In case you missed Lexi’s farewell letter in last week’s print edition, here it is.

Farewell to the Readers

To the faithful readers of the Plainsman Herald:

I am writing today to bid my farewells and express my thanks to you all. I have so greatly enjoyed the support and encouragement from you all over the past few years. This is a position I would never have imagined to find myself in, and I have learned so much in my tenure here.

When Dad (Kent) expressed a wish for some assistance with the Herald and some other Springfield projects back at the end of 2020, I thought, “Oh, what the heck, I’ll go give it a few months.” What began as taking a few photos and meeting notes here and there became covering events, writing articles, designing layout, and anything else that a paper might need. Those “few months” got away from me fairly quickly, and I pack up today with a few years and projects and lessons under my belt.

My deepest thanks to all the individuals who invited me into their close friend circles when I arrived. Having moved to a few small towns and a few large metropolitan areas, the making-of-friends can, counterintuitively, be more difficult in smaller places, where one didn’t grow up with the mechanisms of school groups and churches. I much appreciate everyone who went out of their way to include a stranger.

It has been both a challenge and an honor to stand even for a few brief years, as Dad likes to say, in the shoes of Sam Konkel and all the other editors who have taken a turn keeping the Herald kicking over the years. I have learned a great deal about writing, editing, design, and living in a close-knit community. While I have made many mistakes, let many an error slip through to the presses, and have often had to run corrections, my neighbors have been gracious and helpful as I attempt to record their history.

What a history it is: recorded in great verbal color and detail, from community writer to community writer, editor to editor. Paging through the archives and watching families grow and shift and ebb and flow, from grass to dust drifts to grain sorghum; what a rich and soulful story is Baca County.

While it is such a great privilege to work with my very innovative Dad, and there are many things to love about Baca, the inner gypsy is getting the better of me. I have another degree to finish and new mountains to visit. I used to consider it a fault of mine that I cannot hold still, but I don’t see it so anymore. Both the cottonwoods that stabilize one bank and the flash floods that bring new waters and re-carve the next bank are needed components in some ecosystems. When the water moves on, the flora and fauna continue growing, and the water continues its creative questing elsewhere.

If I can leave you all with an appeal—it takes many moving parts to put out a paper each week, and for the Herald, many of those gears are volunteer writers. Please step up, step in, and throw your support behind Kent and Hunter. If you want to keep your community paper, engage and make it your own. Get your friends involved. Get your grandkids involved. A 138-year-old paper is not something that every community can boast having—take pride in the one you have, and bolster it in whatever way possible. While not quite as dated as the Hartford Courant (Est. 1764), the Herald is a rare little gem, and worth preserving.

This must be a task for the native Baca folk now—the time has come for me to wander on, and while I am always excited each time the chance for new wanderings arise, I will miss many of you and think of you fondly. Perhaps I’ll drop in again.

Cheers,

Lexi Brooks