as charged,” he answered. “I do it for the same reason a class on music concentrates on Bach and Beethoven and not on cacophonous mishmash. That way you can take home something personally valuable from it.” Incidentally, Huston dreamed of coming to this town (but was by then too old) to witness all the religions he had so fondly written about coming together in one place. There was no danger of religion blowing up in his face here. To the contrary.
And it won’t blow up in your face, either. This is a book written to be useful to (and entertain) the open-minded of any faith. As well as to the one in five Americans who say they are spiritual but not religious, who want examples and companionship for going further, in readable, everyday language that can resonate personally. For here abstract ideals descend to Earth, where they are shown embodied in quirky individuals and amid the raucousness of the common day. To cite one instance: when the esoteric ideas of Eastern spirituality — nonduality, emptiness, “one taste,” enlightenment, etc. — migrate westward, they are usually presented in inspiring generalizations. By contrast, in these pages they are depicted on the motley canvas of daily life, as (somewhat) ordinary people in the town use them to relate to one another and to realize a fuller existence for themselves.
To conclude the beginning: Why I Wrote This Book. The world seems to be plunging, with the brakes off, into ever more catastrophic situations. Political realities gone seemingly haywire have left large numbers of people cast out, cast down, wondering where hope is to be found. This was the nonfiction story that I thought I could write that might give my fellow travelers on the planet heart, that might provide imaginative hope and helpful vision. This book cannot pretend to mitigate today’s dark turns of events, but its dramatis personae hint at, or more than hint at, how to respond and to live well when circumstances turn adverse. The consolation that, beyond the dictatorship of greed and environmental pillage and alarms of war, there is something else, something better, is a kind of good news, perhaps now more than ever.
The drowsy, dreaming town was about to wake up, whether it wanted to or not.
Circa half a century ago only a few score old codgers remained in Crestone whose reason for living here was that they were living here. The gold had long run out of this gold-mining town, and boom times had turned into bust times. Should you wonder how the descendants of those old miners supported themselves, the answer is: they didn’t. They were living so meagerly that a magnifying glass would scarcely locate their carbon footprint. They inhabited tiny makeshift cabins that they had thrown up themselves from logs they had cut themselves. Their water came from wells they had dug themselves. For food, they went out and shot a deer. If they tired of venison, they shot a bear. Bread was baked in old coffee cans on wood-burning stoves. Their life was rough and hard, and that was just fine with them.
Crestone then half — but only half — resembled other towns in the San Luis Valley of south central Colorado, towns lying on the valley floor as though having fainted of sunstroke. In them forlorn houses lined forlorn streets, often in townscapes so flat they seemed to take place in two dimensions. In such western byways America’s Manifest Destiny ran out of gas. Films (The Last Picture Show; Paris, Texas; Bagdad Café) used such desolate towns to evoke American minimalism, the sad barrenness of too little, too lost, too far away.
But located high up — more than eight thousand feet — in the valley’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains (which rise to fourteen thousand feet), Crestone was suffused with a kind of nobility that gave it the aura of somewhere. Unlike superficially similar small towns, Crestone’s terrain has always been a place of Big Dreams — from the Hopi on their vision quests to gold miners on their get-rich quests, from land speculators dreaming of $ signs to today’s pilgrims dreaming of a better world. At times their Dream seemed to loom larger than the puny mortals dreaming it, whom it merely used to get itself dreamed.
The Dream has mutated through many incarnations. It is, however, its latest incarnation and the wildest, strangest dream of all that attracts our interest here. This is a story of how that hamlet mutated into something improbable and unclassifiable and without exact parallel elsewhere. Crestone today, with its multiple faiths, is often likened to a miniature, oxymoronic Wild West Jerusalem. But Jerusalem, with its Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, never came close to hosting as many varieties of spirituality, from A to Z (American Native religions to Zen), as Crestone does. Here, as Eastern spirituality makes its home side by side with traditional Western faiths, it has shaken things up and produced unexpected results — including turning religious differences into a source of social cohesion instead of hostility.
Today the town’s twenty-five spiritual centers make it practically a living encyclopedia of the world religions. When you see them all together, what do you see that you didn’t when you saw them separate and apart? In the overture, I borrowed an analogy from language: know only one tongue, and you’ll mistake it for language itself; know a half dozen, and you may begin to discern their underlying structure and how each one renders reality differently. Likewise with religion. If intimately familiar with several faiths, you may better understand what a religious sense of life is, regardless of its cultural expressions, and what difference, for good or bad, in daily life it can make.
Crestone, with its more than two dozen versions of religion — and in that small dusty Wild West setting — doesn’t quite resemble any other place in history. But before we go and inspect it, first a little background: How did such a geographical-cultural-spiritual one-of-a-kind come about in the first place?
History Lessons
Some people, like the Hopi, looked at a landscape and saw something spiritual or in addition. One such group of visionaries were the speculators of the 1970s, who looked at Crestone and beheld the summum bonum — filthy lucre, profits, fortune. A land speculation company, the Arizona-Colorado Land & Cattle Co. (AZC), began investing tens of millions of dollars, laying down water pipes and setting up electric lines just outside the town proper, to entice — so their investors hoped — urbanites looking for a better, freer life. The days of the tough old coots who could withstand every hardship, except prosperity, were numbered: capitalism was coming to Crestone.
AZC succeeded in selling a number of lots (when there was no one around to buy them) by setting up tiny sales offices outside army bases, to which was tacked a sign: OWN A PIECE OF COLORADO. $30 DOWN. $30 A MONTH FOR 30 YEARS. A drunken soldier stumbling back to the base might think, “Ah, what the hell” and stumble out of the sales office with three fewer tens in his billfold and a deed to somewhere in New Mexico, no, Colorado. But to sell enough plots of land to make it profitable, AZC faced a small problem — or actually several large ones. Winter in Crestone was most seasons of the year. When winter was eventually over, in blew relentless dust storms that practically kept people prisoners inside. When the dust storms ceased, then came plagues of mosquitoes. In Crestone there were no doctors, no hospitals, no shops, no movies, no entertainment, and (name almost anything else). AZC had a solution to that conundrum, too: they built a golf course. But man cannot live by golf alone. After a few years, the idea of a retirement community in Crestone itself went into retirement, as AZC went bankrupt. And with that ending our story begins.
Three mismatched characters, as though plucked out of three unrelated narratives, now come together to change the face of Crestone forever. Character number one: a billionaire entrepreneur turned environmentalist. Character number two: a
