. Our family lived in those houses, right on top of a square of grass on which perhaps a doe had nursed her calf. I decided that verbalizing this imagery was not in anyone’s best interest, and we waved goodbye as he and his four-legged trail partner rounded the bend down the hillside.

My cousin and I tried with mixed results to photograph ourselves on self-timer without a tripod and with two dogs who found it just fascinating that we would sit on the ground at their level so they could stick their noses in our faces. I’ve posted the best result of our efforts. The mountain to the left of us in the background is nicknamed “fire mountain.” A former source of vast amounts of coal, the mountain now sports a long, closed scar from mining operations that had to be abandoned when the mine caught fire. The inside of the mountain has been burning ever since, and from what I’ve read, ignited coal mines can easily burn for 10,000 years.

On the Wednesday I was packing to head to the airport, my visit was cut shorter than expected when my cousin panicked and Great Auntie had to head to the hospital in an ambulance (she was later found to be just fine). My other cousin has in fact been taking Great Auntie to the hospital in her own car, but with her away at work mayhem ensued and everyone but the caretaker and I were left in the quiet house at noon on a weekday. I had been volunteered to take my cousin’s rental car back to the airport, and instructed to visit the town of Gilman on the way there if I had time. “Gilman is where your father lived,” my cousin said, and then I realized that the trains, the mountains, and the snow all so ingrained in my father’s memories were actually fragments of this tiny mining town in the middle of Colorado.

I headed out in the rented Jeep Grand Cherokee and drove through what I had missed during my sleepy van ride out from the airport. I passed acres of horse farms where lazy horses stretched out on their sides in the lush grass, rivers winding in valleys between copper cliffs, and empty ski resorts where the brown dirt of summer was slowly breaking through the slushy snow of spring. Sixty-five miles into my journey I reached the Minturn exit off I-70. Minturn was also a former mining town that has since taken up the mail that used to go to Gilman. Like New Castle, it balances precariously between its past and present, with a downtown like the Old West out of a children’s picture book and a neighborhood of newly built ski condos further upriver. A switchback high into the mountains starts at the end of town, and here the seasons seem never to have changed. Evergreen forests stand frosted in white, and slivers of snow dart haphazardly through the heavy gray sky. I stopped at a turnout to take a picture and pulled my fleece from the back seat after seeing that the dashboard thermometer read 45°F.

I nearly missed Gilman on the way up. When Eagle Mine was designated a Superfund site in 1984, the town of Gilman, on the edge of a 600 foot cliff, was abandoned. A chained gate now blocks the main road into town, and a sign warns of “hidden and visible dangers,” “hazards associated with abandoned mining works,” and “unstable geology,” among other perils. I was literally jolted to see the houses on the side of the mountain, looking just as they had in photos on the web, hidden among an overgrown wood and dusted with snow. Like an episode out of the Twilight Zone, the town sat unchanged no matter the season in the valley below. Further up the road, the drama of this ghost town on a cliff was more clearly defined. From an overlook on highway 24 I could see the remains of the town clinging desperately to the eroding cliff, along with flattened wooden houses flaking into earth and empty residences with their windows still half open, at one time to let in a cool summer breeze. I yearned to climb down into the valley and up into the town, but my ignorance surrounding the town layout and fear of getting caught when I had a flight home in four hours prevented me.

My father later told me he knew all the back roads into town from his childhood spent there, and I imagined using that secret knowledge to emerge from dense shrubbery and experience a view of the town that no one had seen in twenty-three years. I was able to do that to some extent, for when I returned home my father showed me the scans of his slides containing photos he had taken over forty years earlier of Gilman, its colorful houses well-kept and flourishing, and its mining operations in full swing.

There’s a facet of both sadness and beauty to the evolution of a town. Maybe a town never really dies, just like someone you love never really dies — they reemerge in the trees and the mountains and the snow and your photographs and memories, at times changed and at times the same, but somehow forever preserved.