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HUGO — While kids meander among the stacks at the Hugo Public Library, 5-year-old Letty Nuffer sits cross-legged at a table concentrating on her language skills using a borrowed laptop computer that displays a fun video to show her how to pronounce consonant blends.

Thanks to a pilot project in telehealth, Letty can access therapy for her speech delay without a four-hour round trip to Denver for an in-person appointment. By checking out an equipment kit designed to facilitate a wide range of health care consultations, Letty’s mom, Kali Nuffer, can connect directly with her therapist as well as to specially designed video lessons.

The library, already an almost daily destination for Nuffer’s family, now has become the conduit for virtual doctor’s appointments for all four of her kids — just one more service that the facility offers beyond the traditional resources for residents on the Eastern Plains. Kristin Allen, the library’s director, says this year’s addition of telehealth has started to become, well, contagious.

“I’ve had several people recently call and say, ‘How can I do this? How can I get one of those kits?’” she says. “Just come down and get a library card. That’s all you need.” 

For many Coloradans, today’s library card unlocks a lot more than books or even an ever-expanding array of digital material available from 113 public library jurisdictions across the state — and that’s particularly significant for relatively far-flung rural communities whose smaller systems account for nearly 75% of the total.

The way libraries serve the public has evolved significantly over the last several years — a trend that only accelerated during the COVID pandemic, says State Librarian Nicolle Davies. She notes that libraries “leaned into technology” for the entire range of patrons, whether that involved teaching grandparents how to use video chat apps, preparing job seekers for a 21st-century workforce or helping kids advance their digital literacy.

“For years, we were really freaked out that everybody identifies us as just books, but we’re so much more,” Davies says. “And the reality is we’ve been in the (digital) space long enough now that we’re comfortable saying, ‘Yeah, we are still about books and we’re about all these other things as well.’ So it’s very surprising when people visit libraries today and find out what we’re doing and what we have, because the perception still can be outdated and antiquated.”

The pandemic necessitated a number of innovations that worked around COVID restrictions, and many of those remain. Davies, who lives in Douglas County, recalls checking out a meat-smoking kit from her local library that came complete with recipes and seasonings. She also checked out an outdoor version of the block-stacking game Jenga for the family to play.

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“There were just so many ways that the library got really creative on how to provide services to people during the pandemic,” she says.

The pandemic also elevated the role of libraries when it came to digital resources like ebooks, audiobooks, streaming movies and music, notes Sherri Baca, executive director of the Pueblo City-County Library District. She said her district reallocated its 2020 budget to pump up funding to digital vendors, embracing the “library at home” concept that meant buying fewer hard-copy books in order to meet the needs of homebound patrons with digital offerings.

“Readers are reading, but the formats are a little different, which is great,” Baca says. “I think that that’s what libraries are supposed to do, move with the times and be very relevant to our users, and get them what they need when they need it.”

That credo has provided scaffolding for public libraries’ ongoing evolution, a transformation forged in times of a devastating virus and deafening political noise — both challenging factors as library workers face burnout on one hand and, on the other, an invigorating reimagining of their role. Pushing back against the headwinds of censorship, libraries have sought to serve as patches in the social safety net, channels closing the distance between patrons and health care, and myriad other functions — while still navigating the shifting demands for information and entertainment in all its digital and analog forms.

Digital content use was escalating even before the pandemic, and COVID ratcheted the demand even higher. But for the Denver Public Library, there’s still high interest not only in bound books, but also older media formats such as CDs and DVDs, which remain popular among those who may not have access to the latest streaming technology.

“We think that’s an equity issue,” says Michelle Jeske, the city librarian and executive director of the Denver Public Library. “A lot of people still don’t have high-speed internet access or may not have great devices for downloading ebooks or streaming videos. Some people might still have a VCR or a Blu-ray player, so we’re still seeing use of those formats. And that’s why we’re continuing to buy or support that part of our collection.”

The specter of censorship

In any format, library collections nationwide have become the target of challenges — some from individuals, others orchestrated by politically motivated groups that have brought issues surrounding intellectual freedom prominently into the public discourse.

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Colorado isn’t without its conflicts, but has been far less affected than many other states. Still, lawmakers in the last legislative session passed a measure designed to reinforce the policies and procedures Colorado’s public libraries employ not only to acquire and use materials, but to deal with challenges to their content. 

James LaRue, executive director of the Garfield County Public Library District, has dealt with more than a thousand such challenges over a career in library management that includes stints as director of the Douglas County libraries as well as with the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. His book “On Censorship” explores the motives behind the challenges, which have come from across the political spectrum, and the dangers of book banning.

“It has gone from the one or two people that get upset by running across something in a library to being more centrally coordinated,” he says, noting that nationally many of the recent objections stemmed from both isolation during the pandemic that pulled some down conspiracy rabbit holes and political strategy aimed at motivating conservatives for the 2022 midterm elections — most often by objecting to books with LGBTQ content. 

Poll after poll says this is a deeply unpopular view, that 70% of either party is opposed to censorship. But why do they keep at it? Because it seems to work. It gets people riled up, and as always in America we are both obsessed with and repelled by sex.

— James LaRue, executive director of the Garfield County Public Library District

“Poll after poll says this is a deeply unpopular view, that 70% of either party is opposed to censorship,” LaRue says. “But why do they keep at it? Because it seems to work. It gets people riled up, and as always in America we are both obsessed with and repelled by sex.”

Although he notes that other states have experienced more frequent challenges, and have seen legislative efforts aimed at even criminalizing anyone who provides access to certain materials, about five states have passed what he calls “anti-censorship legislation.”

“Colorado,” he adds, “is a much happier environment.”

In particular, he notes the new state law’s emphasis on the “request for reconsideration” that challenges must go through that effectively slows the process and prevents knee-jerk reactions. The new law requires that library boards establish a written policy for reconsideration, and lists specific standards that, among several other things, require they consider the perspectives of marginalized groups.

Davies, the state librarian, says that the rancor that spills over from book challenges now appears to have gotten personal. For years, she recalls, surveys on the most trusted professions in America found librarians ranked near the top, along with firefighters. But in the last few years she has been troubled to hear the integrity of her peers disparaged, even if the spitefulness seems less prevalent in Colorado.

“We’re all librarians at the end of the day,” she says, “and so when institutions like the American Library Association are getting challenged, and everybody’s lumping our profession into having this agenda of grooming children and being pedophiles, it’s just been something I never thought I would have seen in this work.” 

The Pueblo district has had a request for reconsideration policy in effect for more than 10 years, and the passage of the new law required them to simply tweak the timeline for how often an item could be reconsidered, Baca says — from once in a 12-month period to once every two years, the most frequent allowed by the law.

Although she welcomes the attention to the issue of censorship, she estimates that in the nine years she’s been with the library system it has received only one or two requests per year for material to be reconsidered.

In Denver, Jeske estimates she sees “zero to one challenge a year — knock on wood.” Even before the new state law, DPL changed its policy to only allow Denver residents to challenge materials to block organized national challenges.

Providing a social safety net

The pandemic proved challenging in many ways, and its aftermath revealed all sorts of societal issues that had always been present but suddenly were exacerbated. Think homelessness, mental health issues and substance abuse, among others. And libraries, particularly in population centers, found themselves nudged to become more engaged when it comes to connecting those in need with social services.

“That’s nothing new, especially for the Denver Public Library being in this urban setting,” Jeske says. “I think the pandemic demonstrated to us and the community how vital we are as a public space and a place of access — for learning, for knowledge, for technology and connection to the world.”

Not to mention for clean water and a restroom.

Since 2015, the Denver Public Library has had at least one social worker on staff to serve that population. That lone hire nine years ago “seemed like a win,” Jeske says, but soon it became clear that one wouldn’t be enough. Now there’s a Community Resources team of at least 10 people, some of them “peer navigators,” people whose experience mirrors those they’re serving.

The team’s training has spilled over to the entire frontline staff so they’re better equipped to handle issues like security, de-escalation, mental health and first aid.

“We’re one of the pioneers in that space,” Jeske says.

Increasing concern over drug abuse at libraries surfaced early last year with a string of suburban Denver library closures over possible contamination from methamphetamine fumes. (There were no reports of patrons affected by exposure.) Contamination became an issue at one branch in the Pueblo district that required action to remediate exposure to the public, Baca says — though fortuitously, the branch was already scheduled to close for renovations. 

But just as libraries have adapted to community needs, they’ve also had to adopt safety measures. In Pueblo, that means installing environmental sensors in the restrooms that monitor the air in real time to detect potential hazards and immediately notify staff.

“A lot of preventative kinds of stuff,” Baca says, “and just being really active in making sure people understand what the library rules are.”

Pueblo’s library system saw another vehicle for meeting the community’s needs. Although most of the district’s facilities are clustered in the city, Baca launched the telehealth pilot in 2,000-population Colorado City, about a half-hour south of the city limits. Kits similar to the ones used in Hugo and elsewhere are available, with the added feature of a hot spot that can provide patrons mobile internet access in an area where service can be lacking — thanks in part to grant money from the Federal Communications Commission during the pandemic.

Pueblo recently received a $250,000 Mellon Foundation grant for a project aimed at collecting digital archives to preserve the local culture and history of areas that may not have the wherewithal to host the material themselves. As the regional hub for this effort, the Pueblo library will be reaching out to communities across southern Colorado to solicit audio, video or photo files that can be uploaded to help maintain the historical record.

She holds out both projects as evidence of the evolving state of public libraries as they match resources with pressing local concerns.

“So it goes back to the social supports,” Baca says. “Where are the gaps? Can the library be relevant?”

Digital literacy, broadband and health

Kieran Hixon suspected something was up when he took part in Gov. Jared Polis’ broadband initiative and learned that rural areas use telehealth at far lower rates than urban centers. The trend seemed counterintuitive, given the scarcity of medical services in rural areas.

A subsequent partnership with the state Office of eHealth Innovation explored melding telehealth services with libraries that, especially in small towns, are considered anchor institutions when it comes to broadband. And it turns out that one of the hurdles to implementing telehealth in those communities is digital literacy. 

Hixon, the rural and small library consultant within the state department of education, saw the gaps and immediately knew libraries could be relevant by combining their core mission — namely literacy, including the digital kind — and their unique ability to provide access to broadband in far-flung locations. He started calling around to small libraries to ask what they thought and found that while some were already hearing about patrons’ health concerns, they didn’t have the resources to assist them. 

“I called this one librarian and she says, ‘People are coming in, and I just don’t know how to help them. And I could sure use help to do it better,’” Hixon says. “I was like, OK, we’re onto something.”  

In partnership with Ashley Heathfield, a telehealth project manager at the Office of eHealth Innovation, Hixon combed data to find the counties with the worst health outcomes that were farthest from medical services. Then they targeted libraries in those counties and sent out an email to see who was interested.

Eventually 17 library jurisdictions, encompassing 24 buildings, signed on to the pilot project, which has been running for less than a year. Early findings include greater use of the in-library spaces than the kits. 

But in Hugo, director Allen began a “soft launch” last spring, and then started spreading the word. Two portable kits have been the most popular, with Allen scanning a barcode just as she would a book to check them out. Patrons normally have 24 to 48 hours to use the kits, though Allen remains flexible. She also fitted a mobile desk that patrons can roll into the library’s board room to use for in-library telehealth appointments with privacy.

Each kit contains a laptop computer with features like headphones with individual volume controls for the hard of hearing and large-print keyboards for the vision impaired, and an ergonomic mouse. It also includes a ring light, scale, blood pressure monitor (including cuff sizes from child to extra large adult), pulse oximeter and forehead thermometer. The kit includes a wireless hot spot to provide an internet connection to a health care provider.

Getting people to realize that libraries are available for more than just books is changing a thought process.

— Kristin Allen, Hugo Public Library director

Allen estimates that the portable kits get checked out five or six times a month, a gradual increase as the area’s “very traditional” population becomes familiar with telehealth as an option and gets used to the idea that their library can be a resource to pursue it.

“Getting people to realize that libraries are available for more than just books is changing a thought process,” Allen says. “They still get surprised when you say, ‘Oh, yeah, you can come in and make copies.’ And then you throw in being able to check out a telehealth kit, and they’re like, ‘A what?’ It’s just a whole new thing for a lot of people to wrap their heads around.”

Librarians going … and coming 

As libraries have undergone mind-bending changes, there’s been some evidence of burnout among librarians even as another generation has embraced the job for new reasons.

Davies, the state librarian, says she’s seen signs of burnout particularly among those frontline staff who deal directly with the public. She also notes what appears to be a mass retirement among those in library leadership roles, though it’s unclear whether that’s a response to librarians coming under attack over issues of content, the overarching lack of civility from the public or just demographics naturally thinning the ranks.

“Regardless of why it’s happening,” she says, “it is happening.” 

But she adds that a lot of younger people have been attracted to librarianship, prompting a spike within some programs as students seek advanced degrees in library and information science, because the shifting role of libraries has in some ways recast the profession as social justice work.

“It’s an equalizer in a community,” Davies says. “It serves everybody.” 

Allen, 44, first worked as an auto insurance claims adjuster in California, but about 14 years ago migrated to Colorado when her company moved its call center to Colorado Springs. She eventually moved to Limon after her husband took a job at the correctional facility outside of town.

With a degree in early childhood education, Allen did day care in her home. She often took her own kids to the Limon Memorial Library for story time with library director Lucille Reimer.

Describing herself as “one of those odd introverts that likes people,” Allen soon found that at the library she was completely in her element, and that comfort zone fed an innate desire to help people. It wasn’t long before Reimer, who needed some extra help, offered her a part-time job. So a few days each week, Allen learned that being a librarian involved a lot more than checking out books.

“It’s a service that you’re providing a community,” she says. “And it just spoke to my heart.”

After about a year, the position overseeing the Hugo library opened up. Reimer urged her understudy to apply. Allen hesitated — she didn’t have that much experience. But Reimer convinced her to take a shot, and she got the job.

It’s part-time, like many library jobs in rural areas, but that meant Allen could continue helping Reimer on a morning schedule in Limon before heading over to run the Hugo library in the afternoon. Now, Reimer is retiring and passing the reins in Limon to Katie Zipperer, who has been directing the library’s bookmobile, another crucial tool for serving the 2,500 square miles of Lincoln County.

“We try to do everything we can together,” says Allen, who’s in her third year directing the Hugo library. “So when we make flyers, when we do programs, it’s always the three of us working together. So it’s been great to share resources.”

When she attended CALCON, the annual gathering of library staffers from all over the state, Allen saw the world opening up. She knew she wanted even her tiny facility to be about much more than books, and suddenly she learned that bigger (and better funded) libraries were doing all sorts of things to serve their populations.

“It just opened my eyes,” she says. “When I saw what other, bigger city libraries were doing, I thought, ‘We can do that.’ I was like a blank sheet when I got here.”

While Hugo’s size and budget might be limiting, Allen’s imagination was not. She noticed the array of “tool kits” that other libraries offered — materials for crafts, sewing machines, yoga, even memory resources for Alzheimer’s patients. She went to her board and told them that Hugo wasn’t keeping up. The library could do more.

So she started small, packaging various school materials in backpacks that students could check out. After those started gaining popularity, Allen moved to providing copying services and printing services that could produce brochures, flyers and posters. Word started filtering through town that the library could offer some extras like binding and laminating, printing and faxing — Allen even started providing a notary service.

With the Lincoln County Courthouse nearby, services like those proved particularly popular.

“We’re trying to do small things,” Allen says. “We don’t have tons of room but we can add on services to make things easier for people.”

When it comes to the future, Davies figures that Colorado is “just scratching the surface” in terms of creative ways that libraries can serve their patrons.  

“Ten years ago, we didn’t have a library of things where you can check out tools and you can check out cake pans, and you can check out VR headsets or GoPro cameras,” Davies says. “Whether you’re checking out gardening tools because you live in an apartment, but you have a gardening box, you don’t need to own these things. But how cool is it that you can check it out from the library?”

Peter Heller is a longtime contributor to NPR, and a former contributing editor at Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure. His previous novels include “The Dog Stars,” his celebrated debut and breakout bestseller in 2012, as well as the Colorado Book Award-winning “The Painter” in 2014. “The River” from 2019 also became a national bestseller and led to “The Guide” in 2021. “The Last Ranger,” about an enforcement ranger in Yellowstone National Park, was published last year and his latest novel, “Burn,” was published in August, 2024. Heller is also an award winning adventure writer and the author of four books of literary nonfiction. He has worked as a dishwasher, construction worker, logger, offshore fisherman, kayak instructor, river guide, and world class pizza deliverer. He lives in Denver.

SunLit: Tell us the backstory of “Burn.” Was there one particular real-life event that cemented the idea of a dystopian narrative, or was this an idea you’d been considering for some time?

