— the VIPs collected on his travels. Maurice sat on the board of the prestigious Aspen Institute of business, university, and political leaders, and, with his enormous influence, he established the institute’s secondary headquarters in Crestone. In those days, the early eighties, you never knew whom you might bump into here. The downtown has about four streets, but walking them you might blink and wonder, Could that really be Henry Kissinger? And that guy, isn’t that, you know, the prime minister of Canada, Trudeau? And what about him — Robert McNamara? Yes, it was they.
Then there is Hanne. She was poised to turn a hamlet on the outskirts of nowhere into a center of world religions. In 1980 a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal reported that Maurice and Hanne Strong were offering free land in Colorado to traditional religious groups. If spiritual cranks and homemade messiahs don’t read the Wall Street Journal, somebody must have read it to them. From under rocks and behind trees across the United States sprang yet another bearded oracle or tie-dyed savior heading to Crestone, chanting the mantra, “Gimme, gimme land!”
And then there is the POA. The Property Owners Association was composed largely of ex-military families who, when they moved here, had radically altered Crestone’s character. But they now wanted no further change, certainly not the kind Maurice and Hanne were bringing. To the rightwing POA, the little foreigner Strong was barging in with what seemed to them a bunch of damned Reds in tow. If Maurice was bad, they considered Hanne unspeakably worse. She would lure to Crestone weird cults, practicing voodoo and black magic. In the early ’80s Hanne received anonymous death threats regularly. Far from appreciating what she was doing, the POA blamed her for everything, short of the weather, and probably that, too.
Yet let a few years fly by, and the metamorphosis has happened; it is a different Crestone once again. The Aspen Institute wives preferred to the majestic mountains of Crestone somewhere where they could get in some good shopping. So, adieu Aspen Institute. Hanne’s weird cults turned out to be Christian Carmelites, and later, when they were Hindus or Tibetan Buddhists, they soon shared something with the old-timers there after all. They cared for the community and, equally important, they cared for the land. As each new group here added its flavor to the mix, together expanding the notion of spirituality, the initially resistant old-timers made a discovery: here was religion not as dogmatic moralizing, not as the closed-off churches of their past, but as a more multi-dimensional milieu in which even nonbelievers could live and thrive. The old town still looked the same, as earthy and folksy as ever, but the shutters of possibility were thrown open, and the unimaginable became imaginable.
When, for example, in the early nineties outside corporate interests planned to drill the aquifer and drain the water table, wreaking environmental havoc, it was unthinkable that with their money, power, and influence they could be stopped. But the ecologically minded members of the new religious groups, joined by old Crestonians and ranchers and farmers from across the valley, voted to tax themselves for funds to legally oppose the mammoth corporations. When against the odds they eventually won their impossible David-versus-Goliath battle, one old conservative rancher from the valley, elated by the results, joked to a man from here, “You know, you weirdos from Crestone are all right.” The man joined in the joke and laughing, replied, “Yep, our alien guides from outer space instructed us to save the land.”
Yes, even without the alien guides, it was implausible. Hanne’s (Glenn Anderson’s / Crazy Horse’s / the dreaming universe’s) vision for Crestone came to fruition. Mecca, Jerusalem, Bodh Gaya . . . and now little Crestone? In that small geographical compass twenty-five different spiritual groups — Christian, Tibetan Buddhist, Hindu, American shamanic, Sufi, Zen — have set up shop, living neighbor to neighbor, providing a unique picture or insight into spirituality today. A mining and ranching town on the fringe of nowhere, headed for extinction, became instead a twenty-first-century microcosm of the world’s religions. Toward the end of his life William Faulkner looked up from his astonishing body of work and wondered: Where did it all come from? Unlike Faulkner, Hanne looks at her unusual creation and finds it not surprising at all. She merely thinks: “Of course it happened. It had to happen.”
2. Where the Hell Am I? A Tour
Suppose you were set down here blindfolded, could you guess — by the sounds, the temperature, the air quality, the felt speed of people passing by — roughly where you had landed? The temperature seems a bit cold for the time of year, since either in winter you stand deep in snow or in August the nights sink into the fifties. There is clue number one. The air inhaled has a fresh, dry exhilaration but, shortchanged a few molecules of oxygen, you cannot quite take in enough of it. Second clue, you are at a high altitude. Your ears strain to catch any telltale sounds, but how peculiar, there are none, no hum, rumble, or din to be heard. A wind does sigh through the trees, and an unidentifiable bird faintly cries, but where are the screeching alarms of ambulances, the coughing of leaf blowers, and the ear-piercing squeals of trucks backing up? Quietness is a scarcely obtainable commodity in the noise-polluted twenty-first century, and curious about how you landed in such a hotbed of silence, you rip off the blindfold. And then . . . a multiple-choice question. When you tear off the blindfold you see you are:
a) where the following story gets under way
b) in a Western, possibly Colorado township
c) nowhere, or nowhere you would want to be
d) on sacred terrain
e) not on sacred terrain
f) in Tibet
If you answered (f), you are wrong — but not obviously wrong. Set against Himalayan-like mountains, the terrain here is a doppelgänger for parts of Tibet. Like a village in old Tibet, the town sits at a high-plain-like altitude (eight thousand feet), abutted by even higher mountains (fourteen thousand feet), and overlooking a vast, seemingly empty valley (160 miles across). Tibet bares the nickname Land of Snows, and here, too, it can snow for months, alternating with dazzling blue skies, followed by a summer warmed by a blazing sun. And as in Tibet, Crestone’s terrain may be inhospitable to much in the way of development, but that very inhospitality makes it hospitable for retreats, monasteries, devotional practices, and solitary introspection. When the two most venerated lamas of Tibet visited Crestone they couldn’t get over it. “This is a place where Tibetan Buddhism can survive!” exclaimed one (the 16th Karmapa), and marveled the other (Dilgo Khyentse), “Many beings will become enlightened here!” Indeed, for some Buddhist practitioners today, Crestone is a New World annex of Old Tibet, but, even so — look on any map — if you answered (f) you flunked the quiz.
All the other answers above have some claim to being right. For most unblindfolded gazers the answer would be (c), Crestone is nowhere (nowhere they have ever heard of; nowhere with touristic attractions). Crestone lies hours away from any major airport. From that airport (either Denver or Albuquerque), you start out on busy highways, then drive down ever less crowded ones, and finally down a two-lane road, and when the road runs out and you can’t go any farther: Welcome to Crestone. In recent years the town has gained some reputation for its religious centers, which lures some tourists wanting to behold that spiritual extravaganza. Did their GPS go haywire? As an excuse for a downtown all they find is a post office, a few small businesses, and some empty buildings, situated on two north-south-running streets crisscrossing two east-west-running streets — negligible man-made scratches in a forlorn expanse of eternally arid real estate. (The various religious centers lie tucked away in the mountains, unobservable from the town.) Hanne Strong’s aristocratic mother visited from Denmark and took one glance at this — by her European standards — uncultured backwater, and she did not need a second. When informed that someone was writing a book about the town, she snorted, “It better be titled One Day Here Is Enough.”
To get the lay of the land, let’s take a drive on the land surrounding
