Review: 'Cheap Land Colorado,' by Ted Conover

In "Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge," his new book of immersive journalism, Ted Conover returns to his home state to explore the San Luis Valley and the people who live there. The valley's flat, arid plains are bordered by sand dunes and the Sangre de Cristo mountains and are populated by hundreds of people in remote trailers and cabins, living off the grid.

You might think it a bleak place, so windswept and isolated, but Conover grew to love it.

"I liked the low density, the slower pace, how affordable most things seemed," he writes. "It was a beautiful, wild and mysterious world."

Conover grew up in Denver. An author and a journalism professor at NYU, he has spent a lifetime steeping himself in unusual and fascinating situations. His first book, "Rolling Nowhere," in which he rides the rails as a hobo, began as his senior thesis at Amherst College.

Since then he has ridden with truck drivers in Africa, tracing the path of AIDS; crossed the Mexican border with migrant workers; attended raves in Minnesota. His 2000 book, "Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing," won a National Book Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Over the years, Conover has mastered the difficult balance that first-person reportage requires; he is a character in the story — an observer, participant and narrator — but the story is not about him.

"Cheap Land Colorado" opens with Conover knocking on doors, volunteering for a nonprofit that offers assistance to isolated residents — firewood, clothing, whatever they need. He is open-minded, but wary. "A lot of people live out here because they do not want to run into other people," he notes. Their driveways are barricaded with gates and chained dogs, or posted with "a rifle-scope motif that says, 'IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU'RE WITHIN RANGE!' "

Initially, Conover is there to report for a magazine piece, but he finds himself fascinated by the area and returns again and again for years, eventually buying his own five-acre plot.

The strength of this book lies in Conover's voice, confident, observant, nonjudgmental. He seems to find everyone interesting. Still, he recognizes "the needy are not always the good."

The book's structure doesn't follow a strict chronology, nor does it follow one main character; readers expecting a traditional nonfiction narrative might be slightly at sea, at first. While the arc of the book is roughly chronological, the chapters are thematic.

Off-gridders, he writes, live here for a multitude of reasons. "Most seemed to be escaping more typical American lives that had become unsustainable, whether because of too many bills or too many disappointments," he writes. "This part of the world is a good place for fugitives or others who want to disappear; neighbors tend not to be intrusive and law enforcement sometimes seems barely there."

Off grid doesn't mean out of touch, though, and folks have generators, wind turbines and solar panels, Wi-Fi and cellphones. They post on Facebook; they send texts. When Conover writes a piece for Harper's magazine about the valley, many residents read it online.

The photo on the book's cover is of Conover's land — his trailer, his blue shed, his view of Blanca Peak. He admits that his "city-loving wife" back in New York doesn't quite get what it is that draws him here. But after years of his visiting, the land has become part of him.

"It was quiet! I owned it. My newfound independence relaxed me."

One more reason to live off the grid.

Laurie Hertzel is the senior editor for books at the Star Tribune.

Cheap Land Colorado

By: Ted Conover.

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $30.