Peter Heller: I never have an idea for a novel.  I came up as a poet and I’m always more interested in the music of the language than a plot.  So I start with a first line whose cadence and sound I love and follow it into the second line and the third.  The story rides on the back of the language. 

Pretty soon I bump into whatever’s on my heart, what’s really concerning me.  And that often surprises me.  You don’t have to be an aficionado of current events to feel the fracturing in our country, the growing and fundamental fissures in how we see the world and our roles as individuals and as a society; to see the disagreements curdling to hatred and sometimes to violence. 

I was once teaching kayaking on a remote river in Costa Rica.  We came out after four days and discovered that the Berlin Wall had fallen.  So having two best friends go hunting together in remotest Maine and emerge into a world of bewildering violence does not seem like much of a stretch.

SunLit: Place this excerpt you’ve chosen in context. How does it fit into the book as a whole? Why did you select it?

Heller: As I wrote myself into the narrative, I found myself following (protagonists) Storey and Jess as they moved through this landscape racked by violence.  And like them, I had no real idea what was going on.  I had to discover it with my characters — just as a reader would.  Which was thrilling and kind of terrifying.  I chose the excerpt to give a sense of this movement, and of the deep friendship between the two men.

SunLit: How does the relationship between your characters Jess and Storey, who emerge from their trip to find a starkly divided America, fit into the broader societal and political rift?

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Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.

Heller: Well, there is this sense that whatever happens in this conflict — which may or may not be rippling out into the broader nation — their friendship is solid, irrevocable.  I can only hope that their bond stands for the state of our Union.  That whatever the perceived betrayals or wrongs…we can get past them.  In the history of the world there has never been a nation or a community with the manifold beauty and potential of the United States of America.  I believe that.  I pray that we endure.

SunLit: Your work has been praised often for the way your novels incorporate the natural world. What is the significance of the wilderness setting in which “Burn” unfolds?

Heller: I’m not sure what the significance is of the natural world in “Burn”.  Except that the sheer and enduring beauty of the Earth in her wildness throws into high relief the folly of men.  And that somehow her implacable silence, her refusal to hate or judge, may redeem us.  

SunLit: Your early work in adventure writing explores some amazing exploits, from surfing to sailing with eco-pirates to epic whitewater expeditions. How have those experiences influenced and informed your novels? 

Heller: On those journeys I often encountered wild country at its most ferocious and raw, and witnessed characters under great pressure.  Often, too, I chronicled my own succession of emotions through ambition, pride, desire, fear, love, terror, euphoria.  Worthy ingredients for good fiction.

“Burn”

>> Read an excerpt

Where to find it:

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SunLit: Within the genre of dystopian fiction, do you have any favorite writers and/or filmmakers whose work has entertained, inspired or influenced you?

Heller: For sure.  Ishiguro slays me.  One of the most disturbing novels I ever read was his “The Unconsoled.”  It may not be strictly dystopian, but the protagonist enters a world that gradually and irretrievably tilts away from what we accept as a stable reality.  The tilting itself becomes the nightmare.  His speculative “Klara and the Sun” I found equally disturbing.  Nor can I ever shake Nevil Shute’s “On The Beach.”  It was written in 1957 and is as chilling today.  A young family in Australia tries to carry on their sweet and normal life as they wait for the fatal fallout from a nuclear World War III to waft into the Southern Hemisphere.  It broke my heart…for all of us.  And then, of course, “The Road.”  Cormac McCarthy is a great and bleak genius.

SunLit: How does the theme of male friendship fit into “Burn” and how do its distinguishing characteristics dovetail with the narrative?

Heller: Jess and Storey have been friends since kindergarten.  They grew up a mile apart on a dirt road above a small town in Vermont and they went through school together, shared a thousand dinners, helped each other’s families cut firewood and make maple syrup.  They know each other’s heartbreaks and joys and they are loyal and forgiving.  They are generous to a fault, usually gentle, but harsh when they need to be.  And they, like all of us, are far from perfect people.  The novel is as much about their friendship and about the search for a certain grace as it is about societal dystopia.

SunLit: Some early readers have described the secessionist battle in “Burn” as a “very possible” scenario in our not-so-distant future. Do you share the view that we may be closer than we think to such a consequence of our deeply divided political and social outlooks?

Heller: I think it could happen the day after tomorrow.  Truly.

SunLit: Many authors who have released books in the last couple of years have talked about the influence, for better or worse, of the pandemic on their creative process. How did you navigate the shutdown?

Heller: The shutdown was tough.  I write in a coffee shop and I had to adjust to writing at home.  That was okay.  Thank God, many of the things I love most are outdoors and often solitary.  I could keep fishing, and running whitewater with others was safe enough.  My wife has a keen sense of humor and that helped a lot.  Someone asked her how COVID went and she gave the best two word answer I ever heard:  She turned to me and said, “You again?”

SunLit: Tell us a little about your writing process. When and where do you prefer to write? Do you have a routine? Do you outline your novels or do they develop as you go?

Heller: I write in a coffee shop, as I said.  I drink two big mugs of strong coffee before I even get there.  When I’m onto a novel, I write a thousand words a day, six or seven days a week.  I never write less and always write just past the quota until I’m into something exciting and then I make myself stop.  That way I’m always in the middle of something, and the next morning I can’t wait to jump out of bed and keep going.  I don’t edit as I go, I don’t usually plot or plan, but follow the language, images, characters…follow a narrative current into new territory.  I want to be as surprised as the reader.

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HIGHLANDS RANCH — Twenty years ago, when the kids were grown and they were downsizing, Jim and Bernie Remley bought this comfortable suburban ranch-style home with picturesque, north-facing views off the back deck to Longs Peak and beyond.

Open space stretches for acres past their back fence, where horse trails wind around grassy fields that usually go brown by July, along with lots of highly flammable shrubs called rabbitbrush. Jim says they’ve seen five fires in these adjacent fields, none of them big, with the closest about a quarter-mile away.

“But the last fire we watched from here you could tell it was hitting rabbitbrush because the flames would shoot up 15 or 20 feet — just incredible,” he says. “So, I keep looking at all this and thinking, ‘Holy cow. Are we sitting ducks here or what?’”

Conversations with their son, a Denver firefighter whose unit responded to the devastating 2022 Marshall fire in Boulder County, pushed Jim Remley to dig deeper. He happened upon an online tool, one of many that have sprung up amid climate-driven concerns over wildfire, that crunches multiple data sets to offer property owners an instant risk assessment. First Street Foundation offers a property look-up product called Risk Factor that provides metrics for a variety of climate-related risks, including wildfire.

“So I put in my address,” he says, “and up came this thing that basically says that within the next 30 years, this property has a 25.7% chance of being destroyed or damaged by wildfire. I’m 81 years old. And you start thinking that you’re living in a high-risk neighborhood. And it’s not because of gangs. It’s not because of gunfire. It’s natural stuff that you can’t really control.”

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In a nationwide 2022 analysis, First Street projected that nearly a half-million additional Colorado homes, businesses and public buildings beyond the current 1 million face increased risk of wildfire over the next 30 years — at 19%, the largest increase in the nation. Significantly, the most vulnerable areas weren’t the forests, where monthslong infernos have scorched wide swaths of the landscape. Rather, they’re in growing suburban counties like El Paso to the south, Larimer to the north and Douglas, where the Remleys live, in the Denver metro area — areas where wildlands rub up against civilization in the so-called wildland-urban interface, or WUI (pronounced woo-ee in the vernacular).

For Remley, seeing his own risk in black and white came as a shock and, over the last couple of years since he ran the numbers, he’s been particularly attuned to the threat. After consulting with a local mitigation expert, he started making small changes to his property. 

He took out some bushes next to his house. He added additional outside faucets and garden hose. He hired a neighborhood teen to help him replace highly flammable landscaping mulch with fire resistant rock.

But while that may harden his property on the fringe of the wildland, it’s just one small slice on the vulnerable border of meandering rows of a densely populated community. What about all the neighbors? Though newly armed with data, Remley wasn’t sure what to do next.

“I’m kind of reluctant to go next door with this and say, ‘Guess what?’” he says. “But I also think, holy cow, maybe I should because they don’t know this. And should I just take a copy of that and give it to everybody on the street?” 

As the wildfire threat on the WUI becomes more than broad warnings from climate scientists and gripping news accounts from too close by, more Coloradans are accessing easily available databases and mapping tools, seeking ways the firehose of information can translate to collective action.

Colorado-based risk tools

In recent years, Colorado experts have taken significant steps toward developing a selection of public resources, including Live Wildfire Ready, which features mitigation tips, that launched in April 2023 and already has logged about 11,000 page views. Within that site, the WUI Risk Viewer offers a broad assessment of a location’s wildfire risk.

Much more layered and detailed risk assessment tools have been developed through the Colorado State Forest Service, a project originally funded by the state legislature in 2012. Initially, the tools relied on data that was updated every five years. Now, additional funding allows for updates every three years. 

The increased frequency means more reliable results as new models can account for new housing construction and factors like shifting fuel sources. Two risk assessment tools were applied to the Colorado Forest Atlas platform: the Wildfire Risk Viewer, a less complex model designed with property owners in mind, has attracted more than 15,000 active users since April 1; the Wildfire Risk Reduction Planner, geared to wildland fire professionals, has seen more than 1,100 active users.

The newest versions of the mapping have a higher resolution than the earlier ones — from 30-meter resolution to a finer 20-meter resolution that, among other advantages, allows for zeroing in more precisely on the fuel types in a given area. Tweaking and customizing fuel models, with input from a group of fuels experts in the wake of the East Troublesome and Cameron Peak fires, led to greater overall accuracy in predicting wildfire risk, says Chad Julian, a wildfire mitigation expert with the Colorado State Forest Service.

“Fuel models are a way to classify what fuel is present, how much is there, what its shape looks like, how tall it is, are there volatile chemicals in it, like some of our shrubs have, that make it more flammable,” Julian explains. “Once we can classify that, we can model fire behavior on it with fire modeling software to understand how fast a fire might burn through that fuel, or how intense the fire might be when it’s burning in that fuel.”

Much of the data that goes into the Wildfire Risk Viewer and Wildfire Risk Reduction Planner — including information on building damage potential and defensible space, which is based on research from California wildfires — is geared toward engaging broader communities. The tools deliberately do not show risk to individual structures or the mitigating quality of their defensible spaces, instead dividing the landscape into roughly 28-acre hexagons that receive an average composite score.

“So you won’t know what your home’s specific score is, but we chose that in these higher density areas for a reason,” Julian says. “The density of homes is so close — like on the Marshall fire is a good example — that you don’t want to look at individuals when you’re in these higher density communities. You want to see it from a community perspective.” 

Individuals who use the tools and see themselves clustered within a particularly at-risk hexagon — he uses Highlands Ranch and Boulder as examples — may be more inclined to engage with neighbors and make a more concerted effort to collaborate on mitigation. Individual homeowners, he adds, typically underestimate their risk before they see the level of detail available on the mapping tools. 

“So it’s probably going to scare them a little bit,” Julian says. “It’s probably going to get their attention. But there’s just going to be a percentage of folks that are never going to engage no matter what they see on the screen.” 

Encouraging collective action

Julian observes that one key to gaining buy-in to wildfire mitigation can be as simple as approaching it from an attitude of engaging rather than “educating” the community. In other words, instead of telling residents what they should be doing, mitigation professionals can meet with them to identify the problems. Communities that help define their own challenges tend to be more invested in pursuing solutions.

He recalls receiving a phone call last year from a concerned resident in the south metro area who wanted to talk about wildfire risk to that stretch of the wildland urban interface. For the caller, it was the devastation of the Marshall fire that had heightened concern about the potential impact on another bedroom community.

That “entry point” for Julian led to him giving a bigger presentation for the entire community. 

“This individual had a lot of fear about small things that she saw within the neighborhood that maybe could lead to fire risk,” he recalls. “What I was able to do, though, was come and present to the HOA and show them that, in reality, they’re in a better position than most neighborhoods I go visit.”

He pointed out that the paved road that bordered the open space beyond the development provided a natural firebreak, in contrast to many others that feature homesites backing directly to fuel-rich fields — areas where dry grass, brush and other flammable materials could offer wildfire a direct path to the built environment. 

The community also had changed its fencing materials to cement fiberboard rather than highly flammable wood, which could be what Julian termed a “game changer,” especially in light of the finding that wood fencing was a predominant mechanism that helped fire move quickly from house to house through Louisville and Superior neighborhoods during the Marshall fire.

“I told them you guys have changed that entire risk calculus by a choice you’ve made at the HOA level here,” he says. “So I wanted to reinforce for them how good of a decision they made there. They’re at a very different risk now than other subdivisions that have the 6-foot-tall cedar fences.”

Julian matched the information he saw through remote sensing on the mapping tools with what he observed on the ground and found that the highest risk areas did indeed match up. 

“So I could give them a real direct recommendation that this is going to be the area where it probably has the highest likelihood of squirting through the interface and getting into the built environment,” he says, “and once it gets in here, then it’s kind of like a Marshall fire. It doesn’t matter how it got in, it’ll behave the same way once it’s in here.”

Since the development was only 9 years old at the time, he cautioned residents about caring for the conifers that had been planted in many of the common areas along with natural grasses. Though the trees are young and relatively small, he told them, proper maintenance on both the trees and the grass — “limbing up” the trees, or trimming the lowest branches, and keeping the native grass beneath them short — the community can enjoy the features of that landscaping without the risk normally associated with them.

In WUI communities adjacent to grassland, Julian notes, the interface with the built community is relatively narrow, which means that fire transfers over relatively short distances — say, 30 or 40 feet. That in turn means that the first three rows of homes essentially make mitigation decisions that can have impact for the entire community. 

A wildfire that transfers into those first three rows can quickly become an urban fire — a separate event like those that unfolded in the Marshall fire and Lahaina in Hawaii — with the capacity to transfer much greater distances than a grassland fire.

“So we’re starting to see how we can get that kind of messaging out there of how important it is that folks in the first three rows of homes that interface with that grassland to work in unison,” Julian says, “so that we don’t have a wildfire transfer in and then become an urban fire like we saw in Marshall.”

Research-based findings of mitigation

Proliferation of real-life wildfires has taught costly lessons about communities’ vulnerability. But researchers also can replicate the dangerous conditions in a controlled environment to directly test materials and measures that might prove effective in mitigation.

In a partially enclosed structure in Chester County, South Carolina, artificial ember showers pelt full-size models of houses constructed of starkly different materials — some fire resistant, some not. The embers either trigger bursts of crackling flames and melting gutters or batter more resilient materials without major damage.

Since 2010, the research center for the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, a nonprofit scientific research and communications organization, has tested building materials and components against simulated wildfire conditions. Supported by the insurance industry, the IBHS bills itself as an independent operation that seeks to create more resilient communities.

Faraz Hedayati, the lead research engineer, has most recently focused his study on wind-driven, building-to-building fire spread, and even the relatively small mitigation measures that can make the difference between a home’s destruction and survival.

“Generally speaking, the hazard of the threat from the wildfire to communities can be divided into two categories, the threat from embers and flames,” Hedayati says. “And the post-event investigations show that most of the ember-driven fires are the driving factor of loss.”

In the testing facility, researchers expose different types of buildings or building components to an artificially produced ember shower, and then note the vulnerabilities. 

“When we are looking at building components, for example, for decks, we know that the under-deck area is very vulnerable, and people often use that area for storage,” Hedayati says. “And then when embers ignite the fuel under the deck, that can start a fire that grows vertically and ignites the decks.

“And then, typically, decks are against glass, a window or a sliding door, which is more vulnerable than a wall. And then the glass breaks, embers can get in, and then the chain of events happens again.” 

In a report published last April, Hedayati and his colleagues emphasized that a two-tiered hardening strategy is best employed to reduce the chances that a home will ignite, by enacting measures to guard against both embers and flames.

For instance, fire resistant roof covering materials, gutters free of debris and vent openings protected with a 1/8-inch or finer noncombustible mesh screen can all help guard against wind-driven embers. Fences made of noncombustible material also can break the path of a fire rather than provide an easy entry way to a property. 

Hedayati spent five days in the field at the Marshall fire in Superior, which he describes as the first area where grassland touched the densely-built urban environment. Mitigation measures could have slowed the process.

It doesn’t matter how it got in, it’ll behave the same way once it’s in here.

— Chad Julian, wildfire mitigation expert with the Colorado State Forest Service

“So the piece about smaller things making a difference?” he says. “Yes, if people do that, they can give the first responders a chance to do their job and save the structures.”

And while individual measures can be effective, developments with many homes in close proximity benefit from a more cohesive approach.

“When you have these dense communities, neighbors need to talk,” he says, “and they need to understand that the risk is shared, and they need to work together to reduce the risk.” 

How does insurance fit into mitigation?

