Chicano book nixed from reading list

DRIGGS, Idaho – If sophomores at Teton High School read Bless Me, Ultima, it will have to be on their own time. The book has been replaced on the assigned reading list by Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights because of protests by parents.

Wikipedia says that Bless Me, Ultima, published by Rudolfo Anaya in 1972, reflects Chicano culture in the 1940s in rural New Mexico. By recounting folkways such as the gathering of medicinal herbs, it “gives readers a sense of the influence of indigenous cultural ways that are both authentic and distinct from the mainstream.”

But one mother who lives in the valley, located adjacent to Jackson Hole, had a different take: “I opened the book and I was appalled,” Shaylee Kearsley told the Valley Citizen. “There’s just a lot of profanity, and the f-word is used a lot, and there are some satanic rituals in the book.”

 

Slowing down lessens animal impact

KETCHUM, Idaho – Dead elk were in the news in Ketchum. A science class at Wood River High School calculated the impact of a car hitting an elk or deer while going 55 mph as compared to 45 mph, reports the Idaho Mountain Express.

A car going 45 mph will hit the animal and travel another 22 feet before coming to a stop. A car going 55 mph will travel another 80 feet before coming to a step.

“The reduction in speed reduces the impact speed by approximately 50 percent,” the students wrote in their conclusion. “Energy is velocity squared, so it translates into a collision that only does one-quarter of the amount of damage.”

But will it kill the animal? That was beyond the scope of their research.

 

Bilingual officers are hard to find

CARBONDALE – Drawn by construction and low-paying service-sector jobs, Latin Americans began flocking to Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley in the late 1980s. Now, Carbondale, located about 30 miles down-valley from Aspen, is 40 percent Hispanic, with many residents unable to speak English. Other towns also have high numbers of Spanish speakers.

This presents a problem for local police, and they have been trying to recruit bilingual police officers for years. One of the local jurisdictions, the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office, pays an extra dollar per hour to any officer who can speak more than one language.

Still, for various reasons, both Anglo and Latino police officers with bilingual skills remain hard to come by, according to the Aspen Daily News.

Anglo police recruits with college-level Spanish are rare. Many Latino recruits who want to become officers do speak English well, but lack the reading and writing skills that are needed for a key component of the job, documentation.

But police who speak Spanish say it gives them a leg up in a valley where the Latino population continues to grow.

“You find that there are cultural differences that make some Spanish speakers initially think that if you’re a Caucasian, you don’t speak Spanish,” said Carbondale police Lt. Chris Wurtsmith, who has a working knowledge of the language. “Then, when you do speak to them in Spanish, you see some kind of relief come across their face, because they know they can come to you with problems.”

 

Uruguayans advised on pot energy use

ASPEN – A delegation from Uruguay recently visited Aspen and a down-valley greenhouse near Basalt, the better to see how marijuana is being grown and sold in the United States.

Uruguay is on the verge of becoming the first nation to completely legalize the production and sale of marijuana. The legislation now being considered would allow citizens to grow up to six plants in their homes and sell the drug to the government, which will sell the product. The legalization is seen as a way to curb drug trafficking and petty crime.

But if the government is to sell marijuana for $2 a gram, it needs to figure out alternatives to the traditional methods of growing marijuana indoors under intense lights that consume a lot of electricity. Electricity is very expensive in Uruguay.

The delegation visited a 25,000-square-foot greenhouse near Basalt that is owned by Jordan Lewis, who is also owner of a medical marijuana shop in Aspen. He shared greenhouse designs and tips on how to produce year-round crops using natural light.

He said that growing cannabis has traditionally been energy intensive. “For a green industry, it’s not very green, and we’re trying to change that,” he told the Aspen Daily News.

 

The state of Colorado pot tourism

WHISTLER, B.C. – With both Washington and Colorado now legalizing marijuana sales for recreational use, there’s intense interest in both Whistler and British Columbia about what is happening south of the border. The expectation seems to be that legalization will soon happen in B.C., too.

With that in mind, Pique Newsmagazine contacted a tour company in Colorado Springs called Get Elevated, to probe the possibility for marijuana tourism that might include tours to Whistler.

Just what these forays into British Columbia might look like isn’t clear. In fact, it’s not at all clear what marijuana tourism might look like in Colorado.

Daniel Moorefield, the project development manager for the company, said the existing appeal for out-of-staters is crude.

“If you were to go right now and look ‘legal pot tours’ up online, you’re going to find that a lot of people are spitting out the idea of, ‘Come to Colorado and get stoned on a bus,’” said Moorefield.

Get Elevated aims for a more elucidating experience. The company has a six-day tour, apparently set to launch on New Year’s, when private smoking becomes legal. Moorefield says it will include luxury accommodations, private transportation, and VIP access to a New Year’s Eve concert.

The tour, he said, aims to expose Colorado’s entire cannabis culture by including visits to see active grow operations, glass-blowing demonstrations and cooking classes. Travelers are taken to shops where purchasing pot is legal, and an attorney is even brought in on the opening night to explain what is and isn’t permissible under the state’s new legislation.

“We’re trying to combine the culture of Colorado with the cannabis culture because over the past few years they’ve become so, so interweaved, but still so many people don’t see how thriving a business (it is) and how positive it can be,” said Moorefield, himself a cancer survivor, who just recently moved to Colorado.

 

Curious array of patrons in Crestone pub

CRESTONE – Among the most curious of mountain towns is Crestone, located at 8,000 feet where the broad San Luis Valley abruptly rises to the 14,000-foot peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Range. It started as a mining town, but little paying ore was found. It now has 130 residents, with a great diversity among them. There is, for example, a Buddhist stupa in the vicinity, as well as a few ski town refugees.

It seems to support just one bar. Writing in the Crestone Eagle, columnist Peter Anderson said that the last bar was “a place where you could belly up to a few beers with a rancher drinking to your left and a monk to your right.” An out-of-town visitor might “have reasonably thought they had wandered into the equivalent of the Star Wars bar scene full of alien life forms on the edge of the known universe. I thought it was a damn fine mountain bar while it lasted.”

The newest watering hole is called the Bliss Café, and he thinks it has the atmosphere of a pub, or a tavern. It has no television, he reports, which is fine: the proprietors have plenty of stories to tell. “However one thinks of this unusual community, they will find that conversation in our tavern is entertainment enough.”

– Allen Best

More from mountain towns of the West can be found at mountaintownnews.net.