Veterinarian Mike Brooks worked from a main street office about the size of a hotel elevator. The roof sign simply said “Vet Clinic.”

One of the first times we pushed through his front door, I was carrying an embarrassed, 18-pound rat terrier named Scottie with about a dozen porcupine quills in his snout.

Brooks was seated behind a small counter with Midge or Rex or Squirrel or one of his own dogs. I don’t remember which one. He didn’t waste much time on the diagnosis. He simply rolled a fresh towel out on the counter, sedated Scottie, pulled his shop light closer and began the surgery while we watched from inches away.

As he worked, he explained the insidious architecture of porcupine quills that made them difficult to extract while I examined a wall of shame beside the cash register featuring photos of dozens of other dogs who’d made the same mistake. Scottie, it seemed, got off easy.

We paid Brooks an astonishingly small fee, carried the still-zonked Scottie back to the car, and went on with our lives. The whole encounter took about thirty minutes — about the same time it took a few weeks later when our other dog, Callie, met the same porcupine.

That time, a Sunday afternoon, required Brooks to stop haying the fields on his small ranch nearby and meet us at the office. He did so without hesitation or complaint.

We were new to rural Colorado, just two months into a complete lifestyle change after thirty-one years in the manic urban hardscape of Southern California. And I remember thinking, “What kind of veterinarian gives out his personal cell number in case of emergencies?”

Mike Brooks did. And after he died this week, it seemed like everyone in the county was telling a similar story. For Granby resident Lisa Piccardo, it was an emergency call to Brooks’ cell on Thanksgiving Day during the 2020 Covid shutdown after it became clear the time had come to euthanize her ailing and deaf ten-year-old boxer, Bandit.

“Our regular vet didn’t work after hours or holiday weekends so we called Dr. Brooks,” Piccardo posted on Facebook the day after Brooks died. “Though we weren’t a patient at the time he met us at the office, opened the door and let us come in (without masks) so we could hold Bandit while he put him to sleep. From then on, he has been our vet.”

Stories like that help explain why, two nights after Brooks died, the local police had to divert traffic around the hundreds of people who gathered for a candlelight vigil outside that shoebox of a vet clinic.

The impact of a life well-lived

Our culture often calculates the impact of a life using the grandest of scales. How many world records? Championships? Net worth? That Mike Brooks probably died in the waning hours of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday also made me think of those who make the kind of grand-scale social impact that merits national holidays and heroic thirty-foot statues on the National Mall.

Sorry to break it to you, but most of us will never make that kind of impact. We’ll gauge the value of our lives on a scale that measures grams instead of tons. But the mistake many of us make is thinking that, because we operate on a smaller scale, our lives are somehow less important.

One of the remarkable things about Grand County, Colorado, where I live, is the number of small-scale heroes who have called it home.

Indiana native Susan Anderson moved here after graduating from medical school in Michigan hoping the mountain air would help her own tuberculosis. She ended up practicing here from 1909 to 1956, and became known among locals as Doc Susie.

Patients often paid her with food, and she hopped trains or hitched rides to visit the sick. She once rented a horse-drawn sleigh to go as far as it could take her, then snowshoed the rest of the way to treat a ranch child suffering from pneumonia. Her home still stands as a landmark in Fraser, and Cozens Ranch Museum has a display of her life and medical tools.

An old-school country doctor

General practitioner Ernest Ceriani moved to the western edge of county in 1947 and helped set up a small hospital in the renovated home of his predecessor. Along with two nurses, Ceriani built a life and practice much like Brooks did, seeing patients in his office, the hospital, and at their homes.

He delivered babies, amputated limbs, stitched up drunken bronc busters, and at least once carried an old man from the basement ward to the upstairs operating room by himself. He even developed his own X-rays to save money. In 1948, Ceriani was celebrated in a landmark Life magazine photo essay called “Country Doctor” by photographer W. Eugene Smith.

Mike Brooks followed their remarkable footsteps, albeit in a slightly different field. He could be affable or abrupt, empathetic or coldly matter-of-fact, and seemed well aware of the thorniness of his reputation.

“When I was in town, I’d often ask locals who their vet was,” recalled Marc Brooks, the vet’s brother who drove from his home in Denver for the vigil. “They’d always say it was Mike Brooks. But when I told him I did that, he looked worried. He said, ‘Not everybody in town likes me.'”

Everyone, though, seemed to respect him and admire his dedication to the animals and animal lovers he served.

“Dr. Brooks was a true county vet, one of the last of his kind,” wrote Aila Holley, whose family operates Sisu Farms, a regenerative livestock operation less than a mile from Brooks’ tiny office. “His exam table and the lobby of his office were in the same space. When I’d go to ask questions, he was often working on a dog or a cat right there. Answering calls on weekends and nights. I’ve heard of a few humans he treated as well. An old-school county doctor the likes we probably won’t see again.”

Brooks’ passing at 67 left only one vet in our town of about two thousand people, and only two in a county of fifteen thousand. Everyone around here seems to have at least one dog — it may be a state law — and they’re all worried about what comes next. And the job of ranching and raising livestock in this harsh landscape just got even more daunting.

“It’s times like these where moving forward in a lifestyle that is very much of the past seems challenging at best,” Holley wrote. “The skills and knowledge needed are becoming increasingly rare; many of the books we reference are older than we are. Much of the new technology we are seeing won’t replace the years of experience. We can ask AI how to pull a calf or correct a prolapse, but nothing can replace the experience of doing it or being talked through it by someone who could do it in their sleep.”

A legacy left behind

The family of Mike Brooks tried to harness the gusher of emotion to help fund a new animal shelter that’s currently under construction. “Mike was such a pragmatist,” they implored, requesting that “in lieu of flowers and to honor him please consider a donation toward the new animal shelter that was so important to Mike.”

Still, by nightfall, the bouquets of flowers and photos of pets left by Brooks’ clients and friends covered the facade of the tiny clinic. Lina’s, the local pizza place, sent an armload of pies to feed and warm those who gathered in the frigid night air.

Someone ran a photo of Brooks with his dog Rex through Chat GPT and created an image of Brooks surrounded by dogs, cats, and horses at the foot of the Rainbow Bridge. I imagine the curmudgeonly Brooks smiling at that, as well as the full 16-ounce Bud Light someone left among the tributes.

All of it underscored what’s becoming increasingly obvious to me: Every life has impact, no matter the scale, and each of us faces a choice. So what kind of impact do you want to have?

Journalist Martin J. Smith lives in Granby, Colorado. He is the author of five previous novels and five nonfiction books. Open Road Media will publish his sixth novel, “27 Knots,” in fall 2026. This essay was originally published his on Substack page about aging in Grand County. You can reach him at martinjsmith@comcast.net.