Discussion of wildfire risk inevitably leads to concerns about rising insurance rates and even the availability of coverage.

“Not only do we have escalating wildfire and hail catastrophes,” says Carole Walker, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Association, an industry nonprofit representing insurers in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, “but we also have more homes in the path of those catastrophes.”

Factor in the rising cost of paying claims, she adds, and thanks to spikes in everything from lumber to labor, Coloradans find themselves “at the perfect tipping point” where pressure accrues on both the availability and affordability of property insurance.

The most effective solutions, Walker says, can be found in risk reduction — and just as there’s data to show vulnerability to climate-related catastrophes like wildfire and hail, the science illustrates how homeowners can tip the odds in their favor. The next step is scaling up mitigation efforts and making them measurable — a quantifiable demonstration that their effectiveness warrants lower rates.

One step toward scaling up fire mitigation was the 2023 creation of the Colorado Resiliency Code Board, which seeks adaptability and preparedness amid changing environmental and other conditions.

“We need to be looking at how to scale up mitigation, and one way we know that we have to do that is through building codes, because then it gets done,” Walker says. “It certainly gets done on new construction. And then what are we doing to harden and mitigate existing construction? So those are sort of a parallel track to that we’re grappling with.”

Partly due to Colorado’s status as a “home rule” state, where local regulations supersede state law, Colorado has resisted a statewide building code. Barring legislation to change that, another option is enacting community-wide wildfire mitigation programs such as Boulder County’s Wildfire Partners, a national model that’s being replicated across the state.

A multifaceted approach to mitigation

Boulder County’s involvement in wildfire mitigation dates back to 1989, in the wake of the Black Tiger fire in the foothills northwest of Boulder, regarded as the first wildland urban interface fire in Colorado. That fire scorched more than 2,000 acres over four days and destroyed 44 homes and other structures within a few hours. Although dwarfed by more recent fires, Black Tiger at the time ranked as the state’s most destructive in terms of property loss, which totaled $10 million.

In 2014, the county developed Wildfire Partners, a public-private partnership that program manager Jim Webster calls “a new approach, a more intensive approach to wildfire mitigation than we’d been practicing before that period.” He adds that the program, which includes education and outreach as well as “home hardening” assistance, has grown over the years to encompass other programs and services for the unincorporated portion of the county.

The program offers mitigation assistance at the property parcel level, such as individual, customized action plans done by an on-site expert, which then can lead to certification — which in turn can factor into a property’s insurability. 

An assessment involves a mitigation specialist visiting the site and spending two to four hours “looking at every tree, every vulnerability, every pathway” that results in a checklist of action items that must be completed to earn certification.

“Some people’s checklist is one item, it takes them a month,” Webster explains. “Some people’s checklist is 20 or 30 items, and it takes them two years. But essentially, you’re reaching that standard to show you’ve done mitigation.”

Once completed, the program delivers a yard sign and a certificate to the homeowner that can be used to help procure insurance coverage or even serve as a selling point in a subsequent sale. Webster notes that the goal of certification in the western part of Boulder County was to help people obtain insurance, but the program doesn’t directly impact rates.

“Other certification programs are coming,” Webster says, “but we were sort of the pioneers there.”

Wildfire Partners also operates at the community level, where neighbors become involved, and at the landscape level, which can include areas like open space or larger acreage.

“There are actions every homeowner in a high wildfire risk area can take to reduce their risk,” Webster says. “We have to match our message to meet each homeowner’s specific situation and meet people where they are. Some individuals in a very small lot will be limited in what they can do, but there’s still some things. So it’s a very nuanced message.

“That’s why we have to be sophisticated and can’t do a cookie-cutter report approach and expect everybody to do the exact same thing,” he adds. “People are in different situations, and they won’t take action if it doesn’t make sense to them.”

The 20-year goal for the program was to perform wildfire mitigation on 6,000 homes. Over the 10 years Wildfire Partners has been in effect, it has accounted for more than 3,500 initial home assessments, which have led to more than 1,500 certifications and 274 recertifications. Emphasis initially was placed on the western foothills and mountains, given the area’s fire history, but since the Marshall fire, the program is working on plans to perform wildfire mitigation on a majority of residential properties on the eastern end of the county.

On average, homeowners took about 14 months from the time of their home assessment to achieve certification, with an average of a little more than 100 hours of mitigation work performed, according to the program’s 10-year metrics. The average cost for those certified was $7,394.62. Financial assistance through the program averaged about $430 per homeowner, including some who received no assistance.

Insurance expert Walker emphasizes the importance of two factors in protecting against wildfire damages: increasing participation in mitigation efforts and confirming its effectiveness based on science like that being done at the IBHS facility in South Carolina.

“The science is there,” she says. “What we really need to do is get homeowners there, communities there, and then support these programs and fund these programs. So it’s going to be a combination of WUI building codes, the right grant funding to help with home hardening and mitigation, the right buy-in from the homeowner.”

In the wake of a rising wildfire threat that recognizes no boundaries of time or space in a time of climate change, that path to mitigating the risks — individually as well as community-wide, can seem daunting.

“It does at times feel that way,” state forest service expert Julian says, “but because I know the things we can do that are more simple to change outcomes for people, I’m hopeful we can find a way to engage with them, instead of educate them, and tell them what problems are present and what they need to do to fix them. I think a lot of those folks are ready for that kind of engagement.”

Story first appeared in:

It’s almost summertime, when the livin’ — and readin’ — are easy. We’ve tried to make it even a little bit easier by offering 20 thoughtful suggestions across many genres, thanks to a collection of Colorado authors who share at least one thing in common: All have earned recognition this year as finalists for the Colorado Book Awards (with winners to be announced June 21).

These writers graciously took the time to consider other offerings in the category for which they became CBA finalists and narrowed their favorites down to two. Then they shared their thoughts on why these selections might appeal to engaged fans of the genre.

They were not bound by any considerations beyond a broad definition of their specific category, so you’ll see recent releases mixed among titles that you may have missed when they were first published. Of course, we also linked to these authors’ own creations that put them in such select company.

Some of the authors already have had their finalists excerpted in SunLit, the Sun’s weekly literary spotlight. All of them eventually will be featured in the weeks ahead, so there’s still an opportunity to be introduced to this collection of Colorado talent and sample portions of their most recently honored work.

So whether you’re looking for a fun beach read or something that dives deep into the issues of our complex world, there’s something with your name on it among this collection. So as we head into summer, enjoy this menu of informative and entertaining literature.

Creative Nonfiction

Camille Dungy, an award-winning author and poet who is a university distinguished professor at Colorado State University, was honored as a CBA finalist for her 2023 book “Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden.” She offers her thoughts and recommendations on two more Creative Nonfiction titles.

“The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year”

By Margaret Renkl (2023)

In this lovely book, written in short sections, Renkl shares botanical, animal, political and personal views from her garden. If you’re a fan of Renkl’s New York Times column, or if you just like the idea of watching a year progress in a highly observant person’s garden, this book is full of rich and thoughtful moments to savor.

“Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto”

By Tricia Hersey (2022)

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed with all the plates I find myself juggling, and I wonder what would happen if I put some of them down. I don’t often think about the intersection of overwork and our nation’s complicated human history, and perhaps I’m encouraged not to think about this question by design. In this brilliant and timely book, Hersey, the founder of The Nap Ministry taps into the power of rest to disrupt the corrupting power of capitalism and white supremacy. One of my favorite writers, Lucille Clifton, used to say that she wrote “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comforted,” and Hersey’s wise and helpful book aims to do both.

Thriller

Caleb Stephens, a CPA who also found writing success with his CBA finalist, the “The Girls in the Cabin,”  specializes in the psychological thriller. He has a couple more suggestions from the Thriller genre for you to consider.

“BETA”

By Sammy Scott (2023)

This is an incredible thriller with a “Black Mirror” vibe about a state-of-the-art AI home designed to meet your every need. I’ll admit that I’m a bit of a prose snob, and Sammy Scott is no slouch. His writing is top-notch, which is what initially drew me in, but what kept me reading was the complex and multilayered plot threaded with heart-rending pathos. And I should probably mention “BETA” is full of twists you won’t see coming. It’s fantastic — a story that feels like it could actually happen in real life.

“Whalefall”

By Daniel Kraus (2023)

This book is both tense and tender — a coming-of-age tale about a son growing up beneath a father with tremendous expectations. An exploration of grief and survival … while trapped inside the belly of a sperm whale. Jay Gardiner is a scuba diver who has an hour to escape before his oxygen runs out and his demons claim him. Trust me, this one will leave you breathless.

Historical Fiction

Buzzy Jackson has a Ph.D. in history and three nonfiction titles to her credit. Now she has added a CBA finalist honor for her novel, “To Die Beautiful,” and suggests two other Historical Fiction titles — both long and short — for lovers of the genre.

“Wolf Hall” (trilogy)

By Hilary Mantel (2020)

The first time I tried to read “Wolf Hall,” the first book in Hilary Mantel’s brilliant and moving trilogy of the life of Thomas Cromwell and his boss, Henry VIII, I put it down after only a few pages. I was overwhelmed. Then I tried again, and quit again. Finally, I watched the entire BBC miniseries version of “Wolf Hall,” straightened out who all the Thomases and Henrys and Catherines and Annes were, and tried reading it again, and it finally took. I read all three books and then read them again. At this point I’ve read them all several times over! An absolute tour de force of narrative voice, deep humanity, and ideas about how to live in this strange and wondrous world. It’s a life’s achievement (Mantel’s writing, not my labored reading).

“The Buddha in the Attic”

By Julie Otsuka (2012)

As brief as “Wolf Hall” is long, this beautiful little novel (145 pages) does something very unusual, telling the story of an entire generation of women — young mail-order brides from Japan around 1900 — in the collective first person. “On the boat we carried our husbands’ pictures in tiny oval lockets that hung on long chains from our necks,” Otsuka writes. “We carried them in the sleeves of our kimonos, which we touched often, just to make sure they were still there.” It is a heartbreaking and gorgeous novel about courage, endurance, and facing the unknown. It’s a window into the human experience that will stay with me forever. 

Literary Fiction

Ramona Ausubel includes the prestigious PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction among her honors in addition to her CBA finalist, “The Last Animal.” She also has published two short story collections. These recommendations focus on Literary Fiction.

“State of Paradise”

By Laura van den Berg (2024) 

This is a tropical storm of a novel. The real world our main character finds herself in is strange — it won’t stop raining, things and people disappear, and she’s filled with memories of being in a mental hospital when she was younger. It’s all haunted. Still, the novel made me feel strangely joyful. Maybe it’s van den Berg’s incredible clarity of observation and image, or the emotional power of a woman and her family holding tight to what matters, even as the forces around them shift. 

“Beautyland”

By Marie-Helene Bertino (2024)

An alien uses a fax machine to send amazing, spot-on observations about Earth to her home planet. But the alien is also a human girl named Adina, living in Philadelphia. But the girl is an alien in her home, in her life. All of those sentences are true, even though they seem to contradict each other. This funny, huge-hearted novel is about the truth of belonging and dis-belonging, and the idea that only from the outside can we see ourselves and our home clearly. I have never felt so human than reading Adina’s alien observations, and I have never identified more with alienation. Brilliant!

Romance

Lou Dean has won several awards for her inspirational stories, and now adds CBA finalist for her novel “Autumn of the Big Snow,” a Western romance whose setting reflects the Oklahoma native’s love for her adopted home in northwest Colorado. She has two more suggestions for Romance fans.

“Chasing The Horizon”

By Mary Connealy (2024)

This is an action-packed story with a determined main character. Beth will capture your attention on page one and you will find yourself drawn into her fight for survival, then take pleasure in watching her faith and hard work lead to love, when least expected. This is an inspirational novel published by Bethany House in 2024.

“The Mermaid Chair”

By Sue Monk Kidd (2005)

This novel is a love story of many depths. This author is a master at probing the human spirit and defining all that a lesser author could not reveal. If you enjoy love, loss and self-discovery, this book will not disappoint. Published by Penguin Books in 2005, this was Kidd’s second novel. Her first, “The Secret Life of Bees,” was a New York Times Bestseller and became a film.

General Nonfiction

Chip Colwell is an archeologist, digital magazine editor and former senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. He’s a CBA finalist for “So Much Stuff,” which explores the history and reasons behind why humans tend to collect, well, so much stuff. He has some ideas for other great General Nonfiction reads.

“The Bear”

By Andrew Krivak (2020)

How has humanity lost its way with nature? And how can we find our way back? This book joins the apocalypse genre, yet is like no other I know. OK, this is fiction, but it reveals so many deeper truths, I can’t help but recommend it here. The novella is a concise epic, unpretentious yet ponderous, about a father and daughter, who are the last people on Earth. Through their journey, they reclaim through lyrical tenderness our interconnectedness to the natural world, at last, in our species’ final moments.

“Soldiers and Kings”

By Jason De León (2024)

Much of the experience of Central American migrants crossing from Mexico into the United States remains veiled. Jason De León is an anthropologist who spent years studying the hidden lives and labor of coyotes, the guides who take migrants along this journey. Obliterating stereotypes and easy assumptions, De León masterfully crafts a readable, gripping popular ethnography. It will haunt you with its tragic stories of how failing politicians have forced so many people into the desperation of migrating north — and created the very conditions for the clandestine smuggling they condemn.

Biography

Steve Friesen spent 22 years running the Buffalo Bill Museum on Lookout Mountain and wrote three books on the icon of the American West. His CBA finalist  “Galloping Gourmet: Eating and Drinking with Buffalo Bill” took him in an entirely new direction with what he calls a “culinary biography.” Here are his picks for two more Biography selections, both with a western flavor.

“The Earth is All that Lasts”

By Mark Lee Gardner (2022)

Gardner weaves together a tale about two of the most fascinating individuals in American history: Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Using newly uncovered information, this well-documented book is both scholarly and very readable. From the book’s opening chapter to Sitting Bull’s death at the end, it grabbed my attention and would not let go. Gardner is a master storyteller.

 “Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness”

By Robert Aquinas McNally (2024)

John Muir is regarded as one of the saviors of the American wilderness. Yet his efforts came at a price for the tribal peoples who occupied that wilderness. McNally shines a new light on a man who we can still regard as heroic but also had his darker sides. The book demonstrates that, despite our efforts to simplify them as either heroes or villains, the people who occupy our past were no less complicated than we are.  

Sci-fi and Fantasy

Ann Claycomb made a splash with her CBA finalist “Silenced” in the Sci-fi/Fantasy category, a book that some critics have described as a modern feminist fairy tale. She offers two titles (that are both part of extended series) that lean more toward fantasy than sci-fi.

“Penric’s Demon”

By Lois McMaster Bujold (2015)

Don’t be deceived by this slender volume: This the first of 12 books and counting featuring a warmly compassionate young man (Penric) who is accidentally possessed by/of a snarky, brilliant demon (Desdemona), an incident that sets them on a years-long path of helping others, often in extremely unexpected ways. Moreover, this book is just one of many ways into the extraordinary catalog of sci-fi and fantasy luminary Lois McMaster Bujold, who did a lot of her writing (like I have done) in the midst of finding Band-Aids, making meals, doing laundry and generally keeping a household going.  Her world-building is wildly inventive, but it’s her utterly appealing, deeply human characters who will stay with you.

“Rivers of London”

By Ben Aaronovitch (2011)

Another gift for anyone who reads a much as I do and who has perhaps been known to panic when they finish a book and realize they don’t have another one queued up: “Rivers of London” is the first of a nine-book (and counting) series about British police officer Peter Grant, who discovers on one of his first nights on the job that he might be, well, a wizard. From there, Peter’s wry, self-aware first-person voice carries us into every corner of his beloved London in the company of his mysterious mentor, an even more mysterious housekeeper, a best friend who may not be, and a fat little dog named Toby. The magic in these books isn’t a metaphor for anything else; it’s magic — wild, unpredictable, fantastical, and often deadly — and that’s absolutely as it should be.​

History

Patricia B. Martinez and Herman A. Martinez earned CBA finalist honors for “Hilos Culturales: Cultural Threads of the San Luis Valley,” their collection of cultural vignettes from the region. They suggest two other volumes that delve into the region’s rich history.

“Trail of the Espinosa Outlaws”

By Michael A. Espinosa (2023)

Originally titled “The Other Side of the Peso,” Espinosa’s book tells his father’s story, documented from verbal accounts by his grandfather around 1857, on their ranch in western Texas. It concludes in El Valle de San Luis in southern Colorado. Based on true incidents, Espinosa brings his father’s and grandfather’s words to life in an exciting novel of revenge that reflects the “human side of violence.” 

