Nucla has a reputation as a tough town. It boomed in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, when the region’s uranium mining and processing thrived. But the nuclear industry collapsed after the Three Mile Island accident, in 1979, and the population continues to drop in Nucla and its sister town of Naturita, which is four miles away. In both these towns, the per-capita income is less than fourteen thousand dollars a year, a little higher than half the state figure, and only eight per cent of the adult population holds a college degree. This year, the school board decided to switch to a four-day school week, because of lack of funds. There’s only one restaurant in Nucla, one hamburger joint in Naturita, and one bar for both towns. It’s called the 141 Saloon, named for the state highway that passes through Naturita. On a Thursday night I’m the only customer, and the bartender, a woman named Casey, tells me that she just bought a three-bedroom house in Nucla for fifty-three thousand dollars. That’s a mortgage of two-fifty a month.

“Only problem is the siding is asbestos,” she says.

“Is that a big problem?”

“It’s not a problem as long as you don’t touch it. Asbestos lasts forever.” She leans on the wooden bar. “What’ll it be?”

“What do you have on tap?”

She smiles and says, “Only thing we got on tap is Jägermeister.”

By the time Don Colcord was eight years old, he knew that he wanted to be a druggist. He grew up in Uravan, a mining town near Nucla, and his mother was a clerk in the pharmacy, where Don liked to hang around and watch the druggist. As a teen-ager, he began breaking into the place. Along with some friends, he stole beer, Playboy, and condoms. (“The condoms went to waste.”) When the boys finally got caught, they were forced to pay for the goods by working at the store for twenty-five cents an hour. “Everybody knew why you were there,” Don says. “It was probably the best thing that happened to me.”

During his teen-age years, Don shared a room with his brother Jim, and one day he found a magazine hidden under the bed. It featured photographs of naked men. When Jim came home, Don asked, “Is this yours?”

“Yes,” said Jim, who didn’t seem embarrassed. He took the magazine back, and neither of them mentioned it again.

Jim was three years older than Don. He was six feet three and well built, but he didn’t enjoy sports or hunting, like most local kids. He spent a lot of time by himself, and in high school he became an excellent student. He was a source of disappointment to his father, who nagged at Jim to behave like a normal boy. In 1972, a couple of years after Jim left for college, he sent his family a letter explaining that he was gay and that he knew his father would never accept it. He asked them not to look for him; he was leaving Colorado for good. And for the next twelve years nobody heard from Jim.

At the age of eighteen, Don married his high-school girlfriend, Kretha; eventually, they settled in Nucla and opened the Apothecary Shoppe. In 1983, Don’s father died, and one of the first things his widow did was hire a private investigator. The detective found Jim in Chicago, where he was a clerk in the county court. He said he’d had a feeling that something had happened back home.

“I’m not your instructor—I’m just a weird guy making an unwanted advance.” Facebook

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The following year, Jim made a four-day visit to Nucla. He went for long drives with his mother, who told him that she had always known he was gay and that she was sorry she hadn’t been able to change his father’s attitude. In the evenings, Jim and Don sat up late talking. One night, Jim told Don that he had been infected with H.I.V., and that his doctor said he was likely to develop full-blown AIDS. Jim told Don where he wanted his ashes scattered. And he asked him to visit Chicago, where Jim lived with his longtime boyfriend.

That year, they talked frequently on the phone. But whenever the topic of a Chicago visit came up there was always a reason Don couldn’t go: he was too busy at the store; his son and his daughter had school activities. Kretha tried to persuade him to make the trip, but he never did.

When Jim died, one of his colleagues telephoned with the news. She sent the ashes in a box, with a copy of Jim’s will, some awards from work, and a few photographs. One of the pictures was taken at Wrigley Field, where Jim stands with his boyfriend in front of a “Go Cubs” sign. When Don looked at the photograph, he realized that he knew virtually nothing about his brother. He had seen Jim for all of four days in the past decade; he didn’t even know his boyfriend’s name. And he understood the real reason that he hadn’t made a trip to Chicago. “I was angry with myself for not being comfortable in a house where two men were sleeping together,” he says. “I didn’t want to see two men kissing each other. It wouldn’t bother me now, but it did then. I really regret it.”

