LOOKING AT THE ROSY GLOW by Ellen Morris Prewitt
When the time came for my mother to leave Grand Junction, she rode the train alone. Her husband, the man who would be my father, was in the midst of following the uranium boom – just the latest boom for him. He’d already left for their next destination, Canon City, Colorado, a town on the eastern tip of the Rockies, south and slightly west of Denver. So that night, Virginia rode across the Continental Divide by herself.
It was late February or March, 1955. Snow still covered everything: the ground, the trees, the rocks. Virginia rode in a dome car, the train cars that were designed with bubble glass ceilings for sightseeing. She had a panoramic view.
It was night. Virginia was all alone in the dome car. She rode through the mountains and the snow and the stars up above. It was gorgeous and Virginia – a Mississippi girl brought west by her husband to pursue the oil boom in the Williston Basin, then sidetracked by uranium – wondered why everyone on the train wasn’t in the dome car with her. Maybe, she thought, they’d ridden cross-country before. So she sat by herself in the empty car and gazed at the sterling beauty.
“I was,” she says, “on my own a lot.”
* * *
When the territorial government of Colorado was doling out public institutions, Canon City chose the penitentiary. Virginia would stand on her new front lawn and watch the prison shine its giant spotlight across the night sky.
The beams of the giant spotlight lacing the black sky – searching, pinpointing, pricking history – what do they show? Here, with Virginia in her temporary home of Canon City where her husband rarely is – traveling, always traveling – the spotlight shows bad judgment, gigantic mistakes, betrayal.
For Canon City, it also shows exoneration.
But what about for Joe?
* * *
In 1806, Zebulon Pike wandered into the Canon City area, only to be halted by the walls of the Royal Gorge. There, he confessed to his journal, he was “at considerable loss how to proceed.” A later biographer would dub Pike “The Lost Pathfinder.” His ignorance of the new American West was almost total. But it didn’t matter. Pike wasn’t there for exploration, he wasn’t looking for the Peak that eventually bore his name. Pike’s purpose, when he camped beside the flowing Purgatory River and first saw the Peak, was to mount insurrection.
Pike, then a Lieutenant in the United States Army, was on an expedition formulated by General James Wilkinson (the then-Governor of the Louisiana Territory) and Aaron Burr (the former Vice President of the United States and the duel-killer of Alexander Hamilton). The purpose of the expedition was to seize part of New Spain, as it was then called, and establish a southwestern empire with Burr in supreme command.
The plan was treason. Pike, authorities say, was aware of the real purpose of the expedition – invasion of the Spanish territory. When Pike first spied the Peak, he was camped at its base, scouting for Spaniards. But today the Canon City Chamber of Commerce lauds Pike – who did not discover or even climb the Peak that bears his name – as the first white explorer in the area (not true). Not a breath is breathed of his betrayal of his country.
What makes our collective selves forgive and literally forget? Sometimes, it’s pure luck. The wrongdoer is caught in a bigger story that needs to stay simple. We Americans take our history in lumps: one lump or two? The story of the West is exploration, discovery, Manifest Destiny. Don’t confuse us with contradictory details. If necessary, make the treacherous son-of-a-bitch an intrepid explorer. The makeover will be easier if the man was never actually punished for his “crime” (neither was Wilkinson, who snitched and was granted protection, or Burr, let off on a technicality at trial).
It also helps if the man himself is involved in the revisionism process. Like Pike, who wrote a bestseller about his western exploits. In fact, in 1859 when Canon City was platted, Pike’s Peak was a name more familiar to the average American than was Colorado. Some historians say that if Pike hadn’t died in the War of 1812, “he would definitely have been presidential timber.”
So, if you’re writing a story with a hero who shows poor judgment and betrays those to whom he owes the highest of allegiances, you might want to put his story inside a larger, more-important story, using his own words if they’re available. For example, make your hero a hard-working businessman of the 1950s, striving for the best for his wife and children, always working, always on the road, sending lonely letters back to hearth and home. That is, if you can make it fit.
