Mountain Survival Tactics

If it wasn't all about dope, it was all about alcohol. Or a combination, natch.

Nederland was a crap town. Ugly and useless and mean. Where you went if you wanted to get your jaw busted or your front teeth knocked out before Last Call. Didn't even have a classy jukebox: couldn't differentiate good country from shlockola. Danced to it, the way drunken fake cowboys dance: lurch from side to side til you bump into someone and can start a fight. Boy, howdy! Big fun.

Nederland is where my kids went to school. Miles down the Peak to Peak to this crummy little school, where they took one look at my shy daughter, in her scuffed boots and overalls, and decided she was a retard. Didn't have no time or room for retards in intellectually advanced Nederland, CO, no sirree, so my girl baby got the slap end of the teacher's tongue. And by the way, if I ever track that person down, she better have a tale of woe that will at least arrest my impulse to accelerate her passage through this world of pain. But I digress.

Ward had its own problems, not the least of which was providing shelter for major drug dealers, which created odd scrutiny: cars with several antennas, cruising through, drivers indiscernible behind tinted glass, that kind of thing. We had this funny little person living there, however, who was a sheriff's deputy in Boulder County. He worked a regular shift, kept his ear to the ground and always managed to get a call in to one of the few phones in Ward, just ahead of a visit from some official unpleasantness.

When we had been there about a year, a group of men, women, kids and a few horses suddenly showed up in town and colonized some vacant buildings. The men were slick talkers and the women were pregnant or busy with children and not inclined to sociability. Word drifted around that they were all on the lam from Florida drug charges: a bunch of Vietnam Vets, putting their military education to good use. Their presence among us upped the visits of dark-windowed cars enormously, especially after they had a little exchange of gunfire with some rude tourist. Not Ward's finest hour.