Enlightenment Town. Jeffery Paine

the metamorphosis has happened; it is a different Crestone once again. The Aspen Institute wives preferred to the majestic mountains of Crestone somewhere where they could get in some good shopping. So, adieu Aspen Institute. Hanne’s weird cults turned out to be Christian Carmelites, and later, when they were Hindus or Tibetan Buddhists, they soon shared something with the old-timers there after all. They cared for the community and, equally important, they cared for the land. As each new group here added its flavor to the mix, together expanding the notion of spirituality, the initially resistant old-timers made a discovery: here was religion not as dogmatic moralizing, not as the closed-off churches of their past, but as a more multi-dimensional milieu in which even nonbelievers could live and thrive. The old town still looked the same, as earthy and folksy as ever, but the shutters of possibility were thrown open, and the unimaginable became imaginable.

      When, for example, in the early nineties outside corporate interests planned to drill the aquifer and drain the water table, wreaking environmental havoc, it was unthinkable that with their money, power, and influence they could be stopped. But the ecologically minded members of the new religious groups, joined by old Crestonians and ranchers and farmers from across the valley, voted to tax themselves for funds to legally oppose the mammoth corporations. When against the odds they eventually won their impossible David-versus-Goliath battle, one old conservative rancher from the valley, elated by the results, joked to a man from here, “You know, you weirdos from Crestone are all right.” The man joined in the joke and laughing, replied, “Yep, our alien guides from outer space instructed us to save the land.”

      Yes, even without the alien guides, it was implausible. Hanne’s (Glenn Anderson’s / Crazy Horse’s / the dreaming universe’s) vision for Crestone came to fruition. Mecca, Jerusalem, Bodh Gaya . . . and now little Crestone? In that small geographical compass twenty-five different spiritual groups — Christian, Tibetan Buddhist, Hindu, American shamanic, Sufi, Zen — have set up shop, living neighbor to neighbor, providing a unique picture or insight into spirituality today. A mining and ranching town on the fringe of nowhere, headed for extinction, became instead a twenty-first-century microcosm of the world’s religions. Toward the end of his life William Faulkner looked up from his astonishing body of work and wondered: Where did it all come from? Unlike Faulkner, Hanne looks at her unusual creation and finds it not surprising at all. She merely thinks: “Of course it happened. It had to happen.”

2. Where the Hell Am I? A Tour

      Suppose you were set down here blindfolded, could you guess — by the sounds, the temperature, the air quality, the felt speed of people passing by — roughly where you had landed? The temperature seems a bit cold for the time of year, since either in winter you stand deep in snow or in August the nights sink into the fifties. There is clue number one. The air inhaled has a fresh, dry exhilaration but, shortchanged a few molecules of oxygen, you cannot quite take in enough of it. Second clue, you are at a high altitude. Your ears strain to catch any telltale sounds, but how peculiar, there are none, no hum, rumble, or din to be heard. A wind does sigh through the trees, and an unidentifiable bird faintly cries, but where are the screeching alarms of ambulances, the coughing of leaf blowers, and the ear-piercing squeals of trucks backing up? Quietness is a scarcely obtainable commodity in the noise-polluted twenty-first century, and curious about how you landed in such a hotbed of silence, you rip off the blindfold. And then . . . a multiple-choice question. When you tear off the blindfold you see you are:

      a) where the following story gets under way

      b) in a Western, possibly Colorado township

      c) nowhere, or nowhere you would want to be

      d) on sacred terrain

      e) not on sacred terrain

      f) in Tibet

      If you answered (f), you are wrong — but not obviously wrong. Set against Himalayan-like mountains, the terrain here is a doppelgänger for parts of Tibet. Like a village in old Tibet, the town sits at a high-plain-like altitude (eight thousand feet), abutted by even higher mountains (fourteen thousand feet), and overlooking a vast, seemingly empty valley (160 miles across). Tibet bares the nickname Land of Snows, and here, too, it can snow for months, alternating with dazzling blue skies, followed by a summer warmed by a blazing sun. And as in Tibet, Crestone’s terrain may be inhospitable to much in the way of development, but that very inhospitality makes it hospitable for retreats, monasteries, devotional practices, and solitary introspection. When the two most venerated lamas of Tibet visited Crestone they couldn’t get over it. “This is a place where Tibetan Buddhism can survive!” exclaimed one (the 16th Karmapa), and marveled the other (Dilgo Khyentse), “Many beings will become enlightened here!” Indeed, for some Buddhist practitioners today, Crestone is a New World annex of Old Tibet, but, even so — look on any map — if you answered (f) you flunked the quiz.

      All the other answers above have some claim to being right. For most unblindfolded gazers the answer would be (c), Crestone is nowhere (nowhere they have ever heard of; nowhere with touristic attractions). Crestone lies hours away from any major airport. From that airport (either Denver or Albuquerque), you start out on busy highways, then drive down ever less crowded ones, and finally down a two-lane road, and when the road runs out and you can’t go any farther: Welcome to Crestone. In recent years the town has gained some reputation for its religious centers, which lures some tourists wanting to behold that spiritual extravaganza. Did their GPS go haywire? As an excuse for a downtown all they find is a post office, a few small businesses, and some empty buildings, situated on two north-south-running streets crisscrossing two east-west-running streets — negligible man-made scratches in a forlorn expanse of eternally arid real estate. (The various religious centers lie tucked away in the mountains, unobservable from the town.) Hanne Strong’s aristocratic mother visited from Denmark and took one glance at this — by her European standards — uncultured backwater, and she did not need a second. When informed that someone was writing a book about the town, she snorted, “It better be titled One Day Here Is Enough.”

      To get the lay of the land, let’s take a drive on the land surrounding the town (the Baca, where most Crestonians live), which stretches mile after mile across prairie-like semidesert. We might be on the set of every other cowboy movie ever made. Yup, boys and girls, we’re out West. Or are we?

      The houses you pass in that expanse form a crazed United Nations of domestic architecture. The first house is New England clapboard, but the next one you come to is Spanish adobe, followed by a log cabin; the one after that could be a futuristic Hobbit-hole, and a mile down the road is an alien spacecraft-like dwelling. On the right you ride by an Oriental palace, and on the left, why, look — a mound of dirt that got overly ambitious. After a while you ask yourself, What planet am I on? Crestone has no building code, which is what first drew ornery mavericks here, after the gold ran out.

      Driving back into town we pass old-fashioned Americana, a plain old wooden Baptist church. I once slowed down to read its sign, which announced that Sunday’s sermon: CHRIST’S ERECTION. Whoa! If Jesus were a man as well as God, he could have had boners, I guess, but when had the Baptists gotten so frisky? The sign, it turns out, had originally read Christ’s Resurrection, until some mischief-makers got hold of it. (A sense of humor substitutes here for the commercial entertainments available elsewhere.¹)

      Indeed, the real hero of this book may not be any individual, lovely as he or she may be, or spiritual group, interesting as they are, but the land. Our hero cannot speak for itself, but others are ready to speak for it, to say what living in such a momentous landscape means. Sister Kaye compares her Carmelite monastery here, Nada Hermitage, with their monasteries elsewhere: “At the Nova Scotia monastery we experience God through beauty. In Ireland we sense God through the people. Here in Crestone we know God mainly through nature.” Granted that all Earth is sacred, Walter Roan, an old Cree medicine man visiting Crestone, was asked, “What makes the land here especially so?” “Where the land is open and vast, when there’s water underneath [referring to the aquifer], and wind blowing across into the mountains, there is spirit and there is no place for the spirit to go then but up,” Roan answered. “Here