If you can’t, wedge it in anyway.
* * *
WEDGING IT IN: TAKE ONE
“Your Daddy Joe was on a business trip.”
Our grandmother, Daddy Joe’s mother, sits in her big overstuffed chair. The chair is upholstered in pink, the wallpaper in the bedroom is pink. The big chair swallows Bigmama, her toes dangle above the pink carpet. She’s answering the question, How did he die? The question asked because Bigmama was careless enough to mention the death.
We little girls sit on the floor in a circle around her chair, listening to what we’ve never heard before.
“He had three business associates in the car with him. One of the men was in the front seat with Joe. The other two were in the back seat. One of the men in the back seat asked Joe a question. So he had to turn to see what it was the man wanted.”
Bigmama demonstrates the mechanics of the fatal turning. She stiff-arms her hands away from her body, holding tight to the steering wheel of Joe’s car. She twists in her chair and looks over her shoulder at the yakking business associate.
“That’s when he took his eyes off the road and hit the train.”
We replay in our minds the car full of men, the daddy traveling to put bread and butter on the table for his family. Then, the yakky man in the back seat leaning forward to ask a question, Daddy Joe glancing backwards to see what the man wanted.
Trying to be polite, trying to be gracious.
Distracted, turning his eyes from the road.
Hit by the train.
* * *
WEDGING IT IN: TAKE TWO
“It wasn’t his fault.”
Mamo, our other grandmother, is explaining how Daddy Joe came to be killed by running his car into a train. The conversation, like all conversations about Daddy Joe, is brief, truncated.
“It was snowing very hard. The train was coming around a corner.”
We nod. We could see the blinding snow, the sneaky train.
“It was a double track.” One track, Mamo said, then a space and a second track immediately following the first. “He made it across the first track, but not the second.”
We could feel the car bumping across the first track, feel the unexpected bump – another set of tracks! – and then see the train barreling down upon us.
Battling unfair odds – an unseen train, a second set of tracks. And, even so, he’d almost made it.
So why wouldn’t anyone talk about him, why would no one speak our Daddy Joe’s name out loud?
* * *
Sometimes our hero’s mistakes get exonerated simply because we like him too much. His story is the one we want to listen to, the one we want to mythologize.
Take the railroads, for example. The Iron Horse of the Great Plains. The chugging progress, the lonesome whistle whine. Who wants to hear about railroad wars? Railroad men killing each other over where to lay their track.
And, yet, there they are. 1878, twenty years after Canon City was platted. The men of the Denver and Rio Grande camped at one end of the Royal Gorge. The men of the local rail company, backed by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, camped in forts at the other end. Fighting over exclusive access through the Royal Gorge, the sole route to the prosperous silver town of Leadville.
They fought to a standoff, caught up in a pissing contest in the Royal Gorge (“It’s mine!” “No, it’s mine!”). But it wasn’t a joke. It was shotguns and barricades and men being killed dead. It was the Royal Gorge Railroad War.
Finally, someone with a clearer head filed suit in the courts, and the dispute wound its way through the legal system (the railroad men all the while camped out in the Gorge). The Supreme Court enjoined both of the fighting companies (“I DON’T CARE WHOSE IT IS!”) and after some more bloodshed a “treaty” was reached at the end of 1879. The railroad lines were partitioned, the war ended.
Leaving us to stand and salute as the railroads, their clanking cars filled with majestic stories of the Old West, scream by our lives.
So, if you’re seeking exoneration (Hey, why are we talking exoneration when we haven’t yet established guilt?), make your hero someone we like too much, so that we don’t care about his thoughtless (why didn’t he tell Virginia he was giving a woman a ride to Colorado Springs?), self-centered (he didn’t know that, back then, just having a woman in the car was condemnation enough?), disastrous (they were killed!) behavior.
