On this first day of January 2000, I drove to a place where I planned to park off the street and walk on the path along Standley Lake. Got there to find a gate across the entrance. Closed due to construction. Construction? In what I thought was official "open space?" A little ways further and I saw a stack of turquoise PVC pipe – just like what they laid along the open space area beside Big Dry Creek behind the college library. Turned out that it was for piping treated wastewater from the plant to various users – which I understand are mainly golf courses. (Have I mentioned that metro Denver is a haven of golf courses and their associated "communities"?) I suspect that laying pipe across designated open space is cheaper than laying it anywhere else, and that's what this construction is about.
So I passed by, continued along 100th Avenue westward, where you can't park along the road to view bald eagles as you skirt the eagle nesting area, and further westward a couple more miles to Indiana Street. Turned north and passed the main entrance to Rocky Flats – nuclear weapons plant no more. Nuclear waste plant now, although the government is doing its mightiest to get it cleaned up – trucking waste to the newly-opened WIPP storage unit in New Mexico. (As if nuclear waste can ever truly be "cleaned up.")
Yup. "Denver" grew a whole lot faster than anyone thought and there's a city next door to this 6500-acre site that used to manufacture the plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs. And Standley Lake – down-drainage – is the source of drinking water for Westminster and Northglenn, at least. (I wrote to the City of Westminster last year asking about its water safety and was assured that testing has shown no groundwater seepage from Rocky Flats has entered Standley Lake.)
Of course, Denver's equally well-known for its other haven of toxin – the Rocky Mountain Arsenal – no longer in business – although still home to reputedly extremely hazardous waste. Some have called it the most hazardous place on earth (probably only because we don't actually know the toxic waste areas that more than likely exist in the former U.S.S.R.).
The Arsenal is now a wildlife refuge – although there are ponds from which wildlife must be protected. Eagles nest there, also. In fact, they host eagle-viewing tours at this former home of biological and chemical warfare agents.
I expect Rocky Flats will become the same. There's a bill in Congress to designate it as public open space – outside of the core plant.
One could see this as a kind of beating swords into ploughshares. And after former Russian President Yeltsin's sabre-rattling with nuclear weapons threats this past month, one wishes that all nuclear—biological-chemical weapons plants and arsenals would be turned into wildlife refuges. And all such weaponry destroyed.
That would be a grand desire for this new millennium.
After passing Rocky Flats, I continued north up Indiana Street to its junction with State Route 128, which runs along the top of a long ridge. One can go west several miles to the main highway running between Golden and Boulder, traversing deeply rolling plains still pretty much untouched. Or…one can turn east and view the scourge of Interlocken – brand new business park of the north. Since I first drove past this area about 18 months ago, it has literally mushroomed from about two office buildings to more than ten, plus a tower of an Omni Hotel and a mess of condos/townhomes, and a huge shopping mall being built.
As I turned east onto 128 – a used-to-be lonely state highway – I noticed a big sign – 30 acres for sale – on the south side of the road. First, picture yourself on this ridgetop – looking south and east toward the faraway towers of Denver. Your vision crosses acres and acres of open prairie/grassland. Then turn and look north and you see Rock Creek. There is indeed a watercourse named Rock Creek somewhere in the maze and morass of 4000-and- counting houses, condos, and apartments, with earth-gouging machinery building sweeping curves for new streets and more buildings.
If you want to experience stark contrast, it is there at that vantage point. But I have a feeling that given a couple more years and the south side will echo the north, for I saw an earth-mover sitting on the south side a little further east with a road being scraped. Of course, that is also the area that the new county of Broomfield plans to build the jail that it must have to be a legally-correct county. Sweet, sweeping winds and meadowlarks against razor-wire and concrete.
Interlocken is assaultive as one drives from Boulder toward Denver in the dark. The City of Boulder has managed to keep its eastward plains as open space (which of course has driven up the cost of housing in Boulder and angered neighboring towns who have become bedrooms towns for it), but those open grasslands are a respite of darkness when night falls.
Then the formerly little town of Superior, holder of the mega-development of Rock Creek, begins to glitter. Then the office buildings step up the side of the ridge, brightly burning lights until whenever, as bright as downtown Denver. Out there in the formerly dark plains.
I wish that the Interlocken office buildings would stand empty, costing their developers mega-dollars in interest payments with no income coming in. But I know that they won't. It's all out in the "country" (HAH!) with views of the Flatirons, and, if you're lucky, the higher peaks behind. Of course, they will also congest even more the four-lane Route 36 which already jams from Boulder-Denver commuters. So then that will need to be six-lanes, ad nauseum.
I experience those night drives and this afternoon as extremely disheartening. And I don't know where to go with it. Even out in the mountains along 285, forty to fifty miles from downtown Denver, hillsides are bedecked with houses, half million dollar homes built on massive rock outcrops.
In the past three weeks, beside Federal Boulevard in Westminster, a little ranch located up a little brushy draw has been demolished. Today, I saw that the land is a parking lot for a dozen huge earth-movers. The brushy draw has been totally "cleansed" of everything growing, and the prairie dogs and their mounds have been ground out. I expect to see another big housing complex going up as soon as they get the streets laid.
Somewhere, missing from this, is compassion. A compassion for the land.
I have finished reading the Dalai Lama's Ethics for the New Millennium and for him the ultimate ethic is compassion. When you feel compassion, you act compassionately and, as such, will harm none. If you have compassion for the land, then greed and wealth are not your gods, your motivation. Caring for land, its inhabitants, ensuring healthy habitats, are.
But here, in the megalopolis of the metro area, you have to turn away from the lonely prairie dog left in the little square of land that is being turned into townhouses…the one whose home next to the fence now around the property is probably what has saved him or her from the sure death that the others suffered. You turn away every morning that you wait at the stop sign, until one morning the animal is no longer there and the mound is gone. And no, the Arsenal Wildlife Refuge won't take them.
In 1998 I wrote the following:
Repose
Behind these high plains ridges that dip to swales,
stark mountains in the flat light
contrast with houses that cheek-by-jowl flow across the landscape.
Prairie dogs whistle in mound-studded fields precisely on the edge of urbanity.
Houses bury the earth under the lava of concrete and tar,
lure the city dweller to a piece of country,
with no understanding that the country is interred,
unexhumable until these houses dry up and blow away
and the greensward bakes to Spanish bayonet.
An architect's contest of gables, juts, and angles
bespeak the overuse of resources to provide huge spaces for few people,
replace the quiet repose of simple lines and natural designs
with a myriad of features echoing the perceived busyness of the lives within.
Whose eyes can find soothe in that view?
In such space, what peace can settle as a restful cloak
reviving tired souls from the day?
Sometimes when I crest these ridges
overlain by car-filled streets and house-choked fields,
I see the landscape emptied of all this.
Grasses, wildflowers, cottonwoods, prairie dogs, and meadowlarks remain,
the mountains – stark in the flat light of full day – keep a windy silence.
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