Trinidad, Colorado; David Mason & the Ludlow Massacre.

Where is everybody? That is the question you ask yourself, wandering the more or less abandoned streets of Trinidad, Colorado on a cool, hazy April morning. It's as though the Martians have landed and taken everybody away: it is America without Americans. Should you venture outward to the sprawl, there's some activity at the truck-stops strung along the frontage roads to I-25, and the usual array of junk food parlors, auto parts stores, big boxes, etc. But the only action I caught in downtown Trinidad was around the multiple stores selling weed, legal in Colorado. Trinidad is close to the New Mexico line. The town is marketing itself as a dope destination for Santa Fe and Albuquerque.
Trinidad was a mining town. Heavily Italian, back in the day. David Mason, former poet laureate of Colorado, is the writer to read in this part of the world. His powerful novel-in-verse Ludlow tells the stories of the Greek, Italian and Scots immigrant miners of southern Colorado, and the miners' strike in 1913-14 that culminated in the Ludlow Massacre.
What remains is this built town, which is wonderful, and proud, and lost. The built town speaks of a civitas no longer extant: it is a challenge to even think of yourself as a citizen in the strip malls that are the standard North American West landscape of loneliness and unease.