Easy, except for one thing: you have to tell the truth.
* * *
“Of course,” Hebron tells me over the phone, “there was a delay in having the funeral because the accident occurred in Colorado.”
I’ve asked Hebron if he’ll answer some questions on Daddy Joe’s childhood, to help with the book. He’s agreed, and he’s talking, remembering.
“I was living at the house then because that’s where I learned about his death. It’s all very vivid.
“Wright and Ferguson handled it. Virginia brought you children around there to the funeral home. At some point, you have to introduce this fact to the children.
“Joe and Virginia had been gone five years, then y’all came and they started coming back pretty regular. Joe was so proud. He’d get y’all all dressed up for Sunday School. He wanted everyone to see what pretty little girls he had.
“One time, one of you fell off a chair in the kitchen. Popped your lip. You were just squalling like crazy. Joe took that little girl and talked to her. He talked to that little girl . . . (choked, crying) . . . in the kitchen. Dean and I were there. It was so uncharacteristic. He was always the Rough Rider. Dean and I looked at each other afterwards. I said, “That’s our brother?”
* * *
If the truth strikes you as too heavy, lighten things up by making your hero’s sins antiquated; old-fashioned sins are cute, faintly humorous. Make it easy on yourself – give your hero faults that don’t arouse modern indignation.
Take Canon City of the 1920s, for example. The town was well-represented by the Ku Klux Klan. This infiltration was part of a larger takeover of the state – the KKK elected the Colorado Governor in 1924. That same year, the state House of Representatives narrowly defeated an anti-Catholic bill that prohibited the use of wine in church sacraments.
We modern readers are likely to forgive Canon City this period in its history because, first of all, we don’t want the KKK out west. That particular evil was a Southern one. (Remember: Keep It Simple.)
Second, the Klan of Canon City wasn’t anti-Black. Anti-Catholic’s not so bad, right? I mean, it’s not racial hatred, and that’s what we care about today. Besides, the Canon City townspeople supported the anti-Catholic movement because they were afraid that the Pope would establish a summer residence at a nearby Benedictine abbey. How quaint they were. “They found joy in Klan activities, dressing in sheets, burning crosses on Table Mountain near Golden and atop Pike’s Peak . . . ”
But sometimes it’s hard to know how a sin will play in the modern world. A married man being alone with a single woman is no big deal anymore, even at night. And adultery . . . that’s sophisticated, right? As to the deaths – well, shit happens, doesn’t it?
What do you think – where would a man driving out of town late on a Friday night with a woman in the car who was beautiful but not his wife, and running the car into a train, killing himself and the woman, leaving his wife and babies bereft – where does that fit on our modern scale of sin?
Does it matter that the woman wasn’t a young thing, but thirty-five years old and able to make her own decisions? That in addition to being a former model, she was a businesswoman, a co-owner of a printing shop and proofreader for a letter shop, a member of the Denver Chapter of the American Businesswomen’s Association? Do the shadings we put on the story matter?
Difficult, isn’t it?
* * *
If you’ve come to the end of your storytelling options, take a clue from the tourists who drive Sky Line Drive to the top of the Royal Gorge. As they stand on the bridge, looking at all the magnificence around them, are they thinking of the souls of the 700 convicts who were rounded up from the nearby penitentiary – it of the strobing lights – and forced to complete the highway in eight months?
They are not.
Because it’s too hard. The state’s use of the convicts – to build hospitals and dig irrigation ditches and quarry stone and construct highways and blast roads through the Rockies – is exonerated because we owe the men too much to even grant recognition of what they did. It is too hard to look at the realities, so we erase them from the picture. We turn away from the probing searchlight that pierces the night sky. We allow the intrepid Zebulon Pike to discover Pike’s Peak. We watch as the civilizing railroads whistle across the arid plains. We spread the picnic blanket for the joyful Klan.
We look at the rosy glow.
