York City. She, number three, would put Crestone on the map and realize there one of the oddest and loveliest dreams in human history. For something new under the sun was taking shape. The Baca Grande News — not welcoming this unprecedented development — refused to print her name or report that news. Belatedly, a generation later, here’s that news story.
Shamans and interior decorators are not hard to come by; more unusual is a billionaire environmentalist. When Maurice Strong purchased AZC’s property assets, including the land around Crestone, his vision for the use of that land . . . well, he had no vision for it. How could he? He had never seen it or thought about it. The two hundred thousand acres he now owned around Crestone came with the larger two-million-acre Monopoly empire spread throughout the Southwest that he had acquired when AZC went bankrupt. If other entrepreneurs had purchased those two hundred thousand acres, they might have erected a ski resort, or tapped the vast aquifer and piped the water to Denver or Los Angeles, or sold the minerals rights to Halliburton, or leased the land to the military for maneuvers and bomb testing. The mountains are too rugged for commercial skiing, but all those other money-making schemes have been proposed for Crestone. Maurice Strong was at least open to other possibilities.
Unlike Howard Hughes and Donald Trump, who inherited fortunes to fast-start their careers, Strong grew up dirt-poor on the Canadian prairie. Working in the Arctic when barely out of his teens, he learned enough about minerals to make his first million in mining stock. Subsequently, Strong alternated between employment in the private sector, amassing a megafortune — primarily in oil and natural gas — and serving in the public sector. For the Canadian government he oversaw the country’s national energy policy, while for the United Nations he supervised the largest famine relief effort in history (in Africa in 1984), and later he master-minded the Rio Environmental Summit of 1992. Already a quarter century ago the New York Times was calling Maurice Strong “the Custodian of the Planet.” Folks in Crestone were less sure what to call him. The ex-military types living in the Baca land development just outside the town proper were suspicious of Mr. Moneybags barging into their midst. He was a damned foreigner, hence likely to be immoral and depraved. And, sure enough, he arrived in Crestone with a beautiful, unmarried female companion on his arm. Strong had planned to headquarter his newly acquired empire in Arizona, but his female companion refused to reside in a city she found as soulless as Phoenix. The couple weighed their options and began exploring their other AZC properties for possibilities. This female companion had, it turns out, a rather unorthodox sense of the possible.
In fact, nothing was more surprising about this billionaire businessman than her. Maurice Strong and Hanne Marstrand certainly made the odd couple; their twelve-year difference in age (he was born in 1929, she in 1941) only began the differences between them. Maurice came from the cultureless Canadian prairie; she, from the European high bourgeoisie. He was physically homely and she was beautiful. He was practical-minded, and she spiritually inclined. The Los Angeles Times in 1989 titled an article about them “‘Mystical’ and ‘Manifester’ Team Up.” If Maurice had the financial resources to allow something new to take root in Crestone, it would likely be Hanne who came up with what that something would be.
She had grown up in Copenhagen, believing, the way some believe they are born in the wrong sex, that she had been born in the wrong country. When she read James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans she thought, “Those are my people.” Hanne invented for herself a secret history. “This is my first time around as a white woman,” she would say to herself. “For countless generations I was a Native American Indian. Then for countless other generations I was a Tibetan.” For a Native American maiden or a pious daughter of Tibet — or even for a proper Danish girl of that era — she certainly behaved inappropriately, becoming (I’ve been told) one of that new mutant species: the wild teenager, young, daring, beautiful, and saucy.
Hanne relocated to New York in her early twenties, encountering no Mohicans taking scalps but rather Manhattanites drinking manhattans (or martinis). One night Hanne met Maurice at a dinner party, and the rest is — tongues wagging. “It’s classic,” went the whispers. “Beautiful blonde babe takes rich fool for a ride.” Hanne would come home from work to find her apartment filled wall to wall with roses, but Maurice Strong was too shrewd to be duped by a gold digger. For all their differences, theirs was a courtship, a partnership, and later a marriage of mutual appreciation and support. It was thus two seasoned, intimate allies who in 1978 arrived to inspect the old Crestone ranch, in order to do with the surrounding land . . . they had no idea what.
What do you do with two hundred thousand acres of semidesert far from anywhere? To a businessman the answer would be obvious: hire consultants, have a feasibility study made, conduct market research, and organize a development oversight committee chaired by accountants. Or, if you are Hanne, you suspect that this is actually a spiritual question. To decide the future of the Crestone land, Hanne could imagine only one sensible approach: like an Indian medicine man she would go on a vision quest. After spending four days and nights alone in the Sangre de Cristos above Crestone, as Hanne gazed out at the meadows and nooks and crannies below, she fantasized a different religion nestled in each of them. What a cockamamy idea, even she realized.
As Hanne was making her way down the mountain, some miles away her teenage daughter from an earlier marriage, Suzanne, was trying unsuccessfully to hitchhike to Crestone. Finally, some geezer as old as Methuselah slowed his jalopy and yelled, “Get aboard!” and then plied her with questions about what a young thing like her was doing in these parts. When Suzanne told him about her mother, the old fellow could scarcely contain his excitement. As he dropped Suzanne off at the ranch house, he quickly scooted out of the car himself. When Hanne answered his banging on the door, he burst out, “Where you been? I’ve been waiting for you!”
This man, it seems, had been having his own visions. He had foreseen a foreign woman coming to Crestone. And that woman — You! he said to Hanne — has a mission to fulfill here. For a terrible time is coming, war and devastation will ravage the Earth, and somewhere safe is needed to preserve the age-old wisdom of humankind. He practically shouted at Hanne: the reason, and the only reason, for your coming here is to establish a refuge for the world’s religions. Hanne remembered her vision on the mountain and wondered: Who is this man?
By the time he knocked on Hanne’s door, Glenn Anderson must have been over eighty years old. What was he? A self-anointed prophet? A shaman? A medium or channeler? He did have one trait in common with all holy persons: he did not work for his own gain. Glenn Anderson lived simply, often sleeping out of doors or in a makeshift cabin so rickety it was like the outdoors indoors. Late in his life he gained some following, principally among hippies, who found his nonmaterialistic idealism and homespun mythology to their liking. Anderson regaled them with stories of how in an earlier incarnation he and the Indian war chief Crazy Horse had been first cousins. Creating a spiritual sanctuary here, he told Hanne that day, was Crazy Horse’s vision for the valley. In fact, Anderson went on, Crazy Horse himself was merely the voice for a message far older, one ancient and coterminous with the cosmos. In establishing a habitat for all the world’s religions, Hanne would be the medium fulfilling a dream of ancient and universal significance.
Hearing an unkempt old fogy splutter such nonsense, most people would have slammed the door in his face. But Hanne heeded his call, and in the coming years she would devote considerable acreage around Crestone, and seek out representatives of the world’s religions to occupy them, to realizing the vision prophesized by Glenn Anderson, or by Crazy Horse, or by the dreaming universe eons ago.
Now that all the principal characters are onstage: the plot — a highly implausible plot, one that would change a half-ghost mining backwater into a setting for the world’s religions to come together — is set to unfold.
First there is Maurice. His official residence was now Crestone but his real home was an unending succession of plane flights,
