Ammi Midstokke: They don’t make ‘em like they used to
Years ago, I read Wallace Stegner’s “Angle of Repose” and had a romanticized glimpse of miner’s life in the West. I was left in awe at the hardship humans went through in the pursuit of better things or just a full belly. While my Subaru sputtered over Colorado mountain passes at 70 mph, I couldn’t help but think about how we ever got up here on horses, in wagons, on foot.
It’s not exactly like they had Gore-Tex at the time. Or headlamps. Or GPS. Or even prospects, seeing as the place was already teeming with prospectors.
These days, we’ve replaced the hardship of survival with faux challenges and races named after the Spartans (as if they ever humiliated their way through a burpee), fueling on electrolyte drinks and stopping for sock changes to avoid blisters.
Around the time I read Stegner, I had pulled a lottery ticket for the Leadville 100 – a legendary trail race that begins at 10,000-foot elevation in the U.S.’highest city and schlepps over a saddle near Mount Elbert. That year, COVID came and shut everything down and I have always pretended to be very sad that I did not get to run 100 miles. COVID damaged us all in different ways.
A spring break tour through the Rockies of Colorado has brought me to Leadville. It just so happens we have friends in this historic mining town. And not just that, but a third-generation family with genuine, fourth-generation offspring. At this point, I think they are just born with enough hemoglobin to osmose oxygen through their eyeballs. They also appear to find 20 degrees T-shirt weather.
The wife is a veritable historian with her name on at least one book. And the husband ran the Leadville 100 for kicks one year, because apparently that’s what locals do for fun on the weekends. They sure aren’t using their time to garden. They have an average of 14 frost-free days a year. This is why I live in Idaho and not Colorado.
Recently, something sparked research into an area of the local cemetery that has hundreds of unmarked graves. In the late 1800s, many Irish who survived the famine immigrated to Leadville, primarily from County Cork. They set up residence on the upper slopes of Leadville, named streets things like St. Patrick’s, and survived in an impoverished shanty neighborhood on a desolate slab of land between the city center and the many mines.
If they could not afford the week’s wages for a plot on the Catholic part of the cemetery, or they were not identified, they were buried with the benevolence of the church in what was known as the “paupers’ section.”
The graves are grown over with towering pine trees and the ghosts cannot be heard above the gentle aeolian song. Once, the graves had been marked with wooden crosses, but they’ve long turned to soil.
A few years ago, the town began to wonder who these people were and found in the annals of the church the original records of the plots, and when available, the names of those buried. They reached out to officials in Ireland, obtained a grant that was further supported by local donations, and built a memorial that lights up the long-forgotten names of these souls.
Standing in the pines and reading the names, I see child after child after child. Flannery, Baby, 2 hours. The Tracy family lost five, between the ages of one day and 3 years old. There are so many stillborns listed, one might wonder if there was something in the water, except then we’re reminded that it was brutal most days of the year and supplies limited. Except alcohol, and one can hardly blame anyone for wanting something to numb them against the cold.
The average age of the deceased is 22. Once, they were hopeful youth abandoning their homeland in search of fortune or just better fortune. Perhaps they wrote letters back to Ireland. Then one day the letters would just stop, I suppose.
Recently, some Irish artists came together to record themselves reading each and every name on the list, names long forgotten but once beloved to someone, pronounced with reverence in their native brogue. I don’t know why, but that was the story that made me cry.
The next day, I ran up Seventh Street toward the Matchless Mine and beyond, gasping for air most of the way. I wore a wind-breaker and merino wool and carried my water and snacks and fancied myself hardy because it was still well below freezing.
I can’t help but feel a little ashamed that I have to seek out struggle for an hour in the morning, that this routine is part of my self-care and mental-wellness plan.
As I turned back toward the town, white peaks in the distance, sun glaring off the snow, I wondered if people were happier then, joyful at the simplest pleasures and respites from a relentless struggle for survival.
Just as some kind of moral epiphany was sure to strike, I trotted past a café and was interrupted by the smell of fresh coffee.
For a moment, the miners and I still had something in common.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com