“Memorias De Mi Familia” (“Memories Of My Family”)

By Michael R. García (2022)

A historical and biographical account by the author who through a labor of love, chronicles his family’s beginnings in New Mexico and southern Colorado. García highlights generations of his ancestors through family records, their contributions and inherited family photographs. He also identifies his great-great grandfather José María Jáquez as a co-founder of the town of Conejos. The author discovered García-Trujillo family lines dated to Abiquiú, New Mexico, in 1735 and recognizes members of his family who represented the new Colorado Territorial Legislature, representing Conejos.

Mystery

Ausma Zehanat Khan continues her rise in the world of crime fiction with the CBA finalist “Blood Betrayal,” the second installment of her Blackwater Falls crime series. She has thoughts on a couple other mysteries that fans of the genre might find entertaining and interesting.

“Guns and Almond Milk”

By Mustafa Marwan (2024)

An astonishingly well-written thriller about the travails of a disconsolate humanitarian aid worker in Yemen and the woman — and crime — he left behind in England. Luke Archer is a British-Egyptian physician who mediates a standoff between opposing forces when a despised general is brought to his field hospital for treatment. Wrestling with questions of love and belonging, Luke must also face the consequences of a heist gone wrong in his past. “Guns and Almond Milk” is a surprising inside look at the wartime destruction of Yemen and the costs imposed by running from the truth.

“The Satapur Moonstone”

By Sujata Massey (2020)

This elegant and compelling mystery set in 1920s India features Perveen Mistry as a rare female detective who is summoned to advise the Maharanis of the princely state of Satapur. The Maharanis observe a state of seclusion from men, thus trust only Perveen to guide them on the future of the royal heir, whose status is in jeopardy. With great attention to the historical period that never feels heavy or irrelevant, the novel is not only superbly plotted, but is also a fascinating window into the social mores and cultural customs of the time.

This story first appeared in Colorado Sunday, a premium magazine newsletter for members.

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A motorcycle escort rumbled slowly along the pavement that cuts through meandering rows of identical white headstones at Denver’s Fort Logan National Cemetery, making its way toward a pavilion where dozens of military veterans converged under a brilliant late April sky for a long-overdue rite.

While bagpipes played, 13 men in crisp white dress shirts beneath black vests bearing patches signifying their military affiliations each accepted a wooden box unloaded from the back of a hearse. Solemnly cradling them in white gloves, some with trembling hands, they delivered sets of cremated remains to a table.

Once the boxes had been laid in a row, a folded American flag next to each, uniformed onlookers snapped a salute. The bagpipes quieted and speakers took their turn bestowing full military honors — and a final resting place — to men who had served their country in wars and peacetime. Men who returned home and fell in love, started families, launched careers, died too young, lived into their 90s.

What they shared, apart from military service that ranged from World War II to Vietnam, was the absence of a dignified end. For reasons often unclear, their cremains had gone unclaimed, sometimes for decades, before a Colorado veterans group began a painstaking search to find them — and dozens of other veterans whose forgotten ashes sat on mortuary shelves all along the Front Range. 

The Honors Burial Program, launched by Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 1071 in Denver with the first ceremony in 2016, so far has identified and honored 143 veterans in an ongoing project that has recognized service dating back to World War I.

“It’s always emotional,” says Bill Bridges, the current director of the VVA chapter’s program who served in the Army during the Vietnam war. “I think 37 volunteers is what it took to put one of those ceremonies together, and the respect that they have for their fellow veterans is what keeps their interest in helping. It’s rewarding to do this.”

Several individuals and organizations work together to conduct the “final roll calls.” Woodworkers craft custom boxes to hold the cremains. State records custodians help identify veterans from among the hundreds of unclaimed individuals. College students research their often opaque backgrounds to provide even a sliver of detail and context to their lives. Veterans honor guard and motorcycle details lend solemn ceremonial touches. One volunteer even bugles “Taps.”

It’s an effort that has been gaining momentum. The Colorado project mirrors national efforts to find and perform a dignified memorial for unclaimed cremains of veterans.

In the latest ceremony, on April 30, Fox31 news anchor Jeremy Hubbard delivered remarks that touched not only on this group of 13 veterans’ military service, but the lives they led afterward and the often unknowable circumstances that left them in sometimes decades-long limbo before their fellow veterans afforded them a final salute.

“We may never know the path that brought these men here today, but we know after decades of uncertainty, their journey finally ends right here and right now,” Hubbard said, “that they may finally rest in peace, knowing that a grateful nation appreciates their service, and is forever filled with gratitude.”

An effort born of history

For Bridges, motivation behind the effort stems from the national Vietnam Veterans of America motto: “Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another.” That promise was shaped by the shared experience of seeing returning veterans of Vietnam become targets of widespread domestic opposition to the war.

“Soldiers weren’t seen in the best light coming home,” Bridges recalls. “So I think a lot of our members remember that. We need to do something, if we can, to make sure that these other generations of soldiers are not treated the way we were.”

The idea began to take shape in 2015, when members of the VVA chapter met at the Lakewood Elks Club for breakfast and sat around tables drinking coffee and talking about current events. Someone brought up a national news item that estimated more than 100,000 veterans had been cremated but never claimed — and hence, never given the military honors to which they were entitled.

So a couple of guys thought, well, we need to start poking around some of these funeral homes and see what we can find. Are there really a bunch of unclaimed veterans out there?

— Bill Bridges, director of Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 1071’s Honors Burial Program

“So a couple of guys thought, well, we need to start poking around some of these funeral homes and see what we can find,” Bridges says. “Are there really a bunch of unclaimed veterans out there?”

In fact, there were. At one Aurora cemetery, volunteers found almost 900 sets of cremains. At least some almost assuredly belonged to veterans, but the next step would involve determining how to identify them.

Calls to the Veterans Administration revealed a verification process in place for unclaimed cremains, but it requires background information that in many cases wasn’t readily available. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s vital records division, though, could cross-reference its database of death certificates, some of which verified military service. 

Those data hits could then be run through the VA records center in St. Louis or even the Department of Defense to find more specific information such as branch of service, length of active duty and confirmation of honorable discharge — all of which help determine eligibility for military burial honors.

Only official veterans service organizations like Vietnam Veterans of America, bolstered in Colorado by state law, are empowered to investigate unclaimed cremains at mortuaries, funeral homes or cemeteries. That helped clear the first hurdle — reluctance of some funeral businesses to share such information.

“There’s a difficult aspect of getting in the door and being able to work with someone that will let you come in and do the work,” Bridges explains. “But once you get over that hump, we’ve got our volunteer teams that come in and we do everything. And when we’re done, we hand them an inventory of everything that they’ve got. And from that point, then they know that we’ll take care of all of the veterans, get them taken care of at a national cemetery, and they no longer have to worry about them.”

But he adds that while his volunteers have been able to work with the larger mortuaries and funeral homes in the region, there’s still hesitancy among smaller operations, which at times have left him frustrated and scolded not to bother calling back. For Bridges, that makes telling the story of his organization’s efforts critical to raising awareness of the program’s legitimacy.

Inheriting hundreds of unclaimed urns

When he bought the Stork-Bullock Family Mortuary last July, Peter Morley found that previous owners had in storage more than 300 sets of unclaimed cremated remains dating back to the 1950s.

It’s not unusual for cremains to be left behind, Morley says. Although sometimes it happens through miscommunication or misunderstanding, other times a human services agency can put a person who has died without surviving relatives, or someone who’s homeless, into what’s called a rotation, whereby a mortuary is paid for either burial or cremation — normally cremation, because it’s less expensive.

That’s how some end up in storage for years. Morley estimates there are thousands more unclaimed at funeral homes across Colorado. 

As he oversaw the business transition to Stork-Morley Funerals and Cremation as managing partner, Morley already had been thinking about how to honor all of the forgotten cremains he’d inherited. Coincidentally, that’s when Bill Bridges approached him about the Honors Burial Program for veterans.

Morley was on board with the program — his great-grandfather served in World War II, his dad served in Korea and his wife did a year’s tour in Iraq, so the program definitely struck a chord with his family’s military history. 

But he also understands how some mortuaries would be skittish about risking publicity by partnering with the veterans project, especially in the wake of recent news reports exposing alleged misconduct in the funeral home business.

“Most mortuaries would be scared, I think,” Morley says. “Even when Bill called me originally I was a little bit reluctant. I was just like, ‘Let me think about it.’ And I kept on telling them we’re ready to do it, I’ve just got to figure out how the process is going to look and things like that. And he was very reassuring to me.”

Morley says it quickly became clear that the veterans group had a significant head start on a process to determine which of the deceased might have served in the active military. 

Bridges reached out to his VVA membership for volunteers to start examining urns and putting together an Excel spreadsheet. Fortunately, some of the veterans already had experience with that application. One brought along a laptop as well. 

Two teams began the sorting process. One volunteer would select an urn, read the name and date and then look for a matching name in the ledger. When they found a match, they’d enter the information into a database and assign it a serial number.

Bridges refers to their protocol as  “on-the-job training.” But he’d meticulously mapped out a process based on his decades of experience designing business protocols for maximum efficiency in the telecommunications industry. 

“It was just a process that I had cooked up because there was nothing written down before I took over this role in terms of how to do this,” he says. “I gotta have a process and I have to be able to train the people on how the processes work and get them to become as efficient as they can possibly be.” 

Combing through handwritten ledgers

Morley was impressed at how quickly volunteers inventoried the urns and determined there were 27 entitled to veterans’ burial honors, which took place in two ceremonies two weeks apart last month. Not only did the veterans identify those who qualified for honors burial, but they also provided Morley with an inventory of the other cremains, which he’s planning to inurn at a separate site rather than leave them in storage.

“I had 334 cremated remains,” he says, “and they went through all 334 to verify if they qualified to be buried at a national cemetery. That’s huge.”

As it turned out, the process involved some low-tech record keeping by the funeral home’s previous owners that ultimately proved beneficial.

“We got really lucky with them,” Bridges explains, “because back in the day, all of their business was done in handwritten ledger books. And there were 50-some of these ledger books where each page is an individual record for someone that they took care of. Some, the binding was coming apart. And others were in pretty good condition.”

“We were pretty fortunate that they all had great handwriting,” Morley adds. “So we were able to read everything.”

The volunteers began their work at the Stork-Morley crematory in Denver early last November and ultimately inventoried everything in three separate three-hour sessions. Matches between dates in the ledger book and information on the urns eventually were cross-referenced against the state’s vital records database and then federal records. 

But identifying which cremains were veterans was hardly the whole story. While on rare occasions an urn turns out to have been left due to miscommunication among family members, who when informed of the oversight could then step in to provide background on the deceased, many more remained mostly mysteries.

Some college history students stepped in to unravel them.

DU class dives into backstories

Camille Cruz, a 20-year-old senior at the University of Denver and daughter of an Army veteran, had no grand expectations when she signed up for a generic-sounding Issues in Comparative History course before the start of the January term. 

But then Cruz, an anthropology major with a minor in history, felt her curiosity and enthusiasm grow as the instructors unwound the syllabus on the first day and explained that students would be working to expand the often sparse backgrounds of military veterans whose cremated remains had been gathering dust on the shelves of area funeral homes.

The class, which quickly filled with 40 students, grew from another effort that history professor Carol Helstosky and teaching partner Elizabeth Escobedo had embraced in 2017 through the National Cemetery Administration called the Veterans Legacy Program. 

The DU professors contracted to set up a website called More Than a Headstone and then supervised students in research on veterans buried at Fort Logan. The result has been a growing database of diverse human stories that lend texture to the near-identical rows of white markers that dot the green landscape.

Through those efforts, Helstosky came into contact with VVA Chapter 1071 and learned of the Honors Burial Program. She and Bridges agreed that student researchers could complement the work that VVA volunteers were doing to identify the unclaimed cremains by putting their research skills into practice.

And that’s how, last January, she brought a new twist to the Issues in Comparative History class. 

Bridges had 27 names of confirmed veterans — the newest group after the 116 his organization had already honored — and the DU students, singly or in pairs, set about researching whatever background they could find.

Part of the objective was to dispel inaccurate judgments that often accompany the unclaimed cremains — that these individuals were estranged from family, fell onto hard times or got into trouble that caused relatives to disregard them. Solving the mystery of why they ended up on a shelf in a storage room, instead of resting in a marked location, motivated the students, Helstosky says. 

“So what my students have found out is in many cases, they’re just ordinary people, many of them wind up being the last family member who passes away, and I guess the remaining relatives or surviving relatives are too distant, or there are none,” she says. “And no one claims the cremains. So they’re fascinated by that story.”

Much of the sleuthing was basic genealogical research, through resources like ancestry.com or fold3.com, which focuses on military records. But a good portion of the work also fell smack in the wheelhouse of young adults who have grown up using social media as second nature.

“A lot of time in college is spent in a classroom learning about history,” Helstosky says, “and that’s all fine and good. But this project, working on these biographies, is meaningful to students because they’re really putting their skills to work, and they’re doing it for a purpose that they have great respect for.”

When Cruz scanned the brief information on the first of two veterans she would research, she was troubled by circumstances of his death she thought might have pointed toward the veteran experiencing homelessness when he died. Calling on connections from an earlier internship with the Denver Medical Examiner, she contacted the Arapahoe County coroner and discovered key elements of the man’s backstory.

He hadn’t been homeless at all, but had died in his sleep after symptoms of illness at a farm where he’d been working. She felt that even that small detail, in the absence of a deeper narrative, provided a certain sense of dignity. 

…This project, working on these biographies, is meaningful to students because they’re really putting their skills to work, and they’re doing it for a purpose that they have great respect for.

— Carol Helstosky, history professor at the University of Denver

“I have a personal passion with the treatment of the deceased with my current internship,” Cruz says, “and so it was really meaningful to be able to reignite the memories of these people. It really is just sad and disappointing that so many people go unclaimed, and their lives aren’t known, especially U.S. veterans.”

She attended one of the two “final roll call” ceremonies at Fort Logan, where her veteran was given full honors. “And that was where it was so palpable,” she says, “to witness that ceremony and to see all of the veterans and supporters there to gather and remember these people who they didn’t know. But they were still honoring their lives.”

Sparked by her experience with the Honors Burial Program, Cruz’s work with veterans will continue through another internship with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which deals with the location, identification and repatriation of the remains of U.S. soldiers lost during foreign conflicts. Cruz will help with tasks like DNA analysis, histology, bone identification and administrative cataloging.

Meanwhile, the DU professors plan to launch students on another round of investigations in January to find background on those 116 veterans already inurned at Fort Logan under the VVA chapter’s program before the university joined in the effort.

Eventually, those biographies that student researchers can flesh out will go up on More Than a Headstone, and perhaps be linked to a national database. It’s research that perhaps isn’t always the traditional archival type that historians do, Helstosky says, but it touches on skills native to her students and the desire to be of service.

“So I would say they enjoy the research for that reason,” she says, “because it’s something that they’re good at, so they feel good about being able to use their skills to help others.”

A job unfinished

The April 30 final roll call ended with a veteran standing before each box of cremains while, one by one, the name of the deceased was read.

“Present,” said the veteran, speaking for each of them while a bell chimed once and the uniformed onlookers saluted.

When all had been recognized, the seven-man honor guard raised its rifles and squeezed off three volleys. Then the sharp crack of the last shots segued into the solitary notes of the bugler blowing “Taps,” and then a final prayer and the rising hum of the bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace.”

Cemetery management determines where the cremains are inurned. Many go to a columbarium, though the rising popularity of cremation has put space there at a premium. The urns holding the cremains of the 27 veterans honored in April were buried in a section of the cemetery where gray markers, flush to the ground, note each one’s name, branch of service and where they served, along with birth and death dates. 

Awards for valor also are noted.

“Our work continues,” Bridges says. “We won’t rest until we find them all.”

Later, he talks about next steps, about how the process has been put in place to do right by veterans who served, lived and died, only to have their memory fall through the cracks. But only for a while.

The program’s focus remains along the Front Range, where Bridges still struggles to find funeral homes that will admit to having unclaimed cremains that could be run through a check for veterans among them. But he did get a call recently from the Arapahoe County coroner’s office asking if he’d check five unclaimed cremains. Four of them turned out to be eligible veterans, whom he plans to honor in mid to late June.

Additionally, he’s working to confirm information that another funeral home in the Denver metro area has about 120 unclaimed cremains, in hope that he and his volunteers can schedule a time to conduct an inventory and begin the verification process. They’ve found, on average, that about 10-12% of those unclaimed have served.

“There’s so much more to do,” Bridges says. “The challenge is doing the legwork with all of these family funeral homes. It’s almost a given that they all have unclaimed cremains of some kind, and they don’t know if they’re veterans or not.”

At Fort Logan, the crowd slowly dispersed, and the motorcycles rumbled back to life. Eight years after the first committal honored 30 veterans, Bridges and his organization feel like they’ve constructed an effective system for following through on the motto of never abandoning their comrades. He has even been finalizing an operations manual so future volunteers won’t have to start from scratch.

