Enchanted Mesa: Gratitude, Generational Generosity, and the Gift of Open Space
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Speaking of Place
Enchanted Mesa: Gratitude, Generational Generosity, and the Gift of Open Space
by Patty Limerick
Nearly half a century ago, citizens in Boulder, Colorado invested an enormous amount of time and energy in an enterprise that would, four decades later, rescue me from the grief and depression of widowhood.
I was in junior high school at the time of the citizens’ labors, living a thousand miles away, so it is a safe bet that the lifeline they gave me falls into the category called “unforeseen and unintended consequences.”
Historians of the American West have endless enthusiasm for calling attention to consequences of this sort, but with a preference for the vexing, the unfortunate and the ironic. We trace the purposeful actions of missionaries who went to save Indian people’s souls and instead introduced infectious diseases that ended their lives. We follow the fate of farmers who brought in the seeds for both grain and the weeds that would plague their crops. We point out that Congressional plans to dodge the troubling issue of the expansion of slavery into the West actually triggered the Civil War.
The preservation of open space by the City and County of Boulder holds worldwide fame as a groundbreaking innovation and inspiration. (As early as 1959 amendments were established in Boulder to discourage development above a “blue line” where no city water would be provided.) The City’s acquisition in 1964 of an expanse of land known as the Enchanted Mesa was an important milestone in the history of that movement.
Kenneth Mirise had acquired title to this land and had begun, in the manner of thousands of Western landowners, to dream of the profits in his future. He would build on the site a luxury hotel like Colorado Springs’ famous Broadmoor, and that hotel would, in turn, be a centerpiece and magnet for an array of luxury homes. A citizens’ group quickly formed to challenge those ambitions, launching a campaign for a City bond vote in 1962 to purchase Enchanted Mesa from Mr. Mirise. Members of Citizens for Enchanted Mesa addressed postcards, wrote letters to the editor, distributed bumper stickers and window signs, circulated brochures, held a picnic rally on site and spoke to voters in personal conversations and in local radio broadcasts. The election result was close: 2,265 to 1,911 in favor of purchasing the Mesa.
The bond issue provided $105,000 for the purchase, but Mr. Mirise claimed that his property was worth a million dollars. A tangle of negotiations and litigation over the value to assign to Enchanted Mesa ensued, with the County Commissioners finally setting the price at $115,000.
To help the City get that extra $10,000, Citizens for Enchanted Mesa came back to life and pled with residents to make voluntary contributions to the fund. By the summer of 1964, the City owned Enchanted Mesa.
Publications by Patty Limerick
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So there is no four-star hotel and no complex of luxury homes on Enchanted Mesa. Instead, a broad trail leads uphill through a mixed forest of Douglas Fir and Ponderosa Pine to mind- and soul-expanding views of the foothills and connects to Boulder’s extensive Mesa Trail.
~*~
For twenty-one years I lived near Enchanted Mesa, but nothing happened between us. I was, in fact, a couch potato of the highest order.
On February 1, 2005, my husband Jeff Limerick, age 56, died from a stroke. We had been together since 1973. My world became unsteady, precarious.
Within a few months, with little in the way of conscious deliberation, I took to walking. I walked all around the University of Colorado campus and the City of Boulder. City streets seemed fine places to walk; the glimpses of human nature were their own sources of distraction and comfort. But it finally occurred to me to appreciate—after twenty-one years of indifference—what the Boulder Open Space offered to pedestrians.
In short order, I had a new custom: I began every day with a vigorous walk through the forest, and it became my routine to start this walk with a trip up the Enchanted Mesa Trail. I got up every morning to confront a swamp of sorrow; the climb up, as well as the view of and from Enchanted Mesa lifted me out of that swamp. With the passage of several more months, I often had as my companion on these outings a wonderful friend named Houston Kempton. He is now my second husband.
While my level of physical activity was transformed, my curiosity about local history remained oddly dormant. The Enchanted Mesa Trail was nearly a second home to me; I felt and feel a sense of familiarity with and (non-exclusive!) ownership of every tree stump, every shift in gradient, nearly every pebble. But I never asked myself what people, resolutions, actions and enterprises had provided me with this reliable route back to sanity and hope.
When I finally learned the identity of the people who saved Enchanted Mesa, it was a pleasure to realize that I knew many of them. Of those who had taken up the Mesa’s preservation those decades ago, quite a few were people I had come to consider friends: physics professor Albert Bartlett, ecologist and educator Oakleigh Thorne, attorney and water engineer Ruth and Ken Wright, City Attorney (at the time) Neil King and newspaper publisher Laurence Paddock had put their shoulders to the wheel of the bond issue and the follow-up round of fundraising. Many others—people whose presence in Boulder regularly lights up my world—worked to save the Mesa.
These people, along with others I never had the chance to meet, played key roles in helping me cope with the tragedy of my husband’s premature death, thereby giving a fresh and much more positive meaning to “unintended and unforeseen consequences.”
And then this chain of intergenerational gratitude extended to another link.
How did I come to know the story of the preservation of Enchanted Mesa and to recognize my debts? A talented University of Colorado student, a history major named Cailyn Plantico, signed up to do an internship jointly offered by our Center of the American West and the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks department. Cailyn researched and wrote the history of the campaign for Enchanted Mesa, rescuing me from ignorance. The appreciation that grandchildren feel for their grandparents has a way of informing and reorienting the sometimes clueless middle generation. In a similar fashion, Cailyn allowed me to express my gratitude while my benefactors are still here to receive it.
But how should we say “thank you” to our elders for these unforeseen gifts of the future?
The answer: Follow their example.
Aspire, with appropriate humility, to create institutions and arrangements that will deliver to those who come after us a comparably miraculous and enchanted, if also unintended and unforeseen, consequence.
Position ourselves so that those who follow us will feel for us some degree of the gratitude I feel toward Al Bartlett, Oak Thorne, Ruth Wright, Ken Wright, Neil King, Laurence Paddock and a host of others whose actions reached directly through the years to touch and, in the most down-to-earth way, restore me.
And, in my own case, compose several long overdue, hand-written thank-you notes and place a copy of this essay in each of the envelopes. And when those are in the mail, take a walk on the Enchanted Mesa Trail with Cailyn Plantico, and with any of our elders who can join us.
Patty Limerick is the co-founder and Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, which serves as a forum committed to the civil, respectful, problem-solving exploration of important, often contentious, public issues. Limerick is also a Professor of History at the University of Colorado, and has dedicated her career to bridging the gap between academics and the general public. Limerick received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1980, and from 1980 to 1984 she was an Assistant Professor of History at Harvard. In 1985 she published Desert Passages, followed in 1987 by her best-known work, The Legacy of Conquest. Limerick is also a prolific essayist, and many of her most notable articles, including “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose,” were collected in 2000 under the title Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West. In 1986, Limerick and CU Law Professor Charles Wilkinson founded theCenter of the American West, which serves as a forum committed to the civil, respectful, problem-solving exploration of important, often contentious, public issues. The Center strives to bring out “the better angels of our nature” by appealing to the common loyalties and hopes of Westerners.