Amy Potter’s balcony offers a commanding view of Battlement Mesa, a Western Slope community named for the imposing geological formation. Most of the few thousand residents of the Grand Valley live there. Potter, a medical assistant, and her retired-cop husband used to live there, too. But a year ago they…
Last winter, the United States experienced the highest natural-gas price surge in its history, an increase of some 400 percent on the wholesale level. In response, the Public Utilities Commission approved several rate-hike requests by the state’s largest energy provider, Xcel Energy. One jump in January alone generated $361.6 million…
Go to GoTo.com, an Internet search engine that provides “sponsored” search results for America Online, Lycos, AltaVista and many other World Wide Web heavyweights. Type in “Scientology,” and you’ll get dozens of hits linking you to sites devoted to the Church of Scientology International. This is what you’ll find most…
“The next time you’re waiting on the concourse at Denver International Airport, you may want to avoid a new paperback named Decree,” this very column warned on September 16, 1999. At the time, even Decree’s Colorado author, G.H. Spaulding, agreed. Westword was “absolutely right,” he noted, “for those who are…
There’s nothing especially swashbuckling about Monk. “I’m a normal guy, and I have a normal job,” says the Boulder resident. “I’m in my mid-thirties, divorced, with a couple of kids. I don’t have dreadlocks. I’m not a typical hippie radical.” He is, however, a wanted man — by representatives of…
Father Knows Best In his prayers: Thank you for Steve Jackson’s beautiful story about Father Jim Sunderland, “War and Remembrance,” in the September 26 issue. It captured the essence of his soul, of how he relates to everyone fortunate enough to know him. Father Sunderland has touched the lives of…
This past July 22 began like any other Sunday for Father Jim Sunderland. He woke at seven o’clock and said his prayers while sitting in his big green easy chair. Help me help others today. Amen! He kissed the silver crucifix he’d been given when he took his vows 53…
Birgitta De Pree’s garden is a mirror of her eccentric personality. The square piece of land she tends in the Emerson Street Community Garden is circled by a fence of twisted branches; the sticks at the entryway are painted a lapis blue. Tibetan prayer flags tied to the makeshift enclosure…
Four activists sit on the arm of a 200-foot construction crane in lower downtown. As two push off and rappel into empty space, they pull down a seventy-foot banner that reads “Wage Peace Now” and bears the likenesses of Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai…
Life at Colorado Free University, a local institution that offers hundreds of classes in everything from Spanish to painting to flirting each month, isn’t quite as free and easy these days. The problem started with CFU’s September course catalogue, which features a ninja wearing a hood and sword. To those…
Fortunately for Coloradans, the biggest local story on September 11 and the days immediately thereafter wasn’t collapsing buildings or appalling casualty totals. Rather, it was the closure and subsequent reopening of Denver International Airport — a logistical nightmare that required immediate action here, as well as coordination with facilities across…
On a sunny day in 1974, I stood in the awestruck company of thousands of my fellow native New Yorkers as a tightrope walker named Philippe Petit crossed the dizzying void between the tops of the two towers of the World Trade Center. A quarter mile above our craned necks…
Firing Blanks A shot in the dark: What were you people thinking? Eric Dexheimer’s “Let Freedom and Gunshots Ring,” in the September 20 issue, gave way too much space to a bunch of blowhards shooting off not just their big guns, but their big mouths. What brave patriots! Not one…
After nearly two dozen surgeries in twenty years, Nyla Bailey thought she knew what doctors could do about her excruciating pain, which wasn’t much. They could make her feel worse, certainly. They could anger and humiliate her, labeling her a hysterical female — or, as one skeptical internist put it,…
When Ben Covalt moved into his small home in northwest Denver in 1996, he looked forward to renovating the house and turning the large yard into an oasis, a quiet retreat from the hassles of city life. Instead, he spent the next four and a half years in an escalating…
Suddenly, it was Groundhog Day. Sunday evening, ABC ran the very same Who Wants to Be a Millionaire that it had shown last Monday night, just twelve hours before the world exploded. Intended as a kickoff to Monday Night Football, whose first match of the season featured the Broncos and…
September 16, 2001, Indian Hills Here, we are far from trouble. No one would have said so during the wildfires last summer, but that was before what happened last week in the East. Now we know very well how safe we are. All of the rural foothills fire departments have…
On September 13, two major stories took place in Denver: Governor Bill Owens announced the grades earned by public schools across the state as part of the sweeping, much-discussed educational reform package put in place by the Colorado legislature, and Assistant Denver Fire Chief Charles Drennan Jr. was shot to…
In the days following the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., the majority of the sporting world, a place defined by its motion, stood still. Major League Baseball suspended play for nearly a full week — 91 games in all. “Who cares about baseball right now?” Rockies…
The Morality of the Story Past imperfect: I picked up the September 13 Westword to get some relief from the awful news on television and found myself engrossed by Jonathan Shikes’s “Forward Into the Past.” What an important moral that story on Camp Amache holds for all of us! It…
John Hopper got a job teaching history at Granada High on the day before school started eleven years ago. His predecessor had quit unexpectedly, leaving behind her students, her classroom and a single piece of yellow paper taped to the desk outlining her courses: world history, government, geography, U.S. history…
It’s 11 a.m., and two of the girls living in the treatment center in north Boulder are sleeping. The other four are still in their pajamas, lounging on couches in the living room and laughing hysterically as they recite lines from Sugar and Spice, the movie they saw last night…
