Littwin: Politics, church and beer in Gardner

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published July 1, 2006 at midnight

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GARDNER - I'm in a bar. It won't be the last one on this trip, but it may be the last bar I visit in Gardner. Of course, they only have two.

You have to really want to go to Gardner in order to go to Gardner, which is in southeastern Colorado on Route 69, somewhere between Farisita and Westcliffe. The mountain scenery is beautiful. The valley town is not.

I'm here because I met a woman - it's always a woman, isn't it? - named Bea Duenas. We met on the Arkansas Riverwalk in Pueblo, where I'm about to eat a Big Dawg hot dog, and where she is attending a 34th anniversary party. Everyone in the party, she says, is a cousin, meaning she has cousins like Rush Limbaugh has pills.

I'm telling her I'm doing a tour of the state, and she says I must visit tiny Gardner, where she lives.

I ask her what's happening there.

Without missing a beat, she says, "Absolutely nothing."

You may not think that is the best way to attract visitors. She must have been thinking the same thing, because she pulls in a cousin - I told you, they're all cousins - for support.

He's in his tuxedo and looking extremely sharp. I ask him whether he lives in Gardner.

"I've got a condo there," he says.

I didn't have to go to Gardner to get the joke. But being here helps. It's a city of two bars, a couple of churches, a house that has a sign that says "the last house in Gardner."

There are trailers and a gas station and memories of when there was a sawmill in town and when the coal mines were pumping out all that coal.

It's a town barely hanging on, with cattle ranchers nearby who aren't doing much better. One rancher said they were doing rain dances but that they must be dancing backward.

It was Bea's story that got me here, though. Before we get to the story, some background. I'm on this tour with photographer Todd Heisler. In 2004, we did what we called a red-blue America tour, looking at the nation's red-blue divide in the run-up to the 2004 election.

We went to Virginia Beach and Seattle and Missouri. This time, we're doing Colorado, which, if you believe the pundits, may be the new Florida.

Colorado was a swing state in 2004. For 2008, the Democrats are concentrating on what they call the Mountain West strategy - going after Colorado and New Mexico and Arizona and Nevada, all of which went for Bush in 2004. I've already seen two position papers on this strategy, so you know it's serious. The Democrats are strongly considering bringing their national convention to Denver. That's how serious they're taking it.

But in this political series, the politics should be subtext. We're not asking people if they're voting for Bob Beauprez or Bill Ritter. But if Ritter - the Democrat - wins the governor's office and the Democrats hold both houses of the legislature, it would be the first time the Democrats have held all three since 1960.

The stakes couldn't be higher for both parties. Can you say watershed?

We went looking first for answers in southeastern Colorado, which doesn't have much water at all, and where most conversations begin with golf courses in Aurora and why Aurora/Denver/Colorado Springs are sucking the water/lifeblood from the ranchers and farmers in this area.

We went to a baptismal in Conejos and a stock auction in La Junta and a Slovenian-dominated street fair in Pueblo. We hope to tell the story from the bottom up - talking to real, actual people - or, in the case of Gardner, from the bottoms up.

Back to our bar. And to Bea's story, which has religious overtones. She grew up right behind the Catholic church, which sits between two bars.

"There were families in every house back then," she says. "We had an arroyo - a dry riverbed - that ran by our house. Everyone would come through the arroyo and then through our yard and go to the Catholic church. And every Saturday night they'd go to confession, right? Right after confession, and I'm sitting on the front porch watching, everybody comes right out of church and goes directly to the bar."

She laughs.

"My dad included. My mom included."

They don't have Saturday Mass anymore. They do have midnight Mass at Christmas and - yes - a beeline to the bar, Bea says.

I drive into town. And sure enough, there's the church. There are the two bars. I walk into Mandella's. I don't know if anyone has been to confession recently, but everyone is friendly and wants to talk.

The talk goes to politics. This is a libertarian part of the state, a don't- tread-on-me part of the state. Soon, they're ripping Bush and county commissioners and asking why politicians won't seed the clouds so they can get some rain.

It's beers all around, and cigarette smoke is clouding the air, but not the issues.

"In 10 years," says Berrie Archuleta, "there might be only one or two ranchers left in the Valley. There will be Joe and . . . "

And Joe Vargas, in a cowboy hat and boots, a beer in hand, says, "Me. And a banker with a sense of humor."

In walks Charley Wacker, also in hat and boots. I ask him about politics.

"The government sucks," he says. "What else do you need to know?"

He gets his laugh, and then launches into an attack on the smoking laws.

"Come first of July, she can't smoke in her own business," he says of bartender/owner Ann Hudson. "She's paying taxes up the yin yang, and she can't smoke in her own bar. You'll love this. We're in a stage 2 fire alert. That means you can't smoke outside. Come first of July, you can't smoke in here, and you can't smoke out there. What kind of law is that?

"I don't smoke, but my dad smoked three packs a day, and he lived to be 80."

There's a strong anti-government mood here. But there's another trend in the state, which brought us the passage of Ref C - which said, in effect, that government does matter. The rural counties down here played a key role in passing that state-changing referendum.

I was talking to Floyd Ciruli, the respected Colorado pollster, about that. He says that 1992, when TABOR passed, was the beginning of an era, one that would come to be dominated by Gov. Bill Owens and low taxes and one that lasted maybe 10 years. Then there was a recession.

The state hasn't changed, he says, but maybe conditions have.

"The high point for Republicans was 2002 with the re-election of Wayne Allard. The president was at his strongest. Terror was the defining issue.

"I think things began to go a bit south when the governor lost on Referendum A. You saw a division in the party. Then we had the recession. The governor had his personal problems. When Ben Nighthorse Campbell surprisingly retired, Owens didn't run, and Ken Salazar emerged. They used to say the Democrats had no bench. Now they have Hickenlooper and Romanoff. You can see a change."

The talk in Mandella's moves back to their town, and why they live here and why they would never live in crowded Denver. And the talk of politics soon fades away.

The bar, I couldn't help noting, is for sale. Much of the town is for sale. It looks depressing. It is depressing, almost as depressing as the drought.

But then somebody offers me a beer and offers up this line on Gardner: "We're not a big enough town to have a town drunk. So we all share the job."

It's what we call in the business a getaway line. And I'm off to start the trip.

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com

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