My sweetheart had just gotten a halfway real job and needed some new clothes, so we drove down to the big city of Santa Fe. Passing up our usual foray into the faux adobe district of art and green chile, we rolled along a busy auto strip past faux New England chowder houses and mansard roofed burger joints to an Old Navy store. As she tried on outfits, I browsed the men’s section, amazed at what I saw: The clothes they were selling were a lot like the ones I was wearing. For the first time in my life, I was in style.
Indeed, the shelves were stacked with sweatshop replicas of clothing worn in bars and on job sites across the Rockies. There were imitation Carhartts, pre-frayed around the knees and hems for that working-class look. Thin and light, they wouldn’t make it through a single day of hard labor, but they sure did look cool. So did the olive-green cargo pants, the kind with the big side pockets I had been getting at army surplus stores since I was a teen. Best of all were the mesh baseball caps emblazoned with the pre-faded image of a deer, an orange sunset, and the words “Buck Mesa, Colorado.” It looked like a vintage hat, a rarity from the ’70s. But unlike the Kenworth hat my uncle gave me when I was eight, this was made in Bangladesh, and there were dozens of them for sale. And if there’s a Buck Mesa in Colorado, I’ve never heard of it.
While it would be easy to shrug all this off as just the latest in meaningless fashion, the fact that a big-name national chain store was prominently featuring the tough and rugged “mountain look” is indicative of something deeper. It reveals a change in our national myth — Colorado as the epitome of cool.
It wasn’t always this way. In 1987, my family fled our recession- plagued Colorado hometown for the promise of San Diego, a city in the midst of a Cold War military-industrial-complex boom. As an impressionable 14-year-old who had watched way too much television, I was saturated with the archetypes of Southern California coolness: bad ass Top Gun pilots playing beach volleyball and riding sleek Jap motorcycles, rich folks cruising in convertibles on the Pacific Coast Highway ala “L.A. Law”, skateboarders like Tony Hawk and Gator ripping up half pipes, hot chicks with teased hair and skimpy bikinis lying on white sand beaches. Compared to all that, Colorado sucked, and I was excited to get out of my hick mountain town.
Needless to say, Cali wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. My illusions were shaken the moment we descended into a smoggy valley and pulled into the driveway of our new home, a dilapidated rental with “SLAYER” spray painted in blood red on the garage door, an inauspicious omen.
Within three weeks, my bicycle had been stolen, our house had been burglarized, and I had witnessed my first act of city cruelty — kids throwing rocks at a homeless person. It was a far cry from the Club Med I had envisioned. The only sign of paradise was the palm tree in our front yard, drooping lifelessly in the stifling heat.
Where were the girls in bikinis? The beautiful people in fancy cars? They were at the beach, 20 miles and several socioeconomic brackets away, an impossible distance for someone too young to drive. But when we finally visited the fabled beach, it too, was a letdown. The ocean was cold and murky, even in the hottest part of summer, and the sand was covered with flabby tourists and mounds of rotting seaweed surrounded by flies. I was crushed.
Perhaps, my standards were too high, for even the best possible reality would have fallen short of the storybook scene in my imagination. But it wasn’t just me. Southern California had been riding a wave of coolness since the days of Gidget and the Beach Boys, but by 1990 that wave had crested and was about to crash upon the trash-strewn beach (closed until further notice due to fecal contamination). Maybe it was the riots of ’92, or the fires of ’93, or the earthquake of ’94, or the floods of ’95, but somewhere along the way, folks began to see through the façade of eternal sunshine, and So-Cal lost its golden glow. To be sure, plenty of Latino and Asian immigrants still flock to the place, and many Americans will always be lulled by the easy climate, but the secret is out, and the average person on the street knows that Southern California is a sinking ship of rolling blackouts, gridlock-related shootings and runaway sprawl … the epitome of Paradise Lost.