* * *
Joe and Virginia rented a small house in Canon City. Two bedrooms, living room, kitchen and bath. When Virginia arrived at the new home, Joe filmed her carrying boxes in from the car. She removed her dark glasses, smiled, so Joe could get a good shot of her face.
While they were in Canon City, the couple would drive over to the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs and ice skate. The hotel had a rink where hockey teams played and Olympic hopefuls trained. Joe and Virginia weren’t Olympic hopefuls. They bought a book on How to Ice Skate. They scraped and slid across the ice. Later, Mary and Ernest Walters – the couple who would investigate the other woman in the car and staunchly declare to Virginia: “nothing to that” – took the couple to skate at Evergreen Lake outside of Denver. There, where the lake was frozen so solid the grooming trucks could rumble across its ice, Virginia bought her own pair of skates. Joe filmed her on the ice, skating backwards, twirling to a stop. Brave in her new endeavor, even if her skates did wobble a little.
It was Canon City where Virginia bought her jacket. A man she knew gave her some deer meat, and the deerskins. She put the skins in the trunk of her car and took them to Pueblo where they made jackets. She had the skins cleaned and tanned and sewn into a fringed jacket. When she spread her arms, the fringe fell to her hips. Buttery smooth, saffron colored, the jacket was a jewel. But later – after Canon City, after Colorado, after everything – the jacket would need cleaning and when Virginia got the estimate for the cleaning bill, she threw the jacket away rather than pay such an exorbitant price. She grieves her decision still.
On lazy weekends, in Canon City, the couple – who had spent so much of their early, happy time out west sight-seeing – would drive out to the Royal Gorge. There, ignorant of the Gorge’s history, they’d stand on the rim and wave at the hobos riding by on the trains. The couple would stand looking down on the Arkansas River and the train tracks and the hobos – there were right many and they’d all wave back – going round and round the side of the mountain.
* * *
Joe and Virginia’s stay in Canon City was short, no more than a handful of months. It was a nice place, this town where the grocery store let you charge your groceries and pay the bill at the end of the month, where friends called you up and asked you to do fun things with them. It would’ve been nice to stay, to rest awhile, but the future was calling. Fate was calling.
To move on, to start a family.
To make decisions that would scar that family forever.
And to hope that when the children grew old enough to know the truth – no snow, no double tracks, no distracting business associates in the car, just a woman who wasn’t his wife – they would forgive those who so wanted to believe in the rosy glow.
ENDNOTES
chose the penitentiary, Abbott, Leonard and McComb, Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, 3rd Ed. (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1994), p. 131.
halted by the walls, Felter, John, The Pikes Peak People (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1966), p. 39.“considerable loss how to proceed,” Stone, Wilbur Fisk, History of Colorado, Vol. 1 (Chicago: S.J. Clarke Publishing, 1918), p. 45. Unless otherwise noted, the facts on Colorado history are from Stone. The discussion of the extent of Pike’s knowledge of the purpose of the expedition is found at Stone, p. 49.“The Lost Pathfinder,” http://www.nps.gw/jeff/overview.htm.ignorance of the new American west, Sprague, Marshall, Colorado: A History (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1984) p. 6.Canon City Chamber of Commerce, http://www.canoncitychamber.com/history.html.wrote a bestseller; “presidential timber,” Felter, pp. 43, 44.camped at one end of the Gorge. Stone pp. 350–358 and Abbott, et. al pp. 89–90.well-represented by the KKK, Abbott, et. al, p. 287.elected the Colorado Governor, Ubbelholde, Benson and Smith, A Colorado History, 7th Ed. (Boulder, CO: Pruett Publishing Co., 1995) p. 286.establish a summer residence, Abbott, et. al, p. 287.“joy in Klan activities,” Sprague, p. 149.Ellen Morris Prewitt’s essays have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Brevity, Fourth Genre, Texas Review, and Skirt! Magazine.