I’m not from here
I just live here
Grew up somewhere far away

James McMurtry on Too Long in the Wasteland

I think I forgot to tell you that I saw the guy who drives a recumbent bike and picks up cans, so my potential worry about him being hit on the highway wasn’t for any independent reason after all.

I thought about him this Sunday night, coming back very late from the office and driving along that same stretch of road. I envy his life in certain aspects.

No matter how long I stay in this place it’s never going to be home.

Apparently a while back there was a plan for a huge residential development near the base, and after ten years in court, taken there by one independent female activist and a clutch of environmental groups, it got successfully killed off.

I listened to a long form story about it. The occasion for the piece was that the Growth partisans are trying again of course. This time they want to take a little town up north a bit, 5000 people, and move 70,000 more into it, specifically into homes in the 250-300K range. For some weird reason the theme of the place would be Italian, maybe even Venetian, a damned odd choice in a waterless land.

They interviewed the lady activist and I was impressed. But before she had her segment, they talked to the esteemed County Administrator. He was a snarky fuck, but cagey too. If we don’t use that kind of land for a proper respectable development, he said, wildcatter half-ass farmers would move in on it, put trailers on it, and use up all the water for pecans or something.

Which allowed him to pose as a concerned environmentalist while pushing for this atrocity to proceed.

Sounded specious to me, but maybe he believes his own yawp. There are gonna continue to be baby boomers retiring off, he said, and they’re going to need places to live.

I am working to become one of them as soon as I can. I reckon if I wanted to live in some old-person hellhole surrounded by golf courses and tragic american success stories, there are already plenty of those around. The original was “opened”, Wikipedia notes–rather than founded–around the time I was getting born. I try to live as the opposite of Del Webb though.

I’ve known where I’ve wanted to end up since the Hummingbird Ephiphany was visited upon me near that place in 1997. I go back as a resident wannabe pretty often. It seems so strange to me that I could want it for 25 years, make compromises that whole time, find work within two hundred miles of it more than once, and still maybe never make it to the place in the end as a dues-paid, mortgage-paid pensioner landowner.

I’m still working hard toward making it happen, but as hope runs into the wall of reality, I’m working on contingencies too. Mainly going back to where I still ‘own’ that beautiful albatross of a barbed-wire loft up north, four and a half hours from the dream town, the only place I’ve ever taken a loan on instead of paying rent. It refuses to sell, and maybe that’s going to turn out to be just as well.

Because I have cans to collect, and poems to write, instead of the long reworked sheets of curriculum that they pay me too little for.

I got a long way on that business anyway, right up against the end of the weekend.

I remain committed to impressing no one but myself in that workplace. It may be enough, or come another June I may go find another place where I’m not from, testing the angles, trying to find a way to one kind of home, or another.