Pearl River      This is a story of the blindness of revenge when politics punishes people.  Because a central player in this tragedy is Trump and his endless, extreme, and irrational capacity for revenge, it is a contemporary drama.  The surprising stage for this play is Rio Blanco County in the far northwestern corner of Colorado’s Western Slope.  Few likely know this area or anything about it, and, if they do, likely only recognize it having stumbled that way because of its closeness to Dinosaurs National Monument short miles away in Vernal, Utah.  Although the biggest town in this lightly populated county, larger than the whole state of Rhode Island, is Meeker, I know the area because of another small town called Rangely.

My family never lived in Rangely.  We actually lived some miles out of town in the company camp that was then run for employees and their families by the California Oil Company, now branded as Chevron.  They were drilling in a field in Rio Blanco and maintained a small refinery in Rangely as well.  My father was a bookkeeper there for five years until being transferred to help open their office in Irvine, Kentucky.  My brother Dale was born in Rangely.  I’ve only been back a couple of times.  Once after driving a car, I bought from a friend in the Bay Area, and spent the night in a worker’s boarding house after sitting in the audience of a school board meeting and listened to them speculate over the growth that might come from developing oil shale, which never happened.  Another time, with my family on what at the time was our annual western camping vacation and roots tour, we drove through.  The town had a minute of fame in the New Yorker some years ago because of the amazing acoustics found in an abandoned oil tank there, which was developed into a museum and music venue of sorts.  Mainly, Rio Blanco County was oil and cattle country.  The name Rangely was an example of a town telling it like it was.

Rio Blanco was in the news again and on the front page of the New York Times recently, which is the real point of this story.  This time it started with a huge fire, the fifth largest in Colorado history, that destroyed 137,800 acres, including a number of ranches and their grazing area.   The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) exists for just this kind of disaster.  The governor requested almost $30 million in aid. Normally, this would be routine, but not in Trump world.  The request for aid has been rejected twice now, last fall and again this spring.

Is this a hardball partisan problem?  No, the county voted almost 81% for Trump and only about 17% for Harris.  Folks don’t sluff off their citizen duties.  77% voted in the 2024 election.  The majority voted to continue to have legalized abortion, while opposing same-sex marriage.  They approved the Rangely school bond.  The largest margin, over 90%, opposed any ban to big cat hunting.  One of my indelible memories from my boyhood there, as well as the frequent trips we made back to Rangely for many summers, was seeing a huge mountain lion stretched over the city hall steps that had been killed to collect the bounty on them then.

Trump ignored their plea because the governor was a Democrat and he was protesting the fact that a former Colorado county clerk was serving a nine-year sentence for having tampered with a voting machine while trying to prove Trump won in 2020.  He was demanding that she be freed and, in his pique, more than willing to punish everyone in Rio Blanco County to satisfy his revenge.  Ironically, there is now a current dispute this summer, because the same governor commuted the clerk’s sentence and let her out of jail, which infuriated many in the state, although that hasn’t meant that Trump has pardoned the people of Rio Blanco from their undeserved punishment.

There’s little comfort for them that they are not alone.  As the Times reported, “As of June, Trump has issued 57 major disaster declarations in his second term, according to the Revolving Door Project, which scrutinizes the influence of money in politics.  The group calculates that the president has rejected 23 extreme weather requests, a majority from Democratic governors, including the one for Rio Blanco County.”

Come on, man, do right!