Eagle

Out of the airplane window last night, flying over some unidentifiable Eastern city, I got to see lightning below me instead of above. Illuminating the sky between gray clouds like a little boy flaunting a flashlight, it shocked the darkness into view, but only intermittently. Every once in a while, a thread of electricity would shoot skyward or between two clouds, bridgelike.

As I left another chapter of this project behind, the drama in the sky offered a parallel. Maybe we won’t shock anyone with earth-shattering thunderclaps or awe-inspiring journalistic rainbows. If you’re patient, and observant enough to turn off the garish overhead lights above your seat, we promise a great show. The two long weeks of editing to come will undoubtedly bring their share of storms, but if we work hard, I know we’ll make stuff worth craning your neck for.

Yesterday, our last in Eagle County, was a strange day. The bright dawn lent an exuberance to my last morning jog around town, but then again, it could have been the excitement at going home.  Home — that unsung place of permanence, familiarity, comfort. People I love, clean clothes, cupboards of the simple food I’ve been craving, music and asphalt paths and suitcases stored away.

But there’s always something sad about leaving. Even if the things you’ll miss have little instrinsic value, something unravels when you say goodbye. It was only four weeks of my life, but it’s still a closing book.

And so, in good Sufjan Stevens-meets-Decemberists fashion, here’s my song with its own too-long title: An ode the things I’ll probably never do again, Eagle County-style:

Drive too much. In a blue Ford Focus. Eat out every day. Have someone other than Mark make my coffee every morning. Watch FOX news over breakfast (ech). Listen to Coffee House on Sirrius Satellite. Visit Colorado and only hike twice. Visit Colorado and not climb a mountain. Take half an hour to explain how I ended up in a place. Ask hundreds of random strangers how they’d change the world using technology. Invite myself to an 8-year-old’s birthday party. Get rejected from an 8-year-old’s birthday party. Eat Nature Valley Honey Oat granola bars daily. Drink Coors Light on the tailgate of a truck with a paving crew. Have an oatmeal raisin cookie every night before bed. Talk to an ex-bull rider about his recent divorce. Watch ice skating in July while eating peanut butter gelato.

Tucked between these, there are many things that I just might get to do again. And the lessons I learned in storytelling (as in life) will keep surprising me I’m sure.

Hello Eagle, and Hello World. I doubt there are many eyes on this, but that’s not going to stop me today. Words for thousands or words for one still have meaning.

We’ve got four days left and I’ve been slow to keep you in the loop. We’re supposed to be reporting on what makes you “Eagle the boom town,” and yet we’ve shared so little along the way. You’ve kept us busy chasing local legends: people committed to causes, teenagers testing their limits, young people telling their life stories unabashedly.

Every day I ask myself where I fit in here, as a storyteller.

I wish I could give you more, report on everything worth reporting on. Tell what needs to be told. Trumpet your successes and raise your best folks up for the world to see. But the truth is, I’m not doing a very good job, and I’m still trying to figure out why.

I could explain it by complaining. The goals of our project are lofty, and its parameters narrow: How do you stitch together youth, technology and boom-town dynamics in a 3 minute compelling, visual, and emotional package? I could talk about feeling unprepared. But all these are empty excuses. I’m here, I’m alive, and I need to respect the task at hand.

I read this quote the other day from Donna Tartt, and I’m still letting its wisdom feed me: Storytelling and elegant style don’t always go hand in hand.

Elegance. Honesty. Being myself. Letting my boots get dusty. These are today’s gifts, wrapped up in crinkly brown paper and without a pretty bow. Today tumbles out at our feet: maybe with something worth telling, but then again, maybe not.

As we near the end of our first visit to Eagle county, our time here has started to boom at least as much as this eponymous town. All the little fits and starts have started to teach me a thing or two about gumption.

Alluring as some abandoned things are (like the old mining town we stumbled across last night), abandoned stories leave a much hollower echo. It’s hard to chase a hope even in it’s infancy. I think storytellers like us are stubborn that way. Sometime, it’s just hard to just let things go.

