I am my only “interview” in the whole of Colorado. Without planning it, the days are a heart-filling personal journey. I see my aunt Adrian, her gravestone, and feel all the isolated depth of that windswept prairie place. I see my childhood friend in Colorado Springs, Drew Wills, with his wife Jeannie Wills. The last time we were all together was at my father’s funeral. How much the gentle trusting affections from early days carry through. We have a six-hour visit, hearing about children and the truly exceptional heart of their athletic lives. None of us wants the night to end. Up to Winter Park the next morning, the van trudging the intense grade and switchbacks of Berthoud Pass, across the Continental Divide, to stay over with a friend and colleague from Rice. He’s been coming to the mountains long enough to have scoped out what probably is all of that backwoods. He puts us up with great food, an amazing lodge of a house, a late-day hike up to Bottle Pass where we appreciate the summit to Byer’s Peak and a sunset hike down. A river walk in the morning to keep his great canine and everyone else happy. We head out with cookies in a tub for Steamboat Springs over Rabbit Ears Pass which is hazy at the top from wildfire smoke, no panoramas this time.
We stay at a local favorite, Rabbit Ear Motel. My parents and youngest three sisters lived in Steamboat in the early 1980s, leaving southern California for Colorado. My dad built a mountain house modeled on the Swiss chalet and skied from its front porch down to the lift line. I lived there too in a condo with the old boyfriend and our dogs. My dog Yampa, named after the Yampa River. Sandy Buchanan, skateboarding surfer teenage girlfriend from southern California, tagged along, splitting her college years between quarters at UC Santa Barbara, Zuma Beach (where she was a rare early-80s female lifeguard) and Steamboat for the ski season. She lived with me and then my parents, met Tom Woods who builds log cabins, stayed on in Steamboat, skiing, competing, river running, mountain biking, hang gliding, becoming a nurse. We meet up with Sandy and Tom. We take walks, admire the craft and beauty of their log homes, remember my father, hear about their rustic place out at Hanh’s Peak Lake which serves as base for easy SUP paddles and serious backcounty powder. We hear about life “in the bubble” of Steamboat.
Accomplished outdoorspeople, all of my personal journey friends, embodying lives lived in my home place Colorado, filling me with admiration and a sense of the lives I wanted but did not live and . . . who I am instead at the crosshairs of those contradictions. To read my contributor note, see here.
Sending love to Adrian in the next world.
With Sandy Buchanan, an original! Dusk walk along the Yampa River near Old Town Hot Springs. Tom Woods is throwing the stick for their dog, Halle Berry. José taking pictures.
Photo courtesy of https://rabbitearsmotel.com/
Bottle Pass . . . (catching our breath!)
The Where of Here: Out on the Beulah Road in Pueblo.
Krista. In my family, we call where we are now “out on the Beulah Road.” It’s Highway 78, Northern Avenue.
When I was little, my grandparents had a house nearby. You can see the Sangre de Cristo mountain range behind where I am set up in a lawn chair with the camera running. This view behind me was the view that I grew up with. I would come out to their house, it was a special place, and be with my aunt Adrian, and my father’s parents. My mom and dad lived on Elizabeth Street, in town, with my younger sisters.
This view was my first orientation to what I would call today “the West.” It was a view, out of a window, from this house built by, actually, my mother’s father, Samuel Monroe Houston II, a Pueblo builder in the 50s and 60s. It was one story, and had no 90-degree angles. It was understood to be architecturally “interesting,” sophisticated.
Of course, you’re talking about people who had money to build that kind of idea. Or that’s the impression they gave. Money was more of an issue than they let on, it split the family up. But they lived very well. They had a sunken living room, and from the floor to the ceiling were these picture windows. Out of the picture windows, we would see what’s behind me. Cocktail hour, dressing for dinner, and the view.
Interview, out on the Beulah Road.
José Aranda making camp. Rain comes later. Fountain, Colorado.