As the crowd filters away, VVA chapter president Stan Paprocki offered a final thought on the committal of these 13 veterans who have finally been laid to rest.

“They’re where they should be,” he said. “Buried with soldiers.”

Al oeste, un espacio abierto salpicado con árboles se desliza sin interrupciones hacia picos pintorescos cubiertos con una neblina primaveral de la mañana. Hacia el este, el quejido intermitente del tráfico vehicular nos recuerda que un hilo de carretera estatal transitada conecta a la comunidad de casas móviles de la Cooperativa Sans Souci con la cercana ciudad de Boulder.

Esta comunidad de 62 hogares, en su mayoría de personas mayores y con bajos ingresos, ofrece cercanía tanto a la naturaleza como a la conveniencia—y eso, junto con los alquileres asequibles de sus lotes, ha hecho por muchos años que la comunidad sea un refugio que concuerda con la traducción de su nombre en francés: “sin preocupaciones”.  

Ya pasaron casi tres años desde que los residentes de la comunidad, impulsados por una ley estatal que buscaba preservar este tipo de opciones de vivienda asequible, se organizaron y compraron su comunidad—un momento emocionante y a la vez de ansiedad cuando la cooperativa tomó las riendas de su destino. Con la compra vino también el alivio que algunos sintieron de liberarse de la tiranía de la avaricia y gobernanza corporativa, pero también la incertidumbre—y preocupación—que resulta de los desafíos administrativos diarios. 

Ahora, la euforia se ha transformado en algunos cálculos financieros abrumadores conforme la comunidad enfrenta su necesidad de un nuevo sistema de aguas residuales que podría aumentar los alquileres a niveles fuera del alcance de algunos residentes. Y la emoción inicial de poder gobernarse a sí mismos ha causado desacuerdos comunes sobre las reglas del parque y su cumplimiento—problemas que reflejan una nueva fase de la realidad cotidiana a la vez que comunidades que ahora son propiedad de sus residentes trazan un nuevo camino en Colorado. 

“Creo que era inevitable”, dice Michael Peirce, presidente del consejo de la cooperativa y habitante de Sans Souci desde 1995. “Al principio, todos suelen trabajar mayormente con un objetivo en común con un entendimiento mutuo. Y luego, después de la emoción inicial, observas un cambio en el consejo. Y la emoción inicial desaparece porque ya no es este nuevo proyecto en el que estás trabajando”. 

Cuando los residentes completaron la compra de $3.3 millones con Strive Communities en junio de 2021, marcaron la culminación de un esfuerzo de dos años para obtener el control del paisaje bucólico que cubre casi 11 acres a la sombra de las Flatirons. Sans Souci se convirtió en la primera comunidad de casas móviles en Colorado—junto con la comunidad de River View en Durango, la cual completó su venta el mismo día—en aprovechar una recientemente aprobada cláusula para “la oportunidad de comprar” en las leyes estatales.

Desde entonces, varias otras comunidades han hecho lo mismo, preservando así trozos de paisajes con casas móviles que forman parte del inventario más grande en el país de viviendas asequibles no subsidiadas. En Colorado, estas propiedades albergan a aproximadamente 100,000 personas. Alrededor del estado ahora existen nueve comunidades de casas móviles cuyos residentes son los propietarios—comúnmente conocidas como ROC, por sus siglas en inglés—con varias ventas potenciales más en un futuro próximo. 

Hasta cuando el trato finalmente se finalizó, Peirce describió un tipo de “emoción nerviosa”. Ahora, ya con bastante tiempo desempeñando las gestiones diarias para administrar la comunidad, los residentes se han visto golpeados por varios desafíos que enfriaron la descarga inicial de adrenalina de la adquisición. 

“Ha sido una combinación”, Chuck Patterson, vicepresidente del consejo actual, dice sobre la empresa de la cooperativa. “Quiero decir, es bueno que la compramos. Pero varios compradores corporativos la examinaron y rechazaron. Y nos metimos en una circunstancia en la que había algunas obligaciones grandes acechando. Y ahora han regresado a mordernos”.  

Luchando con problemas de aguas residuales

Inicialmente, no parecía que la planta de tratamiento de aguas residuales se apoderaría de gran parte del presupuesto.

Una cotización inicial para el trabajo se recibió por $1 millón. Desafortunadamente, Peirce dice, esa cotización se basó en un permiso inicial de la descarga. Desde entonces, los requisitos relacionados con lo que se puede desechar se han actualizado y limitado, y los planes de reemplazar la planta actual con una nueva en el mismo lugar se han abandonado debido a su cercanía al arroyo de South Boulder, justo en el terreno inundable. 

Nuevas cotizaciones, dependiendo de la opción que Sans Souci elija, varían desde casi $3 millones a $4.7 millones.

Durante casi un año, Sans Souci buscó una solución alternativa—consolidando su sistema con el de la ciudad de Boulder al instalar una alcantarilla que se conecte con el sistema de la ciudad a través de la perforación horizontal y crear una estación elevada para bombear las aguas residuales colina arriba fuera de la comunidad. 

Desgraciadamente, Peirce dice, la ciudad mencionó reglas estrictas contra la expansión de servicios públicos a su zona de cinturones verdes—una prohibición establecida a finales de los años 1960 que ha ayudado a limitar la construcción en Boulder.

“Así que esa [opción] se eliminó y ahora estamos teniendo que elegir la [opción] que parece que costará dos o tres veces ese precio”, Peirce dice. “Y estamos teniendo enormes desafíos para ver cómo vamos a financiarla”.  

Patterson piensa que la comunidad no pudo aprovechar una importante oportunidad debido al incendio de Marshall en 2021, el cual no llegó por poco a Sans Souci. Pero los vientos peligrosos que impulsaron el incendio forestal resultaron en reparaciones y medidas de limpieza que desviaron la energía de la cooperativa y retrasaron por dos años el establecimiento de un plan para las aguas residuales. 

El consejo de la cooperativa sigue explorando opciones de asistencia financiera para ayudar a cubrir la reconstrucción. Sin ayuda adicional, y dependiendo del precio final del proyecto, los habitantes quizás tengan que enfrentar un aumento de entre $150 y $250 por el alquiler de su lote, los integrantes del consejo dicen. 

Alrededor de la mitad de los cerca de 85 residentes en la comunidad son adultos mayores. Muchos viven con ingresos fijos—cuando los residentes compraron Sans Souci, más de la mitad vivía con menos de $25,000 al año y ya enfrentaban desafíos para pagar los $720 mensuales que costaba alquilar un lote. Peggy Kuhn, una residente y exintegrante del consejo de la cooperativa, teme que hasta un cuarto de los residentes se vean forzados a desalojar sus hogares si la comunidad no puede resolver el tema de la planta de aguas residuales.

Aunque un aumento inicial en el alquiler siguió la transición a una cooperativa y causó estrés en las finanzas de algunos de los residentes, Peirce dice que no sabe de nadie que se haya mudado debido a eso. Los cambios que sucedieron después de la compra—cerca de media docena de residentes según sus cálculos—tuvieron que ver con razones no relacionadas, con la falta de confianza en una administración liderada por los residentes y el gasto inminente de un nuevo sistema de aguas residuales, o con personas que no estuvieron de acuerdo con el nuevo rumbo de la comunidad. 

Pero desde entonces la comunidad se ha estabilizado y hasta ha atraído a compradores potenciales de hogares individuales. Zoe Quaintance, una integrante actual del consejo que ha trabajado como cocinera y más recientemente en un trabajo de jardinería desde que compró en Sans Souci hace siete años, dice que compradores interesados—no inversionistas corporativos, sino gente local en sus años 20—la contactaron para comprar porque se sienten atraídos no solo por la ubicación, sino también por la idea de una cooperativa. Quaintance no busca vender.

“Es emocionante ser una de las primeras en hacer algo, pero también es—oh, madre mía—tanto trabajo”, dice, describiendo sus esfuerzos para crear una huerta comunitaria, plantar árboles nuevos y varias otras tareas. “No todo tiene que ver con el tratamiento de aguas residuales”.  

Quaintance pagó $88,000 por su hogar de 850 pies cuadrados, y le encanta haber logrado permanecer bastante cerca del área de Lakewood donde se crio. Sin embargo, la incertidumbre relacionada con la habilidad de Sans Souci de financiar un nuevo sistema amenaza a la comunidad que—por lo menos, hasta ahora—sigue siendo una isla de asequibilidad en un mercado metropolitano de bienes raíces fuera de control.

Y esa posibilidad tiene a los residentes en vilo. 

“Si los alquileres aumentan, he escuchado que las personas digan que, bueno, solo nos subirá a donde Boulder está”, Patterson dice, refiriéndose a las propiedades con precio de mercado. “Y yo digo que eso no es por lo que estamos aquí. Esa no es una buena respuesta. Eso no es consuelo para nada”.

Descarrilada por los vientos del incendio de Marshall 

Sans Souci estaba solo a un poco más de seis meses después de su reencarnación como una comunidad propiedad de los residentes cuando ya entrada la mañana del 30 de diciembre el incendio de Marshall se desencadenó a solo 30 pies cuesta arriba de la entrada de la comunidad. Solo el rumbo del viento salvó a la comunidad de un desastre.   

Pero el mismo viento destructor que envió las llamas hacia otro rumbo dejó daños. Los residentes evacuaron por un día, pero los daños del viento los dejaron sin electricidad por cuatro días—y también sin agua ni calefacción, lo cual a su vez resultó en una enorme cantidad de tuberías rotas. Peirce supervisó el subsidio de la Administración Federal para Gestionar Emergencias, o FEMA (por sus siglas en inglés0, al igual que otros subsidios para trabajar en varias reparaciones. 

Tardaron casi un año trabajando en todos los proyectos necesarios causados por los vientos que avivaron el incendio de Marshall, incluida la reparación de tres hogares que perdieron sus techos y otros que perdieron bordes, revestimiento o cuyos techos se dañaron. Las buenas noticias: usando fondos contra desastres de una variedad de fuentes y mano de obra donada a través de Mennonite Disaster Service, Sans Souci convirtió esa mala fortuna en un proyecto para mejorar la comunidad que reinstaló bordes en los hogares de casi todos los residentes y realizó varias reparaciones adicionales.

Pero la atención dedicada a responder a los daños también los distrajo de otros problemas que empeoraron para algunos residentes. 

“Eso fue difícil”, Peirce recuerda, “y también creó fricción en la comunidad porque el consejo estaba menos enfocado en hacer cumplir las reglas, así que algunas de las personas que querían que se hicieran cumplir las reglas empezaron a perder más de su paciencia”. 

Parte de la dificultad para Sans Souci, Peirce dice, ha sido encontrar una compañía de gestión de propiedades que “tenga más experiencia [acumulada] y que ya haya desarrollado procedimientos de operación estándar en lugar de crearlas desde cero”. Describe cooperativas como Sans Souci como un tipo de modelo híbrido—un tipo de comunidad con la que ni las compañías de gestión de asociaciones de propietarios de viviendas (HOA, por sus siglas en inglés) ni compañías tradicionales que gestionan casas móviles se sienten totalmente cómodas. 

Cada comunidad tiene su propia serie de desafíos, dice Tim Townsend, gerente de programas para Thistle, la organización sin fines de lucro con sede en Boulder que ofrece asesoría y asistencia para preservar la vivienda asequible. Elegir la compañía de gestión de propiedades adecuada para manejar las tareas diarias, como recolectar los alquileres y hacer cumplir las reglas, puede ser una propuesta complicada, pero crucial. 

“A veces es una gran victoria en una relación”, Townsend dice, “y a veces no lo es. Lo que he observado en nuestras comunidades actuales es que aquellas con una fuerte presencia de gestión de propiedades que ofrece un apoyo increíble no tienen tantos traspiés ni desafíos como las que no [la tienen]”. 

Townsend también repite la observación de Peirce de que hay una falta de compañías de gestión de propiedades con las habilidades necesarias para apoyar a una ROC. Menciona a Golden Hills, una comunidad de casas móviles en el Condado de Jefferson que compró su comunidad el verano pasado, como un ejemplo de las dificultades para encontrar la compañía adecuada. Thistle examinó o respondió a 34 compañías iniciales interesadas en gestionar la propiedad en el área metropolitana de Denver para pasárselas al consejo de Golden Hills.

“Solo una estaba realmente preparada para terminar trabajando con ellos”, dice, “y entonces fueron puestos en una situación difícil, porque fue [esa compañía] la que tuvieron que elegir. Así que necesitamos más opciones”. 

Townsend señala que las comunidades que no han conectado con la compañía adecuada para gestionar su propiedad suelen tener más dificultades porque tienen más responsabilidades de las cuales encargarse, en comparación con otras ROC. 

Peirce, quien obtuvo experiencia valiosa primero como un voluntario y ahora como el líder de la Coalición de Propietarios de Casas Prefabricadas de Colorado, acaba de ser elegido para su segundo período como el presidente del consejo de Sans Souci. Es su último período en ese puesto debido a límites, pero dice que quizás no pueda terminarlo por razones financieras. 

“Ha sido una labor de amor por demasiado tiempo”, dice. “Todavía no me he retirado—necesito obtener un puesto donde gane ingresos, así que realmente estoy tratando de encontrar cómo pasar la estafeta”.  

El período de uno a cinco años después de convertirse en una comunidad cuyos dueños son los residentes con frecuencia es difícil, dice Mike Bullard, vicepresidente de comunicaciones para ROC USA, la organización sin fines de lucro con sede en Concord, Nuevo Hampshire que ayuda a los residentes de casas prefabricadas a adquirir sus comunidades alrededor del país.

“Están tratando de implementar las metas que establecieron al comprarla y luego justo después hacer que su comunidad realmente cante”, Bullard explica. “Pero en ese momento a veces están tratando de resolver algunos problemas de infraestructura que surgieron durante la compra, así que eso puede presentar un desafío”.  

La mayoría de las ROC nuevas son lideradas por residentes que no saben cuáles son los desafíos de formar parte de un consejo en lo que, en muchos casos, es esencialmente una empresa multimillonaria, dice. Parte de lo que ha hecho que el modelo de ROC sea exitoso—ROC USA ha trabajado con 326 comunidades en 21 estados—es la disponibilidad de recursos a nivel nacional y local, a través de organizaciones afiliadas a ROC. 

“Y, mira, es una organización democrática, y no tienes que buscar lejos para observar que la democracia no siempre es ordenada”, Bullard dice sobre el modelo de residentes propietarios. “La gente no se pone de acuerdo. Pero tener una voz y tener la oportunidad de decir algo sigue siendo mucho mejor que la alternativa”. 

Jugando de acuerdo con la reglas

Los vecinos con frecuencia no se ponen de acuerdo sobre las restricciones en cosas como el estacionamiento o los adornos para jardines, o tienen diferentes estándares sobre el mantenimiento del hogar que pueden verse afectados no solo por el gusto, sino también por la habilidad financiera del propietario de hacer reparaciones o mejoras.  

“Ese ha sido uno de los aspectos más tumultuosos para nosotros”, Peirce dice. “En lo relacionado con las reglas, esa es el área más contenciosa que puedes tener en la comunidad”.  

Inicialmente, el consejo de Sans Souci encontró un amplio acuerdo entre los residentes sobre las reglas de la comunidad. Pero el que no se hicieran cumplir esas reglas al principio resultó en que algunos residentes se quejaran. Mientras tanto, otros presionaron para que se establecieran reglas más específicas—como el la altura del pasto o las malas hierbas. O hasta reglas más estrictas que aquellas impuestas por el propietario corporativo anterior.

“Eso empezó a crear desunión en la comunidad”, Peirce dice.

Quaintance ha observado desacuerdos en ambos extremos, mientras que en su mayoría los residentes parecen buscar un punto medio.  

“Nuestra primera reunión sobre reglas, esa fue una de las primeras cosas que mencionamos, no queremos realmente estar vigilando a las personas constantemente sobre cada pequeña cosa”, dice. “Pero encontré que sí tenemos una manera ligeramente más dura en algunos casos”.  

Sin embargo, una cosa era protestar contra la imposición y cumplimiento de las reglas dictadas por el propietario corporativo, demandas que a veces se sentían injustas comparadas con lo que Patterson describe como el método “laissez faire” del propietario anterior. Los residentes describen una variedad de medidas que les parecieron excesivas: podar las flores silvestres, prohibirles a los residentes que se congregaran en las calles tranquilas o caminar por la comunidad después de las 9 de la noche, sacar adornos de sus jardines y tendederos de ropa.

“Querían que estuviera inmaculada”, Quaintance dice. “Y nosotros como que queríamos ir en la dirección opuesta de lo que hacían antes. Pero también queremos mantener la comunidad segura y limpia en lo razonable”.  

