The Case of the Missing Eyeball

The manager of the Monticello sewer plant, located just off the second tee box at the old San Juan Golf Course, looked down, jumped back, and felt his heart race.
He blinked, blinked again, then refocused for another look.
No, he wasn’t going crazy; there was indeed a large, beautiful brown human eyeball staring peacefully back at him from underneath one of the many sludge piles he had walked among hundreds of times.
Was it some sneaky member of the city council checking up on his work (as if a councilmember knew more than he did about operating a wastewater plant)?
Had some transient drifter stopped for a roll in the sludge and quick nap on his way south?
There were hundreds of possibilities, and not a single one made sense.
The man who made this macabre discovery was Scotty Rogers. Scotty was one of the people who made growing up in Monticello special.
I don’t ever remember seeing him without a genuine smile. No matter who you were, he was always glad to see you and counted everyone he met as a friend. He had a unique sense of humor, which he used to great effect.
Another of his admirable traits was curiosity. I remember a conversation with him at church after he had taken the job at the plant.
I asked him how he liked it. His eyes lit up, and he proceeded to tell me all he had learned in the short time he had worked there. I saw in him a man who was interested in everything and curious about it all.
I think he would have made a great college professor had he had the opportunity.
Born in Parachute, CO in 1908, Scotty, his parents, and siblings spent time there and in Aspen and Breckenridge, where his dad did whatever he could to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads, including ranch work, freighting, mining, and working on a dredge boat.
This was a time when making a living was more physically demanding than it is now. As a result, Scotty learned the value of hard work and resilience by watching his father. Unfortunately, his dad was killed while working on a dredge boat a week before Scotty’s twelfth birthday.
From then until the day he died, Scotty worked hard at whatever he had to do to provide for his mom and siblings, and later for his own family, just as his own father had.
Last fall, my wife and I took a short trip to Glenwood Springs. While there, we rode our bicycles from Aspen back to Glenwood (it’s a great ride, you should try it sometime).
The trail passes within a mile of the Aspen/Pitkin County Airport, and when we were in sight of it, a parade of small, private business jets, one right after another, were lined up to land.
As I watched them, I thought of Scotty Rogers as a young boy living in that county more than 100 years ago and wondered how long his father could have fed his family with what it cost to keep one of those jets in the air for just one hour.
Back to the eyeball--after Scotty regained his composure from the shock of it all, he bent down, reached out, and picked it up. It turned out to be the only thing that did make sense; someone’s glass eye, eerily realistic; the only change wrought by its trip through the plant was the discolored white portion. It didn’t take much to imagine how it got there.
In a town the size of Monticello, there weren’t many people with glass eyes. In no time, he learned that many weeks before, the glass eye belonging to my neighbor, Grant Bronson, had vanished without a trace.
As it turns out, his wife, Colleen, saw a wad of tissue on the bathroom counter and mistakenly tossed it down the toilet. Flush, it was gone. Grant didn’t think much of it; he had an older eye he could use, though it might not have been as stylish as the one he’d lost. (I wonder, do they model glass eyes like they do new fashions?) So, he was not surprised when he took the call that his long-lost eye had at last been found.
When my mom asked Colleen if Grant was upset with her for flushing his eye down the toilet, Colleen laughed, “No, he has had so much fun telling the story to his friends and neighbors that it was impossible for him to be upset.”