Nothing motivates the journalist Ted Conover like a no-trespassing sign, whether figurative or nailed to a barbed-wire fence and backed up with an AK-47. Starting with “Rolling Nowhere,” his 1984 account of hopping trains with hoboes, Conover has made a career of immersing himself in seemingly impenetrable subcultures, then writing with sympathy and insight about his experiences. In his books he has chronicled traveling with undocumented immigrants as they cross the border from Mexico (“Coyotes,” 1987) and working as a corrections officer at a maximum-security prison (“Newjack,” 2000). The sparsely inhabited prairie of southern Colorado might seem an easy gig for a writer who once patrolled Sing Sing, but the world Conover describes in his shaggy but engrossing new book, “Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge,” is every bit as harsh in its own way. Isolated, impoverished and traversed by tarantulas, its human inhabitants alienated, suspicious and well-armed, Colorado’s San Luis Valley turns out to be the ideal Ted Conover assignment.
In the 1970s, developers carved a region of arid, mostly uninhabited prairie into tens of thousands of five-acre lots and put them up for sale for less than $2,000 apiece. They used deceptively pretty photographs of the nearby mountains as bait, and their marks were people without much money who often bought the dreamy-looking lots sight unseen. Other than grading some roads, what the developers didn’t do was develop the land. The new owners, unable to afford to dig the wells, install the septic systems and build the houses that would make for a comfortable life on the prairie, abandoned their lots in droves. Visiting in 2017, Conover found scattered trailers, herds of feral horses and a diverse, loosely connected community of perhaps 1,000 people who scratched out a living, often from growing marijuana.
Conover decided to dig in, commuting between Colorado and his home in New York City between 2017 and 2022. Initially, he parked a used camper on a lot owned by the Grubers, an affable couple who shared a mobile home with their five young daughters, multiple dogs, a baby goat and a cockatoo. But full immersion required that he too have “skin in the game,” and eventually Conover bought his own $15,000 expanse of sage and rattlesnakes, upon which sat a decrepit mobile home containing the late owner’s dentures, a six-year-old carton of buttermilk and a loaded Derringer. “I felt good,” he writes of his humble life on the prairie. “I felt free and alive. I liked the weather even when it was bad — perhaps especially when it was bad, because it was so dramatic. I felt like taking notes on everything I saw and learned. When a place makes you feel like that, I think you should pay attention.”
Pay attention he did. He set about winning the trust of the prickly locals by volunteering with an organization that delivered free firewood. He learned early that if you honk before you exit your vehicle, the person you are visiting might not draw a gun. The bulk of the book consists of discursive anecdotes about the people Conover met and often befriended: “The restless and the fugitive; the idle and the addicted; and the generally disaffected, the done-with-what-we-were-supposed-to-do crowd. People who, feeling chewed up and spit out, had turned away from and sometimes against institutions they’d been involved with all of their lives.”
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Paul, for instance, came here for the cheap land, but also because he couldn’t deal with crowds. A charismatic amateur cook with social anxiety disorder and a passionate hatred of wind, Paul greeted Conover with the words: “Pleasure to meet you, and yes, I’m gay!” Paul introduced Conover to Zahra, a Black Midwesterner who arrived with her six children, their belongings strapped to the top of a rental car, to join an African separatist group that was establishing a settlement. One of the group’s goals: to prevent Black women from becoming the “bed wenches” of White men. When the settlement turned out to be more like a harem — and the harem’s shelter a roofless plywood box — Zahra fled. (She ended up marrying a White man from a local ranching family.) Conover met conspiracy theorists from rural Poland who claimed that the Vatican ran the CIA, and young drifters like Nick, “a drug user with a couple of screws loose.” People in trouble with the law abounded. Conover initially warmed to Ken, “a mustached man in his late sixties who seemed intelligent, outgoing and resourceful” but who turned out to have a long history of arrest for animal cruelty and operating puppy mills. Then there was Don, an elderly minister who came across as “humble, polite, self-effacing” but was taken into custody for failing to register as a convicted sex offender. After his release, Conover dropped by Don’s house to let him “say his piece,” but alas, no one came to the door.
One of Conover’s strengths as a writer is that he is willing to let his subjects “say their piece.” He is wonderfully open to people’s understanding of themselves, even when he sees the world very differently. He patiently listens to far-fetched rants and crackpot theories, registering skepticism but never letting disagreements about politics or lifestyle destroy his relationships or even define them.
Indeed, Conover seems reluctant to judge or theorize much about what he saw and heard in the San Luis Valley. Some might see this paucity of analysis as a problem with “Cheap Land Colorado,” and Conover to some degree invites the criticism. Early on, he suggests he was drawn to the prairie to answer big questions following the election of Donald Trump: “The American firmament was shifting in ways I needed to understand, and these empty, forgotten places seemed an important part of that,” he writes. “Just as the object is defined by its borders … so is society defined by the people out on the edge. Their ‘outsiderness’ helps define the mainstream.”
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If understanding recent political shifts and the American mainstream was his goal, Conover fails spectacularly. But was that really his aim? Excise a few grandiose mission statements from this eye-opening book, and nothing is lost — and nothing seems to be missing. With his thorough and compassionate reportage, Conover conjures a vivid, mysterious subculture populated by men and women with riveting stories to tell. To read “Cheap Land Colorado” is to take a drive through a disquieting, beguiling landscape with an openhearted guide, windows down, snacks in the cooler, no GPS. It’s a ride I didn’t want to end.
Jennifer Reese is the author of “Make the Bread, Buy the Butter.” She lives in New York City and (on the grid) in rural Wyoming.
Cheap Land Colorado
Off-Gridders at America’s Edge
By Ted Conover
Knopf. 283 pp. $30
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