At the same time that So-Cal’s star was fading, Colorful Colorado was sparkling like champagne powder in the morning sun. The sudden explosion of snowboarding and mountain biking, Elway’s back-to-back Super Bowl victories and a brief spurt of feel good environmental consciousness all thrust the state into the national spotlight. By the late-’90s, a glance at the idiot box revealed an America obsessed with what they perceived to be the Rocky Mountain way: big pickups splashing through streams en route to mountaintop campsites, a hapless backcountry skier tumbling down an avalanche chute while Lenny Kravitz sings about how he wants to get away (imagine the hard-charging yuppies who ran out to buy the advertised SUV just because it included a first-aid kit), and, of course, the scantily clad Coors Light girls showing off the state’s majestic peaks. Consumer culture’s love affair with the outdoors — or at least the “outdoor lifestyle” — was soon in full swing, and everybody who was anybody in places like Indiana quickly swapped their Day-glo Quicksilver surf shirts for a North Face fleece and Nike hiking boots. By the new millennium, America’s longstanding California dream (wine on the porch of a bungalow overlooking the ocean sunset) had been replaced by a new Colorado vision — microbrew on a ranchette surrounded by national forest on three sides. Between 1990 and 2003, Colorado’s population jumped from 3.2 to 4.5 million, a net gain nearly equal to the entire populations of Wyoming and Montana combined, with five mountain counties (Summit, Park, Eagle, Teller and San Miguel) doubling in population. In 2005, for the third year in a row, Boulder was rated #1 in the Men’s Journal annual “50 Best Places to Live” article, while Ft. Collins and Buena Vista (!) made Outside magazine’s short list of 18 “New American Dream Towns.” Indeed, while I was writing this, National Public Radio featured a story on String Cheese Incident and hula-hoops, casually dropping the names of Crested Butte and Telluride in the process. Such media exposure lends credence to the “Colorado as Cool” myth, inspiring countless more devout believers to make the mountain pilgrimage.
But as these wide-eyed neophytes roll into storied mountain towns, they’ll quickly learn that these places are unaffordable for all but the jet set or those willing to take a vow of poverty. Some will take that vow, for a season or even a lifetime, but most will end up in the megalopolis along the Front Range where they’ll settle into a 40-hour workaday existence not unlike the one they came to Colorado to escape. The same brown air. The same traffic. The same crime. Quiet desperation with occasional hazy views of distant mountains. By Friday, they’ll be stressed out and ready for a weekend in the High Country, so they’ll pack up the “Avalanche” or “Colorado” or “Tundra” and hit ye old I-70, braving bottleneck traffic jams for some hurried relaxation in yonder hills.
The mountains will be mighty pretty, but there will be some unexpected problems. Fishermen will elbow their way to an open stretch of stream, only to find that massive diversions by the Denver Water Board have dried up entire watersheds. Hunters will wonder if the succulent back strap of that strange acting elk they just shot is safe to eat. Backpackers seeking solitude in the state’s wilderness areas will encounter countless others searching for the same thing, especially in those remote corners rumored to harbor the elusive grizzly. Families who drop a thousand bucks per day on lodging, ski lessons and lift tickets will then be forced to pay just a little bit more to park, not to mention airport prices for cafeteriaquality food at the base.
Sightseers will find former mining towns “restored” to their original mini-mall/real-estate-office status, and once-enchanted ghost towns will be littered with frappucino cups. Indeed, much of this has already come to pass, and every Sunday evening, throngs of weekend warriors head back to the city with maxxed-out credit cards and heavy hearts. Something just doesn’t seem right.
For a while, the millionaires fortunate enough to actually live in the name-brand towns will live a high life of powder and prestige, secure in the knowledge that as they buy and sell parcels of what used to be a ranch, they are absolutely in tune with the zeitgeist of rustic Western living.
They’ll get involved in worthy community projects like banning low-income housing. They’ll fight to make the place more inclusive, lengthening runways at the airport so those with Lear jets can land safely. They might even publish guidebooks to the local back- country, so that all of their neighbors in the new four-season golf “community” can take full advantage of the beautiful scenery.
