Journalist Ted Conover has built a career immersing himself in the stories he writes.
He’s traveled the border with Mexican immigrants, hopped freight trains with a transient community, and worked as a corrections officer in Sing Sing — the maximum security prison.
Back in the ‘80s, he even spent two years in Aspen, documenting the town’s cult of celebrity and quirky worker bees alike for a book called “Whiteout.”
His latest book is “Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge,” focusing on the hardscrabble lifestyle of the San Luis Valley — where several undeveloped acres can go for just $5,000.
Unlike his previous adventures, though, something about this place stuck. Conover is still based in New York City, but he’s held onto the property he bought about an hour outside of Alamosa — two years after the book was published, and about seven years after he began exploring this rural way of life.
“I thought I'd be done and have it out of my system, because that's what happens when you finish a book,” Conover told Aspen Public Radio, speaking over Zoom from his house in the San Luis Valley.
“You've put all this energy into something, and now it's done and you're ready for the next thing,” he added. “But I just like it down here, and … every day I'm back here, I discover something else amazing.”
Conover is embarking on a book tour around Colorado this week, with a stop planned in Aspen on Saturday. He’ll be speaking at Explore Booksellers in conversation with an old friend and local journalist, Paul Andersen, who makes several appearances in Conover’s book “Whiteout.”
In this conversation with reporter Kaya Williams, Conover speaks about the response to “Cheap Land Colorado” from a community he’s still a part of — and shares the lessons learned from a life of participatory journalism.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
An honest picture requires you to acknowledge, yes, there's beauty, and yes, there's things that aren't so beautiful.Ted Conover, on the balance of reporting about off-grid life in the West
Ted Conover: When you write a book, it's like introducing some new isotope into the environment, and you just have no idea what could happen. But knock (on) wood, nobody seems too bent out of shape.
And I think partial credit to that goes to the fact that I started out as a volunteer for this group called La Puente, which tries to help people out here.
That's not a typical journalist approach, but I think the bigger idea here is that I'm a person of privilege writing about people who don't have much of it, and it seems, if I can give back a little while I'm asking all these questions, I think that got me off on the right foot.
And people seem to appreciate the chance to just have a spotlight on them and get to tell their story a little bit. Sometimes it's a glorious story of making a little homestead work on the prairie, and sometimes it's a sad story of, like, retreating here because of the pressures of life.
Kaya Williams: A great amount of your work is about people on the fringe of society, on either end of things. You know, Aspen is one kind of fringe. Alamosa is certainly another. What is it that draws you to these extremities?
Conover: I know that I enjoy the challenge of gaining access to a place that doesn't have many people like me in it, getting to know people who are a little bit off the radar.
Both projects involve valleys in Colorado, and to imagine there is such an array of humanity and of experience such a short distance apart is kind of mind boggling. And so I guess I feel that either kind of immersion is a sort of mind expansion.
Williams: I was going to ask — do you identify as one of these people on the fringe more so, or do you identify as more of like the “normal” person coming in and then returning to normal life?
Conover: Probably the latter. Though, every time I go back to quote, unquote, “normal life,” I'm different. I'm like a rubber band that's been stretched, and it's not going to go back to the shape it had at the beginning. And I like to think it's been stretched in a way that's interesting and not sort of unappealing.
I'd rather just be a person with an enhanced sense of what it means to be human and of the different ways people choose to live their lives. The people down here often don't have much money. They made a very clear choice to live according to their wits, right? If you live down here, you've got to figure out how you're going to keep warm in the winter, how you're going to keep your animals safe from predators, if you have kids, how you're going to get your kids educated. And then just basics, like, how do you level a trailer? How do you fix a car? How do you patch a flat tire?
My naivete about those things can be a helpful way to be out here, because here I am, a supposedly educated person who can't fix a puncture in a tire, and so obviously I must not be as intimidating as maybe was previously imagined.
Williams: Now, it strikes me that some people, myself included, sometimes romanticize this idea of the “wild West” and living off-grid, being so removed from society and going it alone. Your reporting covers the allure of that lifestyle, but also the immense challenges and struggles that these people face. I'm curious if you think it earns the romanticism that a lot of, you know, “city folk” or people who live in more urbanized spaces might imagine it to be.
Conover: It's a balance, and I don't want to deny the fact that the sky here at night is incredible, or the wonder I felt yesterday driving up to Alamosa, passing both a herd of feral horses and then a herd of pronghorn antelope within about 60 seconds.
It's like the frontier, right? You can have that romantic feeling about those things, or about the amazing sunsets. It's okay to pause and admire the beauty of those things. I know my neighbors down here do. And, you know, they love being in such a beautiful place.
That said, it wouldn't be honest to just write about that and leave out the other side of it all, which might include the guy down the road, who you've learned has an outstanding warrant out on him, or that young woman at the party who is so hyped on some drug. And you know, what are you supposed to do with that?
There's various kinds of people who just don't really want contact with other people. And so, should you just leave them alone? And how do you decide if maybe they'd like to talk to you? There's all of these tough questions, and I just think an honest picture requires you to acknowledge, yes, there's beauty, and yes, there's things that aren't so beautiful.
