Ted Conover works as an immersive journalist. He rode the rails with hoboes (Rolling Nowhere). He embedded with Mexican immigrants moving back and forth across the U.S. border for work and for their families back home (Coyotes). He traveled the world exploring the impact of road development from Peru to The Himalayas (The Routes of Man). He worked as a prison guard in the fabled Sing-Sing prison (Newjack). And, drawing from his nearly forty-year career, he’s also written a guide to his style of reporting (Immersion).
Now Conover turns his attention to the San Luis Valley of Colorado and the people who choose to live in sparse, off-grid fashion in often crude trailers, shacks, and campers. Cheap Land Colorado—Off-Gridders At America’s Edge is an engrossing, captivating account of the wide variety of individuals and families who live in these stark, austere conditions. And why.
Conover starts out working with a social service group called La Puente, based in Alamosa. His mentor, Matt Little, cautions Conover not to wear anything blue. The last thing you want when you’re cold-knocking on doors is to be mistaken for a Costilla County code enforcement officer. (Lack of septic systems is a big issue.)
Working for La Puente, Conover brings firewood to the residents and starts, slowly, easing himself into the community. To the surprise of nobody who has read one of Conover’s previous books, characters emerge. We meet Armando, Paul, Kea and Rhonda. The “flats,” both its inhabitants and its topography, turn three-dimensional and kaleidoscopic. There are stories of hard luck, struggling individuals with suicidal thoughts, hard-scrabble folks who possess a simple desire to be left alone, and others who live quite content, thank you, not needing much of anything. Some like the remote location in order to grow their own marijuana and consume it.
Conover, as he has done in all his books, monitors his own impressions and reactions even as he takes copious notes about those he interviews. Conover, who grew up in Denver but lives and teaches in New York, doesn’t hide his own wariness about how he will he be perceived or whether he will be accepted.
“Just about every aspect of this passage intrigued me. I was going into the wild, a place with more pronghorn antelope, feral horses, and coyotes than people. But it also felt at times like a postapocalyptic landscape à la Mad Max, with ruins of old vehicles and junk and things that had burned, some of them still smoking. When the subdivisions have been created, presumably each new road had been marked by a street sign. Most of these now seem to have disappeared, with the occasional remainders evocative of a faded dream, an enterprise that didn’t work out. Instead of an American suburb circa the 1970s, I was headed, in winter, to the far margins to live among the outcasts, the self-sufficient, the alienated., the weed fiends, the wounded, the dreamers, and the hermits.”
Conover buys a 25-foot trailer for $4,000. He plunks it down on a property owned by Frank and Stacy Gruber, whose menagerie includes five children, a Saint Bernard, a ferocious Chihuahua mix, a smart heeler, and a couple of boxers. The Grubers serve as Conover’s home base and connection into the community. Over a four-year period, Conover made 20 trips to the valley, staying for several weeks or a few months at a time. (His teaching gig prevented him from moving in full time.)
Conover’s approach is organic, unforced, and chock full of empathy. He gives a voice to those who didn’t necessarily ask for one. He shows us people helping others with basic needs and simple outreach. Life, death, hopes, dreams, survival, struggle, and renewal. What appears at first to be a series of fiercely independent and solitary individuals who happen to share the same expanse of prairie turns out to be a group that has developed its own unique sense and style of community. Beauty emerges.
In all his previous immersive experiences, Conover was content to walk away when the journalistic work was done. But this time? Well, no spoilers here. But like any great book, it’s a love story in the end.
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Note: This review originally published in Four Corners Free Press (November 2022).
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Previously reviewed: Immersion
Previous Q & A with Ted Conover: Routes of Man
Don't Need A Diagram 