Colorado 2024

Colorado - west of Pueblo

Although I didn’t have time in this visit to look closely at what’s happening in Colorado, I did come away with some impressions. Its weather patterns are shifting. Its people are changing. It is not the same as when I lived there. Not that any place can stay the same…

Infrastructure

Effects of the infrastructure bill that Biden somehow got through Congress are visible everywhere. Small wonder Republicans who voted against it routinely take credit for it. They would be stupid to admit they opposed it.

My main personal experiences of it were water and roads.

Water is crucial in the West. Cities and towns that obtained water rights many decades ago are able to grow. Without water rights, they can’t. My brother and his partner pointed out some areas where people can buy a plot and build a house, but without water rights. Who would want to live that way?

We were in a place with ample water.

When I saw watercourses and lakes, they were clean. Since I moved to the UK, every river in England has become contaminated by increasingly lax sewer treatment. Most tap water in the UK comes from surface water sources, so river water goes through treatment and then we drink it. In my area, it’s “hard” with limescale.

Coloradans get much of their tap water from snow melt. It can’t get much nicer than that. Snow melt is seasonal, so dams and reservoirs catch it in wet season to keep enough available through dry season. I think it wasn’t my imagination that tap water tasted better where my brother and his partner live.

Colorado - dam and reservoir for Pueblo’s water supply

Highways that hadn’t been recently resurfaced were generally either being resurfaced or had signs up indicating they will be soon. Just while I was there, a long stretch near Fountain went from raw construction underway to nicely resurfaced and striped. Even the back roads I got to were mostly in pretty good condition. I didn’t go over a lot of bridges, but the ones I encountered looked like they were okay.

Colorado - road along the Arkansas river to Salida shortly before a section being repaired

People and goods flowed smoothly and constantly. I couldn’t help comparing with the UK where potholes are breeding like bunnies. Will our new British government, unlike the one from 2010 to this year, recognize that money spent to keep infrastructure working is a form of investment?

I also thought about a truck driver my brother told me about who died when a failing bridge collapsed on him—postponing the financial cost of infrastructure replenishment has costs beyond the economy. I saw the new bridge put up since the driver’s death. What happened to him is a reminder that when infrastructure goes too long without upkeep and fails, inconvenience is the least of the potential consequences.

Expression

Colorado is full of art—along streets, on bridges, on walls, even on the sound barriers along interstate highways. Sculptures, murals (so many murals!), shading and texture to suggest mountain ranges in plain concrete, all sorts of art... Even when the art is not Southwestern in design, its colors are Southwestern.

Colorado - Pueblo bridge over the Arkansas river - both ends have these pillars

Colorado is bright. The sun is bright. The landscape is bright. The art is bright. Land and people have an ongoing conversation through so much bright outdoor art.

Colorado - part of mural along Arkansas River

Colorado - Beulah - totem pole in someone’s yard

But Colorado is also infamous for bringing out extremes in people.

Colorado Springs used to be a fabulous place for shouting through bumper stickers and emblems. Focus on the Family had recently relocated there from California. They thought they owned the whole state and almost exactly half the state disagreed (which Focus didn’t realize until voters came within about one vote per precinct of stripping away the property tax exemption for all non-profits, so broad a measure that churches couldn’t have escaped by reclassifying themselves). Some bumper stickers said Focus on the Family. Others said Focus on Your Own Damn Family. There were also bumper emblems. Christian fish, Darwin fish, Christian fish eating a Darwin fish, Evolve fish (holding a wrench in one fin)… Being stuck in a traffic jam was never boring. Everybody had strong opinions and displayed them on their cars.

There aren’t many bumper stickers or emblems any more.

There weren’t many political yard signs when I first arrived, either. Most of the signs on display were for down-ballot races and didn’t make it clear which party a candidate represents. People seemed to be mostly keeping their heads down about politics. That might be a misleading impression—I didn’t have time to drive around much.

Colorado Springs has approximately doubled in population since the last time I lived there. It has urban sprawl. It has much more traffic. Sunday on the way to fly back, when the church crowd got out of services a disturbing proportion of drivers behaved like they were so angry that we skedaddled out of there after our lunch stop at a place not popular with the religious crowd.

