The lower Arkansas Valley hasn’t shared in Colorado’s economic and population growth. Chambers of Commerce in places like La Junta, Las Animas, Rocky Ford and Lamar try so hard, yet they see little for their earnest efforts.
The Arkansas Valley is green along the east-flowing river, but drier and dustier the farther one goes north or south. Rocky Ford cantaloupes are world-class. But the Valley’s drinking water stinks. Literally. Water purification systems and bottled water are big sellers.
Every now and then, there is a glimmer, some small hope of better fortune. Lamar landed a major facility for Neoplan USA. It makes buses that are sold all over the world. Those articulated buses twisting through Denver’s streets are Neoplan’s. And there’s a big and growing new array of windmills generating electricity. But there’s not enough of that.
Now comes a new prospect, literally from the heavens. An international group of scientists plans to build a $50 million, 1,600-square- mile ring of water detectors to find evidence of elusive particles from space called “extremely energetic cosmic rays.”
This isn’t science fiction. It’s hard science, basic research. Colorado won the competition over Utah. Mike Beasley, head of the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, is confident the project will go forward, because the money is coming from several sources – mostly universities with private donors.
That makes it different from another theoretical physics project that several states were competing for in the late 1980s. The Superconducting Super Collider would have been bigger and much, much more expensive. In 1987, seven finalists were announced by the Department of Energy: Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.
The Colorado legislature had a special session in 1988 hoping to win this vast hole in the ground. No one in the legislature fully understood what the thing would do, but since it involved billions of dollars of federal spending, it certainly couldn’t hurt to have one, whatever it was.
Texas, to no one’s surprise, won. This was during the term of the first President Bush, a theoretical Texan, and Texas had many more votes and influential politicians than Colorado. On Nov. 10, 1988, the Department of Energy announced that the giant particle- splitting accelerator would be built south of Dallas, at Waxahachie.
But the project never was completed. Congress terminated it in October 1993. That’s the danger of single-source funding.
Some say the same thing could happen to this cosmic ray experiment. Some say it isn’t at all sure that these super-energetic rays even exist (although there definitely are wimpier kinds of cosmic rays).
But the Arkansas Valley has been disappointed before. I learned some of the lore of the Valley when I spent a year working at the Bent County Democrat in Las Animas, on the western edge of where this project would go.
Towns in the lower Arkansas Valley, downstream from Pueblo, struggle constantly, but they have a way of producing stars.
The last town before the river leaves the state is Holly, home- town of one of Colorado’s most popular governors, Roy Romer. Las Animas is the home of Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson and Dick Wadhams, one of the most brilliant Republican strategists anywhere.
I left because it began to seem I was the only person in Bent County between the ages of 18 and 25. That’s one of the valley’s problems. People find success elsewhere.
But I still have a fondness for the valley. It would be good to see all those hard-working chamber-of- commerce types succeed. They’re very conservative politically, but they’re also people who earn what they get; people you can trust. And for projects like this, there is “overwhelming community support,” Beasley says.
This project may be as ephemeral as the cosmic rays it will attempt to capture, if those cosmic rays exist at all. But for the valley’s indomitable residents, it’s a stellar prospect.
Fred Brown, retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists.
