GUNNISON — There isn’t much to see here at the east end of Colorado’s largest reservoir. Blue Mesa, in a dry year, is an expanse of mud flats, crackly brown weeds mixed with nubbins of long-ago alfalfa fields, and a few vague outlines of what six decades ago was a slip of a town called Iola.
But avid fans of a novel set in that once-upon-a-time town can conjure a tale of love, loss, and survival in this barren stretch of lake bottom.
They come here from around the world to do just that.
The Gunnison Valley has become a destination for readers who are so taken with Shelley Read’s worldwide bestseller “Go as a River” that they travel to Western Colorado to look for remnants of the land where Victoria Nash and Warren Moon fell in love and … no giving away the rest of the story.
The book recently passed the million-sold mark worldwide. It has been published in 45 countries and translated into 35 languages. “Va Ou La Riviere Te Porte,” “Ga Als Een Rivier,” and “Como Si Fuera un Rio” are proving to be as popular as the English version.
Read, who lives in the Gunnison Valley, is flattered that so-called “literary tourists” from so many parts of the world have zeroed in on her out-of-the-way bit of Colorado. She grew up as a fifth-generation Coloradan in the valley, and it is where she opted to base her first novel.
“I evoked our landscape because it’s what I know,” Read said.
She evoked it so well that book fans are compelled to experience it after they have read about it.
“You can drive anywhere around here and feel like you are in the novel,” said Kelly Jo Clark, a bookseller who fields questions from literary tourists at Townie Books in Crested Butte where “Go as a River” is always featured prominently.
Literary tourists sometimes hope to run into author Shelley Read
The phenomenon of “Go as a River” fans traveling to the Gunnison Valley began in the summer of 2023. An elderly couple from Australia popped into Townie Books to ask how to find locations mentioned in the book. They inquired about their chances of bumping into Read on the streets of Crested Butte.
In what appears to be a common thread with the literary tourists, the wife was in a book club that takes delving into its reading selections seriously. They don’t just read a book and chat about it over wine. They research the chosen tomes, and, for this book, that meant traveling 14,000 miles to do it.
The woman’s request was unusual at that time, so the book store contacted Read. She met with the couple over tea.
“They were delightful,” Read said. “It turned out she got so enthralled by her research; it led her to come here.”
Since then, many readers have followed. They have traveled from across the United States, and from Italy, Spain, Poland, France, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic.
No one has a count, but Read said she has received scads of messages and seen Instagram postings with “Go as a River” readers displaying snapshots of themselves sitting by Blue Mesa.
“Is it weird? Totally,” said Townie Books owner Arvin Ramgoolam. “Shelley really captured a place that once existed. People can really romanticize that place.”
The author was a literary tourist, too
Read said she is surprised, awed and flattered by all the attention.
She strapped on a backpack and did some literary travel of her own when she finished college in the late 1980s. It was too long ago to be part of a social media phenomenon so she had no idea if other readers were also seeking out the haunts of favorite authors.
Hers were in the Eastern Bloc countries and behind the Iron Curtain where Milan Kundera, Franz Kafka and Czeslaw Milosz had written some of her favorite books.
“It was about the setting and what they had captured in the repressive culture of the time,” she said.
She still marvels that she was able to stand on the Charles Bridge in Prague after reading about it as a backdrop in so much literature.
She also traced favored authors in Western Europe. She painted houses and waited tables in pubs so she could stick around to soak up settings in the writings of Alice B. Toklas, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Sylvia Plath.
Read said she still can’t believe readers would seek out her, and her book’s settings.
“I have stepped into this one small spot on others’ long trajectory of literature that means something to people,” she said. “It’s a remarkable thing.”
That trajectory snakes across borders and through genres.
Think of “Harry Potter” and the winding streets of Edinburgh, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s string of small prairie towns, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Cartagena. Thoreau’s Massachusetts pond. Zane Grey’s Arizona deserts. Willa Cather’s childhood home in Red Cloud, Nebraska.
Literary tourists seek all of them out. Some of these places have capitalized on the draw with bona fide tourist attractions, including pageants, tours and memorabilia shops. Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” series offers wagon trips across a swath of the Midwest and a chance to view “Pa’s fiddle” in the study where Wilder wrote her “Little House” series.
Read has no plans to have readers visit her home.
And, so far, the Gunnison Valley hasn’t tried to set up a “Go As A River” tour service.
Leora Wallace, the executive director of the Gunnison County Chambers of Commerce & Visitor Center, said she simply points literary tourists in the direction of where Iola once was.
“I have to clarify to them that this is fictional,” she said.
The annual Mountain Words Festival is one event drawing Shelley Read fans because she is a presenter at the May readers’ and authors’ confab. Ramgoolam, an organizer of the festival, noted that it is a more likely place to bump into Read than wandering the busy streets of Crested Butte.
“Reading Colorado: A Literary Road Guide” was published before “Go as a River” came out, so author Peter Anderson didn’t point readers to Iola or the peach orchards of Paonia.
Anderson references other Colorado places readers might be drawn to, including Hunter Thompson’s Woody Creek home, Dalton Trumbo’s Grand Junction setting for “Eclipse,” Mark Twain’s stay in Julesburg that he mentioned in “Roughing It,” and James Michener’s various high plains settings for “Centennial.”
Settings in “Go as a River” are somewhat unique because, for the most part, they don’t exist outside Read’s imagination and her sense of place.
The ranching town of Iola was submerged under Blue Mesa in 1966. When the fictional Victoria Nash lived there, it was a collection of 10 to 15 buildings at the time, including a hotel, a store, a school and a place to load cattle. It was not home to peach orchards.
“Go as a River” settings also include an imagined hunting cabin in the Uncompahgre Wilderness Area and a peach orchard and a farmhouse in Paonia. Some visitors head into the woods above Blue Mesa in the hope they will stumble across what could have been Victoria’s cabin. They roam around Paonia looking for the farmhouse and orchard that might have been Victoria’s.
Read has a humbling idea about why her book has turned into such an international tourist draw: It is set in Colorado.
“I have learned much of the rest of the world is enthralled by Colorado,” Read said. “I hadn’t picked up on that before. I can still say that I am so honored by it.”