I’ve lived in places with many churches. One Texas town I lived in had 35 churches for a population of 15,000. I’ve lived in a Tennessee city where nearly everyone went to church services every Sunday and Wednesday, and many people went to other church-organized functions two or three additional days per week. I have never lived in a place where going to church left so many people as angry as they were behaving on the Sunday of my flight.

My brother pointed out that proliferating Christian churches all over the state are rebranding. Few of them show a cross. Instead they have corporate-looking logos and big corporate-looking buildings. Sometimes I have to look two or three times to realize it’s a church, or I need my brother to point out where to find a hint that it’s a church. One church even franchises itself. It all felt peculiar.

Activity

Colorado Springs was by far the leanest place I’ve lived. It still is.

The USA’s Olympic training center is there and has grown since I left. It’s a sensible location. The athletes train at an altitude of about 6000 feet in a dry climate with plenty of sunny days. Nearly every competition they attend is at a lower elevation with more oxygen.

But Olympians are surrounded in Colorado Springs by other people who are also keen on physical activity. When I worked there, one of my local friends regarded an ideal Saturday as 100 miles on a bicycle at high altitude with steep inclines. He still loves bicycling. A woman who worked in a group adjacent to mine won the race up Pike’s Peak three years in a row (I think—that was a long time ago) and considered herself an amateur. Another adjacent work group entered a triathlon at high altitude as a team building activity.

You could tell what people were into by the shapes of their bodies. Bicycling? Awesome thigh muscles. Mountain climbing? Great calves and shoulders. Walking? Slim waist and muscular haunches. Surfing? Oh, did you think you need an ocean beach to go surfing? In Colorado you only need a river and it doesn’t even need to be big. Colorado Springs doesn’t have river surfing, as far as I know, but some other places do.

(Colorado - surfing the Arkansas River in the middle of Salida)

As I just hinted, it isn’t only Colorado Springs, and it isn’t only adults. I saw multiple boulders and low concrete walls with climbing holds on them for children.

Colorado - bouldering for children in a city park

Can I keep up with Coloradans? No, not even after I adjust to the altitude. But it is fun to watch them play.

Money

Prices are painfully high compared with what they used to be, but the same has happened in the UK. For the most part, if I take a step back for some perspective, price rises are comparable in my two countries. If I look at the data, statistics say inflation has been worse in the UK. It just looks startling to me in the USA because I see it in brief glimpses months or years apart instead of living through the day to day creep like I do in Britain.

Utilities don’t cost nearly as much in the USA. I am envious of what my brother pays for energy and water.

Housing is harder to compare. At most places in both countries, housing has been going up much too fast for “ordinary” people to keep up. There are some places where it hasn’t, but others where the rise has been insanely steep—London in the UK, for example. In the USA, unfortunately much of Colorado’s real estate has become crazily expensive.

Eating out has long been a luxury in the UK. It would be in the USA now, too. At the turn of the century it was possible to eat out three meals a day in Colorado Springs for a total of $10 to a splurge of $15 across the day without resorting to fast-food junk. Now that’s what it takes for a modest lunch.

Automotive fuel is still cheap in the USA compared with the UK. This allows the enormous size of so many American vehicles. Paying less than half as much as Brits for the fuel makes it feasible to drive cars that guzzle.

I can see why so many Americans complain so bitterly about how much prices have gone up. They’ve gone up dramatically all over the world in the past few years. However, in the USA wages have gone up more than in the UK. People in the USA probably aren’t aware their squeeze is not as tight as in countries like the UK. No matter where you are, the squeeze feels bad, and somebody else being in a squeeze too doesn’t make it feel any better.

It’s part of the devilish deal behind fiat currency. When both countries disconnected money from something of actual hard value (gold or silver), money became a floating symbol of collective belief instead of a more direct representation of worth. Governments with high debts, as in both of my countries, want inflation to be as high as people can stand because it makes government debts shrink in value silently, without any need for announcements or actions that might attract attention.

Knowing all of this intellectually is one thing. Being a proverbial frog in a slowly heating pot of water where I live is uncomfortable but happens gradually enough for me to carry on with my day. Getting slapped in the face by it when I hop across the Pond after a long absence always feels like a rude shock.

Colorado LGBTQ+ Background

You may need some historical background.

