Sarah Haas, Nederland. This is a story about Hub Ned, one of Nederland’s newest and biggest buildings. Turning one-year-old in December and perched on the South end of town, the three-story building doesn’t loom so much as it imitates its hillside. Its angular tin exterior appears like a man-made cliff.
You can see Hub Ned from almost anywhere in town but unless you’re a tenant, you probably haven’t had a reason to visit its warehouses, private offices or co-working space. Still, you might have heard about what’s inside: the headquarters of African Basket Markets, a branch of Accounting Specialists and a bunch of other entrepreneurs at work with the fastest Wi-Fi in town.
A conventional story of a building would go on like this, setting the scene by attention to the surrounding details. It might describe how it smells new, like rubber and sawdust and still clean carpet, or it might go on about how it’s used, the way its co-working members sit staring into their computers with big muff-like headphones covering their ears. It might even hypothesize that these headphones are a rather necessary tether, considering the room’s abundant views of the continental divide that must constantly tempt the attention of workers.
This isn’t a conventional story however, because Hub Ned isn’t a conventional building and there are no conventional details. While Hub Ned knows the language of commercial architecture and steel beams, of business plans and returns on investments, it’s not its native tongue. No, the building is considerably more comfortable speaking in the language of the heart because this, Hub Ned’s story, is a love story.
Owners Steve and Jen Karowe met in 2010 when they were, well, old, which is Jen’s way of saying they were both at least 40. Over the hill and on the way down they were both serious and successful professionals who, despite their busy schedules, hadn’t even kind of given up on the idea of true love, even if they were beginning to wonder just where it was hiding.
If it’s possible, Jen knew she’d found the one before she’d even met him in the flesh, judging from the way Steve’s match.com messages made her laugh. Meanwhile Steve, who was equally smitten, was spouting about how glad he was to have met a woman who lived within a 50-mile radius of his Nederland home. Steve is a practical sort of romantic but a romantic, nonetheless. So, on their second date, Steve made a grand gesture and presented Jen with a bag full of leafy greens grown in his 8,000-foot-high garden.
As any mountain gardener will tell you, greens are pretty much the best we can hope for. With a short growing season, intense summer sunlight and an abundance of hungry critters, it’s neither simple nor easy to grow crops that flat-landers might take for granted. If Steve had had a ripe tomato surely he would have given it to Jen, but the pride and joy of that year’s fall harvest was considerably more mundane, although no less significant. For inside his plastic bag was not just spinach but a symbol of the richness of life plucked at its prime so he could share it with the woman he was coming to love. If only Steve could have grown Jen a pineapple.
It’s impossible to hear of the gifted bag of spinach without thinking of the pineapple at the heart of the musical Cabaret. Set in war time Germany the gifted fruit was a gesture of love from the aged Shultz to his beloved Fraulein Schnieder. Long invoked as a totem of joy and hospitality, the symbolism of the pineapple was reinvented in the war time setting, when fresh fruit was hard to come by. Given the circumstances, the pineapple became one with the sweetness of life, even better when shared with the one you love. As Fraulein sings, “If you brought me diamonds, if you brought me pearls, if you bought me roses, like some other gents might bring to other girls, it couldn’t please me more than the gift I see; a pineapple for me.”
And so it was for Jen and Steve, for inside the bag of spinach was also the seeds for the life that they would come to spend together. One year later the two would be engaged. Two years later, they would marry and begin remodeling Steve’s A-frame that he’d lived in since 1993. By the third year they would have their first child and move into their new house. In the fourth year they would buy the lot at 80 Big Springs Dr. so that Steve could bring his African Basket Markets business closer to home. After 18 years of commuting to Broomfield for work, a mountain headquarters was a dream come true.
“But the space was too big,” Steve says. “And it became apparent that we could build something big enough to house other businesses, too. But we didn’t just want to be landlords, we wanted to build a place that could support our community, that could create connections and we hope, as the space continues to grow, that the community will find a life of its own.”
And so, as this story of Hub Ned comes to an end, we find that this building, like the other buildings at 8,000 feet, is not just a setting to our scene, but a character with a story all its own. It’s one that will live and grow with new plots and successes, but one that will always be, at its heart, a love story.
A weekly column about locals living along the Peak-to-Peak. To suggest someone for a profile please email Sarah at mountainfolktales@gmail.com.
(Originally published in the December 6, 2018, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)
