Our
local Catholic minister can relate to the locals because
he's out doing the same things we do. He builds homes and
carries a carpenter's belt with the best of them. His
adaptation to the mountain environment reminds me of the
historically famous Father Dyer. (Father Dyer was
actually a Methodist preacher whose real name was John
Dyer, but he was affectionately referred to as 'Father Dyer'
by the Breckenridge community during the nineteenth
century.)
Father
John took off his tools and stopped working on drywall
in order to spend some time with me. I began by
asking for clarity over my confusion about whether he is a
preacher or a contractor.
Well,
some I have talked to think I should be spending more
time doing churchly things. I just look at churchly things
as not being spiritual things. The things that have driven me have to do with
life itself—to participate and share life as completely
as one can. Life itself is what church is all about. Many
times just being involved in things outside the
church—even with people not in the church—has given me a
deep appreciation of what I'm living and the life other
people are living. I guess I don't see Jesus as being that
type of a person either, one that was doing just churchly
things. He was one who was involved in the lifestyles in
the nitty gritty trenches of what life was all about. And
I believe I should do that too. It's not just something
that I force myself to do because that's what I believe.
This is where I enjoy spending my life and how I enjoy
spending my life. I think one of the things that kind of
motivated me to be ordained was the
fact that I understand life as not
being too complicated—just sharing life with
other people, but at the same time sharing it by living
their lives with them.
I also wanted to bring this other dimension of my friendship and my
contact and closeness with spirituality into my life—to bring that into the other
days, not as something I preach on Sunday and then go talk to the `nice' people and the people that the preacher
comes in contact with. It's kind of like I'll preach to
certain society on weekends. Then the rest of the week I'm
`preaching' to the rest of the people—the drywallers and
the carpenters, and the people that are doing other kinds
of things in their lives. I try to touch that part of life
too. I don't consciously do that, it's just something
that's part of my life. All my life I've lived in places
for just a few months and for years my dad was in the
military service and we lived two years here and three
years there. All my life it seemed as if I'd set down
roots anywhere and this was the first time I came to a
place where I lived in one place over a few years. It's
really a great thing to be able to go into a store and the
proprietor knows you, driving down the road and somebody
says hi to
you or honks their horn or flashes their lights. I go into
Safeway and the checker knows who I am. It's just a whole
way of living which seems so much more comfortable than
going in and dealing
with strangers and being among strangers.
When
I first came up I did a lot of skiing. I've been skiing
since I got to Colorado in '61. So when I got up
here in '78, I skied an awful lot. The last couple
of years I
haven't skied so much for a couple of reasons. My knee
has torn cartilage and I just think they've never
been strong anyway. I'm getting older and I can hardly bend
over [he laughs] to go to bed. When I used to ski in the
sixties, I never had good boots or anything like that. My
feet were a little frozen from skiing back in the early
days.
My
favorite thing is the summers. I like to get out,
especially higher up. I like to do some mining at the mine
where I've been working for about five years. Well, I find gold
every year and found a couple pounds this year. I do
placer mining and that includes dredging and panning. I
have twelve of them and one's right off the highway,
just below Hoosier pass.
When
I first started gold panning about, I didn't know whose
property it was. When I first started panning out there,
it was pretty good. So I got out the little sluice box I had
made and started running stuff through it. A guy came
down and asked me how I was doing. I said, `Well, I'm doing
fine.'
He
asked, "Are you finding any gold?"
I
said "Ya, sure." I got a vile and showed him my gold and
he said, "Well this is the first time in years anybody
has told me they've found any gold. Any time I ask anybody
else they say, 'Oh, no.'" "This is all my property,"
I said. "Oh, I'm sorry, I'll pack up.
"
He
said, "No, just tell me what you find."
And
I said, "Sure, no problem."' Since then we've gotten to be real
good friends.
About
three years ago I leased ten acres from him, mineral
rights for ten acres. I went through all the state
regulations and everything. Got a state permit. I had some
money at the time and invested in equipment. We put a lot
of dirt through there. Somewhere between thirty to fifty
tons a day.
"Well,
we're not doing it anymore. (He laughs about the recent
drop in the price of gold.) There's plenty of gold there,
but its not worth working at the prices that they're
paying right now. The price of gold just went back up to
$500 the first of the week.
"My
future in Summit County will probably be pretty limited.
I'm not sure they're going to be able to find somebody
else to come up here. I don't know if that's even always a
consideration when they move you someplace. They just
figure eventually they'll find somebody to come up here.
"We
use to do a lot more traveling out of the county to take
care of parishes. I used to take care of the Fairplay
parish for five or six years and then that was changed
over to a Colorado Springs guy. I would say two Masses
here in the morning and then drive over to Fairplay and
say one.
"The
difference was night and day. The people are just
a whole lot different from
there to over here. More rural, more country type over
there. In comparison to Denver, I see both as a lot slower
paced environment, and I love it up here. I love that
aspect of being up here in the mountains. I don't think
that I would really be super happy in a place where I had
to have the pressures associated with the city. I think it
would be difficult for me to live there. It would take a
year at least and maybe two years to get over the shock.
#
# #
Father
John Kaufman has been pastor for the Catholic Church in
the mountain community of Kremmling, Colorado, since 1986
and loves it there. Most of his mining activities have
ceased with the exception of an underground mine in Idaho
Springs, Colorado.
