The Stranger

This is based on a true story.

The heat was so intense on this Saturday in July that even the bull snake who had recently made it's home within the aluminum roof of the ranger station near the Colorado Wyoming border refused to surface and startle visitors as was its custom. The air was heavy and dry, motionless. The external thermometer read 93 degrees, and it was only 8:00 am.

Sandy, the visitor assistant who operated the ranger station on weekends, spent most of the morning refilling map kiosks and chatting with guests who traveled as far as Texas and California to visit the Lindenmeier Excavation site. Eighty years earlier, the Smithsonian Institution unearthed a Folsom point embedded in the vertebrae of a Bison Antiquus and put the site, 100 miles north of Denver, Colorado, on the map. This fortunate find by a young scientist temporarily employed with the Smithsonian, Loren Eiseley, who would become a world-renowned author and philosopher, definitively proved that humans had occupied the area 12,000 years ago. At the time, it was considered the Garden of Eden, where life and human existence began.

Today it is called Soapstone Prairie Natural Area. The Folsom people were drawn to the area for its vast viewshed (on a clear day, Pikes Peak is visible from 200 miles away), its natural resources, and its central location to a continental trail system. Following the Folsom occupation, the Ute, Arapaho, and Sioux freely and peacefully roamed the hills black with bison, for centuries. With the discovery of mineral-rich ore near Denver in 1859, treaties designed to protect these native bands were rescinded to encourage white settlers to come West. They came by the tens of thousands. The natives were removed to reservations in Wyoming and South Dakota, and in their place, pioneers planted their homesteads where tipi's once stood. Dozens of families made their homes in the hills of Soapstone Prairie. Sitting atop the Cheyenne Rim, west of the chalk colored cliffs that Michener wrote about in his epic novel Centennial, at an elevation of 8000 feet, the viewshed allowed the settlers to detect traffic, either friend or foe, hours before they would arrive. River rock and Ponderosa pine timber provided material for shelters and supply wagons, and stagecoaches now used the ancient trail system. By the turn of the 20th century, the pioneers were providing for their families by working as coal miners, ranch hands, and farmhands, while a few were making a fairly good living as bootleggers. Bootlegging was an essential industry at Soapstone Prairie after 1896 when surrounding towns outlawed the manufacturing and sale of spirits. Bootleggers had plenty of open prairies to grow grain to ferment, and if given enough warning, they could escape the authorities with a quick trip over the Wyoming border.

A homesteader's life at Soapstone Prairie was challenging. A geographical formation known as the "gangplank," which stretches from central Wyoming into the northern tip of central Colorado, created tornadic-type winds that could tear down a newly built homestead overnight and wipe out freshly planted crops of corn and wheat. Brutal winters would freeze livestock where they stood and wipe out a rancher's income for the year. The summer brought droughts and grasshoppers so thick they would chew up a wooden shovel handle within minutes.

Social interaction was crucial for survival in this isolated environment.  Community dances called "kitchen sweats" provided a relief to the settlers. Each Saturday evening, a different homesteading family would host the event. Music usually included a banjo and fiddle and would go into the early morning hours, breaking only to milk the cows. A schoolhouse provided a place for potlucks and celebrations.

In the mid-1920s, the primary industries that employed the settlers, mining, and agriculture, became mechanized, and work halted. Unemployment and poverty spread at Soapstone Prairie. Many families were forced to liquidate and move. Locally, the pioneers began to experience a crippling depression that would manifest nationally. Mules, tack, and farming equipment were auctioned off to bidders from nearby towns. By 1928 Soapstone Prairie experienced a mass exodus of homesteaders, leaving behind only one family and two ranching operations. Those that were left managed to survive for another seven decades on the harsh prairie. But, by the 1990s, they were gone as well. Mother nature had reclaimed this ancient hunting and gathering ground.

However, by the early 2000s, through voter initiatives and grants, a 19,000-acre section of the land was conserved for public recreational use and cultural education. Cyclists, hikers, botanists, bird enthusiasts, and archaeologists could now travel the same trails as the pioneers and the Native Americans before them.

A 20 by 6-foot ranger station was constructed a quarter-mile from the entrance of Soapstone Prairie. It sat within a bowl of ancient 100 foot high earthen domes. For years it was rumored that these domes were the resting place of the Arapaho or Ute. Or landing sites for Unidentified Flying Objects. Less provocative to conspiracists, the domes are the result of glaciation. Earthen mounds left as the glaciers slowly moved back to the Rocky Mountains tens of thousands of years ago. 

