WEcast

WEcast is a podcast about the history and culture of the West End of Montrose County, Colorado. Brock Benson hosts. Most of what he publishes are read-aloud editions of the San Miguel Basin Forum, each identified on air by volume and issue number and by the week its headlines cover. The format is plain and consistent. Benson opens with a word on the weather, whether that is highs in the 90s and red flag warnings, a monsoon everyone is praying will hold through September, or the sunny mayhem of a town celebration weekend. Then he reads the paper. Stories carry their bylines, most often Reagan Tuttle as editor, and quotations are announced as quotations, so a listener hears the reporting itself rather than a host's gloss on it. The subject range is what a small newspaper's front section actually holds. A water authority board meets with the town of Nucla and its neighbour to sort out who is responsible for which lines and valves. Colorado Parks and Wildlife holds a wolf meeting in Nucla. The Montrose County sheriff answers four questions on immigration holds, the same four questions another sheriff had answered in an earlier story. A mayor updates the paper on a sewer project that had been delayed. A clinic story sorts out what a federally qualified health center can and cannot be while the West End waits on word about staffing. A trustee seat gets filled after a mayoral resignation. Fair week arrives with a dessert contest whose winners take home aprons and wooden spoons, and with the San Miguel Basin Fair and Rodeo flying the flag until the end of the month. None of it is dressed up. The pleasure is in hearing a place take itself seriously, week after week, in its own words. Then the feed changes shape. 'Spawn of the Subhuman w/N3 Theatre' is a theatre club production, directed and produced by Benson, and its dialogue plays out on a flight climbing above an electrical storm that one character insists is just like that day five years ago. It is credited to a different studio and a different set of backers, a glimpse of the network the podcast sits inside: a community library, a parks and recreation district, a historical society, a trust and a foundation. In the cold open to that episode, Benson marks five years of making the show and thanks the people who have kept it going. Johnny Dobbs supplies the theme music. Every Forum edition signs off the same way, naming its partners and promising to be back the following week. With a deep back catalog of issues, WEcast doubles as a running record of one corner of Colorado, and anyone curious about what the West End was talking about in a given week can find that issue and press play.