Small Town Transparency

Our house is on the market. Initially because we wanted to purchase a 40-acre ranch for the kids to raise 4H projects on; now just to be flexible in this wretched economy. After a year of listing with an agent - and a year on the market is not unusual here - we decided, with the coming slow season, to just sell ourselves. Now, I've never sold my own home; I really do believe that's what Realtors are for. But a young couple interested in our home couldn't afford it with the Realtor fee. As we were no longer under contract we thought, 'what the heck?'

And here's the thing about doing a For Sale By Owner in a small town. Without a Realtor, you have to exchange all the documents face-to-face. In a city, you'd be able to hire a courier. And it's not that I didn't feel like driving the one-mile distance. It's just that when you have to say no to the offer, it's hard to ring that doorbell and hand that hopeful young couple, pregnant with their first child, the envelope you know will break their hearts. As I drove home, I knew that by the time I opened my front door, they'd know. Heart-wrenching.

In a city you can be so much more anonymous. In a small town, you can't hide as easily. But that can be a real character-builder. Believe me, in the city I would have hired that courier to deliver the bad news. But here in the country, I sucked it up and faced the music. And, though it wasn't easy, I think I grew just a little bit from the experience.

Goin' down the mountain

Today, like so many families on a fall Saturday, we had soccer games. The difference is, we have to drive two hours round trip to play. Every Saturday. And, because we had a 9 a.m. game today, that meant getting up at 6:30 (where WAS that dang sun?) so we could leave by 7:30 to get to Pueblo in time for warm-ups.

In our small town, there is no soccer in school. It would perhaps - God forbid! - cannibalize the football program and, well, this is small town America and we just cannot have that. So beginning in grade school and going through middle school, our kids train during the week here for games played in a league an hour away. We always have to travel because, even though we live in a beautiful valley that is certainly worth a Saturday car trip, we're the only ones up here so down the hill we all go.

It's OK. We're used to having to travel a ways for things. Unless you can get them at the Family Dollar, which we do have. On fall Saturdays we make the downhill run for a little recreation, maybe lunch, some errands, even a movie that we think might not make it up to our one-plex. People often say "how can you drive an hour to get everywhere?". It's easy. There was a time when people used to take weekend drives either for recreation or supplies. So it's really not that different. Today, the Aspens were beginning to turn along with the Maples and Cottonwoods so it was a pleasure. Besides, people in the city spend an hour in their cars going places. They're just not moving, in general. I'd rather have it my way.

The oneplex strikes again

I just came from the oneplex, our Jones Theater on Main Street, from seeing Julie&Julia. I admit, I am in a post-cinematic-Nora-Ephron-screenplay haze, but I am inspired to spend more time on this blog. I have been too busy with other things and have neglected this little journal of a small life in a tiny town.

The truth is, I may not have much more time here. The economy has crashed and with it, our business of 17 years. And so, I may have to leave Westcliffe a town my father describes as my obsession. We took a chance on a dream and now it may be nearing an end. And I have so many stories to tell - five years worth!

So, if the "Julie" of the movie could cook 524 recipes in just 365 days, working her way through Julia Child's classic "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and blogging each day to tell about her experience, I can dedicate myself to telling the stories of an urban family who decided to take a chance on moving to the country.

What's Playing at the OnePlex?

One weekend we took the kids to a youth production of Rumplestiltskin at the local theatre. It is a theatre for live performance (regardless of what the older gent who climbs a ladder to change the marquee spells out) and also a theater for movies. This was a little disappointing to our two popcorn hounds who could not quite understand why they could not crunch their favorite snack during live theatre. After all, we were in the movie theater. Oh well.

Now the weekend before, we went to the theater to see the long-awaited Harry Potter release. Mind you, we had already seen it prior to leaving civilization but this offered a great opportunity for us to experience what the movies were going to be like at our local one-plex. And we were not disappointed. At the point in the movie where the projectionist pushes a button or something to transition from one reel of film to the next, all of a sudden there was no sound. A minute or so went by before polite moviegoers started to cue the projectionist, “Sound!”. Nothing. “Sound!” Some rustling from above and behind us. My husband got up and walked to the back of the theater, presumably to take matters into his own hands. But before long, a lanky gentleman bounded down the center aisle and informed us of the situation. “OK,” he said, “we have a slight problem. The sound on projector two has gone out. So we can either continue on like this, or I can stop after each reel and load the new one.” Well, who wants to see a movie with half of the sound? We all voted for option two. So every 20 minutes or so, the film would stop and we would wait about three minutes (it started at five, but the projectionist got faster each time) for it to start up again.

