Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Walden but had no idea it existed.

My old schoolmate Jason Slane said it best: "Stereotypes work because they are true." Of course that's just the surface of things.

I make fun of Walden. Growing up in trailers gives one license to.

I'll go deeper places soon, but when you pull into Walden you do see a lot of pick up trucks. There are cowboys, many of them rugged, older guys in huge hats that match their bellies. And down Main Street you'll see the shuttered businesses, the faded paint of hope gone by. It's a John Mellencamp song or, more appropriately, a country verse repeated over and over until it's all that makes sense anymore.

Don't judge a town by it's signage. There's a chance they may not give a damn.

I think there's about 500 people in Walden now. The whole county might be close to 900. There are many more cattle than humans.

That's just part of it though. People in Walden are like people anywhere else, and if there is a difference it's that they're more trusting. (Actually it's tough to say if they're more trusting, or if it's just too damn cold to turn off their car when they go to the store.) It's easy to lose that faith when you're living in the city. You lock your cars, you hide your valuables, you don't answer your door. In Walden, if someone knocks on your door you wonder why they even bothered. They should have just come on in and made themselves at home. I was just up in Walden, and I stopped by a friend's house. The door was wide open, there was music blaring and food on the table. I walked around and peered in every room, but no one was home. So I sat down on their couch and ate potato chips and drank beer.

Trust is a big part of living in Walden.

That's another stereotype that may not be true: the one where a redneck will shoot you if you stumble into his home. There's a good chance he'll first see if you want to hang out and drink a little bit. This is the attitude I still have, but I live in the Denver metro area. Telemarketers and door-to-door salesmen often have to tell me that they need to get going.

Making do.

The thing I like about Walden is its make-do attitude. They make do with what they have. The football team was 11 man, and then 8, and now 6. And sure there are shiny new Chevys and Fords gleaming throughout the county, but often you'll see some kid driving something that should have been scrapped a long time ago. If there were to be a commemorative quarter for the town of Walden, it'd feature a 1987 Chevy Cavalier plowing through four feet of snow.

The rodeo parade is the ultimate in doing well with what you've got. All of the county's emergency vehicles are summoned to add to the serpentine line of vehicles and animals. The safest place in the world might be Walden's rodeo weekend parade. There's at least one ambulance for every five people. I could make the claim that it's handy to have all the paramedics on hand because kids dart into the street to grab candy, but Main Street is large enough to avoid disaster. Main Street looks like it was built for large trucks, swathers and the hustle and bustle of business. Now it's for people stopped right in the middle to have a conversation.

Once the parade takes a left and disappears, the untrained onlooker might think it were over. Not so. It turns around and comes back. The parade returns for another pass, and often with cars and random beasts and and confused people just trying to get to Steamboat that merged with the march along the way.

Dad, they're not wearing seatbelts.

Rodeo weekend in Walden is not for parents who freak out. Your kids will get mauled by mosquitoes and high-fived by drunks. They'll get picked up and coddled by middle-aged women you've never met, and all that lecturing about seat belts and safety kind of goes bye-bye in a pickup with a bed full of kids. Or someone just out of diapers riding a farm animal.

What it is good for is eternal youth. It's the only place where I've seen five generations in the same bar. Drinking may not be the best thing to hand on down, but that's not all that gets passed. The younger folks get a nod of confidence, some kind of pat on the back for enjoying life, and the older folks get an opportunity to see that the world isn't as screwed up as they thought it was. A college kid getting a hug from his friend's grandmother sends a gentle jolt about both of them being all right.

For once I spent so little time in the Stockman Bar all I have are pictures of the beautiful outside.

Sometimes I'd get overwhelmed by being back home, and with enough cheesy pride tell the boys, "You know, when your dad was a little boy he lived here." They'd look at me with suspicion that I was ever young, or they wouldn't acknowledge me at all because horses were walking down the street.

Why, yes boys, I am *sniff* from here. And you are too.

It's not uncommon, I'm guessing, for a parade to blare by while a guy gets lost in the haze of his worries. But if there's anyplace you want to snap to, it's under a big blue sky with all these people making do. Just like you they're shaking off a long winter--whatever your winter is--for a day in the sun.