Looking Back

In 1970, my BF, the kids, the dogs and I pulled up stakes in California and relocated to Ward, Colorado. At the time, Ward was almost a ghost town. There was still a post office, a general store and cafe and a fire department, with an old Forest Service tank truck and a six person governing group: six people who, against enormous odds, had made it through many winters in the high, windy place and could still be relied on to show up and vote.

We were there because there was a carpentry job that the BF, a neophyte hammer swinger, thought he could handle and I didn't have anything better to do and the kids and dogs didn't get a vote. On our trip from California, in the BF's funky camper, the dogs had discovered the joy of porcupines. We had to spend most of a day at a vet's in Elko. We quickly learned to do the quill extraction ourselves.

Hazel, the woman who would be writing the BF's checks at his job in Ward, was 72 years old when we arrived. She had been the state botanist of Colorado for many years. She owned most of the gold mining town of Ward. She had grown up there. Her father ran the livery stable. During the boom days, he handled travelers' horses and had his fingers in many travel-related pies. Hazel, his only child, delivered milk to the miners and their families. In 1906, fire raged through the closely-built community of miners' shacks and destroyed them. Most people left, and Hazel's father bought out their claims, their homesites, whatever they couldn't carry away, for negligible sums.

In 1970, the town was not beautiful. Ward sits in a little teacup, right below the Peak to Peak highway, with National Park all around. In order to extract whatever gold ran through those mountain rocks, they had to be dug up and crushed. The mine dumps circle the town and nothing will ever grow on those dead spills of scree.

Our house was a three room shack with a wood cookstove, a coal burning heat stove, a collapsing hillside pressing on the back of the house, a decrepit and listing outhouse and no running water or power. We bought a turquoise and white battery operated record player so we could listen to Carole King and James Taylor. We had several coolers to keep our perishables in. We read by kerosene lamp and candles. We hauled water in 5 gallon cans from the hose at the cafe, up at the top of the town.

BF began his job, which involved shoring up a sagging, roofless building in the center of town. Hazel wanted it preserved because it stood on a mine claim. She owned the building but not the land. BF, in full ex-Mime Troupe, all for one, one for all mode, decided that the building could, in fact, be a Community Center and could be restored much quicker if he could hire more people. Some of those counter-culture types, maybe, who were trickling into town. And so the greening of Ward began.