And yet here’s another day, touching my shoulder like the afternoon breeze to say keep trying. Here I am, wishing we didn’t have to leave. As I sit beneath the day’s late haze shrouding Mt. Sopris, a baseball hat clad man strums chords behind me. His fingers are languidly patient, never rushing into melody or silence. The turbid mountain weather dips into an evening for walking, dining, and laughing our way into the fading warmth.

As I sit and mull over the healthy array of story ideas we’ve pursued here in Eagle, I can’t help but think maybe it’s just luck. And then I ask myself, do I believe in luck?

Maybe. But then again, maybe luck only follows well-laid trails. Gumption is the groundwork, and we’ll return with plenty of mud on our boots.

Since I posted last, our perfect little mountain Boom Town has delivered its share of down days. While the food, fresh foliage, and morning jogs have been unparalleled, our stories looked barren for some time: Long lists of names and numbers. Dead ends. Emails returned, empty. Contacts with less to say than we hoped.

I’ve re-learned that it’s all in your outlook. When I sit down to our notes from the last few days, I see how all the cold calls and painful prodding have paid off. Really, only two days (yesterday and part of today) started to test my optimism. Two days that made us start thinking of wild story alternatives, like moving up to the remote old mining town we visited today, unplugging ourselves from technology, and chronicling the process.

But people are coming through. It’s amazing how you can drop into a brand-new town and five days later start running into the same people, and turning off the GPS. It’s amazing how people start caring about what two random journalists are doing in their town.

Wednesday, the morning after I last wrote, we met with Susie Davis from The Youth Foundation. I contacted Susie immediately after I checked out their site and learned of an program they run called Neighborhood Net, an after-school access program for kids who don’t have Internet at home.

Susie not only has a huge heart, she’s a goldmine. We left with names trailing off our notebook pages. She also showed us some digital life journals created by area youth (through the Center for Digital Storytelling). I think I felt the tingle of tears in each one of them. We left full of ideas, and a copy of Malcom Gladwell’s recent book, Outliers.

Later that day, a recent high school grad from SOS showed us how the other half lives in this County. Irving Hernandez is a second-generation Mexican, and isn’t afraid to talk about the social dynamics in the perfect-on-the-outside County he calls home. Irving narrated our drive west of Eagle: through his trailer park neighborhood, and the neighboring towns of Gypsum and Dotsero. The latter is completely made up of trailer parks where you’ll find the folks who keep boom towns like this booming. (Video to come!)

Yesterday we met another young woman. Though we learned some interesting things about how little the Anglos and Hispanics mix once they hit high school, nothing concrete came of it. That’s what’s hard about this project: you can have 15 interesting conversations, and yet not a single compelling story idea will emerge. Being a portable journalist is really pushing my boundaries as a storyteller.

Today  after what felt like 50 more business cards handed out (at colleges, chambers of commerce, and community centers), one of Susie’s contacts came through for us. Steve Kauffman, the founder of Access Roaring Fork, is passionate about youth and technology and excited to work with us. We start Monday.

When you’re in God’s country, it’s not hard to look up.

(And even then, Rocky Mountain beer helps)

Day two here in Eagle ran away on us. Things are happening here, and we’re racing to keep up. To describe the experience so far, I’d say it’s an abundance of riches.

After arriving early Sunday morning, we hung out in Denver for the afternoon. Mary’s delightful brother and sister-in-law took us for lunch, and then we had coffee with Nathan Rodriquez, the Communications Director for S.O.S. Outreach, a youth organization we’ll be working with here in Eagle.

Monday we spent the entire day at Yeti’s Grind, getting our bearings.  With great coffee, free wireless, comfy leather couches and a bustling scene, we decided to make Yeti’s our temporary office. With it’s very own cycling scene, awesome latte art, and happy hours, I could stay here just for Yeti’s.