The landscape around the station is dotted with reminders of thousands of years of occupation. Hidden by buffalo grass and sage, ancient tipi rings line the hikers' path. The skeletal remains of a dugout lie in a coffin of rabbitbrush and mahogany, and beside it, barely visible, a chicken coop is matted to the prairie floor. Remnants of sod, adobe, limestone, and timber homes battered by wind and weather stand as tombstones to the pioneer era—a shard of glass from a windowpane or water pitcher litter the landscape, alongside a flint arrowhead. A stove-once prized by the household's mother as the hearth of the homestead, now slowly becoming part of the earth. Other than the wind whispering, sometimes screaming an ancient cry from a thousand years, these artifacts had no voice, no one to tell their story. That was about to change.

For Sandy, the day so far was uneventful due to the blistering temperatures. By noon only a handful of die-hard cyclists had come through the gate entrance at the station to tackle a brutal 34-mile section called the "Loop." Other than the bull snake, which she knew was probably curled just a few feet from her head inside the structure, and a persistently chiming Western Meadowlark, she was alone. The heat made the boredom unbearable.

Her half-closed eyes caught the sight of a dust flume at the front entrance to the park, a quarter-mile from her station. Standing to get a better look, she could see it was a vehicle approaching at a rapid pace. The dust continued to swell around the speeding automobile as it got closer, enveloping it in a massive dust devil.

"Who the heck is THAT?" she whispered to herself. "Teenagers?"

Tires locked, the phalanx of black rubber and swirling prairie dirt screeched to a stop at her station. Through the dust, a male voice yelled, "I need to talk to you!"

"Excuse me?"

"I need to talk to you!" the voice yelled louder, "I need to talk to someone. Anyone!"

"Are you having a medical emergency, sir?" she yelled back.

"No! Gosh dangit! I just need to talk to someone!"

"Okay, okay, you can park over there.", Sandy pointed to a small parking lot north of the station.

The driver gave a wave and slowly chugged toward the lot. Sandy made a mental note of the license plate and vehicle make-a blue and white 1970 Ford F100 Ranger, as he drove off.

Moving to the west side of the station, she leaned out the front door to get a visual of her guest as he exited his pickup—male, approximately 6 feet tall, slender, but lean build: Levis, buttoned-down striped shirt. A straw Montana style cowboy hat with a Tom Mix crease perched high on his head. As he approached the station, she noticed that his gait was smooth and deliberate- no apparent signs of injury or limp: age, approximately early seventies.

Sandy motioned for the man to follow her into the station. "You can take a seat here." she pointed to the swivel office chair she had occupied just a few moments before.

"Whoo, it's hot!" the man groaned as he settled into the chair. "That truck don't have air conditioning." 

"What can I do for you?" Sandy asked, coaxing him into a conversation.

"My name is Vernon Maxwell. And I woke up this morning knowing I needed to tell someone, anyone, my story."

"Well, it's just me and a snake. And he doesn't have ears, so I’m all you’ve got." Sandy perched herself on a stool and settled in to hear his tale.

"You see, I was born in these hills. My mother gave birth to my twin sister and me when she was 50 years old. Momma moved us to town when I was two years old. The Depression was about to hit, and a lot of folks had lost their jobs. But, she had a generous heart and often worried about the folks that was left up here. Momma would get eggs and milk and bread for the families. She never drove a car, so we would all load up in the buckboard and come back up to help."

Vernon stood up and stared out at the prairie. His eyes well up with tears. "I remember a young single mother. I was seven when we came up. I can remember it like it happened this morning. Those kids had nothin'. Do you understand what I'm saying? Nothin! Not even toys. I gave em' an old train set I'd gotten for Christmas one year. You'd a thought I'd given them a chunk of gold."

As he talked, Sandy noticed he still had all of his own teeth and his skin was smooth, void of wrinkles of a 90+ year-old man.

Vernon continued, "It wasn't like today. Today we can still get a little help from the government. Back then they had nothin'. They would just walk with nothing but the clothes on their back. Just looking for a handout, a job, anything. It wasn't all bad though. I remember the dances they used to have up here. Boy, there were two brothers who were bootleggers. They had stills stashed everywhere. And one of em especially liked to dance. He could dance all night long!" Vernon slaps his knee and grins. "What I'm trying to say is that we stuck together. What we had we shared. We still tried to have a little fun."

"That's quite a story, Vernon. And you're right, sometimes we need to let go and laugh even in the midst of a storm."

"Thanks for listening to my story. I've been wanting to tell it for almost 90 years. I'll let you get back to your job now."

Vernon passed away six months later. Sandy was sad to see a photo of the familiar face in the local obituaries. She realized that Vernon possibly knew his time on earth was coming to a close. The boy in him, masked in a 94-year-old body, who had felt the pain of others, needed to be heard. Possibly he had carried that pain his entire life.

Glancing through the obituary, she noticed there was one item that Vernon left out on that muggy Saturday in January. Vernon's mother had died two years after his birth. Vernon was raised by an older sister in the hills of Soapstone. It was not Vernon who gave the children the old toy train, but it was Vernon who was gifted with the generosity of a stranger. A gift that lasted a lifetime.