Red phone booth for the dead at Silverton Cemetery creates tension | Western Colorado

She bought a plot of land on a hill in Hillside Cemetery, next to the resting place for the town's mining-era pigeons. And instead of a headstone, she bought a large red British-style telephone box to mark the plot.

Both would prove controversial in a city known for never missing a good, two-sided argument. Moving into the afterlife on a property near prostitutes was one thing for a small Ts…

“Get rid of the phone booth!!!” wrote Carol Thompson Carlson Primus on the San Juan County Historical Society’s Facebook page.

“Back to England,” wrote Mike Palmer about the stand.

Yet the red phone booth remains at Hillside Cemetery in Silverton, which is no ordinary small-town cemetery. The nearly 150-year-old cemetery is not fenced off by iron gates and has no neat paths. The gravestones are scattered rhymingly on a steep mountainside. It is littered with sinkholes and fallen headstones.

Hillside, with its magnificent views of the San Juan Mountains, is both a city park and a cemetery. Residents walk their dogs there and enjoy picnics on the benches or on blankets spread over the graves. Visitors enjoy poring over the town's colorful mining past, engraved on stones that sometimes list the reasons for the interred – dropsy, slipped on ice, hit in the head by a beam, blown up in a mine, frozen to death with 10 mules, hanged …

Brockman's friends say she liked the quirky nature of the cemetery. She liked cemeteries in general and made a point of visiting them on her travels. She always dragged her friends to cemeteries. Silverton Cemetery was her favorite.

Brockman, 62, came to Silverton after pursuing a career in communications, starting in New York City with an internship at Vogue magazine, then working for banks and energy companies before starting her own advertising and communications firm, Chimera Communications, and moving to Durango in 1996.

She bought a horse ranch near Durango. Horses were her thing. Harleys, too. And boats. And small mountain towns. She bought a second house in Silverton, which she called the Hillbilly Hotel.

“Whatever she did, she made it big. That's why we have a phone booth in Silverton,” said her close friend and longtime collaborator Lisa Morales.

DESIGN INSPIRATION FROM JAPAN

Brockman's idea of ​​a phone booth was inspired by a concept connecting the living with the dead developed by Japanese garden designer Itaru Sasaki in 2010. Sasaki placed a phone in his own garden so he could communicate with a cousin who had died of cancer. He made the phone available to the public the following year, after an earthquake and tsunami in Japan killed more than 15,000 people.

Sasaki's phone sparked an international movement called My Wind Phone, which gave many people the opportunity to communicate with their deceased loved ones. Wind Phones do not record messages.

The empty cases of old telephones are like holding a seashell to your ear and thinking you can hear the sea.

There are now 275 wind phone booths in cemeteries and memorials around the world, with new ones being added every week. My wind phone records show that the only other wind phone in Colorado is attached to a tree on Aspen Mountain.

The phones in Wind Phone's phone booths have rotary dials or old-fashioned push-button numbers, but they only connect to intangible memories.

The idea is that mourners can dial a number they remember – or just make one up. They can speak into the phone – into the silence on the other end. It's a detached way to connect with the deceased, be they human or animal.

Brockman hoped that the phone booth would be a good way for her many friends to remember her by calling her and having a confidential conversation.

Brockman chose a British-style phone booth because she had traveled in England and loved the bright red phone booths. She told friends that she always ducked into one whenever she had the chance, just to feel the steel and glass embrace of a sturdy red booth, full of history. She hoped they would have the same feeling.

Before spending $4,000 on a replica British phone booth she found online, Brockman asked the city council if there were any rules about what could be placed in the cemetery. She was told she could decorate her grave however she wanted.

Last October, while she was visiting her family in New Jersey, a delivery truck left her phone booth in her front yard. Friends hauled the 400-pound booth to Hillside, where they poured a concrete foundation for it, planning to surprise her when she returned.

To the surprise of many, including Brockman, an uproar of opposition had formed after the phone booth was installed at the cemetery. Silverton residents who felt Brockman's phone booth desecrated Hillside Cemetery complained on social media.

The fact that there were no specific regulations in the city prohibiting a telephone booth in the cemetery did not matter.

Like so many controversial issues, the dispute over the phone booth was brought before the Silverton Board of Trustees by those demanding its removal.

Critics argued that this should not be allowed because it would risk the cemetery losing its historic status. This turned out to be wrong. Others said that something so big and so red would destroy the peaceful atmosphere of the cemetery and interfere with their devotion at the grave.

The board voted to keep the phone booth.

The vote came after Brockman attended the meeting to explain what she hoped would be a gift for her city.

She also took out a full-page ad in the Silverton Standard newspaper expressing her impatience with the critics and explaining her motives behind the Wind Phone.

“I envisioned the Hillside Wind Phone not as a memorial to me as I die of this cancer, but as a gift to those who visit the cemetery, including my friends and family, but more importantly, to everyone,” she wrote.

She wrote that history is not just about events in the past, but is a living thing that continues to be written every day. In her ad, she predicted that the Wind Phone would become a part of Silverton's history and that she would be remembered as a woman who cared deeply about the town.

Her friends said she was deeply hurt by those who saw things differently.

“She cried about it. It was all so painful for her,” said DeAnne Gallegos, a close friend of Brockman and executive director of the Silverton Chamber of Commerce.

CALL OTHERS

Brockman died on August 18, a little earlier than expected. She had been in hospice care for a year and spent her last three weeks recovering, visiting her favorite mountain haunts with groups of friends. She enjoyed dinners with old friends who came to visit from all over the country. She was planning a trip to Laguna Beach, California, to dig her toes into the beach sand one last time and visit a fancy spa with girlfriends. She died two days before that planned trip.

Before her death, Brockman had overcome the pain of the phone booth controversy, friends said, and received confirmation that her phone would live up to her expectations.

In February, Silverton businessman Rick Noble — described by himself and others as “not hippie-ish,” “not esoteric,” “not very spiritual” and not someone who would walk into a cemetery phone booth for an imaginary conversation — found himself inexplicably drawn to the phone booth the day after his beloved dog, Kora, died.

Noble was at the city dump to pick up his usual Saturday garbage when he said he felt he had to go to the phone booth immediately. He jumped in his truck, sped up the hill to the cemetery and waded through knee-deep fresh snow to the red phone booth.

A single trail of animal tracks in the snow leads to the door of the red wind phone on a ridge in Silverton Cemetery.

As he got closer, he saw dog tracks – a single track. There were no other tracks in the fresh snow. The paw prints led to the red phone booth and ended there. No tracks led away from the booth. Noble entered the booth and picked up the phone.

“I went in and cried like a baby. I 'called' Kora and I felt my grief immediately disappear. I felt her telling me that everything was OK,” Noble said.

Gallegos, who was out of town at the time of Brockman's death, immediately went to the phone booth upon returning to Silverton. She said she picked up the phone to say something to her friend, but she was at a loss for words.

“What really upset me was the total silence on the phone. It was hard. The phone is dead. There is nothing on the other end…” Gallegos burst into tears and could not describe her experiences in the phone booth any further.

Morales said she hasn't been there since Brockman's death.

“I'm not ready yet,” she said. “I will be.”

MESSAGE IN THE STAND:

“Calling All Angels” Dry your tears. Enjoy the view. This telephone of the wind is there for you. Connect your heart to those you love. The angels in the wind above are listening. And here I find myself. — NB