I'm Not Wrecking Your Town

Overheard in the New West

By Emily Esterson, 7-21-07

	Still pretty sleepy.

Scot and I had come down out of the San Juan Wilderness after backpacking for three days in thunderstorms, camping streamside, eating hastily cooked macaroni and cheese in the vestibule of our Walrus backpacking tent. It had been a nice trip. But he had column due for the Albuquerque Tribune that he’d forgotten to write before we left, so we packed out of the woods early Sunday morning. Our socks were wet. Our boots soaked from stream crossings. We’d lost one of our river shoes and run out of food. We were craving a hot meal. A dip in the Pagosa Hot Springs, an Internet cafe, a hot meal and a laundromat were in order. He was meeting friends for another four days of packing. The good wife that I am, I decided I’d dry his socks and pants.

We dumped our packs on the sidewalk on a side street in downtown Pagosa, and we piled his wet smelly clothes back up in the trunk of the car. We headed four miles out of town, where there was an Internet cafe. I left him at Higher Grounds, a Starbucks knockoff (complete with CDs of arguably hip music for sale at the register) in the “new” part of Pagosa Springs, acres upon acres of condo-loft homes sat adjacent to a golf course. Everything about this neighborhood gave us the willies—from its ski-lodge look to its sanitary cafe to the City Market, which was so upscale it reminded me of more of Whole Foods than a run of the mill Krogers.

I found a laundromat in one of those faux-log strip malls that were popular in Colorado in the early ‘80s (quite a ways out of town. The people who shop at that City Market undoubtedly own washer-dryers, probably the fancy new LG kind). It was a quiet day. There was one other customer, an overweight, sweating man in his fifties, who, I imagined, lived in a trailer on the outskirts of town and had junked cars in his yard. Judgemental. I know. But I was bored. I re-read the same issue of Newsweek I’d read in the dentist’s office a week ago. The only other magazines on the little table next to the mustard yellow plastic chairs were back issues of “TPE” (Today’s Pentacostal Evangel). So I started eavesdropping. The man was un-muscled, but wearing a muscle t-shirt. He had thick glasses. The woman, probably 60, was wearing a floral housecoat and minding the store with an scolding manner. Every time I wheeled my little basket next to my washer, she came and wheeled it back next to its basket brethren in a neat line up next to the dryers. I gathered I was not to move my basket from its parking space until I was ready for the washer-dryer transfer.

She knew the man, and a conversation ensued. They were talking loudly, considering only one washer was going at the time. The topic at first was whether or not Pagosa Springs had enough population to support a Wal-Mart.

“But those rich people don’t want it,” the woman said. “Those people move here, and they think all of a sudden they’re natives, like they have the right to control our communities, tell us how to live. I bet with Dulce and Chama [two nearby New Mexico communities] we’d have enough people to get Wal-Mart to come. Those people, they live here, what, two years, no, a summer. Heck, I thought native meant you were born and raised here.”

Man: “I’ve lived here 15 years. I’m not a native. At least I know that. That Fourth of July parade, that was an example, the town was so crowded, you could hardly see. They come here from California and they make everything expensive, so the real people can’t live here.”

Woman: “People don’t even know what Pagosa means.”

Which was funny, because not 15 minutes earlier Scot and I had wondered that exact thing.

In the 40 minutes that I’m in the laundromat, it has become obvious to me that this conversation, which goes on and on, and maybe I’ve had too much coffee, but I’m finding hard to tune out and really irritating, is taking place for my benefit. And, that it’s not the first time the keeper of the laundromat has railed against the outsiders when they were in her midst. In fact, it was so cliche it sounded scripted.

In Southern Colorado, where the increase in population/income is directly proportional to the number of free “homes and land” magazines distributed in front of the convenience store, the natives, or the faux natives, or non-natives who feel they lived there long enough to have a say, are getting testy. There are still only 11,000 people living here full time, and unemployment is below the national average (4.50 percent vs. 4.60 percent).Yes, the cost of living is higher, largely due to the skyrocketing cost of homes and land. But it’s still not as high as Durango to the west or Colorado Springs to the north.

Surely, I am my laundry friends’ worst nightmare, with my pink Crocs (which for the record are Payless knockoffs), my well-soiled nearly-new Honda Accord, my hippie bandanna covering my long, salt and pepper hair, my minuscule load of wash—not the load of a working mom with six kids living in above-noted trailer park. Surely the volume of their discussion was meant to alert me that I was not welcome in their Pagosa, even though I’d just dumped an obscene number of quarters into the woman’s washing machine. Now granted, my load of wash did not make her Sunday, financially-speaking. I didn’t have six loads going. I didn’t buy a candy bar from the vending machine. I didn’t get saved reading the Pentacostal magazine. But I wondered how these two would fare if those million dollar homes in the valley hadn’t ever shown up. Would they be complaining instead about how, say, Bayfield or Cortez or Montrose had gotten all the money, and they were left out in the cold?

Ironically, earlier in the day I had shared one of the mineral pools with a nice young man and his six year old daughter. The man was from a local ranching family, born and raised in the Pagosa Valley, in the shadow of the San Juans. He talked about how the valley had changed and how much better it was for a young family like his. “There’s more to do. More jobs, more money,” he told me. “More people, too, and the tourists are annoying, but that’s okay.” He, like ourselves, had opted for the shabbier, simpler mineral pools, away from the glitz and glam pools built for the tourists, across the street.

There was a time when Pagosa Springs, and similar towns all over the Rockies, were undiscovered, quiet communities. There was a time, too, between the demise of mining and logging and the advent of tourism and the arrival of outsiders, that those towns really suffered economically. Down the road a piece, say Alamosa or Bayfield, it’s possible to see places still not recovered, with residents eeking out a living.

Yes, for those of us who remember when there was no “Adult Golf Community” on the edge of town—any town—it’s lamentable to see how we’ve ruined our landscapes. Even in shabby Albuquerque, we cringe when Forbes or Fortune or the New York Times writes a glowing piece about the quality of life here. “Oh, no! The Californians are coming!”

I live in one of those neighborhoods, too, Laundry Lady.  Our old Hispanic farming community (where I am decidedly NOT a native), now has two, count-em, two gay couples, one of whom flattened the original house and is in the process of building what could honestly be called a McMansion. Two others like it are in process down the street, in what used to be 12 acres of alfalfa.

But, you know what, I’m not worried about it. Because we’re all from somewhere else. Our society has always been on the move—from east to west, west to east, north to south. As a whole, we migrate, we move, we change.

When I leave here (for Pagosa, or someplace like it, financial gods willing), someone will pay way more than I did for my house. I’m counting on that, and I’m not ashamed of it. It’s not the reason I live here, in this hot, dry valley. But I don’t deny that it’s the natural course of the economic universe today. I wish I could be more socialist about it. I really do. But I’m a realist.

So, Laundromat Lady, the times are changin’. You never know. You might just get rich off those Californians. But I do know one thing: Next time I need to dry socks in Pagosa, I’m heading elsewhere.

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