Cheap Land Colorado by Ted Conover

Author:Ted Conover [Conover, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Raising the wind turbine

Finally I came back outside with my numbers. We set to work adjusting the cable lengths. Maverick, meanwhile, helped attach the turbine to the tower and, doubting that its carbon-fiber blades could be as sharp as they looked, ran his finger along one and cut himself. Finally, four of us started lifting the mast while Luke ratcheted away on the opposite side with his come-along, to negligible effect. Then Troy had a brainstorm: we could lift it faster if we used his truck. He had me drive while he and Joseph stood in back, pushing up on the mast. As I inched toward the mast, the turbine moved higher and higher. Maverick held a guy wire from the side to keep the mast from tipping sideways. Finally it was in position, and the wires tightened. There was little wind, so we couldn’t test it yet, but once the turbine was spinning it would help keep my batteries charged on cloudy days. And if I ever had a hot water tank in the mobile home, the wind could keep the water hot.

Troy and Joseph headed back to Troy’s place. I had picked up lunch for Luke and Maverick at Subway in La Jara earlier and asked if it was a good time to talk more about their lives. We cleared a space inside the big blue trailer and sat down, me with a notebook.

Luke seemed exhausted. I asked about it, and he said it was mostly due to being overweight and having a weak heart. But he blamed Asperger’s, too, “because of the anxiety and stuff” that Asperger’s brings: “it just wears their body down so much quicker in their life.

“I’ve noticed that, as I get older, emotional stuff hits me harder,” he continued. “I see how I take things harder and I get aggravated about things a lot quicker. I kind of had some woman issues this last month. And it seemed to hit me a lot harder than it should have. And I mean I didn’t really want to get out of the house, just stay inside.” His doctor, he added, “has me on antidepressants. I’m on an anti-anxiety med. You know, that kind of stuff. I think it helps.”

I asked Maverick how much his father’s autism had affected him growing up. He told me it hadn’t directly—Luke had been in prison when he was born, and he was given up for adoption. After Luke got out of prison, he checked in on Maverick occasionally without letting Maverick know who he was. Then came a day when he was sixteen, Maverick said. “I still did not know that he was my father until…I mean literally that day I figured it out. He said, ‘Oh, I guess we’ll figure out who I am when you turn eighteen’ and it just kind of clicked in my brain: This must be my dad. But yeah, we lost contact for a while until I turned about eighteen or nineteen and then we started talking again.

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