Long Way Home (19 page)

We shook hands all around, and I carried my chair into the store and fingered the spines of some rare books. The antiques were eclectic, with some fine pieces and some ignoble ones. Through the front window I could see Carpenter and Campbell talking with a heavily tattooed pedestrian, and I felt certain they'd be sitting out there again tomorrow, weather permitting, and the day after that until the first bite of winter drove them indoors.

ON SUNDAY MORNING,
the nineteenth of October, I woke to the bluest sky imaginable. Some days are so insistently beautiful that they demand your immediate attention, and this was one. If I wasted another second in bed, even a heathen might construe it as a sin, so I was in the shower and out the door in under fifteen minutes, clutching a Styrofoam cup of tea and a rock-hard motel bagel.

There's a clarity to western light I've rarely seen matched. As it spread across the mesa of Pueblo West, it brought up the pastel colors of the casitas, rose and turquoise and ocher, and the grayish green of the sagebrush. In the arroyos, the cottonwoods and aspens flared in golds and yellows. Though the air was still chilly, I could feel the sun gathering its strength. By noon I'd be stripped down to my Welcome Center T-shirt.

U.S. 50 ran very straight through Pueblo West, tempting drivers to bank some time against what they'd lose later when the highway snaked into the Rockies. I was in no rush myself, not on such a morning, so I turned onto a spur road toward Florence, a hamlet in the shadow of a large complex of faceless buildings—probably a government installation of some kind, or so I assumed.

The road curled downhill and crossed a bridge over the Arkansas, no longer barely a trickle. Instead it flowed briskly through the desert, a classic trout stream of deep pools and riffles. I accepted this as a tip of the hat from the cosmos, my reward for being an early riser and, in general, an affectionate fan of creation.

I assembled my rod and began casting. Only a few activities bring me more contentment than fly fishing for trout. As a novice, I kept a tally of my catches, recording the length and weight of any noteworthy brown or rainbow, but I quit that years ago. I had almost, but not quite, reached the point where just sitting by a river was enough to satisfy me. If that enlightened moment ever occurs, no friend of mine will believe it.

On the Arkansas, I was hampered by the lack of hip boots or chest waders, yet I hooked and released a brace of small trout. That gives the angler a heady, godlike feeling or, better, the sensation of a Roman emperor delivering a thumbs-up rather than a thumbs-down to a gladiator. My trout didn't deserve any bragging, but I thought I'd do some in Florence, anyway.

For such an out-of-the-way spot, Florence defied the economic trend and looked quite healthy, with artsy shops, antiques stores, and the sort of restaurant you'd find in a big city—Sonny's Louisiana Seafood & Steakhouse, where blackened frog legs and fried gator are on the menu. When I remarked on this at a café, eating a plate of toast as a substitute for the bagel I'd fed to the desert, my server shrugged and said, “It's the prison.”

Not just any prison, either. Those faceless buildings I'd passed were ADX Florence, one of the nation's four super maximum security facilities. ADX, the Alcatraz of the Rockies, holds some of our most dangerous, violent criminals, many of whom have killed a fellow inmate elsewhere. They're subjected to what critics brand as cruel and unusual punishment, confined for twenty-three hours a day to a cell where the furnishings—a stool, a desk, and a bed—are made of concrete.

The roster at ADX Florence reads like an all-star team of bad guys. It ranges from al-Qaeda operatives to such homegrown terrorists as Terry Nichols, a coconspirator with Timothy McVeigh, and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. ADX also imprisons hit men, serial killers, and the head dudes from the Aryan Brotherhood, Gangster Disciples, and Almighty Latin Kings. Andrew Fastow, Enron's former CEO, does his time in the minimum-security tract.

Colorado is a hotbed of prisons, as it happens. Ever since 1985, when a law doubled the maximum sentence for felonies, the state has been short of cells. Its rate of incarceration, a statistic based on the number of inmates per one hundred thousand of the population, stands at 7 percent, far above the U.S. average. The Department of Corrections, with a budget of $644 billion in 2006, predicted that it would run out of beds for prisoners by the end of 2008.

