Summer 1973

When I was 13 years old I often rode my bicycle about six miles up Castle Creek to Conundrum Road.  One of my best friends, Sean Carter, lived just a short distance off Conundrum Road.  At the time they were so remote that their telephone service was still on a “party line.”  For those readers who are not familiar with that it is when all of the homes in a remote area shared the same pair of phone wires.  Although each of these homes had their own phone number, whenever a call was placed to one of the homes on the party line the phones rang in all of the houses.  Each resident learned what their distinct ring sounded like versus the calls made to someone else.  Over time the party line participants learned when to answer and when not to. 

For my friend Sean and his family they lived near two other homes and that was their neighborhood.  Every summer Sean and I would have the run of the woods and could play for hours on end and never bother anyone.  In the summer of 1972, when I was 12 years old a few more homes were going in near Sean’s house.  This was ok as they were still pretty far apart.  That summer another new resident moved into the trees, not too far from a new house which was about a half mile from where my friend lived.  This new resident had lived in the valley since the early 1960’s when Aspen became a favorite hangout for the Hippie generation.  He went by the name of “Mother,” and most everyone who lived in the valley knew him.  He was harmless and actually a very engaging person.  Well, Mother lived out of his van up in the trees and not far away was a very large, redwood tank.  The tank was kept full by a natural spring year round.  We were not sure how Mother came to have this tank, but we drank out of it whenever we passed by.

The following summer Mother moved on but left his tank behind.  For Sean and I this was an opportunity to have a new fort.  As soon as we discovered the abandoned tank we grabbed our tools consisting of shovels, an ax and a saw or two.  First, we drained all the water since a fort full of water would be no fun.  We also removed the pipe, crushed the opening to the spring and when the water kept flowing towards our fort we dug a trench and routed the water over to the road.  Next, we began our modifications, first by chopping a hole in it near the bottom.  Once all the water drained out we made the hole bigger so we could easily go in and out of our new fort.  Then we chopped a few windows in the side at about our eye-level as lookout ports.  The entire carnage took less than an hour as we were on a mission.  By the end of the day we had a pretty nice hang-out. We both agreed that we would be back next weekend.  We even left a few of our tools behind as we were sure they would come in handy on our next visit.

Later that evening, I received a call from Sean and I could tell that something was very wrong when he asked me if we knew about the tank in the woods.  Not knowing the situation at hand, I proceed to itemize all that we had done to it and inquired as to why he would ask such a “dumb” question.  It was at that point that I learned what we had done as his parents were on the phone, too, but I was unaware of that fact.

As it turns out this tank did not belong to Mother.  It was actually the water source for the new house off in the distance through the trees.  We had turned a very expensive tank into junk.  We had also destroyed a natural spring.  At first I thought we were going to be sent to Salida, Colorado, to the youth penitentiary.  Thankfully, the man who owned the tank turned out to be a very nice person and agreed that our thinking the tank was Mother’s made sense; but, we still had to pay for our bad deed.  The home owner agreed to fix everything and in return we had to spend the next couple of weekends stacking wood for his fireplace.  In retrospect, we got off easy.  However, I do find it ironic that years later Sean became a very outspoken member of Earth First.