Some people would find this unacceptable. Intolerable. But, truth be told, it was not too bad. Other than the fact that it took about 30 extra minutes to see this film the second time, it was rather nice. We discussed our favorite scenes. Took bathroom breaks without fear of missing a crucial conversation in the film. Bought more popcorn – which, by the way, was $2 a bag, much cheaper than city popcorn – met the people in the row in front of us, visited with friends from soccer. All for the price of 30 minutes of my life. And, hey, I’m living in the country. What else did I have to do?

The Dreaded "W" Word

Now sometimes weekends include trips “down the mountain” to either Pueblo – where the mall is – or Canon City – where the Wal-Mart is, both about an hour away. I can now understand why country people drive big trucks. It took quite a bit of maneuvering for Dana – a self-acclaimed master packer – to cram the booty just from Target into our Durango. When we closed on the house here, we had to actually drive up to Canon to the title company. And those words you dread, those words that identify you truly as someone who lives in the sticks, were uttered from Dana’s mouth: I need to go to Wal-Mart. Time stood still. The birds went silent, clouds ceased to float. It was like being in a hick Matrix. Life would never be the same. Of course, when we got to W**-***t, we still experienced the horrible service that we had always experienced there; but this time, we were at their mercy. We HAD to be there. Very discouraging. Perhaps that is why people always look so down in the mouth at Wal-Mart, except of course in the commercials.

Nice Ride.

When we were making our decision about moving out of Dallas, I remember one of the categories on the mental spreadsheet was the high level of consumerism so prevalent in that glitzy city. Perhaps it was growing up in the 60s and 70s and then going to college in hippy dippy Austin that stunted my consumer gene but all that shopping for the latest and greatest thing just never appealed to me. And my husband, having been raised on a farm, never mainstreamed into big city buying either. So moving out of the city where it wasn’t just about what you drove, but how long it was (think mondo Suburbans) was something of a no brainer as far as the car column of the spreadsheet was concerned. We’re the types that would drive a car into the ground. Rural Colorado is just the place for people like us.

In our town, there appear to be two kinds of car owners. The first are in the category that we will most likely fall into – their cars are at least 10 years old and have bumper stickers professing their beliefs plastered all over the back. Things like “Keep your laws off my body” and “So many prairie dogs, so few recipes”. This kind of car makes sense up here because, for some reason, people that live in the country do not believe in garages. We do not have one and, being from the aforementioned car-as-extension-of-self city, we were fairly horrified and immediately started planning the construction. Another great thing about this brand of car is that there is only one carwash in town and it is the do it yourself kind. Which can get downright uncomfortable very quickly at this high, cool elevation. When you’re driving a car held together by duck tape and baling wire, what’s a little dirt?

Now the second kind of car owner is the type we aspire to be. You can hear them coming before you see them because of their gravelly, rumbling diesels. These are the landed gentry so to speak. They drive the big king cab trucks and Suburbans which they need to pull their horse trailers. The nicer your horse trailer, the higher your status. Those trucks also come in handy for driving around your acreage, checking fences and whatnot. Yessir, someday when I have acreage, I’m going to buy the noisiest diesel truck on the market. And the rattliest horse trailer (just in case you don’t hear my diesel when I pull into town).