I remember participating in the very first Pride parade in Colorado Springs. The city seemed on the verge of becoming as dangerous for LBGTQ+ people as Houston had been in the 1970s to early 1980s. Being known as gay felt risky. That march, the ballot measure about property tax exemptions for non-profits, and Tim Gill’s brilliantly strategic Gill Foundation and then Gay and Lesbian Fund of Colorado turned the tide.

The Gay and Lesbian Fund repeatedly stepped in with donations to benefit an entire community—not only the LGBTQ+ portion of the community—and Gill made sure each donation made news. For example, whenever PBS or NPR did their fundraising drive, when it reached peak attention the Fund announced it would match donations made in a specific time window. The LGBTQ+ community poured our donations in during that window, knowing Gill would double the total and our contribution would make the news. We became one of the largest blocks of financial support for public broadcasting there. The same happened when the Red Cross needed a surge of donations after a flood in Boulder, and so on.

Focus on the Family’s campaign to demonize LGBTQ+ people lost credibility. Gill made us visible as people who were contributing for the benefit of everyone, not only ourselves. The “gay agenda” and “perverts” narrative from Focus on the Family didn’t square with such persistent nurturing of the entire diverse community around us (including people who hated us).

Colorado is one of the states that makes it easy to put proposed new laws onto the ballot for the people to decide instead of having all laws set by the legislature. For that reason, both sides of the political spectrum try out new ideas there. When I lived in Colorado, its voters were split almost exactly down the middle. Ballot measures frequently passed or failed by a margin of one vote per precinct or less. The margins are not so tight now.

The general feel of being there is no longer so strongly about being a target for being who I am. That’s a welcome change.

Socializing and Food

Speaking of how people behave, I had forgotten how friendly people can be there. Walking along anywhere, it was common for complete strangers to smile and say hello as though offering a passing greeting to someone they know and like. (Well, it was common except on Sunday after church in Colorado Springs. The more I ponder that, the more weird it seems, very out of step.) There is an easy fluidity in the friendliness. It comes across as a genuine element of who people are rather than a veneer.

When socializing with people you know, even in modern times, “breaking bread” together is still central to our rituals. Socializing and food are linked.

I’ve always loved the food in Colorado. At the house, lunch might be a burrito or chimichanga with a roasted spicy green pepper on top. None of that would be in the kitchen in the UK. My brother’s partner usually cooked dinner, which often featured produce from the farmer’s market. My brother cooked too. I’m not a great cook and was often exhausted. I confess I didn’t take a turn at cooking.

Although dining out would be too expensive to do regularly, for this trip a bit more of it than usual was inevitable. There were also a few visits with friends (theirs or mine) to fit in.

It was so easy to visit safely outdoors—not just on the patio at home, but sitting in camp chairs in the woods (remember, Colorado is often sunny) or at outdoor seating at restaurants. This was the warm season and it gets seriously cold in winter, but the outdoor seating doesn’t all shut after summer. At one of the nicer restaurants I noticed heaters over the outdoor tables that put to shame the best of the places my wife and I go in the UK.

Indoor Public Spaces

We only stepped into indoor public spaces briefly to buy something, place an order for dining out, get a vaccination (during this trip I got two, one that is a better version in the USA and one that is only available privately in the UK at a highly inflated price) or ship something (part of the main purpose of my trip). I wear a good FFP3 respirator for that. A few other people wore face masks of some kind too, more than I see in the UK but not many.

I wear mine for my trans-Atlantic travel. From the UK to Colorado, hardly anyone else did.

From Colorado to the UK, I stopped counting when I saw a dozen people board the airplane wearing N95 or N99 respirator masks. Aer Lingus has barely begun flying into and out of Denver. Its flights on that route aren’t full yet, which made a dozen or so masked passengers a more impressive proportion of the cabin than it sounds.

Wrap-up Thoughts

Colorado’s voters tended to live jumbled up together when I lived there. As I said, you could see it in Colorado Springs bumper stickers.

The electorate has become more liberal overall since I left the area, but it looks like people are now more inclined to live in clumps that have similar political views. I’m not saying neighborhoods are completely stratified that way. Some Republican and Democratic yard signs showed up next door to each other. But I also saw a few areas I used to know pretty well that looked like they had become more predominantly one political stripe.

That’s a shame. I liked it better when people of different beliefs rubbed elbows with each other more of the time.

Colorado is still beautiful, still entrancing—but different. I would have liked to have time to see more.

(All photos and the video in this post are by Bonnie D. Huval © 2024)