I came here to do the interview for this project because I have been searching for this landscape forever and all the writing that I have done and the kinds of yearnings I have to be in specific places, they always harken back here. My family moved very early in my life because they were extremely upwardly mobile and they wanted to get out of Pueblo. As a child, I didn’t know that Pueblo was anything to get out of. I thought it was a place where people loved me and my grandparents lived and our neighbors thought I was, you know, charming, and I could walk around our neighborhood in town, walk up the steps onto people’s porches and knock on the door, and they would open it, and in I would go for a visit. So for me, it was home. But my parents, they had a sense of how much money they couldn’t make living here in Pueblo and working in the family business. They knew its limits. And my father had differences with his father about how he was running the business.
Where we are is very close to what is today Imperial Cemetery. Imperial Cemetery is where my aunt is buried, and my grandparents are buried. My father wasn’t buried there, he preferred to have his ashes scattered. [I was reminded in Steamboat during the visit with Sandy and Tom that Tommy had gotten a hang gliding permit for us to go up into the mountains, to scatter his ashes. I didn’t know that detail. We went up bumping along in the back of his pick up. Tommy and Sandy had skied with my dad, and he’d treated Tom a bit like a son, giving business advice, cautioning him not to live only for the next ski day.] So we scattered the ashes partly in Steamboat, and my mom scattered them in other places, where they’d had adventures. I think that’s telling about where my father’s places were – they were many places. He loved Austria and Germany, he begin skiing the Alps as a young man and then returned into his 60s.
But Imperial Cemetery used to be my grandfather’s cemetery. It was called “Valhalla,” and my family was in the funeral business. They had a funeral home in town also called Valhalla. When my grandfather died, my aunt inherited that business. She had been in it for years already, and at that point my father and mother had been long gone to California. My aunt changed the name to the Adrian Comer Funeral Home. Everyone discouraged her. They told her no woman should put her name on a funeral home. And even though there were lots of funeral homes around that had men’s names, a funeral home my parents later bought was called J. A. Conrad and Sons . . . you could have a father and son company but not a woman’s name on the sign. She didn’t listen to that counsel, did it anyway, and she was great at her business, continuing until she retired in her mid 70s.
José Aranda. [Reading from interview questions] Given what you’ve been telling us, generally, what places do you feel comfortable in or welcome? Or not? What places are your places, your people’s places? Alternatively, on what land or lands, do you feel you belong or not belong?
Krista Comer. As a child, I understood that this is Indian country. I understood it because of the people I saw around me. I understood it because of some of the people who worked for my family. I understood it when we would be in town, or we would go to certain restaurants or to the infamous “Stuckey’s” – I understood we were related to Indian country, that Indian country was everywhere around us, Mesa Verde. But I didn’t have a concept of what that meant. And my parents certainly didn’t have a concept of what that meant. What they taught us was that this was our place. It belonged to us. And I felt that I belonged here and my early orientation and ontology about place is very core. I still feel I belong here. I feel what people have been talking about in these interviews: I feel the smell, the trees that are familiar, recognize the Sangre de Cristos are close, “present.”
“What my girlfriend drives”
José and I camped last night in a place that’s a little north of here. We camped not at the base of Pikes Peak, but in the long lead up to Pikes Peak. It’s undeveloped land. We camped there through a woman that we met through Hipcamp. I asked one of the guys there about his vehicle and he told me, “That’s not mine, that’s what my girlfriend dives.” That made me smile. I was in the right place! It was important to me to come back to Pueblo in a different way than the way I left, which felt located on the inside of the picture windows, looking at “a view.”
