Sometimes volunteering can lead to big things.
For Esther Greenfield, it’s resulted in two books, a museum exhibit, the cover of a magazine and an upcoming PBS documentary.
She was a writer of a different sort in her professional career. Originally from Washington, D.C., Greenfield had worked as a speech writer for the chief of finance for the Department of Veterans Affairs as well as a personnel specialist.
“I was also given all the difficult letters to answer,” she said about her 27-year career with the federal government. “Sometimes to children, or just anything sensitive. Those were always hard. But because of that misery, I have this life now. I thank the VA every day.”
Greenfield got her love of history from her mother.
“When I was a little girl, my mother and I would get on the K4 bus and go to the Smithsonian,” she said. “I loved the dioramas, the jewels, the first ladies’ dresses. Sometimes she agreed to let me take off my little Mary Janes and slide across the floors in my little white socks.”
Her grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Palestine in the late 1800s, and that led to more history.
“They would tell stories about ‘How we came to America,’” Greenfield said. “My grandfather would tell about how he fell in love with Zaydie in about 1890. He was leaning against the wall of a drugstore and whistled at her. It was extremely racy for the time.”
When Greenfield and her husband moved to Durango in the late 1990s, she started volunteering for organizations such as the Center of Southwest Studies and the San Juan Mountains Association. At the center, she was asked to sort through the 8,000 photos donated by the Western Colorado Power Co., photos that depicted the fortitude of the men who electrified Southwest Colorado.
“It took about three years, and I just did it whenever I felt like coming in,” she said. “I enjoyed looking at people’s faces. Sometimes it would take a magnifying glass, because the photos were tiny.”
As she looked at the photos, she realized that most were taken by one man, Philip “P.C.” Schools, a superintendent at the power company.
“So then I became curious about P.C. Schools, and it was like the universe opened up,” Greenfield said. “I’m an accidental author.”
She had already done some historical research and writing for then Durango Herald columnist and editor John Peel.
“He wanted me to research a cowboy,” she said. “He turned out to be a bad guy. He killed a horse, beat his wife, scared his children. I credit John Peel for a lot of this success, because he took every story I turned in. It’s heady stuff to be told ‘Yes.’”
One of those stories was about Schools, A Powerful Look at Power. That article led to the next step, which was big, but not glamorous.
“I was scrubbing the toilet with giant yellow gloves shaped something like two rubber ducks on,” she said, “and the phone rang. I heard a man on the phone talking about my article. He got my attention saying something about publishing and then about my writing.”
The man turned out to be the director of publishing at GraphicArts Books in Portland, (Oregon).
“‘Your writing,’ he said, ‘is ...’” Greenfield said. “And that’s when the phone finally slipped out of my rubbery grip onto the floor. I never heard what wonderful things he was going to say about my writing.”
The book became Tough Men in Hard Places, using Schools’ photos to tell the story. It inspired a major exhibit at the Center of Southwest Studies and a cover story in Colorado Country Life. Now, filmmaker Jay Kriss of Inspirit Creative/Backdrop America Films is working on a documentary of the same name as part of a “Reel West” series he is creating for Colorado Public TV. It’s currently scheduled to air in fall 2016, Kriss said.
While the documentary will also include historic film footage and interviews with numerous people involved in the Western Colorado Power Co. story in addition to referring to Greenfield’s work, she’s pleased as punch Kriss bought the rights to her title for his documentary.
The publishing bug bit after Tough Men, and Greenfield went on to write her second book, Reading the Trees: A Curious Hiker’s Field Journal of Hidden Woodland Messages, which was released late this summer.
She was introduced to arborglyphs when she volunteered with Ruth Lambert, cultural program director of San Juan Mountains Association. The result of 17 years of hiking, 1,300 arborglyphs discovered and seven years of compilation, it includes tree-trunk carvings divided into categories such as Love in the Woods (nudes, women, messages of love), Wild Things (animals), Brands & Boundaries and Remember Me.
Photographs can’t capture many arborglyphs in their entirety because, as the trees they’re on have grown, the carvings have stretched around the trunk. So Greenfield has drawn them in her field journal as well as photographing them, and the drawings add color and clarity. A diehard researcher, Greenfield also learned more about the carvers and wrote short stories about the sheepherders and cowboys who were lonely and far from home.
“My greatest memory from all those hikes isn’t in the book,” Greenfield said. “It was 7 a.m. on a day in 2006, and I heard a noise. In a clearing, there were 12 coyotes in a circle howling, being led by a coyote puppy in the center. It went on for at least 30 seconds. There was no way I could capture the magic of that in a drawing or photograph.”
abutler@durangoherald.com
To read the book
Esther Greenfield’s new book Reading the Trees: A Curious Hiker’s Field Journal of Hidden Woodland Messages is available at Maria’s Bookshop, 960 Main Ave., and Between the Covers Bookstore, 24 West Colorado Ave., in Telluride.