Along with his mother and his younger sister, Don scattered Jim’s ashes at the juncture of the San Miguel and the Dolores Rivers. The Dolores flows from the south, where it crosses the great salt dome of Paradox Valley, and the water is saline and has no fish. If you swim there, you float as if you were in the ocean, a thousand miles away.

The last doctor in Naturita died fifteen years ago. There’s a small health clinic, and recently it contracted with a doctor in another part of Colorado to visit two days a week. But the mainstay is Ken Jenks, a physician’s assistant who is on call twenty-four hours a day. Jenks has lived in rural Colorado for a decade, and during that time he has learned that electrical tape is harder to remove from a wound than duct tape. Twice he has had patients suffer cervical fractures and drive themselves into the clinic rather than wait for an ambulance. It’s not unusual for somebody to sign out of the clinic A.M.A.—against medical advice. A couple of times, Jenks has told heart-attack victims that they needed to be evacuated by helicopter, only to have the patients decline because they believed they could get there cheaper. Jenks signed the forms, unhooked the I.V.s, and the patients got into their pickups to drive the two hours to a hospital. “And they made it,” Jenks says. “So they were right!”

Jenks grew up in Salt Lake City, but he has spent most of his working life in small towns. “Maybe I can describe it this way,” he says. “I like to play chess. I moved to a small town, and nobody played chess there, but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That’s sort of like living in a small town. It’s a simpler game, but it’s played to a higher level.” Jenks says that he is forced to have “a working relationship” with local methamphetamine users, treating their ailments in confidence. He explains that small towns might have a reputation for being closed-minded, but actually residents often learn to be nonjudgmental, because contact is so intense. “Someday I might be on the side of the road, and the person who pulls me out is going to be a meth user,” Jenks says. “The circle is much tighter.” He believes there is less gossip than one would assume, simply because so much is already known.

One morning, a young woman arrives at the Apothecary Shoppe after spending the weekend in jail. She had an argument with her husband, who called the police; Colorado law requires officers to make an arrest whenever they respond to a domestic dispute. The law is intended to protect women from being coerced into dropping charges, but in this case the husband claimed that he had been attacked. In the drugstore, the woman is approached by half a dozen neighbors who have read about the arrest in the local newspaper.

“It’s not what it sounds like,” she tells one elderly woman. “He’s lying about the whole thing, and he’s going to get in trouble for that.”

They stand at the pharmacy counter. “It’s terrible when I have the criminal element in the store,” Don jokes.

The young woman reads the police blotter in the newspaper. “He said I attacked him with a frying pan. He said I hit him in the arm. If I’d attacked him with a frying pan, I’d a hit him in the head.”

“Let me tell you what you should do,” the old woman says. She is in her seventies, with curly white hair and a sweet, grandmotherly smile. “Get you some wasp spray,” she says. “It’ll put their eyes out.”

“I can’t even have Mace, because it’s a weapon.”

With the wisdom of age, the elderly woman explains that wasp spray is not classified as a weapon and is thus available to people who are out on bail. “It’s better than pepper spray,” she says.

A while later, I see the young woman cutting out the arrest listing. “This way, if I’m ever stupid enough to think about taking him back, I’ll look at this,” she tells me. “I’ll keep it in my scrapbook.” (Eventually, all charges were dropped, and they divorced.)

