This used to be a nice, quiet town. Everything has changed, gotten so congested and expensive. I can’t live here anymore.
This used to be a lively place. Now the town is dead and there are no jobs, and nothing to do. I can’t live here anymore.
Nothing ever changes. This town has been exactly the same as long as I’ve known. I can’t live here anymore.
You can’t go home again. Well, duh.
How much ink has spilled over Thomas Wolfe’s book? The title, I mean. No one actually reads the novel, published posthumously in 1940.
This is like using “Alice in Wonderland” to talk about something else. “Catch 22” is another, right there with “Mission Impossible.” It’s way more fun to talk in metaphor than in straight up, plain words. Better yet in titles, so compact.
“You Can’t Go Home Again” is another cliché, true. It’s also a root truth beneath the tired indictments of where someone has lived for any length of time, voiced endlessly as if profound, revelatory, unique to this place.
But it’s not. Ski towns, beach towns, farm towns, factory towns, mining towns, every suburb defined enough to have a council and some that do not, college towns, big cities, little ones. This is Dr. Seuss, to fish out another metaphor from authors’ names or nom de plumes.
No place has changed in my lifetime more than Honolulu, where I lived young and returned right out of high school from one of those eternal suburbs, same as ever to this day. No place was more faded and worn out than upstate New York, save maybe the middle of Illinois, where I had the window seat in the 1990s as editor of a local daily in each.
I’ve stayed no place longer than in a ski community that in many ways I have to acknowledge grew better rather than worse, all considered. With roundabouts and development came amenities, more trail systems, better concerts, better athletics, a cancer center, the world’s best orthopedic surgeons, more choice among restaurants, improvements in education and opportunity for the kids. And as here, I could be in the wilderness within minutes, still able to find trailheads without another car in the lot.
An old, old rancher in the Vail Valley long before the ski resorts told me once: “Don’t let anyone tell you it was better then. Trust me, it wasn’t.”
Yet the mournful howls are joined en masse, almost eagerly as if joining a coveted club, a pack of true locals. Yes, all’s gone to ruin, I know. The place is pure hell now, red moon full, greedy monsters all about or else their factories gone for good.
The owners of a fancy clothing store in Vail Village made a lot of noise about bailing when I arrived in 1999. Colorado had voted out the Olympics, but still the skiers came. We learned quickly that you couldn’t get to Denver from there on a Sunday afternoon or evening, same as trying to come up from Denver on Friday nights and Saturdays, all bumper to bumper on I-70.
I respected that the disgruntled couple made a decision to move someplace quieter, one of those innumerable alternatives in the West alone. Doing something besides endlessly griping as if choices didn’t exist. We always have a choice, after all.
Last fall about this time, I read yet another story about the end of the ski bum lifestyle, the latest of a genre going back to Warren Miller, who wrote a weekly column for the Vail Daily while I was there.
Heather Hansman’s “Powder Days” was a community read in Park City, so you might have read it, too. I loved it, but I also noted with extra interest the weary trope about how those days are all over now etc., etc., etc.
See, she didn’t even start her golden age in Beaver Creek until 2005, living the life and loving it all at a certain phase, just while we adults with kids in a whole ’nother stage of life duly noted others lamenting the end of it all with no hope for evermore as we suffered through a development boom. It’s all soured since, as she’s grown up, sure. Another cycle yet turns.
But you’ve had to have met some exuberant new young bums, as I have, on the lifts right here. Somehow it works, at least for a bit, as it did for Hansman, Miller and maybe you.
The end of skiing is adjacent to town’s gone to all hell as skiing and ski towns together run at peak popularity in fact. There’s a Yogi Berra aspect to this: “No one goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” Except here they all are, still, skiing decidedly not dead or even stale.
In a blink this will change, someday. Climate change will have its way, and resorts are likely in the fullness of time to overextend or collapse of their own weight. Park City could well go the way again of a Leadville, or a Sterling, Illinois, or some other ol’ once was, used to be.
If so, the howling will be just as mournful and useless, and shared, the loss keenly felt. I heard it across the Midwest and Rust Belt, unvarnished, unpainted, unrelenting. If one must choose between poles, in rural poverty at least you know everyone in what restaurants and grocery stores are left. And homes are cheap — only you still can’t afford them.
I confess I’m not with the howlers and the moaners, the victims helpless against the tides, whether flowing or ebbing. If this is you rearing back and opening your jowls, the urge is telling you something: Make a choice. Stay or go. Or make the choice that I see as solid a minority as I’ve ever seen making right here. That is, clamping down on the challenges of too much posterity and all the down sides with that.
There are in fact bigger problems in the world than ours, worse places to live, more to mourn than a long lift line. Just saying. The sun also rises.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at drogers@parkrecord.com or (970) 376-0745.