My husband, being in his 40s, had to have his midlife-crisis car purchase. City folk go for racy things with Italian or German names. But here it's not how many gears, but plain-old four-wheel drive that matters. Before our purchase, we overheard someone complaining about having to drive behind a Texan with two-wheel drive. As we were the only ones in town as far as I could tell with Texas plates, I sunk a bit into my collar. So my husband jumped at the chance to buy a 75 Bronco. Never mind that it can't really go over 30 miles and hour and it eats more gas than aforementioned mondo Suburbans. It came with bumper stickers! "Broncoholic" and "Jerry Jeff Walker" right on the back fender. So now, we have joined the ranks of country folk that must have at least one more car in their yard than they have drivers. I guess you'd call it country consumerism. For us, it's our economical car, our high-occupancy car and our drive-over-anything car. I dare the Big Three to come up with just one that can do all that!

One more funny thing I noticed right away is that up here you NEVER hear the “breep breep” of someone activating their car alarm. Except for in the summer when all the tourists come to town. Of course, that’s not hard to figure as half the cars driven up here were built before alarms were on the drawing boards. But also because people trust each other. Or know eachother, so it's tougher to get away with crime. It is always with great reluctance that I push that little button on the key fob. Now, I don’t do it at home and I don’t do it if my car is empty (with the exception of all the junk that accumulates behind the front seat which anyone is more than welcome to cart away). But sometimes I run into the grocery store and leave my laptop – my life! – in the car. Its even more embarrassing when you do it in the dead of winter when every other unoccupied car in the parking lot is running. Still, you never know when some shifty non-local might park next to you. Better embarrassed than sorry. photo copyright Jan Lee 2009

Window TV

Now the same week we discover the mail will not just magically appear at our door like it did in the city, we also begin to wonder what day trash gets picked up. It is of particular concern to us as we have about 40 big moving boxes in our backyard. Guess what? That does not happen just because you unload your furniture at an address either. Turns out you have to hire someone to haul your trash, unless you want to take a weekly drive out to the dump yourself. But at $16 a month, I figure it’s worth not getting banana peels and coffee grounds inside my decidedly non-country friendly coupe.

One thing we do have now I like to call “window TV”. In our living room the large windows face west so we have sweeping views of the Wet Mountain Valley and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains beyond. Today Zoë and I sit and watch a storm blow down the mountains. You can actually see where it begins and ends. It reminds me of spending time as a child at Long Beach Island in New Jersey. We used to rent a house each year, right on the bay, with the same kind of large windows looking east. When storms came in from the west you could look out over the water and just watch the storm rise and come toward you – like a giant, curling hand. This is just the same. Today when the clouds lift, the mountain tops shine bright white with newly fallen snow.

Wow. This is worth all the strange little quirks of adjusting to life in the country, I think. Sitting here with Zoë watching this instead of TV. And then, Griffin shouts from downstairs “Zoë, Spongebob is on” and my bubble bursts. In a flash she is gone. The power of the yellow sponge.

Small-Town Double Take Number One

After arriving in town, our first stop is at the office where the keys were left for us in an envelope taped to the door. Small-town double take number one. Unfortunately they don’t work so we go to the house and unload the office stuff out of the little U-Haul we rented, unload our house stuff (mattresses and towels and toys – the essentials while waiting for your moving van) and then reload the office stuff back into the truck. Where is Frenchy when you need him? Exhausted – yet again – but happy to be in our new home, we order the first of many take-out meals and settle in for the night. Nothing but the sound of the wind in the aspens and the occasional crunch of tires on our newly graveled street. Bliss.

Now I have always lived in a city or a suburb where we take certain services, I discover, for granted. Specifically speaking, trash and mail. Having been in our little house in the valley about four days my husband announces that we have no mailbox. Odd, I thought. Well, we'll just have to get one. But having never lived in a house or apartment that didn’t come with a mailbox, I first think – miraculously –to check with the post office.

“Let me take your number and I’ll have the carrier call you about where she can deliver your mail,” said the woman behind the counter at the post office. Huh? Talk to the postal carrier? Is that legal? First of all, in the city I never knew who was going to show up with my mail – half the time it was someone wearing street clothes and a pith helmet. I had no idea who carried my mail. I’m pretty sure the post office had no idea who carried my mail. In a couple of days, a friendly voice on the phone informs me that she can deliver my mail to Emery and South street, about a block away, because there is already a mailbox she delivers to there. Faced with the choice of either going to a mailbox on a random corner or going to the post office where our mail is kept safely behind lock and key, we opt for the post office.

