My maternal grandmother was a formidable woman. I remember a three hour canoe trip down the Ausable where, as passengers and myself as perhaps fifteen, I elected to teach her how to shoot craps. She listened to my explanations of the rules and my rudimentary understanding of the probabilities associated with the game. She agreed to “learn by doing,” we knelt in the middle of the canoe and rolled time after time. I was amazed at her capacity for instant understanding of the complexities that I had just taught her, for she beat the shit out me. As we pulled the canoe out at the landing she said, “You can’t teach your grandmother how to suck eggs. ”

Like this written snapshot of his grandmother, George can capture the essence of a person in one image, and so it is his portraits that are, at least for me, most striking.

A 2007 self-published book of his work, entitled: George Stranahan: Pilgrim and Philosopher, opens with the following summary of George: “George has photographed through sixty five years of his pilgrimage which is now permanently located in Woody Creek, Colorado. The pilgrim’s photographs reflect, we believe, a bit of what it is like to ‘embark on a quest for moral significance or some higher purpose such as truth.’”

Almost every one of these photographs portray people and objects removed, alone, silenced, abandoned: dirty plates and forks left after a party; a woman with her body slumped over her legs, back exposed, in a drained, free-standing tub; an old couple at a restaurant, sullen, staring at nothing, in separate directions; a wrinkled, white blouse hanging in an old, brick building’s open window; a topless woman in jeans sleeping face-down in a field of tall weeds; empty chairs, empty tables, empty rooms; unkempt cemeteries; a dirty, questioning Nepalese boy; a topless woman in a skirt with a laced hem, bending over an unmade bed, taken from behind with her right breast partially exposed.

We each have many shards of broken stories that make up our memory, and we take these shards and build a mosaic out of them that is the story as we tell it now. It is not just one memory into one story, but many fragments of memories rewoven into a larger and more meaningful story. I think that our reconstruction of fragments of stories into a remembered story is a better representation of what happened⎯ not factually what happened but what happened to that person’s soul⎯than any video camera or lie detector could have produced.

And photographs never lie? They too are shards, records of a moment; and how I have chosen some, rejected others, and arranged them out of order is part of that mosaic. I am trying now to mentally move back from the mosaic to a distance where the shards blend smoothly into a picture; and what is that picture? As I squint the shards blend yes, but so also the image blurs, and I can’t get the picture. And perhaps that’s for the best. “We can only see as far as our headlights ….”

Among all the projects George is working on simultaneously, the cataloguing of all his photographs takes utmost precedence.

He says to Mirte and me at one our People’s Press meetings in an Aspen Chinese restaurant, “I have to do my printing. I have to do that work. I’m going to die slumped over an Epson printer. I used to think I was going to die digging in an irrigation ditch, shoveling, have a heart attack in the hot sun, but no…the problem with a dark room is, How does anybody know that they should come to check the dark room to see if there’s a body on the floor? Because you can’t just walk into a dark room. You have to knock and get permission.”

George has been thinking about memorializing himself and his work for some time now. A few years ago, he hired Carrie Click Kallstrom (who is now a part of People’s Press) to edit the same documents he has provided me. She made some headway, but for some reason the effort was lost along the way. And before then, in September 2001 (before or after 9/11 I’m not sure), he hired Lori Tullberg-Kelly, owner of Pit Bull Marketing, to develop a strategy for marketing himself. As one of her projects, Lori sent out a letter to a group of people George “pulled out of his Rolodex.”

…Over the years George Stranahan and I have been business partners and collaborated on a myriad of projects. Currently we are in the planning stage of marketing George’s upcoming ‘philosophical memoirs’ and in a broader sense, the marketing of George Stranahan himself, that will allow us to tie together all of his sundry endeavors in a way that makes sense to the world-at-large, if possible.

In this vein, I am asking for your help and insights regarding George. You have all had dealings, both business and personal, with George over the years and I feel your perspectives to be invaluable in answering the daunting question ‘Who is George Stranahan?’ So, it would be most appreciated if you would spend some time and thought grappling with this question and let me know what honestly and candidly comes to mind.

In this Focus Group Analysis report, Lori writes, “I received replies from 8 of the 20 participants (including myself), coming from Karl Stauber; Molly Stranahan; John Hickenlooper; Ed Bastian; Michael Moore [not the documentary filmmaker]; Michael Cohen; Deborah Schoeberlein.”

Here is the reply from his eldest child, Molly Stranahan:

George Stranahan is a seeker. He is searching for understanding of the world, for truth and for justice. He has looked for the answers in nature, in physics, and in his photography. Education is one of his missions, because it is a way to look for answers. Much of his life has been focused in increasing his knowledge, and he is damn smart, so he knows a whole lot about a whole lot of things.