“Muchos de nosotros somos [personas con] bajos ingresos”, agrega Doretta Hultquist, de 81 años, quien ha vivido en la comunidad desde 1967. “No tenemos el dinero para hacer muchas mejoras”.

Peirce, quien anteriormente enseñó filosofía en la Universidad de Colorado y estudió democracias a pequeña escala, dice que la dinámica de Sans Souci refleja lo que observó en su trabajo académico. Cambios en los integrantes del consejo, además de la transición a mantener en lugar de lanzar una empresa, pueden resultar en una progresión que disminuye el propósito común que inicialmente definió a la comunidad.

“Con frecuencia, es difícil mantenerla cuando alcanzas el punto de mantenimiento”, Peirce dice. “Las personas tienen menos intereses personales, un menor sentido de propiedad porque no estuvieron en la etapa de creación. Están heredando los compromisos de otras personas”.

Patterson observa que la comunidad cuenta con muchas personas que suelen ser independientes y gruñonas, mientras que otras están ansiosas por trabajar de forma colaborativa.  

“Pero en general”, dice, “la comunidad tiene un espíritu”. 

Y por ahora, ese espíritu incluye creer que los problemas pueden manejarse y que el modelo de residentes propietarios puede perdurar.  

“Siento que realmente tenemos que mantener la esperanza”, Quaintance dice. “Muchas personas están preocupadas sobre algunos de estos desafíos que estamos enfrentando, pero hay tantas cosas optimistas que seguimos escuchando. Solo quiero trabajar lo más duro que pueda para superar esta cosa del tratamiento de aguas residuales y mantener los alquileres bajos. Creo que si podemos superar esto, estaremos en una situación bastante buena para el futuro”. 

Cuando Peirce piensa sobre 2018, cuando la preservación de comunidades de casas móviles ocupó un lugar central como asunto legislativo, recuerda “un grupo medio fracturado que estaba trabajando duro”. Ahora, ve al estado invirtiendo en este sector de la vivienda asequible, condados dedicando fondos para preservar comunidades de casas móviles, y fundaciones comunitarias dando un paso hacia adelante para ayudar a que los residentes compren sus comunidades. Hasta las empresas de ingeniería civil han expresado su interés en ayudar. 

Legislación sobre la oportunidad de comprar dio lugar a una red de apoyo que sigue creciendo, un desarrollo que, a pesar de los dolores de crecimiento que han presentado desafíos para los residentes en su pequeña franja de cielo en el Condado de Boulder, a Peirce le parece alentador.

La diferencia en recursos disponibles entre ese entonces y ahora es notable, señala, ya que comunidades como Sans Souci ayudaron a forjar un camino para el movimiento de ROC en Colorado. 

“Como el primer hijo”, Peirce dice. “Los padres aprenden de su primer hijo. Y cuando llegan el segundo, tercero y cuarto, terminan cometiendo menos errores”.

EVERGREEN — Outside, even on an overcast and chilly spring morning, the foothills rise around Joyce Vanek’s home and wrap the slowly thawing vale in the striking natural beauty that drew her to Colorado. 

Inside, a 3-year-old champion Portuguese water dog curiously greets visitors before hopping onto the couch and settling next to her owner. Harper, named in part for famed novelist Harper Lee (earlier pets included a miniature donkey named Atticus and a cat named Scout), offers living, breathing evidence of Vanek’s appreciation of rare and beautiful things — whether it’s champion pups, bagging four of the Seven Summits or appreciating fine wine as a certified sommelier.

All around them, walls and tables covered with books, photos, framed sketches and assorted mementos reflect Vanek’s passionate life spent breeding, showing and — after years of experience and training — judging dogs in competition. 

One particular keepsake, a page of typewritten lines beneath an iconic logo of a pointer mid-stride, captures the culmination of that passion: an invitation to judge this year’s Westminster Dog Show in New York, widely regarded as the world’s premier canine event. 

“I’m just excited and exhilarated that I’m honored to do this,” says Vanek, 69 — and preparing for a birthday celebration later this month atop a Colorado fourteener. “There’s I don’t know how many thousands of judges that they draw from. That’s a huge honor.”

The show begins Saturday with ability and obedience championships open to all types of dogs before breed competition — the traditional mainstay among “purpose-bred” dogs that Vanek will help judge — starts Monday at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, New York.

The number of potential judging candidates approved by the American Kennel Club and considered from across the globe hovers somewhere in the low thousands, while the number selected for Westminster in any given year fluctuates between 30 and 36, says Don Sturz, president and show chairman for the competition’s 148th edition, making it the second-longest continuously held sporting event in the U.S. next to the Kentucky Derby.

“Judging at Westminster is the pinnacle of any judge’s career and it’s highly sought after and highly regarded,” Sturz says. “And so we try to maintain that image of bringing the best that we have.”

Those standards are established within the sport through judges’ conduct in the ring, he explains — from how they examine the dogs to the choices they make to how they engage with the exhibitors and their dogs. Are they personable? Are they kind? Are they fair, giving each exhibitor the same amount of consideration? Have they established themselves in the sport as someone people respect? 

Those qualities form a baseline for selection, but so does past performance. Judges who have worked Westminster previously and done well often find themselves invited back. Sturz, who now heads the selection process, says Vanek falls into that category. This marks the second time she’s been chosen, with the first coming in 2017. 

“When you watch her in the ring, she exudes confidence, but at the same time, she’s approachable and friendly with the exhibitors and kind with the dogs,” Sturz says. “She is very decisive in her choices. She gets through the examination and the sorting very efficiently, while at the same time giving everyone their fair time to impress her. And you know, she just looks the part when she’s in the middle of the ring. And that’s part of the Westminster magic.”

When you watch her in the ring, she exudes confidence, but at the same time, she’s approachable and friendly with the exhibitors and kind with the dogs. She is very decisive in her choices.

— Don Sturz, president and show chairman of the Westminster Dog Show

That magic nearly turned to disappointment for Vanek. Owing to the frustrations of small-town mountain mail delivery, she very nearly missed this opportunity after the post office discontinued individual delivery in her area in favor of communal boxes. Last summer, as sort of a silent personal protest, she didn’t retrieve her mail for a couple of weeks.

Vanek decided to break her boycott the day before she was to leave town to judge a dog show in Idaho. After emptying her mailbox and tossing the stack of envelopes on the kitchen table, she noticed one that featured that familiar pointer logo. Vanek figured Westminster either was asking for a donation or offering tickets to this year’s event.

When she opened it to find an invitation to judge, she also realized how close she’d come to blowing her chance: She was just hours away from the deadline to respond. She immediately telephoned Westminster, which had been wondering why they hadn’t heard from her.

Her first invitation to judge had proven even more memorable, as it arrived, entirely unexpected, on her birthday.

“When I got the envelope and looked at it that first time I was like, are you kidding me?” she recalls. “It was like one of the best birthday presents, because I didn’t think I was worthy.”

Sturz, who first showed a dog at Westminster at age 10, recalls the first of 10 times he has been invited to judge. He felt that same sense of unreality, of having to read and re-read the invitation before grasping what it all meant. 

Judging that first year instilled what he recalls as a tremendous sense of responsibility to the history of the event — a feeling that for him has never diminished.

“I remember getting very emotional as the moment came to choose the winners,” he says. “And that has happened every single time. You just don’t get jaded about that event. It kind of ruins you for every other dog show.”

A competitive family background

For Vanek, the genesis of her passion for the competition surrounding showing beautiful things, whether dogs or horses or even “inanimate objects like rocks and shells and whatnot,” began during her upbringing in St. Louis, where she helped her mother show American cocker spaniels. In a family where her siblings were significantly older, she notes, the puppies “were like my brothers and sisters.”

She inherited competitive instincts from her father as well. Ollie Vanek spent his career in professional baseball, including as a scout for the St. Louis Cardinals — he famously scouted and convinced the Cardinals to sign a lanky teenager named Stan Musial, who developed into a Hall of Fame slugger — and later for the New York Mets. Ollie’s scouting territory covered New York and Pennsylvania, where she attended her first AKC dog shows in the 1960s while spending summers often traveling with her dad.

The very first dog she could call her own, though, arrived when she was just a kid, courtesy of an older brother who was attending dental school at St. Louis University. His connection to the school qualified Vanek for discounted orthodontics, and on her appointments at the medical campus she heard dogs barking outside and wondered why. Her brother didn’t have the heart to tell her they were used for research.

Shortly after midnight one New Year’s Eve, she awakened to feel something moving around in her bed. Her brother had liberated a beagle puppy from the medical school. Given the magical hour of the gift, she named the pup Cinderella.

Vanek eventually added an affinity for horses, specifically Missouri fox trotters and Tennessee walking horses, though she also rode thoroughbreds in steeplechase competition. Her attachment to animals was sealed after she migrated to Colorado in 1975 and met her future husband, a dentist named Steve Nielsen. When he proposed, she told him she didn’t want an engagement ring — she’d rather have a dog and a horse.

He gave her an Old English sheepdog and three horses — “It sounds like he traded something for me, doesn’t it?” she says — with the dog constituting his engagement gift and the horses marking their wedding. (He also came through with a diamond engagement ring.) They settled on horse property but Vanek’s involvement with horses eventually waned, and she turned her competitive instincts fulltime to her sheepdog, which she first entered in obedience competitions, with great success.

To those events she eventually added the predominant dog show template of conformation — or how well the dogs conform to standards of a particular breed. Now even Westminster has added competitions from agility to dock diving, featuring all breeds, including mixed, ahead of the main event. 

But it was the world of conformation that shaped Vanek’s understanding of such a variety of breeds that she eventually judged shows in all 50 states and internationally in Australia, Scandinavia, South America, Mexico, Europe and China.

“It’s based on breeding stock, that’s first and foremost,” she says. “You want to persist in supporting and preserving this particular breed. And so just like anything — horses, cattle, sheep, whatever — you have to try to preserve what’s the best. And then we go not only to what they look like, but what’s going on inside — their health, their brain, their temperament. You want to preserve everything that those particular breeds were based on.”

Vanek recalls the precise moment when, in the midst of a competition, she decided she would pursue judging. And it came, not surprisingly, when she felt that her Old English sheepdog pup Tank — short for Lord Tanqueray, a nod to the British gin — got shortchanged in a competition in White Sands, New Mexico. It marked the first dog show she entered with a dog she’d personally bred.

“I thought nobody in the universe could ever beat this dog, this glorious, gorgeous sheepdog puppy that I bred,” she says. “And he didn’t not win, but he didn’t win everything. And that’s how people get — you think you or your dog or both of you are deserving and something goes awry. Well, then I had something to prove. 

“And I went, I can do as good as she can,” she adds.” And that was the start of it.”

The journey to judging dogs

The road to becoming a judge takes years to travel, but starts with a minimum of 12 years of experience with a given breed — including breeding and raising at least five litters at home and breeding or owning four or more champions from those litters, according to the American Kennel Club. 

Along the way, candidates have to become familiar with dog anatomy and ring procedure at shows — and pass exams on both. Experience as a ring steward at a minimum of six shows demonstrates understanding of event logistics and complements additional instruction in judging and other eligibility requirements.

“You have to show that you’re involved in preserving and improving the breed by having litters,” explains Vanek, who juggled judging with work as a dental hygienist before stepping away from that job a few years ago. “Not an overabundance, but you have to breed and then you have to show these dogs and prove that what you were breeding is hitting the standards, so that my Old English doesn’t turn out looking like a Chihuahua.”

Portuguese water dogs quickly revealed themselves to be a good match for Vanek, who found them a perfect complement for the outdoor lifestyle she and her husband enjoyed. But the breed also held an additional attraction that complemented her love of competition and beautiful things. She especially likes rare things.

When she discovered Portuguese water dogs, back in the late ’70s or early ’80s, there were fewer than 300 in the world. They had nearly gone extinct in the 1960s. She managed to acquire a dog named Lancer, who became one of the breed’s most significant sires, begetting a string of champions in conformation and title holders in performance.

The dogs particularly loved to tag along on kayaking trips. At one point around the late 1980s, Lancer even performed a water rescue of a rafter dumped in the “Eye of the Needle” rapids on the Colorado River near Kremmling. Lancer, her first champion in the breed, wasn’t specifically trained to rescue people from the water, but he knew how to retrieve objects. And so Vanek quickly weighed whether to give the command, knowing she could be sending her dog into danger. 

But clearly it was a life or death situation. When she talks about that moment, her voice falls to an emotional whisper.

“He got him by the collar and brought him back,” she says. “He was remarkable.”

Although Lancer died at age 15 in 1999, the dog that currently curls up to Vanek on the living room couch, born during the pandemic, is his daughter. Under normal circumstances, those dates wouldn’t line up. But Harper continues the line thanks to semen from Lancer frozen 37 years ago at Canine Cryobank in San Marcos, California.

When it comes to judging breeds, Vanek’s job varies by location. She has judged seven times in China, where she has learned about Tibetan mastiffs, a popular breed in that country. In Europe and Australia she was introduced to Lancashire heelers — not a new breed, but only recently recognized by the AKC and new this year to the Westminster show, where Vanek will judge them.

In the United States, Vanek judges seven groups: herding, working, sporting, nonsporting, toys, terriers and hounds. At Westminster, she’ll judge the sporting group (Barbet, Braccho Italiano, Brittany, Lagotto Romagnolo and Nederlandse Kooikerhondje), working group (Akita, boxer, Tibetan mastiff) and herding group (Australian cattle dog, Australian shepherd, Berger Picard, miniature American shepherd, Lancashire heeler, Spanish water dog and Polish Lowland sheepdog).

Since this is the internet era, there are also websites that judge the judges. Vanek understands the dynamic — her own frustration with a judge triggered her interest in becoming one. But she doesn’t get caught up in that kind of criticism.

“What’s the point?” she figures. “People don’t know — just like my attitude at that (White Sands) show, when I went, ‘Well, I can do better.’ Once you get into it, you know that sometimes your dog isn’t at its best in the ring. It’s hard for some people to identify that not every dog is going to be a superstar.”

It’s certainly not for lack of trying. Vanek reaches amid the books and periodicals on her coffee table and pulls out one monthly publication — full-color, slick and easily more than a half-inch thick — and flips through page after page of flashy ads touting meticulously groomed pups posing glamor-shot gorgeous to accentuate features of their champion bloodlines.

“A lot of dogs are backed by a lot of money,” Vanek notes. “I don’t really want to know that kind of stuff because we’re supposed to not know who the dogs are. We’re supposed to be impartial. These people pay a lot of money to advertise some of these dogs and some of it is valid. 

“What I try to do,” she adds, “is be as uninfluenced as possible.”

Vanek notes that judges focus on details that likely escape observers outside the ring — features like the positioning of a dog’s teeth or eyelid conditions known as entropion or ectropion that constitute finer points that impact particular breeds.

And so she pays close attention to subtle distinctions like a dog’s bite and facial expression. Judging breeds with thicker coats, she probes beneath the blow-dry, custom trims and other tricks of the dog-showing trade to determine their true frame.

“You actually have to put your hands on,” Vanek says. 

Her approach reflects a journey that began around age 25, when she began accumulating her credentials and expanding her knowledge base, though she wouldn’t officially start judging until she’d turned 39. She figures she probably started sooner than most, due to the early motivation of that snub at the New Mexico contest and her focus on animals when many of her peers may have been waiting for their kids to grow up before diving full-bore into the judging regimen.

“I didn’t have children, so my dogs and my horses were my kids,” she laughs. “Don’t we look alike?”

A pup 8 years in the making

Kidding aside, Harper does reflect traits that Vanek has wanted in a dog for years. And the pup came along on the heels of her first dog-less stretch since she was a baby. She’d lost two dogs on the exact same day — Nov. 13 — one year apart, with the second dying in 2019.

But the planning had already been underway to try to breed another Portuguese water dog, named Zellie, to the long-deceased Lancer via that previously frozen semen. 

The litter was eight years in the making, encompassing Vanek’s study of pedigrees, maintaining health clearances and timing the breeding around work, travel and judging — not to mention further scheduling issues created by COVID. But, Vanek saw her wishes come to fruition, in the form of a litter of five puppies, that put a merciful end to “what seemed like an eternity” without close canine companionship.

Part of the process, Vanek concedes, was decidedly nonscientific.

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“When I do a breeding,” she says, “I whisper in the mother’s ear: This is what I want —  can you and Mother Nature and God agree on this? And so I wanted a black, wavy female with white feet and a white chest.”

The puppy she would name Harper turned out to be the last of the five to emerge. And her playful presence continues that valued connection to Lancer, a dog so devoted to family that, at the funeral following Steve’s death in 1995, he walked down the aisle at the church with a rose in his teeth and sat faithfully in front of his photograph. 

Seven years ago, shortly before she first judged at Westminster, Vanek went to look for that diamond wedding ring Steve had made for her so she could wear it at the event in his honor. But the box where she kept it had disappeared.