Women account for much of the increase, but that's true everywhere in America. We jail ten times more women than all of western Europe combined. In Colorado, 86 percent of those incarcerated were convicted of a nonviolent crime, usually for drugs or drug-related theft, and they often leave behind dependent children.

The United States has the world's highest rate of incarceration, in fact, with Russia a laggardly second. About 7.2 million people are behind bars, on parole, or on probation. The astonishing numbers, still rising, do not reflect an upsurge in crime. They're due instead to policy changes, particularly regarding drugs. Our prisons also act as way stations for the mentally ill.

Cañon City, just west of Florence, tops the penology charts in Colorado, with nine state and four federal institutions, and the locals would probably be delighted to squeeze in a few more. They actively sought their first one about ten years ago, when some Benedictine monks decided against selling their abbey to the Bureau of Prisons. The disappointed residents, deprived of the anticipated jobs and income, passed the hat, bought a property of their own, and sold it on good terms to the bureau, a favor since repaid many times over.

Cañon City, founded in 1858, was laid out during the Colorado gold rush. The locus of the strike was Pike's Peak, visible on the horizon that morning and dusted with a postcard sprinkling of snow. Though I expected a fortress mentality in town, with inmates in brightly colored jumpsuits cleaning out gutters and spearing trash, there was no sign of the prisons, only of their positive impact on the economy.

At an old armory in Cañon City, I found a coterie of gun buffs attending a show of firearms and weaponry. These shows are very popular in Colorado. In Denver, there's one on almost any summer weekend. Unlicensed vendors used to be a scourge, exempt from the Brady Act and willing to trade with felons and juveniles, but the voters closed that loophole after Columbine.

The Shriners had sponsored the show. A ticket cost five bucks, available from a wizened gent in a fez. Once through the door, I ran into a rotund dealer in a wheelchair, who held the command post up front.

He wore a cowboy hat and what I can only describe as God Bless America clothing embroidered with flags and plastered with flag pins. He sat like a pasha before a table laden with revolvers, not cheap Saturday night specials but elegant Smith & Wessons that could set you back a grand or more.

The crowd was every bit as eccentric as you might imagine and also very old. I counted four men on respirators. Arthritis appeared to be a common ailment.

Along with rifles, shotguns, and revolvers, the enthusiasts admired Bowie knives, samurai swords, medals, badges, Native American jewelry, bolo ties, and bayonets. The dealers were as frayed as desert pack rats after wandering from show to show. Unable to control their habit, they often squandered any profits by swapping with their peers.

WHEN THE HIGHWAY
dipped into the canyon of the Arkansas River beyond Royal Gorge, I began to compose a note of apology to Jefferson City in my head—a “Dear Jeff” letter, I guess you'd call it, because I'd fallen hard for Colorado. Come winter, I'd probably be fickle again and change my mind, but on this perfect autumn day, under a cloudless sky with the sun dappling the water, there was no place else I'd rather be.

The Arkansas wears away a foot of granite about every twenty-five hundred years, so it took many millennia for the canyon to form. If you put a rock under a dripping faucet and checked on it ten years later, you'd have an idea of the infinitesimal pace. The canyon has both a somber antiquity and an austere beauty. Indifferent to the affairs of human beings, it inspires silence and awe, to quote Steinbeck on the redwoods again.

Fly fishing has a fairly severe code of etiquette, and one of its cardinal rules is to give other anglers plenty of space. I usually respect it, but near Texas Creek, while scanning the river from the car, I noticed an expert at work and got out to watch him, creeping closer over the granite to study his technique.

Though I catch my share of trout, I do it by being a good stalker and knowing where the fish lie, but I can't cast for beans. More than once, I've wrapped a line around my neck or hooked a random portion of my anatomy, most memorably when I sunk a barbless but sharp fly into my cheek on California's Truckee River and had to perform some instant self-surgery with a pair of pliers.

The expert on the Arkansas made casting look easy. He could handle forty feet of line with a perfect textbook loop. His fly landed so softly it might have settled on a pillow, but he wasn't having any luck. The sun was too bright, and the trout were too wary. He needed a change of tactics and must have realized it, because he retreated into the shallows to sort through his gear.

He became aware of me then. Some anglers hate to be observed, while others accept it as part of the game, and he fell into the latter category. He had the freshness and newness of Colorado about him, as friendly as a puppy.