At the store, Don never discusses anyone’s situation with a third party, but he frequently mentions his own problems. Twenty years ago, Kretha was diagnosed with a rare degenerative form of spina bifida, and now she rarely leaves home. Their oldest son flies F-16s for the Air Force, but their daughter has struggled with alcoholism. After she had difficulties caring for her son, Gavin, Don and Kretha took custody of the boy. Don often mentions such issues to a customer. “If I’m dealing with somebody who has an alcoholic in the family, it helps for them to know about my daughter,” he says. “You can’t pretend that your family is perfect. My daughter is not perfect, but she’s trying.” He continues, “Almost all druggists in a small town will tell you the same thing. You are part and parcel of the community. Nobody’s better, nobody’s worse.”

In Nucla, Wednesday is bowling league night. The local alley shut down to the public long ago, because there are so few people left, but the facility opens twice a week for community leagues. The alley was built in 1962 and all its equipment is original, with an exuberant use of steel that you don’t see anymore: long, shiny Brunswick ball racks, dining tables with heavy flared legs. Scorecards advertise businesses that have been dead for decades: Miracle Roofing and Insulation, Sir Speedy Instant Printing Center (“Instant Copies While You Wait!”). Don is the league’s president, and he certifies the lanes every year. He took a course in Montrose in order to be licensed to use a bowling-lane micrometer.

Don’s collection of certifications is impressively esoteric. He has taken CPR courses, and he’s qualified to use an electric defibrillator. He has a pyrotechnics-display license, so that Nucla can have fireworks on the Fourth of July. When he heard about a new type of hormone therapy, he flew to California to attend two days of classes, and now he compounds medicine for four transgendered patients who live in various parts of the West. Every three months, Don talks with them on the phone and prepares their drugs; he finds this interesting. On Friday nights, he announces Nucla High football games. They play eight-man ball, although if a bigger school comes to town they switch numbers with every possession, so that each side can practice its plays. When Nucla is on offense, it’s eight-on-eight, but it becomes eleven-on-eleven when the other team has the ball. Occasionally, somebody gets confused, and Don’s voice rings out over the loudspeakers: “There’s eleven white guys and eight blue guys, and that won’t work.” The football might not be first-rate, but the players’ names are a novelist’s dream. Nucla has Seth Knob, Chad Stoner, and Seldon Riddle. Dove Creek has a player named Tommy Fury. Blanding has Talon Jack and Sterling Black, Tecohda Tom and Herschel Todachinnie. Shilo Stanley, Terrance Tate, Dillon Daves: if alliteration ever needs an offensive line, recruiting should begin around the Colorado-Utah border.

When outsiders come to town—loners, drifters—they often find their way to Don. A number of years ago, a man in his seventies named Tim Brick moved to Naturita and rented a mobile home. He placed special orders at the Apothecary Shoppe: echinacea, goldenseal, chamomile teas. He distrusted doctors, and often had Don check his blood pressure. It was high, and eventually Don persuaded him to get on regular medication. Soon, he was visiting every four or five days, mostly to talk.

Don referred to him as Mr. Brick. He had no other local friends, and he was cagey about his past, although certain details emerged over time. His birth name had been Penrose Brick—he was a descendant of the Penrose family, which came from Philadelphia and had made a fortune from mining claims around Cripple Creek. But for some reason Mr. Brick had been estranged from all his relatives for decades. He had changed his first name, and he had spent most of his working life as an auto mechanic.

One day, his mobile home was broken into, and thieves made off with some stock certificates. Mr. Brick had never used a broker—to him, they were just as untrustworthy as doctors—so he went to the Apothecary Shoppe for help. Before long, Don was making dozens of trips across Disappointment Valley, driving two hours each way, in order to get documents certified at the bank in Cortez, Colorado. Eventually, he sorted out Mr. Brick’s finances, but then the older man’s health began to decline. Don managed his care, helping him move out of various residences; on a couple of occasions, Mr. Brick lived at Don’s house for an extended stretch. At the age of ninety-one, Mr. Brick became seriously ill and went to see a doctor in Montrose. The doctor said that prostate cancer had spread to his stomach; with surgery, he might live another six months. Mr. Brick said he had never had surgery and he wasn’t going to start now.