George Stranahan is a fighter for justice. He loves to go up against the powers that be. And he has changed the world. He transformed physics by creating the Aspen Center for Physics where physicists come together to share their ideas and work, creating synergy. He has empowered people to change their lives. There is his legacy as a “rebel educator” and how he influenced many children who attended the Aspen Community School who know how to find their own answers to their own questions, and knew was someone who believed in them. George created the community of Woody Creek, first by creating the Woody Creek Tavern as a gathering place, and then by bringing people together to discuss their concerns, and ultimately by creating the Woody Creek Caucus.

George has also created a family – he has had three wives, and I think he is still trying to understand marriage. He has six children and helped raise three others and he has six grandchildren [today he has nine, with one on the way]. And we all try to understand him.

Ultimately, I think what George is really searching for is love. And by that I mean knowing he is unconditionally accepted. That he is loved not for what he has done or given, or how smart or funny he is, but just for being himself. And he has it, even though he doesn’t know it. Because no matter what he does, I for one, love him, just for being my Dad.

Towards his own parents, George is more critical than his daughter of him, and I would say, for good reason. Although, like all of us, his parents too must have been seeking unconditional love from those too who did not give enough of themselves. Then, I wonder, if unconditional love is truly within human capacity. There are always conditions, even if it is simply to love in order to be loved in return.

My friend Lynne lived down the street, a couple of minutes further on the school bus route. She too was mothered by an employee; in her case, simply named “Nurse.” That, too, was unremarkable to me, and I too called her Nurse – she had no other name.

In the perspective of Evolutionary Psychology my parents followed the imperative of mating, though I understand from later snips of information perhaps not in great agreement about frequency or violence. They produced six children, the last perhaps being the only “accidental.” Did was a woman’s right activist. I remember the several day visit at the founder of Planned Parenthood. My parents weren’t innocent of birth control – though I recall a moment with a birthday party balloon when my mother exclaimed in disgust her revulsion with things “rubber.” I read that now as condoms, but who knows for sure.

So, I believe my parents made myself and my brothers and sisters by conscious choice as well as sexual urgency. The child rearing, the business of bringing us to the age of our own reproductive capacity was farmed out to Miss Joss. I have to believe that Miss Joss had instructions for our reading and was held accountable for them. I never overheard either the instructions or the feedback: “good job” or “don’t do that again.” If Miss Joss was accountable to Did, we were accountable to Miss Joss. She called the shots. At no time was there an appeal to the higher authority, her employer. “Miss did blah blah.” None of this was unremarkable, then or now.

There were servants at the Carranor Club, at the country club, and is my friend’s house too; adults with the “power” that all adults have over children. They could order us around, tell on us. Because they were our monitors, they were the most likely to know our secrets – if you like, they were the Screws of our lives. If mom and dad were the warden of our penitentiary – our venue of penance, perpetual penance of non-adulthood, then the servants were the guards, the Screws, of our everyday activities.

Last week I experienced George as the supreme elder. We (Carrie, Daniel, Mirte, George and myself) sat around the table at the Woody Creek Community Center and shared our concerns with the direction of People’s Press and its possible acquisition of an established, local publishing company while collaborating with a local bookstore. Everything was moving too quickly, and it seemed quality and a strong foundation would be sacrificed. I directed the flow of conversation.  George listened, and let us speak. When we were done with our kvetching, he delivered a solution that none of us had considered, but one that almost completely mitigated our risks and costs, and would allow us to proceed more organically. We have yet to see how the other parties respond to this new proposal, but for now it is something we as a group are much more comfortable proceeding with. By the end of the meeting, I felt I had been the one trying to teach my grandmother how to suck eggs.

There were two competing motivations – one, to figure out the system, get what we wanted in spite of the system, etc. and this meant knowing and understanding the servants, which led me to empathy for their lives. I believed them, as now, that my parents were kind and gentle masters. And the servants were cheerful rather than resentful in their work. But the work is not like a regular job where the employee is a player within a productive organization, providing a service or product that competes in a market. One might claim that the servant frees up the master from the daily drudgeries that they might be vastly more productive with the time thus freed. But the fact is that a regular job employee does things for the employer that either the employer cannot do, or that the employer is doing something else essential to the organization’s mission. The servant does what the master could do and chooses to pay for it instead.

There is a distance in George’s photography, and in his relationships. But it is the distance which allows him to rise above assumptions, to view life at a bird’s view – big enough to make an impression, yet small enough to hide.

Posted in chapters | No Comments