The end of summer is always a little sad, but this year it felt especially so. During the last three days of August, three people I care about died unexpectedly. I want to tell you about one of them.
Ed Marston died of complications from West Nile virus on August 31. The last time I saw Ed was at a community arts event in my town a few weeks before his death. He looked healthy and fit and we talked at length. He told me he was he was back to hiking and feeling recovered from his heart attack earlier in the year. The surgeon who’d done his bypass surgery was a Vietnamese refugee with a remarkable life story, and Ed spoke fondly of her and her many accomplishments. I had no idea that I’d never see him again.
Marston moved to our little rural county in western Colorado in 1974 with his wife Betsy and their two children. A former physics professor born and raised in New York, Ed was transformed in his adopted home. He and Betsy founded two newspapers in the mid-70s and early 80s and in 1983 Ed became the publisher of High Country News, with Betsy at his side as editor. The duo built HCN into a must-read publication covering topics like endangered species, public land use, climate change, the environment and federal land agencies in the West.
During the 19 years that Ed served as publisher at HCN, he mentored and trained countless journalists. But that’s not how I knew Ed. I knew him as a pillar of our small and quirky community. He wasn’t the guy who bitched and moaned about the state of things. He was the one who rolled up his sleeves and got to work doing something about it.
The thing about Ed was that he showed up. He was present and he participated. He cared about ideas, but he also cared about people and he wanted to make his chosen community the best place it could be. He had core beliefs, but he was a listener with an open mind. He was capable of changing his opinion, a particularly admirable trait in these polarized times. As Lisa Jones wrote in a 2002 profile of her former boss, Marston wanted “to see the West become a more tolerant place – a place of ideas, not a place where you shoot (or dam, or log, or sue) first, and ask questions later.”
Ed served on the boards of the Paonia Chamber of Commerce and Solar Energy International, and he spent 18 years as an elected member of the Delta-Montrose Electric Association co-op board. He was also a fierce protector of public access to public land. He stood up to oppose “anyone — no matter how powerful – who used political influence to try to close off access to wilderness,” wrote Betsy in notice about his death. She went on:
Ed loved to think about how to solve problems, and he sometimes found Delta County a frustrating place to get things done. He thrived on conversation and was never shy about asking people about their lives. He also belonged to a book club that he found stretched his mind. A city kid, he said that rural life had brought out the best of him. He was a hiker and appreciated living close to the natural world. Most of all, he was grateful that he and his family chose, 44 years ago, to make a leap of faith and take “a year off” to move to the small town of Paonia.
People traveled from across the country to attend Ed’s memorial service, but it was the huge showing from the local community that struck me most. This was a man who left a mark in his place. He was (in Betsy’s words), “a burr in the side of the U.S. Forest Service during the 1990s,” yet he had a remarkable capacity to speak across the political divide and make friends with people he disagreed with. Knowing this about him, I was not entirely surprised to see Mike Mason, a Republican running for the Colorado State House who has stated that “global warming, sea level rise and CO2 is just one big power trip,” paying his respects at Ed’s service. The next week, Mason wrote in the local newspaper that “I am a better person having known Ed.” I feel the same.
The day after Ed’s memorial, I went running high on the Grand Mesa with a friend who’d come in for the service. Ed was on our minds and as I drove back down the mountain, I turned on our local public radio station just in time to catch the last of an interview with Ed recorded a few years back. He talked about the community, local politics and the changes he’d seen over the years. As the interview finished, the audio faded into a live rendition of May the Circle Be Unbroken, performed by a band in the studio, and it felt like the entire listening area was shedding collective tears.
Photo of Ed, Betsy and Buster (Ed named all his dogs Buster) courtesy of Ed Marston’s Facebook page