Enlightenment Town. Jeffery Paine

      To conclude the beginning: Why I Wrote This Book. The world seems to be plunging, with the brakes off, into ever more catastrophic situations. Political realities gone seemingly haywire have left large numbers of people cast out, cast down, wondering where hope is to be found. This was the nonfiction story that I thought I could write that might give my fellow travelers on the planet heart, that might provide imaginative hope and helpful vision. This book cannot pretend to mitigate today’s dark turns of events, but its dramatis personae hint at, or more than hint at, how to respond and to live well when circumstances turn adverse. The consolation that, beyond the dictatorship of greed and environmental pillage and alarms of war, there is something else, something better, is a kind of good news, perhaps now more than ever.

       PART I

       TOWN

1. A Dream Awakens

      The drowsy, dreaming town was about to wake up, whether it wanted to or not.

      Circa half a century ago only a few score old codgers remained in Crestone whose reason for living here was that they were living here. The gold had long run out of this gold-mining town, and boom times had turned into bust times. Should you wonder how the descendants of those old miners supported themselves, the answer is: they didn’t. They were living so meagerly that a magnifying glass would scarcely locate their carbon footprint. They inhabited tiny makeshift cabins that they had thrown up themselves from logs they had cut themselves. Their water came from wells they had dug themselves. For food, they went out and shot a deer. If they tired of venison, they shot a bear. Bread was baked in old coffee cans on wood-burning stoves. Their life was rough and hard, and that was just fine with them.

      Crestone then half — but only half — resembled other towns in the San Luis Valley of south central Colorado, towns lying on the valley floor as though having fainted of sunstroke. In them forlorn houses lined forlorn streets, often in townscapes so flat they seemed to take place in two dimensions. In such western byways America’s Manifest Destiny ran out of gas. Films (The Last Picture Show; Paris, Texas; Bagdad Café) used such desolate towns to evoke American minimalism, the sad barrenness of too little, too lost, too far away.

      But located high up — more than eight thousand feet — in the valley’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains (which rise to fourteen thousand feet), Crestone was suffused with a kind of nobility that gave it the aura of somewhere. Unlike superficially similar small towns, Crestone’s terrain has always been a place of Big Dreams — from the Hopi on their vision quests to gold miners on their get-rich quests, from land speculators dreaming of $ signs to today’s pilgrims dreaming of a better world. At times their Dream seemed to loom larger than the puny mortals dreaming it, whom it merely used to get itself dreamed.

      The Dream has mutated through many incarnations. It is, however, its latest incarnation and the wildest, strangest dream of all that attracts our interest here. This is a story of how that hamlet mutated into something improbable and unclassifiable and without exact parallel elsewhere. Crestone today, with its multiple faiths, is often likened to a miniature, oxymoronic Wild West Jerusalem. But Jerusalem, with its Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, never came close to hosting as many varieties of spirituality, from A to Z (American Native religions to Zen), as Crestone does. Here, as Eastern spirituality makes its home side by side with traditional Western faiths, it has shaken things up and produced unexpected results — including turning religious differences into a source of social cohesion instead of hostility.

      Today the town’s twenty-five spiritual centers make it practically a living encyclopedia of the world religions. When you see them all together, what do you see that you didn’t when you saw them separate and apart? In the overture, I borrowed an analogy from language: know only one tongue, and you’ll mistake it for language itself; know a half dozen, and you may begin to discern their underlying structure and how each one renders reality differently. Likewise with religion. If intimately familiar with several faiths, you may better understand what a religious sense of life is, regardless of its cultural expressions, and what difference, for good or bad, in daily life it can make.

      Crestone, with its more than two dozen versions of religion — and in that small dusty Wild West setting — doesn’t quite resemble any other place in history. But before we go and inspect it, first a little background: How did such a geographical-cultural-spiritual one-of-a-kind come about in the first place?

      History Lessons

      Some people, like the Hopi, looked at a landscape and saw something spiritual or in addition. One such group of visionaries were the speculators of the 1970s, who looked at Crestone and beheld the summum bonum — filthy lucre, profits, fortune. A land speculation company, the Arizona-Colorado Land & Cattle Co. (AZC), began investing tens of millions of dollars, laying down water pipes and setting up electric lines just outside the town proper, to entice — so their investors hoped — urbanites looking for a better, freer life. The days of the tough old coots who could withstand every hardship, except prosperity, were numbered: capitalism was coming to Crestone.

      AZC succeeded in selling a number of lots (when there was no one around to buy them) by setting up tiny sales offices outside army bases, to which was tacked a sign: OWN A PIECE OF COLORADO. $30 DOWN. $30 A MONTH FOR 30 YEARS. A drunken soldier stumbling back to the base might think, “Ah, what the hell” and stumble out of the sales office with three fewer tens in his billfold and a deed to somewhere in New Mexico, no, Colorado. But to sell enough plots of land to make it profitable, AZC faced a small problem — or actually several large ones. Winter in Crestone was most seasons of the year. When winter was eventually over, in blew relentless dust storms that practically kept people prisoners inside. When the dust storms ceased, then came plagues of mosquitoes. In Crestone there were no doctors, no hospitals, no shops, no movies, no entertainment, and (name almost anything else). AZC had a solution to that conundrum, too: they built a golf course. But man cannot live by golf alone. After a few years, the idea of a retirement community in Crestone itself went into retirement, as AZC went bankrupt. And with that ending our story begins.

      Three mismatched characters, as though plucked out of three unrelated narratives, now come together to change the face of Crestone forever. Character number one: a billionaire entrepreneur turned environmentalist. Character number two: a self-appointed local shaman. Character number three: a Danish interior decorator living in New York City. She, number three, would put Crestone on the map and realize there one of the oddest and loveliest dreams in human history. For something new under the sun was taking shape. The Baca Grande News — not welcoming this unprecedented development — refused to print her name or report that news. Belatedly, a generation later, here’s that news story.

      Shamans and interior decorators are not hard to come by; more unusual is a billionaire environmentalist. When Maurice Strong purchased AZC’s property assets, including the land around Crestone, his vision for the use of that land . . . well, he had no vision for it. How could he? He had never seen it or thought about it. The two hundred thousand acres he now owned around Crestone came with the larger two-million-acre Monopoly empire spread throughout the Southwest that he had acquired when AZC went bankrupt. If other entrepreneurs had purchased those two hundred thousand acres, they might have erected a ski resort, or tapped the vast aquifer and piped the water to Denver or Los Angeles, or sold the minerals rights to Halliburton, or leased the land to the military for maneuvers and bomb testing. The mountains are too rugged for commercial skiing, but all those other money-making schemes have been proposed for Crestone. Maurice Strong was at least open to other possibilities.

      Unlike Howard Hughes and Donald Trump, who inherited fortunes to fast-start their careers, Strong grew up dirt-poor on the Canadian prairie. Working in the Arctic when barely out of his teens, he learned enough about minerals