After a year or two, they’ll claim the coveted status of “local,” even as they disdain the descendants of pioneers who bag their groceries at Safeway. (All of which has already occurred in my childhood stomping ground of Grand County.)
But like ocean waves gradually undermining a cliff-side estate, eventually the realities of mountain life will crash the party of these New Westerners. For starters, as other like-minded trendsetters build homes in the next big place, convoys of dump trucks and heavy equipment will stir up choking clouds of dust (which settles in thick layers in homes occupied only a few weeks each year). Drought will cause golf courses to lose their green luster, and the fairways will turn an unsightly brown. Pine beetles will infest weakened forests, leaving vast stands of dead timber that will be charred (along with a number of “secluded” trophy homes) by fires of epic proportions. This will ruin the pricey views, causing property values to drop and bursting the much inflated real estate bubble.
Worst of all, as these beautiful people drive their Hummers around town, they’ll be forced to endure the sight of brown-skinned migrant workers who magically appear each day to pour concrete and wash dishes, prompting horrified cries about how “the Mexicans are ruining the place!” In 1859, at the behest of unsubstantiated rumors and newspaper headlines, throngs of would-be millionaires rushed to what is now Colorado to pluck easy money out of the streams of gold, only to discover squalid mining camps and tribes of red skinned locals who were none too happy about the sudden changes. Some of these miners stayed, and a select few struck it rich, but many thousands of them (derided as “go backers” by early pro-growth chamber-of-commerce types) returned home bearing tales of disillusionment and a gut feeling that they’d been lied to. Although it may take another 15 years, Colorado will undergo a similar exodus as the quality of life plummets and folks lose faith in the myth of the mountain life. And where will these emigrants go? What part of this great land of ours could possibly be better than the Rockies?
THE MIDWEST of course! If this sounds far fetched, consider the following: While Colorado held top spot in the aforementioned Men’s Journal ratings, the Midwest held eight of the 50 spots, including two in the top 10, and the Outside list of 18 “dream towns” included two from the farm belt. As the global political, economic and atmospheric climates heat up — terrorist attacks, gasoline shortages and various weather-related natural disasters — nervous citizens will turn to the “Heartland” for solace, trading the adventure of rugged mountains for the safe predictability of a Norman Rockwell painting.
Snow-covered peaks will give way to grain silos and water towers as the new beacons of hope, and former adrenaline junkies will learn to love the slow, salt-of-the earth pace of life in Americana, a place where the lawns don’t even need to be watered. Pious Colorado Christians, long vexed by the state’s armies of scraggly Gore-Tex pagans, will hark to the siren song of “intelligent design” emanating from flatland school board meetings. The liberal latte crowd will be drawn to the region’s college towns like Madison or Lawrence, traditionally among the more progressive communities in the country. Everyone else will jump at the chance to buy an obscenely affordable home, or perhaps to settle in one of the dying Great Plains communities currently offering FREE LAND to anyone willing to bring some warm bodies to prop up the local population. By 2020 at the latest, Colorado will be old hat, and car commercials will feature nuclear families driving hybrid station wagons through the amber waves of grain.
Like the earlier California dream, much of the coming “there’s no place like home” myth will have little basis in reality. Many Midwestern archetypes, such as Main Street businesses and low crime rates, have already been decimated by the likes of Sam Walton and crystal-meth, and the family farm went bankrupt years ago, but by the time anyone figures this out, it will be too late, for the rush for greener pastures will be on, and nobody will want to listen to naysayers.
So raise your frosty beer mugs and toast to your glorious moment of coolness, Colorado, for it won’t last much longer. Soon, thrift stores across America will be deluged with castoff hiking boots and Patagonia underwear, and the Centennial State will be left with plenty of elbow room as the masses move way, way down valley, somewhere over the rainbow. Wolves will wander in from Wyoming to feast on developers. Trailer courts will resound with raging solstice celebrations. Log mansions will go up in flames in sacrifice to the great god Pan. And we’ll all live happily ever after.
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