About the same time, my husband discovers that – surprise! – we have no mailbox at the office either, even though it is on Main Street downtown. Or in town. I’m not sure Westcliffe is big enough to have more than that – up, down, eastside, westside. Just in town. Anyway, now we have mail that is just floating around in post office purgatory because both addresses I so efficiently entered on my change-of-address cards in Dallas appear not to exist. We decide to get one PO box for everything which entails filling out more change-of-address cards so when the mail returns to the Westcliffe post office from the non-existent addresses we expected it to arrive at, it now has to be re-routed to the box in the building. However, that change-of-address has to go through Colorado Springs – 75 miles away – to get the official o.k. So much for less red tape in small towns. The government is still the government. Enough said. So we wait patiently for our mail. It has just now started to trickle in. Amazing how fast bills find their way to you whereas checks must not have that same acute sense of direction.

Failing Moving 101

On the day of our move from Dallas, the foreman proclaims we are not ready. I beg to differ. I am more than ready to leave the 90-degree steam bath. But he means that we have about a day of packing left before he can load us on the truck. In essence, we have failed Moving 101.

I wonder if this has some kind of underlying meaning. I mean, who isn’t ready when the movers show up? Is this some kind of cosmic hint that the move isn’t right? Another thing to keep me up at night. That and all the packing I still have left to do.

The next day the movers – a new crew including our driver, Stanley, another guy and a character named Frenchy who mumbles when he talks so it’s hard to understand him – show up and this time we were ready. Six hours and 83 boxes later the truck is full – unfortunately too full to make the stop downtown to pick up our office load. Another call, another truck, another kink in the plan. As I leave our house for good, the new owner is walking in with items as I’m walking out with mine.

We collapse at my mother’s house in Plano. I need my mommy after the two-week grind of paring down 2,500 square feet of possessions to squeeze into 1,400. Not to mention dogs and children who just don’t understand why you can’t take them on their usual long walks and jaunts to the dollar store while cramming six years of collected Happy Meal toys into boxes (and trash bags). I fall asleep sitting up. Dana eats dinner at 11 p.m. But it’s over. On one end, at least.

The next day we set out for Amarillo not nearly as bright and early as my father would have done it. I remember those car trips of my childhood when he would be walking around in the dark house, tapping his Timex and barking, “we’re nine minutes behind schedule!” But we are going to a hotel room where we will be sleeping with both kids and dogs. What’s the big hurry? We make good time, eat Wendy’s poolside at the La Quinta and pass out early watching “Home on the Range”.

Our last day of driving goes quickly and uneventfully with the exception of the portion of I-25 that passes through Trinidad, Colorado just north of the New Mexico border. With a history of panic issues related to driving (before the miracle of modern medicine) it is a tad unnerving when my Mitsubishi Gallant starts bucking on a near vertical climb. But once we clear that hurdle it’s smooth sailing. I crank the White Stripes and my sole passenger, Henry, our two-year old lab who is wearing sunglasses, and I lean forward, trying to gain speed.

Paring Down and Moving On

Within a year of visiting Colorado, we make our move.

We have purchased a wonderful house in Silver Cliff, the stepchild town next to the better-known Westcliffe. While we know renting is the smartest way to ease ourselves into this new lifestyle, frankly, there's not much on the rental market. So we take yet another leap of faith and buy it. So much for wise first steps.

Our new home is much smaller than the one we own now, so I weed out and pare down our possessions. This feels good. No, great. I think of the scripture when Christ challenges his disciples to go forth into the world to carry the good news, wearing nothing but the clothing on their backs. THAT’S paring down. My task is a snap by comparison. Some goes to friends, some to the donation center, more to a consignment shop and some we sell during a pool party.

The new house is actually quite old. Rebuilt in 1990, it was originally a Presbyterian parsonage located a few blocks away. It has the original ponderosa pine floors (complete with square nails) and red window frames. It is full of western charm, sided in cedar and topped with a red metal roof. The grounds are the prettiest we’ve seen in the area with whispering aspens, pines, a sunken deck, stone walls and a fire ring. And the mountain view is breathtaking.

