Guest Column

Western Growth, Like the Squash in My Backyard

By Allen Best, 9-02-06

	Young squash plant. Photo by Chris Lombardi.

By Allen Best

My garden and house in metropolitan Denver have several parallels with the broader West. The mining boom of Colorado and other states left a legacy that lingers today. Even today, you can’t go far in those mining regions without seeing splotches of orange mine dumps on hillsides, or large terraces of spent orange once crimson and toxic, but now covered by a thin layer of impervious clay and top soil.

Like those miners, various inhabitants of this house have used the backyard as a landfill. I know this because I harvest glass from this garden after every rainstorm, every spring tilling, and every July soaking.

The glass, I can live with. It makes gardening a bit of an adventure. Call it extreme gardening. As for the license plates that I have uncovered, maybe I’ll post these mementoes of “Colorful Colorado” on e-Bay. Surely somebody has a hobby of collecting rusted, 1920s license plates.

The foot-deep stratum of plaster detritus that underlies my garden is another matter. In what may be the American way, somebody figured to make things right by spreading a few inches of soil atop the construction debris. I have spent several years laboriously trying to reform this “soil,” screening out the lime particles, but with only modest success.

In early May this year, surveying the drab garden, I was dubious of autumnal fecundity. The garden looked so vast, so empty – like large portions of the American West. I couldn’t imagine anything ever taking root. From previous experience, I know this reclaimed garden only shugs when presented with seeds of ordinary vegetables.

So this year I installed two tiny squash plants in my personal brownfield, then waited. And waited. Nothing and more nothing. Finally, in July, the squash became imperialistic, threatening to colonize the rows of onions, red beets and green peppers planted in the more pristine parts of the garden. The empty quarter has become a sea of green. It looks like Vietnam. Who’d have thunk?

My garden is like many places in the Southwest. With Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado in the lead, once empty quarters are rapidly filling in the West, the nation’s fastest growing region during the 1990s. That torrid growth has continued. Baby boomers are flooding into sunny, scenic areas to stake out property for their sunset years. “Put a piece of Montana in your IRA retirement account,” says one sign in the Flathead Valley north of Missoula.

Others are coming because, with modern telecommunication and improved transportation, they can. The key is that they can still draw their city-like salaries and lead the good life in a more pastoral, easy-going setting.

A striking example of this is found in old mining towns of Aspen, Telluride, and Breckenridge, all in Colorado, and in Park City, Utah, and Ketchum, Idaho. After World War II, skiers began arriving to take possession of the fading Victorians, if not quite as happily the Superfund sites and other legacies of the mining era. These ski areas from the 1960s and 1970s were like the seeds of my zucchini plants. Growth was slow at first, then took off impressively and now have become like the vines that have crossed my neighbor’s fence. The ski towns have become resort valleys that are expanding into lateral valleys.

Jackson Hole, the part-time home of Vice President Dick Cheney, and a good many other influential and wealthy sorts, is now spilling into neighboring Idaho’s Teton Valley. Aspen’s down-valley shadow now extends 80 miles. Blue-collar down-valley towns have become gussied up with what Washington Post cultural trends writer Joel Garreau calls the Santa Fe-ing effect. These places, he writes are “becoming urbane without the urban. Or even suburban. It is becoming a place where people can make city-quality money, and satisfy city-quality tastes, without the city.

One of the most striking examples of this gentrification – and population explosion – is in Colorado’s Eagle County, where Vail is located. In 1960, two years before the ski area opened, the population stood at less than 5,000. Ever since, the population has doubled every dozen years. It now stands at more than 50,000, and is expected to hit nearly 90,000 as the youngest baby boomers retire.

But even that city-like number fails to tell the whole story. Demographers predict some 33,000 commuters hurrying in and out of the county. That’s no big deal for a Denver or even a Phoenix, with broad expanses to sprawl, but quite a challenge for valleys whose exits are either canyons or mountain passes.

What is most surprising, in a way, is how expected all this was. Sober-minded demographers have been predicting this population growth for years. Now, right on cue, it’s happening. And coming with it – perhaps too late – is a mad rush to preserve open space and ensure affordable housing.

This last-minute scramble makes me cranky, as I’d like to think we could have done a better job of planning for the population growth. But then I think about my garden, the squash tendrils lording over my onions, next blitzkreiging into my neighbor’s yard. In May, I couldn’t image this much greenery. Worse, if a vegetable demographer had warned me, I’d have paid no attention.

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