April in Iris

Just before the county line, on Gold Basin Road, there is an unmarked turnoff tucked in the willows. Follow it up for a while and you will gain the ridge. After the cattle guard, the road  descends in a wide arc, gradually making its way to the bottom of a surprisingly deep gully. Here, tucked between sage hills, the road follows the creek, making its way across a marshy meadow and a sometimes deep water crossing. Cell phone reception is spotty, the hillsides steep. 

As you climb out of the creek bed, just over the hillside to your right is a small collection of houses in an area generally known as Iris. The green street signs atop gleaming metal poles provide comic relief in an ocean of undulating, sage dotted hills. As if any person would ever say, take a left on Iris Lane at Merry Go Round Road, it’s about 30 miles south of Gunnison on the seasonal dirt road.  

A site of a busted mining outpost from the 1800’s, Iris is a community outside of community and not an easy place to get to most of the year. It is important to know where you are, as public and private land braid like intermittent streams. It is wildly easy to trespass and there are many signs warning you not to do so. And so, for me and my map, the exploration of Iris has come slowly. The views are expansive, the curve of Sawtooth Mountain rising above the hills to the south, the ridges of the Anthracites like clouds in the north. 

Gunnison, by most people’s standards, is remote. The neighboring towns are over mountain passes; Denver is over two hundred miles and a continental divide away. Twelve to fourteen thousand-ish souls exist in a valley ringed by a semi-circle of towering walls of granite. The valley’s southern mouth yawns to the empty space of Saguache County. There are five stoplights in the entire county, all of them clustered in the grid of downtown Gunnison.  

Leaning over the handles of my mountain bike, I wonder about this collection of people who have chosen to both extricate themselves from town and cluster themselves together, their homes not unlike teepees in a prairie in an old west oil painting. 

Gliding along a flat section of the dirt road, I can’t help but consider what it means to live this way. An outpost like Iris offers a stark contrast to a world that coerces us into hellscapes of super cities, people stacked by the thousands in boxes, one atop another, climbing into a sooty sky, the paranoid citizens creating a reality within a reality, imagining themselves connected to those they have never and will never meet, growing more and more paranoid and afraid to leave their boxes… 

There are empty mine shafts and a cemetery and the wiry fence of the county line. Reaching the crest of a hill, my heart pumping, I take a water break, straddling my bike. A wide, dry basin lies below. The bike flexes beneath me as I descend, fence posts flying by one by one. 

I read a book a few months ago about a man who haunted a collection of seasonal cabins in a lake community somewhere in New England. Behaving something like a racoon, he pilfered the empty cabins during the long winter months for things that he needed and some that he didn’t. For years, vacationers arrived each June to find small scale disturbances: missing blankets, books, and canned goods, overturned nightstands and displaced vases from where the mysterious figure had entered a bedroom window. Some felt frightened and violated. More than a few found it funny. A small contingent found these trespasses an egregious sullying of the American grail of private property; for most, it simply lent to the mystique of the place, a ready-made ghost story. Eventually the recluse was caught, rather ignobly, in the act of stealing boxes of cereal from the boarded up sleep away camp. His tent was found in the immediate vicinity, tucked into the dense brush just out of view, empty cans and borrowed pants thrown about.  

The people of Iris are of a different breed than this. They live not as hermits, driven by a sense of ascetics, anger, religious fervor, or mental illness. Nor are they castle builders, seeking to impose their will upon a landscape. These homes are neat and well built, neither ostentatious nor wanting. The roofs appear to be tight and large, orderly stacks of split firewood are testaments to both care and forethought. I wonder what the folks of Iris say to one another, what they know about one another, what their complaints are. I wonder if they have regular, neighborhood dinners or if they simply co-exist here, alone together.

In my mind, there must exist an understanding, a kinship, especially among the few that are here year round. It is a bold thing to build a home here. To choose to stand together apart from the world like this. If nothing else, it would seem that the decision to buy a parcel of land in Iris would engender a certain understanding of one another.   

With a final walk down a south facing hillside, I have now completed this particular section of my map. Far flung as it is, there is not much cause to come this way again. The grey clouds of April are thickening. As I take in this particular view of southern Gunnison for perhaps the last time, I like to think that should the governments of the world continue on their mad path, the neighbors of Iris will still be here, tucked inside the folds of the hills, on the corner of Main and Vine.