STARTLED IN COLORADO

Out of nowhere the words: "Ludlow Massacre Site," which we weren't even looking for, Exit 27, off I-25, heading down to New Mexico, and suddenly we're rattling down a dirt road driving toward the mountains when we saw the battered sign, and then, beyond the spot where the tent colony stood, before it was burned to the ground by Rockefeller and his National Guard, appeared, oh-so-ghostly, the monument itself, beautiful, serene, incongruous in this barren spot, imprisoned by a fence, then surrounded by another, and, chiselled into granite, terrible facts I already knew: April 20, 1914....18 dead...of whom 11 were children...," along with the statues of the miner, and mother holding her child, and in my heart the thunderstorms that had been threatening all day began to rumble, and I turned to Sandy and said, "What do they need all these fences for, they kind of ruin things, don't you think?" and that was almost a year before the statues were beheaded. "The bloodiest conflict in American labor history" The monument was vandalized the year after our visit. Ludlow, Colorado 2004

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