Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West by Timothy Egan

Author:Timothy Egan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Travel
ISBN: 9780307557308
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1999-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

A FEW YEARS into his project, Turnbull’s ranch was crowded with birds—speedy, hyperkinetic, somewhat neurotic, exceedingly horny— and Highlands Ranch was crowded with people, who were doing their share for the Colorado population boom as well. The area could not build schools fast enough: children attended in shifts, going through the summer, with classes set up in vinyl modular units dumped on the bare ground. When Turnbull purchased his land, the main thicket of homes was off on the horizon, where the Philip Morris property faced Denver. But nobody expected that the bald land south of a city that had just suffered another devastating bust would take off as fast as it did. This surge of prosperity seemed different. The other Front Range booms were based in one way or the other on tearing up the Rockies. The coal and silver miners, the oil drillers, the water-snatchers, the shale-oil and synthetic fuels explorers—they all came armed with tools to rip up the land, and they left behind slag heaps of poison, half-built mountain roads, and communities saddled with debt and heartbreak. This time around, the boom was based on telecommunications, computer software, recreation—the new American West, they liked to say. Time and again, companies announced that the main reason for locating near the Front Range was because they wanted to be in the midst of all that Rocky Mountain country. The workers were skiers, hikers, rafters, fishermen, hunters, Sierra Club members first, and software engineers and biotechnicians second. The irony, of course, was that they came to an area where planning was anathema, and suburbs sprouted without logic or consideration to traffic problems or water supplies. The Brown Cloud, especially on stale winter days, kept the Rockies out of view.

Near Turnbull’s property, the streets filled quickly with three-thousand-square-foot starter homes and spindly six-foot starter trees. The Philip Morris contractors, aware of the desire of their home buyers to be close to nature, named the streets and neighborhoods for endangered species. There was Spotted Owl Lane, Wildcat Reserve, Bobcat Ridge, Cougar Ridge. Turnbull’s home was on the elevated edge of Highlands Ranch, about six thousand feet above sea level. He could look out on days when the wind blew the Brown Cloud away and see some of the big sentinels of the Rockies, from 14,255-foot Longs Peak in the north to 14,110-foot Pikes Peak in the south. And he could look up to where Buffalo Bill is buried and see a wave of homes rippling all the way down the slope of the mountains, through Denver and then south and east up to the border of his ostrich ranch.

The eccentricities of ostriches took some getting used to. Feeding them was not difficult. He gave them pellets of protein and fiber, a diet that would produce a mature bird in under two years. But they swallowed anything—car keys, kids’ tennis shoes, cellular phones. They particularly liked shiny things. They ate sand and flecks of rock to aid digestion, so a silver watchband looked even better.

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