It was the wrong side, to be inside, that’s the feeling. It was great to be there last night, and I did feel I belonged to this land. And I say that, knowing that these are unceded Indian lands, and that I say that as a white person. And I say so not to dispute any sovereignty claims, but to try to come to terms with the ways in which I was raised to think this all belonged to me. I have a piece coming out in Western American Literature in August about “Staying with the White Troubles of Recent Feminist Westerns,” so I have been thinking about being white a lot. Coming from a certain amount of money, from aspirational backgrounds, the world really did seem to belong to me. Even as a girl. That is what I was raised with. Working class people, the working poor are not raised with that idea. José — you were not raised with this idea! So a lot of places seem to be my place. But when we moved, when I was six, to San Francisco, I will say that San Francisco did not seem to be my place. Cities in general have not seemed to be my place. I live today in Houston, Texas, and Houston is now my place, and is my place because my sons were raised there. Because Jose is from there, and his family is there now. We’ve lived there now a long time and I’ve made it a decision to be in Houston – again, Indigenous lands, Karankawa driven early – because it doesn’t make sense not to be from where you’ve lived for a long period of time, and where your children live. That doesn’t make sense to me. But that has been a harder belonging, a decision. When I was living on the beach in California, and when today I go to Galveston, those places feel like my place. And I’m sure they do in part because of the profound whiteness of beach culture in this country and globally, and in global cinema.
I was even thinking about this [long-sleeved Galveston] T-shirt I wore today mainly for sun coverage because it’s very hot. It’s 95 degrees, maybe? It’s really hot.
José Aranda. It’s on the hotter side of 95.
Krista Comer. [laughs] There’s a breeze fortunately.
I have on a lot of sunscreen and obviously a hat and sunglasses. I wore this shirt for sun coverage. But you know, Galveston is a place I now belong because of the children, we took them as children. Very, very early, swimming in the Gulf and feeling out the Gulf and the waters of the Gulf and what it’s like when it rains and you’re in the water. Lots of people complain about the Gulf, especially Californians, although my own family has learned about Houston over the years and does not stereotype it so much — which is important because when people stereotype Texas, basically they wipe out all the people who aren’t white when they assume the conservatism of Texas. There’s so many people who aren’t conservative, and so many people who aren’t white, and who have other languages than English. You know, the minority majority state status?!
Anyway, about Galveston, that will be a place that I will claim, because of the children, forever.
José Aranda. This sounds like a good moment to ask you about association of these places with the US West? Associations might be feelings, memory, body of knowledges, historical cultural legacies, language or sound legacies, sense of kin, and ancestry, any of which invariably might include violence.
Sunset . . . the prize.
Krista Comer. When I was growing up, I didn’t understand Pueblo as “the US West.” if you drive around, there’s a lot of commemorative wagon wheels and guys wearing cowboy boots. The more you get into the mountains, the Mountain West, certainly it’s marketed as the West. When I was growing up, I didn’t think anything about that. When I left California to go to Wellesley College in 1984, I was an “older student” there at 24. I thought of myself as being from California. I really began to understand by virtue of the culture shock, what it was to be on the East Coast with people who, well I was very different from most of the young women at Wellesley, or in Boston. I began to understand myself as… as from a different region. I thought of it as Californian and beach [where I lived when I left, and where I’d been involved in building beaches houses]. But over time, and particularly when I went to grad school, I understood it as being from the US West. I was trying to come to terms with where I was from, and my parents seemed to have been so mobile, and that wasn’t a question that was that important to them. What was important to them was a certain amount of adventure and adventure tales and adventure living.
When I moved to the East, people had a better sense of where they came from. It was a moment where Critical Race Theory was really entering university life and my own thinking. Like all of us in my circles, I had been influenced by Black feminism, early 1980s Black feminism, so I felt like a lot of people could understand where they came from, and they would talk about where they came from. And they would talk about it through race or through region or through family histories or legacies. And I really couldn’t do that. My first book, Landscapes of the New West, took off from that confusion.
I got interested in Wallace Stegner because he was one of the only writers I knew who talked about where he was from along with a sense of lack of credibility in East Coast contexts. He felt that he was subject to what he would call regional chauvinism. I really took heart from his statement that to know where you’re from is to know who you are. How to theorize this for myself as a feminist . . . I’ve been writing on that topic for years . . . and recently I wrote what is more abstractly “a theory piece” for the Susan Bernardin volume, “Standpoint, Situated Knowledges, Feminist Wests.”
