Article Contributed on: 8/20/2009 11:38:40 AM
This is the American West. This is where you live.
There are lots and lots of dudes walking around with dusty cowboy hats and horse poop on their boots. There are rodeos, where cute little baby cows get wrestled to the ground by those same dudes in the cowboy hats. There are bears and pumas and coyotes and all manner of carnivorous critters that may, at some point, wander onto the golf course and try to eat your purse dog. On occasion, they may be successful. There are raucous saloons where drunken bar fights happen, and if you're not careful with the Axe Body Spray, you may walk out of there with your Crocs smelling of whiskey and cigar smoke. And there ain't a smoking ban in the universe that can do a dang thing about it.
This is the American West. This is Colorado.
We have the Front Range watching over us like a quiet fortress propped up by God, inviting the tougher members of our species to hike its twisting trails and hunt bull elk in its magnificent forests. We have sometimes brutal winters, where it's entirely possible that you may get lost in the white-out just three feet from your Porsche SUV, if not for the concern of your neighbors, or maybe a dude in a cowboy hat, passing by you in his rusted pickup truck. We eat steaming bison steaks and elk burgers and breakfast burritos stuffed with jalapenos. We eat jalapenos on everything. We eat jalapenos on chocolate cake and ice cream.
This is the American West. This is history.
This is where Doc Holliday played his last hand, and the Arapahoe and Cheyenne fought for their existence in the Colorado War of 1863. This is where the Fifty-Niners came to carve out a new life in silver and gold from the veins of Pike's Peak, risking all they had for a bit of dust in a metal pan. This is where rich deposits of rhyolite stone were discovered, in the mesas and valleys surrounding a weird rock that sort of looked like a castle. This is where a single train depot on Perry Street brought the Denver and Rio Grande lines to a struggling, dusty settlement that would eventually come to be known as Castle Rock, Colorado.
This is the American West. We have trains.
They make noise.
I live quite close to that noise, and with every rattle of the tracks and every shriek of the Union Pacific's horn, I hear the bold song of the American West in my teeth and bones, reminding me with a smack upside the head that I can be a hell of a lot tougher than I sometimes believe. In these unsteady times, that's a bit of information I'm not willing to give up.
If the newly-planted yuppoids of Douglas County aren't digging the trains, then they should move someplace a little more quiet, and perhaps a little more safe, where their precious purse dogs won't get quite so agitated when the mighty Union Pacific blows through town. If these complainers need a "Quiet Zone", might I suggest a pair of headphones, with a nice Yanni shuffle on the Ipod?
This, however, is the American West. We have trains.
They make noise.
And what a bold and blessed noise it is!