Enlightenment Town. Jeffery Paine

sector, amassing a megafortune — primarily in oil and natural gas — and serving in the public sector. For the Canadian government he oversaw the country’s national energy policy, while for the United Nations he supervised the largest famine relief effort in history (in Africa in 1984), and later he master-minded the Rio Environmental Summit of 1992. Already a quarter century ago the New York Times was calling Maurice Strong “the Custodian of the Planet.” Folks in Crestone were less sure what to call him. The ex-military types living in the Baca land development just outside the town proper were suspicious of Mr. Moneybags barging into their midst. He was a damned foreigner, hence likely to be immoral and depraved. And, sure enough, he arrived in Crestone with a beautiful, unmarried female companion on his arm. Strong had planned to headquarter his newly acquired empire in Arizona, but his female companion refused to reside in a city she found as soulless as Phoenix. The couple weighed their options and began exploring their other AZC properties for possibilities. This female companion had, it turns out, a rather unorthodox sense of the possible.

      In fact, nothing was more surprising about this billionaire businessman than her. Maurice Strong and Hanne Marstrand certainly made the odd couple; their twelve-year difference in age (he was born in 1929, she in 1941) only began the differences between them. Maurice came from the cultureless Canadian prairie; she, from the European high bourgeoisie. He was physically homely and she was beautiful. He was practical-minded, and she spiritually inclined. The Los Angeles Times in 1989 titled an article about them “‘Mystical’ and ‘Manifester’ Team Up.” If Maurice had the financial resources to allow something new to take root in Crestone, it would likely be Hanne who came up with what that something would be.

      She had grown up in Copenhagen, believing, the way some believe they are born in the wrong sex, that she had been born in the wrong country. When she read James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans she thought, “Those are my people.” Hanne invented for herself a secret history. “This is my first time around as a white woman,” she would say to herself. “For countless generations I was a Native American Indian. Then for countless other generations I was a Tibetan.” For a Native American maiden or a pious daughter of Tibet — or even for a proper Danish girl of that era — she certainly behaved inappropriately, becoming (I’ve been told) one of that new mutant species: the wild teenager, young, daring, beautiful, and saucy.

      Hanne relocated to New York in her early twenties, encountering no Mohicans taking scalps but rather Manhattanites drinking manhattans (or martinis). One night Hanne met Maurice at a dinner party, and the rest is — tongues wagging. “It’s classic,” went the whispers. “Beautiful blonde babe takes rich fool for a ride.” Hanne would come home from work to find her apartment filled wall to wall with roses, but Maurice Strong was too shrewd to be duped by a gold digger. For all their differences, theirs was a courtship, a partnership, and later a marriage of mutual appreciation and support. It was thus two seasoned, intimate allies who in 1978 arrived to inspect the old Crestone ranch, in order to do with the surrounding land . . . they had no idea what.

      What do you do with two hundred thousand acres of semidesert far from anywhere? To a businessman the answer would be obvious: hire consultants, have a feasibility study made, conduct market research, and organize a development oversight committee chaired by accountants. Or, if you are Hanne, you suspect that this is actually a spiritual question. To decide the future of the Crestone land, Hanne could imagine only one sensible approach: like an Indian medicine man she would go on a vision quest. After spending four days and nights alone in the Sangre de Cristos above Crestone, as Hanne gazed out at the meadows and nooks and crannies below, she fantasized a different religion nestled in each of them. What a cockamamy idea, even she realized.

      As Hanne was making her way down the mountain, some miles away her teenage daughter from an earlier marriage, Suzanne, was trying unsuccessfully to hitchhike to Crestone. Finally, some geezer as old as Methuselah slowed his jalopy and yelled, “Get aboard!” and then plied her with questions about what a young thing like her was doing in these parts. When Suzanne told him about her mother, the old fellow could scarcely contain his excitement. As he dropped Suzanne off at the ranch house, he quickly scooted out of the car himself. When Hanne answered his banging on the door, he burst out, “Where you been? I’ve been waiting for you!”

      This man, it seems, had been having his own visions. He had foreseen a foreign woman coming to Crestone. And that woman — You! he said to Hanne — has a mission to fulfill here. For a terrible time is coming, war and devastation will ravage the Earth, and somewhere safe is needed to preserve the age-old wisdom of humankind. He practically shouted at Hanne: the reason, and the only reason, for your coming here is to establish a refuge for the world’s religions. Hanne remembered her vision on the mountain and wondered: Who is this man?

      By the time he knocked on Hanne’s door, Glenn Anderson must have been over eighty years old. What was he? A self-anointed prophet? A shaman? A medium or channeler? He did have one trait in common with all holy persons: he did not work for his own gain. Glenn Anderson lived simply, often sleeping out of doors or in a makeshift cabin so rickety it was like the outdoors indoors. Late in his life he gained some following, principally among hippies, who found his nonmaterialistic idealism and homespun mythology to their liking. Anderson regaled them with stories of how in an earlier incarnation he and the Indian war chief Crazy Horse had been first cousins. Creating a spiritual sanctuary here, he told Hanne that day, was Crazy Horse’s vision for the valley. In fact, Anderson went on, Crazy Horse himself was merely the voice for a message far older, one ancient and coterminous with the cosmos. In establishing a habitat for all the world’s religions, Hanne would be the medium fulfilling a dream of ancient and universal significance.

      Hearing an unkempt old fogy splutter such nonsense, most people would have slammed the door in his face. But Hanne heeded his call, and in the coming years she would devote considerable acreage around Crestone, and seek out representatives of the world’s religions to occupy them, to realizing the vision prophesized by Glenn Anderson, or by Crazy Horse, or by the dreaming universe eons ago.

      Now that all the principal characters are onstage: the plot — a highly implausible plot, one that would change a half-ghost mining backwater into a setting for the world’s religions to come together — is set to unfold.

      First there is Maurice. His official residence was now Crestone but his real home was an unending succession of plane flights, from here to there to everywhere. He returned to Crestone bearing unusual souvenirs — the VIPs collected on his travels. Maurice sat on the board of the prestigious Aspen Institute of business, university, and political leaders, and, with his enormous influence, he established the institute’s secondary headquarters in Crestone. In those days, the early eighties, you never knew whom you might bump into here. The downtown has about four streets, but walking them you might blink and wonder, Could that really be Henry Kissinger? And that guy, isn’t that, you know, the prime minister of Canada, Trudeau? And what about him — Robert McNamara? Yes, it was they.

      Then there is Hanne. She was poised to turn a hamlet on the outskirts of nowhere into a center of world religions. In 1980 a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal reported that Maurice and Hanne Strong were offering free land in Colorado to traditional religious groups. If spiritual cranks and homemade messiahs don’t read the Wall Street Journal, somebody must have read it to them. From under rocks and behind trees across the United States sprang yet another bearded oracle or tie-dyed savior heading to Crestone, chanting the mantra, “Gimme, gimme land!”

      And then there is the POA. The Property Owners Association was composed largely of ex-military families who, when they moved here, had radically altered Crestone’s character. But they now wanted no further change, certainly not the kind Maurice and Hanne were bringing. To the rightwing POA, the little foreigner Strong was barging in with what seemed to them a bunch of damned Reds in tow. If Maurice was bad, they considered Hanne unspeakably worse. She would lure to Crestone weird cults, practicing voodoo and black magic. In the early ’80s Hanne received anonymous death threats regularly. Far from appreciating what she was doing, the POA blamed her for everything, short of the weather, and probably