. . . When I went East, I left behind my Western body actually, and that was pretty terrible. That’s pretty terrible. I’m asking other people these questions, so I know what the next question is of course. About feminism. And I guess I will say that when I left behind the West, in some ways I left behind how I had made peace with the fact that no place I was ever in was a feminist place. Every conversation that was even a little bit about, I don’t even know what I called it, I didn’t call it women’s rights. I don’t remember the early ways I started talking about “feminism.” But when I left those places in order to pursue something that was more intellectual, I left behind what was “the West,” and including my Western body, the way I had a relationship to the outdoors, to the way I spent my time, to having dogs, then not having dogs anymore.
José Aranda. You’ve answered most of the questions that you’ve asked others, but I want to take you back to an in-between place, that moment where you’re still living on the beach building houses, before you go University out East and start to engage with what feminism looks like in the East Coast. What was the feminism that you’ve encountered between the beach and between the East?
Krista Comer. Yeah, thank you for the question. I think it was about being strong in outdoor contexts. Talking back to men who were, you know… always better at everything outdoors. Having ideas as a woman and talking about those ideas, not being afraid to be a feminist . . . killjoy. I was such a feminist killjoy. [See Sara Ahmed on this term.] And it was a problem for all the people around me . . . Not wanting guys to pay for things for me. I never wanted that. . . . Autonomy, psychological autonomy, mobility autonomy. I think of all the times I drove back and forth from Oxnard to Steamboat, and then Steamboat to Oxnard or Oxnard up north, you know, Santa Cruz or points north of that. There was a way I was really trying to claim the feminist road trip for myself, or the convention of the road trip, I was trying to claim it in ways that were feminist. It was kind of a mess. I won’t say that I did it perfectly.
But, you know, one thing I love to say to students is you have the wrong understanding of the Civil Rights period and sexual liberation when you underestimate what a mess it was. How much confusion there was, and how much of a lack of sense there was of what people were trying to figure out. People didn’t quite know what they were doing, even though it was in the right direction. The Alice Walker book, Meridian, has always seemed to me to be a good representation of the mess of things. Because the book was engaged, it was politically engaged, but it showed the interpersonal relationships, what people did for certain causes, that were completely, in retrospect, misguided. I think I was trying to . . . it was very Western too what I was trying to do . . . I was never really trying to be a surfer and I knew people, girls I mean, like that who were – but I was always trying to be outdoors, writing in my journals, and there were very few girls or women that were really outdoors. I was always trying, I was always trying to get it for myself somehow, that experience and set of knowledges and do that in spite of the fact that as I write in the first blog “Heading Out,” you know, I didn’t succeed…
And my mom was trying to get it too by that point in her life. She was trying, taking my sisters and me camping on ambitious trips and… she was also trying to figure it out. My dad did not go on these trips. Early on, I don’t think there was much desire to figure out how to be outside of the picture window, but after a while, there definitely was, and my mom had my 4 sisters to pay attention to. But, you know, as much as I felt very responsible for my sisters, they weren’t my children and felt some autonomy and drive to go find the world for myself. And, I did. I did everything I could to control my life and eventually what it meant I did was to leave, was to leave that place because it couldn’t hold me. And it couldn’t sustain me. And you know, that was a terrible sacrifice actually.
Let’s end on a different note than “terrible sacrifice.” Coming back to this place . . . I mean, I did years of projects with the Institute for Women Surfers as a way to come back to the water, come back to that beach place I was ruptured from because I was chasing feminism. And this, here, to me is an earlier moment when I didn’t even yet have a sense of all those political overtones. I haven’t talked about my parents doing a certain kind of business in San Francisco in the 60s, you know, concerning the Vietnam War, and I’ve been writing about that for quite a while [but have not been ready to publish material]. But this place is before then, and just coming back to a sense of place, and a sense of what it feels like to be here. It’s great to come back, return outside of the picture window, to sleep out last night.