Looking Beyond Mack...

As many of you know, my mother was born and raised on a homestead in Western Colorado. Last summer, Linda and I visited out there for a family reunion and toured the old neighborhood. In addition, I’ve been doing some research on our family’s history. It all gets one to thinking…
The largest town in that area is Grand Junction. Sitting along the Colorado River, the land is great for farming, with fields, gardens, and orchards spread all around it, (quickly being replaced by neo-suburban development). Moving Westward, comes the smaller town of Fruita. It’s somewhat drier there, and irrigation is essential – but with it, even a city slicker like me can tell one will get good farmland. Beyond that is Loma, drier and smaller still, and after that is the tiny, forlorn, dusty, former railroad town of Mack. Looking beyond Mack is the state line and the edge of the Utah desert, and that is where my grandparents and a few other hardy families settled, in a community they called New Liberty. Now, some of these areas are enjoying something of a renaissance in building. People who work in or want to be near Grand Junction can afford more land or bigger houses out there. But despite that, you still get the feeling that you’ve moved beyond prosperity when you look beyond Mack. The ground is dry and what vegetation exists is burnt and drier yet. I’ve visited this place several times over my life, and keep coming back to the same question – What were they thinking moving out here – to farm?!?
Looking through old family papers and newspaper clippings, and listening to my Mother’s stories, I know that my grandparents were dealt a bad hand. Life was a long list of hard times, hard luck, and harder work. Previous farms had failed in the past and I think that New Liberty may have been the last toss of the dice for them. I always will wonder if they saw hope, or just a last stand, as they looked beyond Mack. It had to be daunting.
After the move, the land and the times remained hard, there was a house fire and the depression, bad harvests and disease; some families made it, including mine (barely), and some didn’t. Some individuals made it, and some didn’t. My grandfather hanged himself on that property.
The older I get, the more I contemplate that situation, and how so many of us face variations and modern versions of it. As we shuffle through middle age, choices seem to get harder, and the successes less certain and the failures more daunting. Some years seem like little more than a tally of loss. One keeps going, but sometimes we are left wondering if we’re making a new beginning, or a last stand; and we look beyond Mack…