Liza, a former rancher, looked me straight in the eye. “Buffaloes don’t respect horses,” she said.
“They don’t?” I asked.
“They’ll walk right through a horse. They’re very aware of their size, and they use it. I worked a ranch with buffaloes on it.”
“Then how do you herd them?”
“On motorcycles.”
I paused long enough to take that image in and work my way through it.
“Have you done that?” I finally asked.
“You bet I have. It’s the only way, ’cause big as they are, they’re scared of the noise.”
Liza lives in Saguache, in the northwest corner of the San Luis Valley, a place of “holy silences,” as she describes it. “Saguache” is the Ute word for “water at the blue earth,” and as you drive into the valley you can see that it’s so.
The vast expanse of the San Luis Valley ushers you into a landscape of sage, unending, dramatic sky, and tall peaks — on this occasion just dusted with the season’s first snow. Embraced by the rich earth and stonecut majesty of the valley, Saguache is a place, too, where a dramatic landscape blends with the crosscurrents of poverty, declining population, and drug and alcohol abuse that lay over this part of the valley like a fog that never lifts. It is a place, as well, where the townspeople demonstrate an uncanny devotion to its survival and a hard-bark stubbornness about not leaving. A place where the need for basics — a sidewalk, a street light, a viable business — cut a straight line to the truth of things.
Milton Jones, the mayor of Saguache (who also works for a local sand and gravel company), puts it this way: “We know what we need, and we know we don’t have the means to get it. So we try to figure it out.”
In Saguache, “figure it out” means placing a red bucket in the lobby of the local theatre (a historic landmark, they tell me) to raise enough money to keep it open. “Figure it out” means scrabbling together funds to provide basic services and address pressing problems. Alcoholics Anonymous posters are on virtually every bulletin board and telephone pole. And “figure it out” means promoting Saguache to conference organizers as a great place to hold rural Philanthropy Days, the twice yearly statewide meeting that connects funding organizations with people in need. That’s why I was there, helping to represent the Colorado Health Foundation.
My two days at Rural Philanthropy Days in Saguache showed me the need is great. According to the conference brochure, “Saguache County has been one of the most economically challenged counties in Colorado for decades . . . . The local economy is based on the traditional industries of ranching and farming that now struggle to provide a sustainable economic engine.” That’s an anticeptic way of saying that Saguache is laboring under a heavy load and a sad sense of the inevitable.
“Our kids won’t stay here after high school,” says the mayor. “There’s nothing to keep them, so they skedaddle. We’ve been trying to come up with ways to attract some businesses to come, so more of our folks will stay, but it’s tough. We don’t have a lot to offer.”
And yet . . . Main Street in Saguache features an anomaly from another place and circumstance: Hauck/Pedersen Fine Art would be right at home in upper Manhattans. Its collection includes hundreds of museum-quality abstract paintings and pottery.
And yet . . . the town recently secured $500,000 from the state to pave Main Street and lay new sidewalks, with street lights to come later.
And yet . . . the people I met there were steadfast in their devotion to this place of “water at the blue earth.”
During good times and bad, the philanthropic world is crucial to towns like Saguache. You come to realize just how crucial when you meet the people, walk the streets, breathe in the need.
Rural Philanthropy Days included a kind of “speed dating” event during which representatives from non-profit organizations move from table to table of funders, looking for a match with their work. A 22-year- old woman from Indiana is here on a two- year Mennonite volunteer mission to work at a family counseling and violence prevention facility. A young North Carolinian, working her first job at a local community garden, says, “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
I saw funding organizations aligning their missions with a specific need and changing lives for the better, lives that stand strong in this place of “holy silences.”
Charles Reyman is vice president of communications at the Colorado Health Foundation. He was a 2005 Colorado Voices columnist.
