Gosh, I'll miss the voice of Greg Hobbs

Gosh, I’ll miss the voice of Greg Hobbs. His recent death incited the urge to retrieve a few of his books, read several of his many poems.

I most recently corresponded with him on March 18. He wrote: “As we turn towards Spring I want to tell you how much I enjoy your writing and insights! best regards, Greg Hobbs.”

The obituary posted by his son, Dan Hobbs, said that Greg was born in Florida but lived in various locations as befitting a family in the Air Force. He attended a year of seminar in San Francisco staffed by Sulpician priests. (As did Art Goodtimes, if you know the Lone Cone poet from San Miguel County). Then, he got his law degree in Berkeley.

Greg was very much devoted to the Intermountain West, though. He talked often, in my experiences, about falling in love, being in love with his wife, Bobbie, of a treasured time together during relative youth in northern New Mexico, at a place called the Philmont Scout Ranch.

He was an attorney for the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District in the 1980s when I became familiar with him. Then, in the late 1990s, he was appointed to the Colorado Supreme Court. Sitting next to him at a conference dinner table at then-Western State College, I blundered a question to him, addressing him as “judge.” Those on supreme courts are called justices. (I can be a dunce.)

Greg was an almost fierce defender of Colorado’s system of water appropriation, the wisdom of our forebears. That system, until modifications began in the 1970s and then again almost 20 years ago, would extinguish a river so long as it was put to “beneficial use.”

This side of Greg was very legalistic. A couple years ago I read a book called “The Man Who Thought He Could Own Water.” It was written by a woman who grew up on a farm along the South Platte River near Platteville, between Greeley and Denver. She tipped her hat in the acknowledgments to Justice Hobbs, and I could darned near tell what paragraphs of her book he had written.

Precise, lawyerly.

There was another side to Gregg that came out in his poetry. In May 2020 he had sent me this poem:

INTO THE WEMINUCHE WILDERNESS

In the Rhythm You’re Returning To

Pack your pack, your saddle bags,

your camera, craft, your fishing pole,

your sleeping bag, your pocket knife,

flashlight, poncho, wooly cap

Whichever map will get you back!

To canyon, forest, peak, and stream,

quiet eye of deep-down things,

juice and joy of streaming light

within, along, above, below

What’s very good that needs you not!

Paws and claws, gills and wings,

trunk and branch, flower stems,

mother dew and father cool,

beauty’s changing discipline

In the rhythm you’re returning to!

Ever fresh and ever new,

creation’s changing symmetries,

pour off tarns and pocket cirques,

travois tracks and medicine wheels

The smallest thing the hardest to do!

Leave them alone just let them be

a column of moonlight,

the rainbow’s curl,

wetland seeps.

Greg Hobbs

Sometime last year we had also corresponded about the poetry of Thomas Hornsby Ferril, a poet whose words can be found in the Colorado rotunda. Ferril had made his living as a publicist for Great Western Sugar. I had worked in one of the GW Sugar factories, as had my brother, as had our grandfather. And my dad had topped sugar beets while waiting to go off to war, while our grandfather had grown sugar beets.

I wondered if Ferril had written poems extolling the wonders of sugar beets. Greg looked for me, as he owned Ferril’s books, but could not find any. Greg did that sort of thing for a lot of people, writing book introductions and so forth.

Another time I inquired about the career of his son, who married a woman from New Mexico and was farming organically along the Arkansas River between Pueblo and Rocky Ford. He sent me a poem about one of their shared adventures, a story that also reflected his deep interest in Colorado history.

OLD BENT’S FORT

I ride with my son along the Arkansas

from Avondale through Boone, La Junta,

Las Animas and Lamar, we talk of William

Bent and Charlie Autobees, how they

settled with the River, one on the north

bank in American Territory, the other

just across, where Mexico started

or ended, depending on how you see

the idea of countries starting and ending.

Each of them turned the river onto the

land, so to eat while the sky hung out

over the prairie. Dan and I pass to

the ramparts, reconstructed. Bent

and his Cheyenne bride lend us their

eyes for looking through the cottonwoods

to the River, smoke curls up from the plaza.

Greg Hobbs

Colorado Mother of Rivers, Water Poems at 28

(Colorado Foundation for Water Education 2005)

I’m not sure whether this photo was of Greg or of his brother Will. It looks to me like Greg as a younger man.

That voice, that wonderful voice of measured words, those word implicitly hugging Colorado and its peaks and prairies, cities and farms—I will miss it! -— Allen Best, Dec. 1, 2021

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