Fort Collins
A couple of years ago, I returned with my family to live in Fort Collins, a college town I knew well as an undergraduate 21 years ago. In the heyday of my college years, the Grange in the nearby tiny town of Bellvue was the place to dance, and I remembered renting the place to raise money for Art City Times, one of those papers you put out when you’re young and willing to work for nothing.
Not long ago, I was invited to a different kind of fund-raiser at the Grange; this time it was to help preserve the Grange itself, as well as what’s left of Bellvue.
Instead of a lot of 20-somethings dancing to Ska, on this night toddlers joined their families on the dance floor. An old couple smiled as my friend, myself and our three kids took up seats at a shared table. My plate was filled with delicious elk-meat fajitas, while our middle-aged friends in the Poudre River Band were having fun improvising the lyrics to “Memphis, Tennessee.”
The scene had changed, but the old walls and worn wood floor were the same as they had been over 20 years ago, and 100 years before that. A table of old photographs was set out for anyone interested in the family of Jacob Flowers, the man who founded the town. Some of the pictures showed grim faces from a hard life.
There was a story that people called Flowers “Uncle Jacob” because he raised pigs to give to the poor families of quarry workers, who lived at what is now the bottom of Horsetooth Reservoir.
While the Bellvue Grange is a gem in my blurry college memories, as I watched children jump puddles in the dirt alley outside I became keenly aware that the days of my ego-saturated youth were just a blip in the history of the area.
I recalled a news item about a longtime Bellvue ranching family who’d received an angry call from a neighbor, the owner of a new trophy home on the hill. The man complained that a dead horse was rotting in the rancher’s back pasture and sullying his view.
The rancher knew about the horse, and explained that his pasture was so muddy he couldn’t move in the heavy equipment needed to take out the carcass. Then the rancher told the newcomer that his trophy home on the hill was kind of an eyesore to him. End of conversation.
This was yet another tale of the modern West where people and interests collide, each seeing through different colored glasses.
Am I on the inside or the outside? I wondered, as my friend and I watched her husband having fun playing bass guitar. Before parenthood, he was in the thick of the ’80s music scene in Los Angeles.
I was grateful to the old couple at our table who welcomed us. Would I be so kind if I were them?
While I wasn’t raised here, I spent a pivotal part of my youth here, and I want to be a part of its modern life. My sister, who owns a ranch in nearby Livermore and sometimes works as a farrier, helps me connect. Thanks to her, I’ve been to a post-branding party that was hosted in a huge old barn. Somehow, cowhands found the energy to two-step after perhaps the hardest day’s work of the year. It’s a continuing way of life that I always feel privileged to glimpse.
It also makes me wish more people had a chance to revel in the history that changed northern Colorado. In town, we have neighbors from Russia, India and Argentina, and all have come here for jobs developing software or in engineering. They seem to spend their days between work and big-box stores, and I doubt they know there’s still a rural existence going on around them.
You probably could say the same for many Westerners. Sitting in the grange with me that night in Bellvue, my friend mentioned that she’d never tasted elk meat before.
I stepped outside to check on the kids. Under the stars, I pointed to some of the old buildings and their faded fronts, trying to pass on a little history to the children. A boy who just moved here from Los Angeles scoffed, “This is a town?”
“You bet,” I said, “and all the people dancing inside right now love it.”
Sonia Koetting is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
