On Monday morning I was to see the judge, and I asked for a razor to give my best appearance. I was brought to County Court Judge Curt Penny's chambers. He looked at the trooper and he looked at me and looked at the trooper and asked what were we doing there. The trooper explained that I had been hitchhiking on the Interstate. The judge asked me if I had enough money for a bus ( I didn’t even have enough money for lunch!), then said I could sit at the top of the highway entrance ramp, but I couldn’t stick out my thumb or hold a sign. Within about half an hour a young guy eyeballed me as he was getting on the ramp, asked me if I was hitchhiking, and offered me a ride. He was driving a muscle car, a Roadrunner or a Javelin, that he had run all the way across Nevada, Utah and Colorado without an air filter, and it was only just starting to give him trouble. But, he was a Coast Guardsman from Oakland due in Washington, D.C. to report for colorguard duty before I needed to be back in New York, so I knew I’d make good time, and in fact made it door-to-door in about two and a half days. I probably slept right through to registration after I got in.

*     *     *

I had taken a job with the Fort Morgan office of Colorado Rural Legal Services. At the time I arrived, a case was developing concerning the conditions in the Morgan County Jail. Various matters did not meet constitutional minimums, like cells, cages really, with solid steel walls on all sides and no lights; the failure to segregate juvenile offenders from adults, convicted prisoners from pre-trial detainees who were held merely because they had been unable to post bond, and more. My previous job at Boulder County Legal Services included a project developing and teaching classes on civil law to the inmates at the Boulder County Detention Center. I was assigned to investigate and to interview inmates at the jail.

Soon after I arrived in Fort Morgan, the regional council of governments was sponsoring a forum for senior citizens which was held in Burlington. Although Kit Carson County was not in our service area, I was asked to drive the two and a half or three hours to Burlington to give a presentation on the services available to senior citizens through the offices of Colorado Rural Legal Services. Sharing the dias with me was Judge Penny. I soon realized this was the judge I had been presented to those few years earlier, but he didn't recognize me. Where I was able to defer several questions to Judge Penny, he had to field a number of tough questions, and shared with me through asides the frustrations of responding to some of the more difficult ones. Confidants.

Shortly after that, our office got a call regarding the conditions at the Kit Carson County Jail. My announcement that I had some (ahem) personal experience was greeted as a quite pleasant surprise and made me a valuable resource. Chief among the problems in Kit Carson County was that the jail had been added on to the top of the courthouse, and there was only a single steep, narrow stairwell that would act like a chimney in the event of a fire, resulting in a death penalty for inmates largely in on minor offenses. Inmates are entitled to three meals a day. Another problem was the lack of segregation of offenders, a problem which many small counties face. The case was filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, named for one of the plaintiffs, an inmate at that time, William Left Hand Bull, et al., v. Kit Carson County Sheriff and Kit Carson County Commissioners. A settlement was reached in a relatively short period of time.

It may have taken me six years, but I shut down that jail.