Sarah Haas, Peak to Peak.   I found out about Stevie LaRue from a friend on Facebook, his name accompanied by a short message that said it all: “This guy has a lot of mountain folk tales.” So, on a rainy Tuesday, I got in my truck to drive an hour along the Peak to Peak and down Highway 7 to Lyons. The drive was perfectly fall, perfectly melancholy, dotted with seasonal pops of yellow aspens as if filling in for the absent sun.

The moments before an interview are always a strange experience as I ready myself to meet a stranger where they’re at, hoping to leave an hour or so later, on more intimate terms. Walking from my truck to Stevie’s house I wished the drive hadn’t been so sullen, that I wasn’t knocking on his door such a solemn guest.

But walking through his door was like going through a portal of joy. First there was Bruno, a short, thick and brindled pit bull who licked my feet insatiably. Then there was the place itself — a small one bedroom laid out like a train car. From edge to edge the place couldn’t have been more than ten feet across and every square inch was covered by Stevie’s stuff.

The walls looked like the great French salons from the 1800s’s, covered in music posters, photographs, framed artwork, and sporadic garlands. The lights on the high ceilings were softened by hanging tapestries and the room was spot lit by lamps in every cranny. Stevie had couches running perpendicular to the long side of the space, creating little activity nooks, a place to watch the local news, to play CDs, to make art.

“I like to feel surrounded by all this stuff,” he’d tell me later, but by then I’d already felt how good it was to be wrapped in such a loving curation of objects and art. “It’s the stuff of my life and I love it.”

We sat down in the art nook where Stevie paints rocks and, surrounded by paintbrushes and jars, he started telling stories, one after another after another. Even with so much to look at, it was all I could do to stare into his grey-blue eyes, unblinkingly, rapt in his tales.

“I came out here when I was 24,” he begins. “I was tired of all the crap going on back home in Dayton. We did a lot of crazy stuff, like running [illegal things] from one side of the city to another in a Volkswagen van without any headlights,” which was fun, he says, until it wasn’t. In the nick of time, some friends came back from a summer trip to Colorado where they’d stumbled onto a little place called Ward.

“They said they’d lived in tents just outside the town and swore they’d stay there forever,” Stevie says, “Which lasted until late September when their tents collapsed in a snow storm and they decided it was just about time to go.”

For Stevie, Ward filled him with a sense of manifest destiny, so he worked hard that winter, saving up $150 to fund his first trip to Colorado in 1971.

He arrived in June and found some nice trees edging a meadow just north of Brainard Lake, a good place to call home. So, he set about building a ramshackle tree house, covered with tarps, where he’d live for the next three summers with a Siamese cat named Blue.

At this point in his stories, it strikes me that this apartment, concrete foundation aside, is his grown-up version of a treehouse with a fort like feel that perfectly reflects it’s 73 year old inhabitant.

“It took me all these years, but I finally realized why God put my on the planet,” Stevie says. “To spread joy and happiness.”

“Have you ever been unhappy?” I ask, perhaps naively.

“No.” He didn’t even hesitate.

Sure, Stevie experienced all the things that adults like to grumble about; he had to work hard, he got divorced, he had to move out of the house that he’d built with his own two hands, but at every turn his perspective is cheery. He got to spend thirty years working in forests, cutting down beetle kill, teaching kids how to use chainsaws. He saw fires ladder up through ecosystems and, in fighting them, earned enough money to build a house.

His ex-wife is still his best friend and she still lives in their house in Ward where they raised two children of whom a father couldn’t be prouder.

Before I leave, I ask Stevie about a few objects that caught my eye, like his seven-pointed star of a belt buckle, which he got for $18 from a silversmith in Ward in 1972. But it turns out it’s what I couldn’t see that he really treasures, hundreds of music posters and CDs he’s collected over the years, almost all signed, filed away in drawers. As he flips through them he points at the people pictured, lovingly, as if it was a family photo album. He goes to a lot of bluegrass shows (a lot) and he says he always stands near the stage and dances like a fool.

On the drive home I remember the old adage that it’s only the wise who admit they are fools and only a fool would love life as much as Stevie LaRue.

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 September 13, 2018, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)