In Colorado, Threat of Terror Is a World Away

Every morning the locals pull up their favorite stools around the cash register at Higgins Hardware and settle into a comfortable banter about the comings and goings of their lives and the world around them.

They talk about struggling farms, the lack of snow and the days when this shop sat at the edge of open pasture, not faceless sprawl.

The threat of terrorism seems a world away, even as Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is again urging Americans to lay aside food, medicine, duct tape and plastic sheeting in case of attacks.

Higgins Hardware has plenty of tape and plastic -- gathering dust on the shelves.

“There has been no mention of terror attacks, none whatsoever,” said Mary Higgins, who has owned the store with her husband, Rollie, for 25 years. “I don’t know if it’s the way of life here or what. Duct tape isn’t going to keep out radioactivity or poison chemicals.”

Gary Beard, a farmer from the small town of Pierce, rolled his eyes.

“Why would I buy duct tape?” he asked, as if it were the dumbest idea he’d ever heard. “Just wait till all these people try and rip it off the wall, all the paint is going to come off with it.”

A woman strode in looking to have a key made.

“Any duct tape today?” Higgins asked brightly.

While people in some parts of the nation have stockpiled water and sealed up windows to ward off chemical and biological attacks, residents of this ranching town about 60 miles north of Denver seem oblivious to the threats, convinced they are low on Al Qaeda’s hit list.

“People are pretty self-sufficient, they feel they can take care of themselves,” said Chris Cobler, editor of the Greeley Tribune.

A largely conservative city of 80,000 where people attend church and live close to the land, Greeley is a place prone to sympathize with President Bush. Nearly all elected officials are Republicans. And though the town has a growing Latino population and some new high technology businesses, it remains mostly white and working class.

When people gather, they talk more about a drought that is reducing farms to dust bowls, than terrorist plots. And the only gas attacks they fear are those that waft in from the teeming cattle pens on the outskirts of town.

“The overwhelming thing is the sheer distance we feel from the threat,” Cobler said. “It’s such a non-issue that we haven’t written much about it.”

Mayor Jerry Wones said the city has emergency plans but doubts they will be needed.

“We are not taking it lightly,” he said. “I just don’t think people believe that threat is likely out here. We are not afraid.”

The sense of being removed from terrorist attacks has carried over in the West’s attitude toward war with Iraq. A recent Los Angeles Times poll showed Westerners are less likely than people in any other region of the country to believe war is inevitable.

Greeley, lying in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, was settled as a place for idealists looking to escape the East Coast and build new lives on the range. The founders named it after Horace Greeley, famous for his exhortation of “Go west young man!”

Huge meatpacking companies like Swift and ConAgra dominate the economy, fattening up cows in giant feedlots along rural Route 34 as it heads toward the open range lands to the east. Cows, thousands of them, loiter in muddy pens, gazing into the middle distance.

And yet this place of cowboys and rodeos that boasts the state’s largest Fourth of July parade had an unlikely rendezvous with Muslim fundamentalism that still echoes in the world today.

In 1949, Sayyid Qutb, considered the godfather of radical Islam, spent six months studying education at what is now the University of Northern Colorado. But even dry, strait-laced Greeley was too much for the prudish Qutb, who was scandalized by a church dance where men and women mingled freely.

He later wrote that the pastor “created a romantic, dreamy effect” by dimming the lights and playing “Baby It’s Cold Outside” on the gramophone. The dancing intensified, he reported, the room became a tangle of arms and legs and “the air was thick with passion.”

Qutb returned to Egypt in a huff and helped organize the militant Muslim Brotherhood. He chronicled his disgust with Greeley and the U.S. in his book “Milestones,” which has inspired legions of radicals, including Osama bin Laden, ever since. He was hanged by the Egyptian government in 1966 for his role in a plot to kill then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

“It’s a good thing he didn’t study in New Orleans,” said Ken McConnelogue, vice president for university affairs at the university. “But you wonder if we were the match that started the fuse burning.”

Wones quickly quashed that idea.

“I don’t think we lit the fuse,” he said. “It was just a coincidence. We have a great deal of foreign students at the university. Certainly any one of them in the future could turn out like that.”

Greeley’s distant encounter with the roots of militant Islam holds little, if any, significance, for today’s students.

“So far as there is any sentiment here about the terror threats, it’s a mocking sentiment,” said Nate Miller, a 23-year-old political science major who edits the student newspaper. “With the exception of Oklahoma City, all of the high-profile terrorist attacks have been on the East Coast.”

There have been some antiwar protests on campus but they have been met by counterdemonstrators supporting Bush’s stance on Iraq.

“For the most part, this is just not part of our daily life,” Miller said.

Back at that hardware store, the crowd was thinning.

The subject of war, having been introduced, now moved on to possible targets in the region.

“You got nuclear missiles in Colorado Springs, you got missiles in Wyoming, you got missiles in Montana,” said Bill Naibauer, a real estate agent.

Rob Dean considered this.

“It’d be pretty hard to hit one of those,” he concluded.

Another customer named area reservoirs ripe for sabotage.

“Yeah, but most don’t have much water in them anymore,” said Beard, the farmer.

Most supported Bush on Iraq but were in no hurry for war.

“We still haven’t gotten Bin Laden yet,” said Rollie Higgins. “And I have seen these attacks before and they haven’t done much. I guess if it’s really going to do something I wouldn’t oppose it. But I would like to see us wait, and if the Iraqis fail to [disarm] then I guess we have no choice.”

His wife, Mary, said the region has more pressing concerns.

“We have farmers who aren’t planting this year. Some cities are out of water. We have sugar beet companies that have gone out of business,” she said. “That’s what people here are worried about.”