We spent the day emailing and leaving messages, reading local papers and bouncing story ideas off each other. It was a relaxing, yet productive start to our Eagle experience. (Did I just write those two words in the same sentence?)

http://www.sosoutreach.org/

We  spent the majority of today in Edwards, a town near Eagle, where S.O.S. is based. We drove down to the office to introduce ourselves, and ended up talking to Arn Menconi (S.O.S founder and one of the Patchwork  Nation bloggers) for about 3 hours. He and Seth, one of his employees, took us to a Mexican mercato for an authentic lunch. My two tostadas kept me full for the rest of the day!

S.O.S. are just the folks to partner with while we’re here —       totally plugged in to Eagle County’s youth. Arn has a contagious passion for building leadership in underserved  youth. They even offered us office space while we’re here.

On the way out, they asked us if we would come back later today to record an interview (for their recently-launched website) with Alfredo Velasco, one of their alumni.  Velasco has received a full scholarship to Dartmouth College to study electrical engineering, and isn’t shy to credit his success in part to the S.O.S. experience.

I (Jen the writer) shot the video all by myself. It was a little unnerving not having my favorite mentor there, but it went well. Afterwards, Alfredo took me for a tour of Edwards from his perspective, and at the end of it all, I dropped him off at the local skatepark to meet up with his friends. He’s heading to his native Mexico tomorrow afternoon, but he’s definitely on our short list for our next trip here.

I took short hike around a silvery mountain lake nearby, and am back at the hotel revelling in the free internet, popcorn machine, and friendly bartender Anne. She insisted on bringing me a glass of red wine, on the house.

A serene end to a day full of promise.

It’s Saturday in Syracuse, and the bags are packed and ready to go. Mary and I arrived home safely from Nixa, Missouri, the first town in this adventure that we’re calling The Young and the Wireless. Tomorrow we leave for Eagle, Colorado, where we (and this blog) will be coming to you live and unplugged.

Under the Patchwork Nation model, Eagle is representing “Boom Town” demographics in our project. What exactly does this mean? Growth, relative affluence, 38.5 million Americans, to name a few. But as well-researched as this category is, a face-to-face meeting is in order. These neat little community categories beg us, as journalists, to find the correlations as well as the deviations.

My grandfather was a compulsive labeler. In his tool shed, each nail drawer, box, and peg board hole had a neatly-printed label to go with it. As we found in Nixa, labels can help you find what you’re looking for. But as with my grandfather’s system, what’s inside the drawer is often much less tidy.

I can’t wait to be surprised. Not just by the mountains (which I’ve been craving for the past 2 years out here in the East), but by the people who make up the place we’re calling America’s Boom Town.

Hello Eagle, Colorado! We’ve never met you, but we’d like to. We’re Jen and Mary, and we’re a pair of journalists on our way out west.

We’re coming to Eagle to do a project on something worth talking about. Not disasters or epidemics or shootings, but something we think matters. What could this be, you ask? What news is worth telling in an age where we can barely keep up as it is?

It’s simple. We want to know how young people and technology mix in Eagle. Call them the Net Generation, Generation Y, the Millenials, whatever you like —  we want to meet them. The 13-year-old doing inspiring things on Facebook, the 18-year-old leaving her cell phone behind for a week in the wilderness, the college student teaching their grandma how to Google.

Their stories will be featured on www.theyoungandthewireless.com (yes, that’s a play on that wonderful mainstay of daytime television), and the slightly more reputable (but no more pithy) Patchwork Nation. They’ll sit beside stories by people from NPR and PBS. And who could expect anything but greatness from the people who brought us Sesame Street?

We’ll be arriving in Eagle on the 9th of June, and staying until the 22nd. During that time, we’ll be looking for the town’s most interesting stories on youth and technology — told or untold. So if you have a lead on a great story, leave a comment, or send us an email by clicking the “contact us” link.

We can’t wait!

For more information on what exactly we’ll be doing, please visit the Syracuse University description of the project, the News21 blog, or any of the aforementioned sites.

cartoon by Jerry King