“You fishing?” he shouted.

“No waders,” I yelled back.

“Hell, I've got an extra pair!”

He scrambled up the bank, a carpenter employed only piecemeal now because of the slowdown. He was still young enough to regard this as a plus. It gave him more free time to fish.

“I've got some money stashed away,” he bragged. I knew what that meant. He could cover his rent and still have a little left over for the good times. I'd lived like that myself in what seemed another life and never regretted it.

There's a breed of young men out West who enjoy doing all the handy things bookish types like me spend hours avoiding, and he belonged to it. In his truck, he carried chains, flares, tools, kits to patch a tire or fix a snakebite, a camp stove, packets of freeze-dried food, and virtually every other essential required if nature ambushed him on the way to Cripple Creek. No doubt he could repair whatever broke, too, and build a house from scratch or tear one down if it came to that.

His spare waders fit me not at all. They were much too big. I waddled like a circus clown in a barrel, holding them up with suspenders. Around my waist I cinched a belt to keep the waders from filling up if I tumbled, a real possibility considering the slippery footing. Without any felt-soled boots or a staff for support, I stuck to the slack eddies.

We both fished Pheasant Tail nymphs in various sizes, and my new angling partner caught and released a nice, fat brown. Nymphing can be boring, though, a bit like fishing with bait. The serious fun began around one o'clock, when a hatch of Blue Wing Olives rousted the trout from the depths and enticed them to partake of the banquet.

I'd brought along some BWOs in various sizes and tied on a smallish imitation. On my second cast, the fly provoked a slashing strike, and I landed a fat brown of my own. This day can't get any better, I thought, but I'd underestimated the pleasures of Colorado.

RIDE TOWARD THE
radiance. I'd cooked that slogan up on the first day of the trip, but I'd forgotten about it until I cruised into Salida, as radiant a place as I've ever encountered. The highway climbed up from the canyon to a plateau at about seven thousand feet, and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, lightly capped with snow, created an impossibly romantic, even heavenly backdrop for the town.

The Sawatch Mountains are nearby, too, and so are the Mosquitoes. Salida looks out on a dozen peaks of more than fourteen thousand feet in altitude. The Arkansas runs through it, ideal for kayaking and whitewater rafting. There are outfitters galore to supply gear and lead pack trips. Bikers and hikers have countless trails at their disposal. Salida has fine restaurants, Colorado microbrews, and hot springs. The sun shines almost daily in October, and the air is crystalline

Little wonder, then, that the residents are so fit, absolutely glowing with health. The obesity I'd seen elsewhere doesn't exist in Salida. In general, Coloradans take good care of themselves—fair and square-jawed, with excellent teeth and no sense of irony. They're better-looking for it and less oppressed by circumstance. A taxing hike or a trip over the rapids rids the arteries of sludge.

In various parts of the nation, I'd met with an occasional fearfulness, but the folks in Salida gave the fear a new twist. They were scared their little hideaway would be discovered, worried that someone like me would broadcast its virtues and cause a stampede that would lead to the sort of ruin all Coloradans dread.

The scenario was well established. Outsiders stumble on a jewel of a town and buy second homes, and the price of real estate soon escalates beyond the grasp of the locals. Trustafarians and retirees move in, followed by predatory Californians, a sickening situation. In Colorado, they value a kind of purity and innocence, and they hate to see it compromised. Aspen and Vail were gems until they were discovered, or so the mythology goes.

I heard an earful about this from a ski bum at Benson's Tavern, but he got it only half right. Salida and similarly gorgeous Colorado paradises are great seducers. They encourage those who love the outdoors—especially young people—to scrape by on a menial job to fund their passion, but the years go by, and the young people wake up middle-aged and can't afford a house. That's when the bitching starts. The ski bum blamed all his problems on “invaders.”

When I tired of his sorry tale, I dragged myself away and indulged in a healing soak at Salida Hot Springs Pool. The natural mineral water, piped in from a spring in the Rockies, fluctuates in temperature between ninety-five and one hundred degrees. It has no stink of sulfur, and even a half-hour treatment will leave you rosy-cheeked and utterly relaxed.