LandDesk
When discourse derails After Silverton bans Pledge of Allegiance, a little civility might go a long way by Jonathan Thompson
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wenty-five years ago this spring, I rolled into the small mountain town of Silverton to be the reporter-photographer at the weekly newspaper. The sky was gray, the place was quiet, and the streets somehow managed to be both muddy and dusty at the same time. It was awesome. The mining industry had abandoned the region several years earlier, and the community was still smarting, economically. Enrollment at the school was dropping. The tourism industry did pretty well from July 4 to Labor Day but was virtually nonexistent for the remaining nine months. Year-round work was hard to come by and the wages generally low. My pay was $275/week, or less than $5 an hour, but in a town where rents were below $300 a month and for a $100,000 you could get a castle – with a foundation, even – it was enough to get by. There was also a great little coffee shop, The Avalanche. Wiley Carmack, an outspoken, rabid conservative known for his vitriolic letters to the editor, held court there almost every morning, alongside a handful of others who leaned leftward politically. The shop was tiny and on cold days – which is to say, always – was shoulder to shoulder with a diverse mix of folks getting jacked up on coffee. That inevitably led to spirited discussions about politics, which inevitably led to outright screaming matches. I’m pretty sure Wiley called me a pinko commie idiot at least once, and I probably had some choice words for him, too. Town Board meetings were often just as raucous, and joint town-county budget meetings resembled a multi-
badger cage fight. In Silverton, politics are a blood-sport, sometimes literally. But once the meetings or caffeine-addled debates ended, something else always took hold, something like community. Bitter adversaries would sit side by side at the Miners Tavern without killing each other. Wiley came to our potlucks, and we went to his Christmas party. Yeah, he got a little mad when we drank his high-shelf liquor, but we were still friends. The 400 or so year-round residents were like a big, quarrelsome, dysfunctional family. Maybe we didn’t always like each other, but in the end, we had one another’s backs, just like the people working underground in the mines. I am sure that this spirit still exists in Silverton, but judging by the latest fracas, it has worn rather thin and has been tainted by the same anger and meanness that seems to have infected our nation as a whole. The ruckus over the Pledge is just the most visible manifestation of a battle that’s been building in Silverton for years, a sort of political/social Gold King Mine blowout, if you will. It began back in 2014, when the town voted to allow off-highway vehicles to ply select streets, creating an enforcement nightmare along with a situation in which some residents were subjected daily to the off-roader roar and dust, while others were not. The tension flared up in 2017 when community members tried to re-ban OHVs, and then again when Shane Fuhrman ran for mayor last year. During the campaign, Fuhrman’s critics portrayed him as a wealthy, big-city outsider who was intent on turning Silverton into the next Aspen or Telluride. Originally
telegraph
from Evergreen, Fuhrman – an attorney and businessman – moved to Silverton from Brooklyn a decade ago and bought the historic Wyman Hotel. Judging by social media bile, Fuhrman’s big crime was to update the hotel to a mid-century modern style, which turns out to be more attractive to the clientele of Silverton Mountain Ski Area than the faux-Victorian decor found in other local lodging establishments. He won the election, nonetheless, and began the thankless and virtually unpaid job as the town’s mayor. Along with dealing with a pandemic and then the flood of tourists that followed, Fuhrman and his fellow trustees also explored the idea of expanding the small, townowned ski area onto surrounding BLM land to give a boost to the winter economy. They also wanted to add a riverside path, trails, a bike park and other amenities. That further fueled the become-another-Aspen fears. (Interestingly, the fact that Silverton Mountain operates a heli-skiing operation out of the Aspen airport, ferrying the wealthy to the mountains around Silverton for $17,990 a pop, doesn’t seem to elicit the same reaction.) But Silverton doesn’t need to become Aspen to have some of the same problems. Despite its grunginess and lack of a major ski resort, airport or reliable high-speed internet, the town has fallen victim to the housing affordability crisis that has pervaded nearly every corner of the West. In that respect, things have changed dramatically since I arrived in Silverton so many years ago. As the Silverton newspaper guy from 1996-2006, I attended literally hundreds of community meetings I can’t recall ever hearing anyone recite the Pledge at any of 4 July 1, 2021 n 7
