When, in 2022, I saw that immersion journalist Ted Conover, who practices what he calls “research by participating,” had published Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge, I assumed it would be something like a twenty-first century Walden: maybe a little tougher, a little more (as the title suggested) edgy, but essentially another meditation on what the natural world can teach us about ourselves and our follies. Thoreau was also an “off-gridder” (a milder sort) and I looked forward to the kind of transcendental insights that Thoreau dished out in 1854. The dust-jacket blurbs called it “profound” and “deeply engrossing” and I was ready to learn about what Conover’s time in the San Luis Valley could teach me. If I could better appreciate human experience from a 65-acre pond in Massachusetts, imagine what I could learn from a valley in Colorado the size of my home state of New Jersey.
Here’s the video version of the interview:
But Cheap Land Colorado was not the book I expected. It’s far better.
Like Thoreau, Conover conducts an experiment and describes his experiences, making sense of them in hindsight. Thoreau wanted to “to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms” and report what he had found; Conover wanted to reconnect with a part of Colorado he first saw as a kid that that “looked like fake scenery from a movie” and learn about the people who chose to live there. (As he states in the interview, people do not end up in the Valley by chance.) So he went, but not as a playacting cowboy or drive-by anthropologist. Instead, he volunteered for La Puente (“The Bridge”), an organization that supports those in the Valley who need a hand as they face poverty, drugs, and all kinds of trouble. He bought his own plot of land and a used trailer for $4,000 and moved there. His experience as an NYU journalism professor living off-the-grid may sound like the stuff of a wacky, out-of-his-element movie—but it’s not. At one point, it’s almost a matter of life and death. As Swankie tells Fern in Nomadland, “You could die out here.”
Conover presents those he meets as interesting Americans who, for a variety of reasons, have moved to a place that, as his epigraph says, is beautiful if you know how to look at it.
“I wanted to stick around long enough that I could feel fairly certain I had no delusions. I wanted the view from the ground—close up, first person, continuous, ongoing … At a time when more and more people seem to believe that almost anything can be true, I wanted a book that could be fact-checked, populated by people who are indisputably real.” –Ted Conover, Cheap Land Colorado
In 2022, I interviewed Ted on the New Books Network. When I told him about Pages and Frames and asked him to name a film he wanted to discuss in light of Cheap Land Colorado, he suggested Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020). We talk about what the film gets right about life off-the-grid and how it dovetails with his own work. Ted also speaks about earning the authority to write about his neighbors and why he always resists preaching to the choir. He’s a truly interesting person with insights about the lives of those he’s met and the challenge of capturing those lives for his readers.
Cheap Land Colorado comes out in paperback on July 30. It’s a terrific book. Thank you, Ted Conover, for the conversation. You can visit Ted’s official website here to keep up with his latest work, including a recent and captivating piece about off-grid deaths published in Outside.
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