Around last Christmas, Harper was roaming the house, rooting around in a guest bedroom, when she emerged with the ring box in her mouth. Now, as Vanek heads to New York to determine the best of the best in the dog world, she’ll perform her job as she had hoped to years earlier —  fortified with yet one more rare and beautiful thing.

To the west, tree-dotted open space rolls uninterrupted toward picturesque peaks veiled in a spring morning mist. To the east, the intermittent whine of traffic reminds that a thread of busy state highway connects the Sans Souci Cooperative mobile home park to nearby Boulder.

This community of 62 households, largely older and low-income, offers proximity to both nature and convenience — and that, coupled with manageable lot rents, has long made the park a refuge befitting its French translation, “without worry.” 

It has been nearly three years since the park’s residents, bolstered by statewide legislation aimed at preserving such affordable housing options, organized and purchased their community — at once a giddy and anxious moment when the co-op took control of its destiny. With the sale came relief from what some felt to be the tyranny of corporate greed and governance, but also uncertainty — and worry — that comes with day-to-day operational challenges.

Now, the euphoria has given way to some daunting financial calculations as the community confronts its need for a new wastewater system that could bump rents to untenable levels for some residents. And the early exhilaration over self-governance has triggered familiar squabbles over park rules and enforcement — all issues reflecting a new phase as resident-owned communities chart a new course in Colorado.

“I think it was bound to happen,” says Michael Peirce, president of the co-op board and Sans Souci resident since 1995. “In the beginning, everybody tends to be working largely with a common goal with mutual understanding. And then, after the initial excitement, you have some board turnover. And the initial excitement goes away because it’s not this new project you’re working on.”

When residents closed the $3.3 million purchase from Strive Communities in June 2021, it marked the culmination of a two-year effort to gain control of the bucolic landscape that covers nearly 11 acres in the shadow of the Flatirons. Sans Souci became Colorado’s first mobile home park — along with the River View park in Durango, which closed its sale on the same day — to take advantage of a recently enacted  “opportunity to purchase” provision in state law.

Since then, several others have followed suit, preserving patches of a mobile home landscape — or manufactured home, as it’s also called — that ranks as the nation’s largest inventory of nonsubsidized affordable housing. In Colorado, it shelters an estimated 100,000 residents. Statewide, there are now nine resident-owned communities — commonly called ROCs — with several more potential sales in the pipeline.

Even as their deal finally came together, Peirce described a kind of “nervous excitement.” Now, well into the everyday business of running their park, residents have been buffeted by a variety of challenges that have tempered the early adrenaline rush of ownership.

“It’s been mixed,” Chuck Patterson, vice president of the current board, says of the co-op venture. “I mean, it’s good that we bought it. But a number of other corporate buyers looked at it and turned it down. And we walked into a circumstance where there were some big liabilities that were lurking. And now they have come back to bite us.” 

Grappling with wastewater issues

Initially, it didn’t seem like the wastewater treatment plant would take that big a bite out of the budget.

An early estimate for the work came in at just over $1 million. Unfortunately, Peirce says, that projection was based on an earlier discharge permit. Since then, the requirements surrounding what can be discharged have been upgraded and tightened, and plans to replace the current plant with a new one on the same site had to be abandoned because of its proximity to South Boulder Creek, smack in the floodplain.

Revised estimates, depending on the option Sans Souci chooses, run anywhere from just shy of $3 million to $4.7 million.

For close to a year, Sans Souci sought an alternative solution — consolidating its system with the city of Boulder by running a mile-long sewer line into the city’s system via horizontal drilling and creating a lift station to pump the waste uphill from the park. 

Unfortunately, Peirce says, the city cited stringent rules against extending utilities into its greenbelt zone — a prohibition dating back to the late 1960s that has helped curb development in Boulder.

“So that route was out and now we’re having to go for a route that’s looking like two to three times the cost,” Peirce says. “And we’re struggling mightily to figure out how we’re going to fund it.”

Patterson figures the park missed an important window of opportunity due to the 2021 Marshall fire, which narrowly missed Sans Souci. But the damaging winds that fanned the wildfire led to repairs and cleanup measures that deflected energy and put the co-op two years behind on coming up with a wastewater plan.

The co-op board is still exploring avenues of financial assistance to help cover the rebuild. Without additional help, and depending on the project’s final price tag, residents could be looking at an increase of anywhere from $150 to $250 to their lot rent, board members say.

About half of the park’s roughly 85 residents are seniors. Many live on fixed incomes — at the time residents purchased Sans Souci, more than half lived on less than $25,000 per year and already stretched to afford the current $720 per month lot rent. Peggy Kuhn, a resident and previous co-op board member, fears as many as a quarter of the residents could be forced out of their homes if the park can’t solve the financial riddle of the wastewater facility.

Although an initial rent increase followed the transition to a co-op and strained the finances of some residents, Peirce says he doesn’t know of anyone who moved out as a result. The turnover that followed the purchase — about a half-dozen residents by his count — either had unrelated reasons for leaving, lacked confidence in a resident-run operation facing the looming expense of a new wastewater system or disagreed with the park’s new direction. 

But since then the community has stabilized, and even attracted potential buyers for individual homes. Zoe Quaintance, a current board member who has worked as a cook and more recently in a landscaping job since buying in Sans Souci seven years ago, says she was approached by interested buyers — not corporate investors, but 20-something locals — who were attracted not only by the location, but by the idea of a co-op. She’s not looking to sell.

“It’s exciting being one of the first to do something, but it’s also — oh my goodness — so much work,” she says, describing her efforts to help set up a community garden, plant new trees in the park and a number of other tasks. “It’s not all wastewater treatment.”

Quaintance paid $88,000 for her 850-square-foot home, and loves that she’s been able to remain fairly close to the Lakewood area where she grew up. But still, the uncertainty surrounding Sans Souci’s ability to finance a new system looms over the park that — so far, at least — remains an island of affordability in a metro real estate market run amok.

And that possibility has residents on edge.

“If rents go up, I’ve heard it said amongst people that, well, it’ll just get us up where Boulder is,” Patterson says, referring to market-priced properties. “And I say that’s not why we’re here. That’s not a good answer. That’s no solace at all.”

Derailed by Marshall fire winds

Sans Souci was only a little more than six months into its reincarnation as a resident-owned community when late on the morning of Dec. 30 the Marshall fire sparked to life just about 30 feet up a hill across from the park’s entrance. Only the direction of the wind spared the community from disaster.

But the same destructive wind that sent the flames in another direction still took a toll. Residents evacuated for a day, but wind damage left them without power for four days — and also without water or heat, which in turn led to a huge run of burst pipes. Peirce oversaw administration of a FEMA grant as well as other grants to work on various repairs.

It took most of a year to work through all the projects made necessary by the winds that stoked the Marshall fire, including repair of three homes that lost their roofs and others that lost skirting, siding or had roof damage of their own. The good news: Using disaster funds from a variety of sources and donated labor through the Mennonite Disaster Service, Sans Souci turned that misfortune into a community improvement project that reskirted the homes of just about everyone in the park and performed various other repairs.

But the attention devoted to damage response also distracted from other issues that festered among some residents.

“That was tough,” Peirce recalls, “and also created friction in the park because the board was less focused on rule enforcement, so some of the people who wanted to see the rules enforced started losing more of their patience.”

Part of the difficulty for Sans Souci, Peirce says, has been finding a property management company that “has more experience under their belt and has already developed standard operating procedures versus making them up from scratch.” He describes co-ops like Sans Souci as a kind of hybrid — a type of community with which neither HOA management companies nor traditional mobile home management companies are completely comfortable.

Every community has its own set of challenges, says Tim Townsend, program manager for Thistle, the Boulder-based nonprofit that offers coaching and assistance aimed at preserving affordable housing. Choosing the right property management company to handle day-to-day tasks like rent collection and rule enforcement can be a tricky — but critical — proposition.

“Sometimes it’s a big win in a relationship,” Townsend says, “and sometimes it’s just not. What I’ve seen from our current communities is that those who have a strong property management presence that’s incredibly supportive don’t experience as many of the hiccups or challenges as the ones who do not.”

Townsend also echoes Peirce’s observation that there’s a shortage of property management companies skilled in supporting a ROC. He cites Golden Hills, a Jefferson County mobile home park that purchased its community last summer, as an example of the difficulty finding the right fit. Thistle vetted or fielded initial interest from 34 property management companies in the Denver metro area to pass on to the Golden Hills board.

“Only one was really equipped to end up working with them,” he says, “and so they kind of got put into a tough spot, because that’s who they had to go with. So we need more options.”

Townsend points out that parks that haven’t connected with the right management company tend to struggle more because they have more on their plate in comparison to other ROCs.

Peirce, who gained valuable experience first as a volunteer and now as the leader of the Colorado Coalition of Manufactured Home Owners, just got elected to a second term as Sans Souci board president. He’s term-limited in that position but says he may not be able to finish the current term for economic reasons.

“It’s been a labor of love for too long,” he says. “I’m not retired yet — I need to get into an income earning position, so I’m very much trying to find how to pass the torch.”

The period one to five years out from first becoming a resident-owned community often proves difficult, says Mike Bullard, vice president of communications for ROC USA, the Concord, New Hampshire-based nonprofit that helps manufactured home residents purchase their communities across the country.

“They’re trying to implement the goals that they set out at the purchase and then right afterwards to make their community really sing,” Bullard explains. “But at this point sometimes they’re working through some infrastructure issues that came up during the purchase, so that can be a challenge.”

Most newly minted ROCs are led by residents unfamiliar with the challenges of serving on the board of what, in many cases, is essentially a multimillion-dollar enterprise, he adds. Part of what has made the ROC model successful — ROC USA has worked with 326 communities in 21 states — is the availability of resources at the national and local levels, through ROC affiliates.

“And look, it’s a democratic organization, and you don’t have to look far to see that democracy is not always clean,” Bullard says of the resident-owned model. “People disagree. But having the voice and having the opportunity to have a say is still so much better than the alternative.”

Playing by the rules

Neighbors often disagree about restrictions on things like parking or lawn ornaments or have differing standards on home maintenance that can be impacted not only by taste, but by a homeowner’s financial ability to pay for repairs and upgrades.

“That’s been one of the rockiest aspects for us,” Peirce says. “When it comes to rules, that’s the most contentious area you could have in the park.”

Initially, the Sans Souci board found broad agreement among residents about community rules. But early lack of enforcement led some residents to complain. Meanwhile, others pushed for more specific rules — like for length of grass or weeds. Or even more stringent rules than those imposed by the previous corporate ownership.

When it comes to rules, that’s the most contentious area you could have in the park.

— Michael Peirce, board president at Sans Souci

“That was starting to create rifts in the community,” Peirce says.

Quaintance has seen disagreements on both extremes, while for the most part residents seem to seek a middle ground.

“Our first rules meeting, that was one of the first things we stated, we don’t want to really be policing people constantly on every little thing,” she says. “But I found that we do have to have a slightly heavier hand in some cases.” 

Still, it was one thing to rail against the imposition and enforcement of rules handed down from the corporate ownership, demands that sometimes felt unfair compared to what Patterson describes as the “laissez faire” approach of the previous ownership. Residents describe a variety of measures they found excessive: mowing down wildflowers, prohibiting residents from congregating in the quiet streets or wandering through the park after 9 p.m., removing lawn ornaments and clotheslines.

“They wanted it pristine,” Quaintance says. “And we kind of wanted to go in the opposite direction of what they did before. But we also want to keep the community safe and clean within reason.”

“So many of us are low income,” adds Doretta Hultquist, 81, who has lived at the park since 1967. “We don’t have the money to do a lot of upgrades.”

Peirce, who formerly taught philosophy at the University of Colorado and studied small-scale democracies, says the dynamics of Sans Souci echo what he saw in his academic work. Changes in board members, plus the transition to maintaining rather than launching a venture, can trigger a progression that diminishes the common purpose that initially defined the community. 

“Oftentimes, it’s hard to sustain after you get to the maintenance point,” Peirce says. “People have less vested interests, less sense of ownership because they weren’t at the creation stage. They’re inheriting other people’s commitments.”

Patterson observes that the park has lots of people who tend to be independent and cranky, while others are eager to work collaboratively. 

“But by and large,” he says, “the community has a spirit.”

And for now, that spirit includes belief that the problems can be managed and the resident ownership model can endure.

“I feel like we’ve really got to keep up hope,” Quaintance says. “A lot of people are a little bit concerned about some of these challenges we’re facing, but there’s so many hopeful things we keep hearing. I just want to work as hard as I can to get through this wastewater treatment thing and keep rents low. I think if we can make it through this we’ll be in pretty good shape for the future.” 

When Peirce thinks back to 2018, when preservation of mobile home parks moved front and center as a legislative issue, he recalls “kind of a fractured group of folks who were working hard.” Now, he sees the state investing in this sector of affordable housing, counties dedicating funding to preserving mobile home parks and community foundations coming to bat to help residents purchase their communities. Even civil engineering firms have expressed interest in helping out.

Opportunity-to-purchase legislation spawned a network of support that continues to grow, a development that, despite the growing pains that have challenged the residents in their little slice of Boulder County heaven, Peirce finds heartening.

The difference in available resources between then and now is remarkable, he notes, as parks like Sans Souci helped forge a path for the ROC movement in Colorado.

“Kinda like the first child,” Peirce says. “Parents learn from their first child. And by the second, third and fourth, they end up with fewer mistakes.”

When Denver writer-rapper-cartoonist-speaker-podcaster-professor R. Alan Brooks — a man rapidly running out of hyphens — recently began to conceptualize his first children’s book, he rode a cresting wave of artistic momentum. 

Over the past several years, Brooks, 48, published his first graphic novel, landed a gig teaching that art form at a local university, hosted multiple podcasts, delivered a popular TED Talk, established a weekly comic strip for The Colorado Sun, published a second graphic novel, appeared in a short-story anthology and had his visual arts featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Denver Art Museum — twice.

Lots of other projects, from screenwriting to educational cartoons, filled in any gaps. Those surges of creativity — and income — allowed Brooks to step away from a day job selling insurance to focus full-time on his varied creative pursuits. And yet, to realize this children’s book, a relatively modest passion project inspired in large part by his bond with his young niece, he instinctively turned to crowdfunding. 

That his Kickstarter campaign surpassed its $8,400 goal in just five days tells the story of an artist who, having little luck with traditional avenues for monetizing his skills, instead has found financial footing by cultivating an organically grown audience who appreciates his work. And that audience has continued to expand as his artistic range has attracted more and more public recognition. 

And though appreciation may have been long in coming for the Ithaca, N.Y., native who grew up in Atlanta before venturing to Denver more than 20 years ago, Brooks has turned hard lessons and timely advice to his advantage.

“The beauty of living in this age that we live in is that I don’t have to depend on a publisher to tell me I’m a writer,” Brooks says. “The beauty of Kickstarter is if I can create something that engages enough people, they will help me create it. And if I don’t engage them, then they don’t have to help me create it — but I’m not waiting on a gatekeeper.”

His experience in pulling together funding in 2017 for his first graphic novel, “The Burning Metronome,” became a foundational lesson in how to approach the business side of his craft that sustains his artistic instincts. Although he hadn’t had much luck previously with crowdfunding, this time his Kickstarter request found its way into a college alumni group. 

Some people from his alma mater — he entered Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, at 16 and graduated three years later — posted it on Facebook. Suddenly, names that he hadn’t heard for maybe 25 years started popping up as donors. Before long, he had just about doubled his original goal.

By concentrating on the audience that I know that I can have direct connection to, and building out from there, I can have my needs met while I’m expanding, so that I’m not reaching for deals out of desperation.

— R. Alan Brooks, writer and artist

When his TED Talk hit a million views (it’s now approaching 3 million), he reasoned that at least a million people knew about “The Burning Metronome.” Still, no traditional publishing offers materialized. He tried to leverage the TED success to generate speaking engagements, but potential agents mostly told him to come back when he had a major publishing deal. The traditional mechanisms for career advancement weren’t working for him.

“Basically, I’ve made a living in spite of those institutions,” Brooks says.

He began adjusting his thinking about the business side of his art after hearing some wisdom from Melanie Gilman, a comics creator who advised concentrating efforts on the smaller pool of already dedicated fans instead of aiming to mushroom his following.

“If you have a dedicated 1,000 that will buy three things from you a year, you can make a living,” Brooks says, recounting the advice. “And it sustained me. By concentrating on the audience that I know that I can have direct connection to, and building out from there, I can have my needs met while I’m expanding, so that I’m not reaching for deals out of desperation.”

Also, his life partner, Juan-Nean Young, became his business partner. She felt her background as a life coach with business and negotiation skills might make a difference and capitalize on the TED Talk. Brooks agreed — and soon Young was landing him paying gigs.

