When I pushed against the swollen, wood door of the church for sale three blocks from my Denver home, it creaked, breathed, and gave way. The sale sign out front had lured me for weeks, but the cracked steps and block-long dumpster made me believe its doors would be locked.
“Come inside,” a gentle voice, a sliver of glasses and gray hair, said from behind the handle. I tied my dog to the rail and went in.
A man with a bandana and a long beard offered me coffee in a Styrofoam cup and told me that the church was, in fact, for sale. For less than $100,000. Owned by Navajo elders, the landmark was being sold because they couldn’t afford to maintain it any longer.
While we walked, he showed me the sheen on the banisters and the hidden closet alongside the stairs. He introduced himself with four ethnicities, the Man with Many Names, and told me about his beliefs before he shook my hand, asked if I’d be back, and shook my hand again.
I’ve thought about that church for weeks now, replayed what it was, what it could become. What casseroles were lined up on long tables, what moments had been mourned by heads hung over warped pews.
Sometimes, in Denver, I push on doors of public places because I hunger for the visual history that has beckoned me to more novel places: New Orleans, with its toothy pediments and Creole cottages; Rome, with its centuries-old arches and vaults; and the small Alaskan fishing town built on the Russian fur trade and Tlingit totem poles where my husband and I spend our summer months.
If there’s a For Sale sign on a house, I assess the width of the dip in the hardwood floor and the slant of the mantle through the windowpanes. I nudge the knob on the door just in case. I’m not in the market to buy a church, a house, or even a room right now. But when I moved back home to Colorado, its sprawl disconnected me. I longed for dusty myths, days gone by, deaths and dreams wedged between aged walls.
Last week, my husband and I drove up past Empire to cross-country ski and stay with our friends, the Ruckhauses, at their family’s mountain place, a wood cabin tucked into a grove of spokes the pine beetles left behind. Every other weekend, Keith and Gayla Ruckhaus and their daughter Manya head to the hills to do what Keith’s father did most of his life: heave and hoe up ungroomed trails, returning by late afternoon to the wood house and hot minestrone with cracked saltines.
In the cabin’s living room is a 7-foot tall, ceramic-tiled tower. The kachelofen needs only a few logs of wood at a time and its tiles, caved inward on themselves like loudspeakers, funnel a radiant, low intensity heat into the room. Kachelofens have been around for over 2,000 years and have benches where you sit facing the room with your back against the heat. Keith’s father, a refugee from the Holocaust, built the two-story chalet and spent many of his happiest days up here. When I asked Keith about his father, he showed me letters from the 1930s and the eulogy he read for his dad.
Fred Ruckhaus was Jewish, and his family had made plans to get out of Vienna as quickly as possible in the late 1930s. Fred had planned on going to the embassy for a visa one morning in 1938, but his bicycle broke. He disassembled it, figuring he could get his visa the next day. That day, all the Jews at the embassy were taken by the Nazis. The next day, two Nazis arrived at Fred’s home. With the chain and pedals of his bike tangled in an oily pile, Fred did his best to answer their interrogations: Where was everyone? How many Jews lived in his house? Bike grease filled Fred’s fingernails. “He can’t be a Jew,” one of the Nazis said to the other. “They don’t get their hands dirty.”
The soldiers left. Fred never saw his family again.
He wandered in London for two years, and the day he planned to buy a ticket to America, his bike broke again. The ship Fred would have boarded was attacked by German U-boats and sank at sea. When he did finally make the trip, he came directly to Denver, then to build and fill this cabin with its posters of flower-studded Austrian canyons, with its kachelofen that calls to my cold palms.
Fred’s stories did not emerge immediately. He kept them quiet, like an old house with many doors, and Keith found new rooms up until the year of his father’s death. In Keith’s eulogy, he explained that a part of his dad found a home but another part of him was filled with a deep longing for what had been. “I began to see,” Keith writes, “how his life — his love of the mountains and his family, his career, his faithfulness to my Mom and his friends, his deepest thoughts about religion, life, forgiveness and carrying wounds that won’t heal — fit together.”
In the same way, hearing the stories and sorrows that have filled each home where I stand or sit or eat, make my life here feel more fit together than I once thought it was. I have my own heritage, of course, but the shapes of strangers’ lives have a mysterious way of shaping our own.
When I think of where I’m from, I’ll think of my family, my first yellow home, and my great-grandma Kenny, born in a Shannon saloon. But I’ll also think of the old Navajo church near my house and the words that Keith wrote: “My father’s spirit congeals with Indian warriors and conquistadors, cowboys and gamblers, exploiters and bandits, missionaries and mountaineers.” History, despite the newness of Denver’s architecture and the newness of the year, lives here.
Megan Nix (www.megannix.com) of Denver can be reached at thenixionary@gmail.com.