“I think he needed someone to be able to really accentuate all of his accomplishments, without it seeming self-centered, so that people can really understand his value,” Young says. “So I’m able to just put it in a different frame, that’s all. His mission, to creatively change the world through writing and art, is something that inspires me to speak on his behalf.”

Young says one facet of Brooks’ talent that may still be underappreciated is his music — both as a rapper and a songwriter.

“A lot of people don’t know how musically inclined Alan is when it comes to rapping,” she says. “He’s really good because he’s a wordsmith. He’s so good at being able to decode messages and to translate those messages in ways that people can understand.”

Seizing opportunities

In 2018, The Colorado Sun approached Brooks about creating a multipanel comic strip that would be a vehicle to address issues important to Coloradans. Brooks responded with a proposal for “What’d I Miss?”, a strip built on the friendship of a young Black man and a middle-aged white woman recently emerged from a 30-year coma. He enlisted local artist Cori Redford to draw and color the strip while he handles the writing and storylines. 

It’s now approaching its 300th episode.

Around the same time, Regis University invited Brooks to speak to students about writing graphic novels (a genre of novels written in comic-book format) along with a couple of other writers. Brooks’ presentation stood out, and the university hired him as an adjunct professor of graphic narrative, says Andrea Rexilius, program director for the school’s Mile High MFA in Creative Writing.

She says Brooks melds pragmatic writing advice with motivational topics such as managing impediments like procrastination or personal fears that may get in the way of self-expression.

“What I love about him as a teacher is that he’s just incredibly practical at the same time that he’s visionary and inspiring,” Rexilius says. “He knows how to get the work done. He knows how to keep at it, even when there are obstacles. And that kind of tenacity, I think, is one of the most important things for grad students, or just students in general, to keep in mind.”

Landing two regular gigs in succession reinforced his tenacity to continue following his artistic muse. In 2019, he launched another collaboration — this time with artists Kevin Caron, Dailen Ogden and Sarah Menzel Trapl — with his second graphic novel, “Anguish Garden,” an allegory about white supremacy.

What I love about him as a teacher is that he’s just incredibly practical at the same time that he’s visionary and inspiring.

— Andrea Rexilius, program director for Regis University’s Mile High MFA in Creative Writing

“It was really incredible that this happened,” Brooks says of his turn of fortune. “Because I’ve lived my entire life as a person who was creating art but nobody’s ever wanted to buy it. I never had a lot of support with any of it.”

Eventually, Brooks also started teaching at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, which in turn led to writer and editor Cynthia Swanson offering him an opportunity to contribute to the 2022 anthology “Denver Noir,” a collection of short stories in which his comics-style entry — the only such piece in the local version of the popular Noir Series, and only the third overall — shared pages with a host of established authors including Peter Heller and Manuel Ramos. (He also earned recognition alongside those two writers and others in Westword as a “must-read” Colorado author.)

The project carried prestige, but didn’t come with enough money for Brooks to follow his preferred route of hiring an artist to flesh out his storyline. So he drew it himself, an exercise he says contributed to “finding my feet as far as being able to draw my own stories.”

That process had already begun as he took on some high-profile projects.

Connections on the dance floor

The first museum break came through a Denver dance club.

Brooks and a couple of acquaintances started showing up at Beauty Bar (since closed) on Motown Thursdays, an event thrown by DJ Miggy Camacho. One of Brooks’ friends, who happened to be a fan of comic books, wound up dating a woman who worked at the Denver Art Museum, and introduced her to Brooks at the club. 

Later, when the subject of finding a graphic novelist to produce work to complement the museum’s renovated Western galleries came up, she mentioned Brooks. Networking paid off.

“I guess the dance floor is like my version of golf,” Brooks says.

To that point, he hadn’t often drawn his own comics. But he’d also found that collaborating artists sometimes have difficulty keeping on schedule and finishing projects. The son of financial journalist Rodney Brooks (they share the same first name, so Alan goes by their shared middle name, minus the Jr.), Brooks has a healthy respect for deadlines and didn’t want to risk sharing the workload. So he decided to dust off his drawing skills and take on the challenge — he was to create a comic about the legendary Black cowboy Nat Love — entirely on his own. 

The permanent exhibit, a web-based creation viewed on a touchscreen in the gallery, drew positive notices from museum visitors, but Brooks looks at it now and sees it as one step in his broader development.

“It’s all right. It’s cool,” he says. “I don’t have impostor syndrome or anything like that. But the places where I was growing as an artist are immediately apparent to me when I look at that.” 

His success earned him another project with the museum — a comic book treatment of Balthazar, one of the storied “Three Wise Men,” to provide a bridge from historic artists to the present in the exhibit “Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks.” Museum director Christoph Heinrich jokingly noted that Brooks was the only living artist in the exhibit.

Lauren Thompson, a senior interpretive specialist at the Denver Art Museum who worked with Brooks, notes that in addition to Brooks’ artistic eye and imagination, his openness to experimentation proved a big plus. She also praises his adaptability to what can be an almost open-ended creative journey for which neither the artist nor museum staff can predict the end result. 

“It’s a creative process that we’re in together,” Thompson explains, “and he’s a wonderful partner to do that with. Not everyone can do it well, even if they’re extremely talented in their media. It’s just a different skill set. And he’s got that.”

Last year, Brooks also was commissioned to contribute a piece to the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibit “Cowboy,” for which he created a comic book treatment about the town of Dearfield, the largest Black homesteading settlement in Colorado (a topic he also addressed in “What’d I Miss?”). It still seems strange to him that his work has now appeared in museums, given his childhood experience of hearing teachers talk condescendingly about comic books.

“I would get in trouble for reading them,” he recalls. “Everybody talked about them like they were nothing. They weren’t in libraries. I couldn’t find them anywhere except for comic book specialty shops. So if you would have told 10-year-old me that comic books would take me into newspapers, museums and universities, I never would have believed that.”

Taking advice to heart

When Brooks decided to be a full-time writer, he started listening to writing and business podcasts — shows like “How I Built This” on NPR — and took some basic tenets to heart, such as “don’t spend more than you make.” Close attention to his bottom line meant embracing the tools of the do-it-yourselfer.

For instance, he drew the pieces for his museum exhibits in a program called GIMP, an open-source image editor similar to the popular but costly Photoshop. He asked himself: Is my drawing earning enough to justify paying a monthly subscription fee? The answer was no, so he taught himself the free alternative. 

Decisions like that have guided him through times when he acknowledges that leaving the insurance business to make comic books “didn’t sound like the wisest move.” He points to landing the Regis University job and then being recognized for his Sun cartoon with an award from the Society of Professional Journalists — coincidentally, the same year that his father won a journalism award — as turning points that cemented the idea with his family and within himself that his commitment to the arts was really happening.

“Thankful to say that I haven’t had a year where I’ve lost money as a business,” Brooks says, reflecting on his artistic rise over the last few years. “But it still feels gradual to me and I think it’s largely because I don’t make any money unless I generate activity. So it’s always like a hustle.”  

He’s drawn inspiration from the late Melvin Van Peebles, the Chicago-born actor, filmmaker and writer who once said that he realized he could either do what he wants or have what he wants — and he chose the former.

“I think there’s something to be said about the sacrifice to make things that are good for your soul. It’s a choice,” Brooks says. “And it’s not that I want to live in poverty, but it is a choice to choose what’s important and see how I can expand from there.”

And that brings him back to his latest expansion — a children’s book.

This venture began when the same people who initially connected Brooks with the Denver Art Museum suggested that a comics-style piece might help kids connect with an exhibit of African art. That idea struck a chord with him and rekindled a desire to write for a younger audience — a notion that had gained momentum with weekly Zoom calls he made to his then-5-year-old niece during the pandemic shutdown.

“I was like, OK, how can I make this a piece that means something to me, and allows me to do something meaningful for my niece and children her age?” he says. 

The result was “The Masks In Your Dreams,” a 40-page story of how children on a school field trip to an African art exhibit “learn a lesson about how to love themselves, and how to unleash their dreams.” He included English and Spanish versions of the story.

While he was creating the book, he says, some medical emergencies among museum staff put the project on hold. In the meantime, he moved forward on his own, completing the book with the help of fellow cartoonist Lonnie MF Allen, who provided coloring expertise, and launching the Kickstarter campaign to finance the publishing.

Around the Christmas holiday, when Brooks was visiting his family in Maryland, he pulled out his laptop and showed the complete narrative to his now 8-year-old niece, who goes by Dylan G. and served as a model for a character in the story.

“She’s reading it to my mother,” he recounts, “and it was just like this really beautiful, beautiful moment. It was something I created, that had my niece in it, and she could see herself. And she’s reading it to my mother who raised me. It was just … all kinds of feelings.

“Business-wise, it’s just adding another dimension to what I’m able to give to people,” Brooks adds. “So much of it, for me, has been about creating a thing and then just seeing what activities come to me. And when they come, I’m sure going to be ready.”

Though separated by 46 miles of southeastern Colorado prairie and more than a century, the massacre at Sand Creek and the incarceration of Japanese Americans at the Amache camp have long been connected by shards of shared history and the common thread of government-sanctioned cruelty.

Memories of both tragedies converged last spring, when descendants of those 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho people murdered in 1864 by U.S. troops, mostly Colorado volunteers, attended the annual pilgrimage to the World War II-era incarceration camp. In turn, many of the Amache descendants trekked to the site of the massacre to learn and pay respects.

It was a groundbreaking convergence, sparking dialogue that gave birth to a long-percolating idea: create a youth-centered initiative to ensure that the history and remembrance extends to future generations. With the help of a $50,000 Outdoor Equity Grant from Colorado Parks and Wildlife, that concept will be realized later this spring. 

As many as 12 young people ages 14 to 25 will participate in the new Youth Ambassador Program, an experience that includes two four-day visits to the National Historic Sites encompassing May’s Amache pilgrimage and the Sand Creek Spiritual Healing Run in the fall. Members of both descendant communities will participate along with selected high school students from Eads, near the Sand Creek site, and Granada, which sits in proximity to Amache.

“There’s a desire from within the descendant communities to increase youth participation in events that are already happening,” says Annie Danis, an assistant professor at Cal Poly Pomona who has done archeological work at the Amache site for nearly 10 years and helped secure the grant. “We’re just trying to bring resources to people who haven’t always been included. And that’s mostly a younger generation of descendants.” 

The program will culminate in January with a virtual youth summit, where students will meet to discuss how experiences at both sites have impacted them. And since the grant focuses on youth perspectives on site interpretation, those voices can be incorporated into future interpretive programming.

The grant covers all travel expenses plus a $100 per day stipend for each participant because, Danis says, “what they are going to do by participating in community events at the sites is work.”

Building off the discussions at last spring’s pilgrimage, Danis — in collaboration with the Amache Alliance, Sand Creek Massacre Foundation and the National Parks Conservation Association — applied for and received the two-year outdoor equity grant through CPW that will fund the inaugural program. The broad collaboration that also includes Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes will lead the effort to deepen young people’s connections to both sites — as well as each other.

“I’ve always been one to advocate for the youth learning their history,” says Greg Lamebull, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma who serves on the Sand Creek Massacre Foundation’s board of directors. “And this history is being lost.”

Lamebull learned the history of the Sand Creek Massacre largely from family members in his home. He went on to teach Indigenous Studies at the Sovereign Community School in Oklahoma City, a charter school where most of the students were Native American. 

“As harsh as the history is, in our home our grandparents made it a point to teach us (the history) at a young age,” he says. “Growing up, I’ve seen the tears of my grandparents when they told the stories to us as children at the dinner table or around the campfire. Those images were seared into my memory, how important it was for them to teach us.”

Educators from both descendant communities will lead the youth ambassadors in learning about the sites and have begun formulating how they’ll identify and select potential participants for the program. Given the short timeline before this year’s Amache pilgrimage, set for mid-May, the initial effort will probably involve a relatively small group of young people.

Where the program leads remains an open-ended proposition, with the youth summit providing participants the opportunity to determine what comes next.

“The hope is that it generates something none of us could have ever come up with on our own,” Danis says, “in terms of insights that can guide interpretation at the national parks; in terms of things that these young people want to say to lawmakers about how these sites are recognized; about how these young people want to communicate with their own peers about this experience, about their identity and how they want to use it in their own lives.”

Early strands of connection

In a sense, the connection between Amache and the Sand Creek Massacre began with the opening of the incarceration camp in 1942. Originally known as the Granada Relocation Center, where more than 10,000 Japanese Americans, most of them American citizens, were held, the name was soon changed to avoid postal service confusion with the town of Granada.

The name Amache referred to Amache Prowers, the daughter of a Cheyenne chief who married cattle rancher John W. Prowers. Her father was one of the tribal members murdered at Sand Creek.

More recently, the connection between the sites was noted in a 2006 speech by Derek Okubo, whose father was incarcerated at Amache, at the ceremony marking it as a National Historic Landmark. He would go on to serve on the advisory board of the Sand Creek Massacre Foundation as well as the board of the Amache Alliance.

By doing this with the youth, it’s a very intentional and deliberate effort to make sure history is remembered and shared, and that we work together to strengthen our country and make sure that we learn from our past mistakes.

— Derek Okubo, Amache descendant, Sand Creek Massacre Foundation advisory board

“At the time I didn’t see it growing into something like this,” Okubo says of the developing bonds between the two descendant groups. “But I found it interesting that two significant historic occurrences were within 45 minutes of each other. By doing this with the youth, it’s a very intentional and deliberate effort to make sure history is remembered and shared, and that we work together to strengthen our country and make sure that we learn from our past mistakes.”

Alexa Roberts, a current board member of the Sand Creek Massacre Foundation who at that time worked for the National Park Service as the first superintendent at the Sand Creek site, felt the spark of an idea when she heard another speaker at that same 2006 event. 

Amache Preservation Society founder John Hopper, a local teacher and school administrator, explained how student involvement at the site — his organization has performed all manner of service from site maintenance to interpretive presentations — had helped shift public perception and foster greater understanding of the Japanese American experience in the camp. Roberts imagined a similar youth-centered movement around Sand Creek that might create “new levels of understanding.”

“People tend to think an event like Sand Creek, from almost 160 years ago, was just a historical event,” Roberts says. “But if people can understand something that’s more within the realm of their own experience, or a period of time that they’re more familiar with, then it’s an opportunity to actually think that Sand Creek isn’t just an event from our historical past. Maybe Sand Creek is still a reminder of our present.” 

A “fixer” steps in to help

At last year’s Amache pilgrimage, when Native guests joined in discussions, the long-anticipated idea of involving youth from both communities again surfaced. With everyone on board with the concept, Danis took on the nuts-and-bolts tasks of applying for the Colorado Outdoor Equity Grant that provided the means to realize it.

“I think about my position as a researcher as like a fixer,” Danis says, “where I have the time and resources for doing things like applying for grants even when they’re not exclusively for research in my discipline.”

Danis grew familiar with the historic sites of southeastern Colorado even as she was studying as a graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley, with a focus on research with Native American communities. She connected with University of Denver anthropology professor Bonnie Clark and the DU Amache Research Project, where her archeological interests intersected the story of the Japanese-American incarceration camps.

She tracked moments when the two narratives converged — most obviously with the discovery of Native artifacts on the camp’s grounds, but also through connections found in the camp archives, such as the mascot for the camp’s high school being the Indians. On days off, Danis and Clark would also take students working at Amache to the Sand Creek Massacre site. 

“So I knew only a little bit about that history, but I knew it was out there in the same landscape,” Danis says. In fact, some of the World War II-era incarceration sites were built on reservations or other Native land. One incarceration center, she adds, was built on land that already had a history of dispossessing Native people — a government boarding school.

The National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting and preserving the nation’s iconic landscapes, aided the grant process and development of the program as part of its ongoing work supporting the new National Historic Site at Amache and furthering partnerships with Indigenous communities, says Tracy Coppola, the group’s Colorado senior program manager.

“We owe everything to the elders, within both the Amache and Sand Creek Massacre sites, who advocated to protect these stories that would have otherwise been neglected or deliberately forgotten,” she says.

Roberts notes that interest in the program has spread beyond the descendant communities to the two small towns — Eads and Granada — closest to the historic sites. Educators in Kiowa County are recruiting students familiar with their geographical connection to Sand Creek. And she imagines the same will hold for Granada, where students already have been stewards of the Amache site for decades.

Elleni Sclavenitis, executive director of the Sand Creek Massacre Foundation who has produced a documentary on the atrocity as well as a short film that’s part of the History Colorado exhibit on the massacre, figures that this sort of opportunity promises to be far more engaging than what students can experience in a classroom.

“It’s a way of understanding history through personal life experiences and personal family histories, too,” she says. “So I imagine that might create more interest than amongst your average high school student for an average history lesson.”