A Wing and a Prayer

Seven months after we first return from the Wet Mountain Valley our time is filled with prayers for guidance, discussions with perplexed family, trips back to Westcliffe in the name of research, and much agonizing. It seems as though we have received mostly negative input from those around us, yet our hearts just keep calling us there.

We're not without our own concerns about keeping our business alive from a remote location. Not to mention the challenges facing city people trying to relocate “off the grid”. Solar power. Cell phone service only – and expensive analog roam at that. Septic tanks and water wells. Back up generators. No neighbors for miles. One supermarket. No dentist or pharmacy. We have tried to think of every imaginable contingency but know that nothing but experience will truly inform us. With that thought in mind, we make the decision to bite the bullet and move over the coming summer.

It is a true test of faith. We still don’t have the Dallas office situation worked out. Perhaps the bigger story in our transition is the fact that, coming back from our first visit to the Wet Mountain Valley having been to a Christian family camp there, Dana had what he terms a mini-conversion. And so now, in additional to changing location, we're changing the entire direction of our business from secular to faith-based. Heaven help us.

The Romance of the West

I’m not from the west. Far from it, in fact: I grew up in New Jersey (exit 131). In 1978, upon my graduation from high school, my family moved to Dallas riding the crest of the oil industry boom. Our move meant I could go to college at the University of Texas where people were paying an astonishing $4 a credit hour. But I moved to Texas at an odd point in time. My east coast, New York City suburban mentality never could reconcile with tooled cowboy belts, mechanical bulls and “who shot J.R.?”. I high-tailed it back east three months after graduation with no job and $300 in my pocket.

For seven years I sowed my wild oats – mainly in the shadowy recesses of Manhattan nightclubs. It was in the city that my journalism degree took me through public relations to advertising. It is where I honed my craft by day and choked out the last breaths of my adolescence by night. And then I was done. I missed my family. I missed having money in my pocket. I looked up at those skyscrapers, at the hundreds of windows behind which thousands of people moved through their lives. And suddenly the city was way too big for me. I needed a city that was manageable. A city that gave me choices but not quite so many. As the 80s drew to a close and Dallas emerged as less hick and more hip, I again headed west.

But I never truly felt a part of “The West”. My husband grew up in Oklahoma on a farm. With horses and cows. He knew a gelding from a stallion, a bull from a steer. But not me. As his family got to know me in our early years together they would collectively giggle at my attempts to pull something out of the fishing hole or keep my children’s white shorts from turning red in the Oklahoma country dirt. Don’t get me wrong – I have come to appreciate the subtle beauty in that part of the country. The vastness of the sky, the rolling fields changing colors with the seasons and even with the movement of the sun each day. The rough-hewn fence-posts connected by prickly barbed wire. The majesty of an ancient Live Oak. The vibrancy of a roadside field of Indian Paintbrush.

In the Wet Mountain Valley, the fields are as long as the mountains are high. The geography is less gentle than Texas and it just feels more western to me. Less a melting pot of American southwest and Mexican cultures and just pure American West. Wagon trains and cowboys. Bears and Indians. I can’t say why but this appeals to some part of me more than Texas does. I look forward to the solitude of winter. Coming from the east coast, I’m not afraid of the snow and the cold. I never moved away from the weather. Just the crowds.

The Seed is Planted

On the back of my Mapquested directions to our Colorado destinations, I begin sketching out an idea for a mountain retreat: we’d buy 35 acres of land and on the property we’d have an elegant yet Spartan cabin that we’d rent out to city dwellers who need a quiet repose from the stress of urban living. It would have an outdoor shower, a feather bed and aromatherapy. No TV. No Internet. No telephone. We’d create packages with horseback riding, yoga classes and massages in town. Everyone would live happily ever after.

I know it is the dream of countless Texans who have escaped the August heat in the cool mountain regions of Colorado. For a week after their return they float in a gauzy dream state, holding on to the final fleeting remnants of the peace they found in their mountain hideaway. Maybe I’ll move there, they think. It’s so pure, so clean, so beautiful. No crowds, no cars, no shopping malls or multiplex movie theaters. Why don’t more people live there?

At first, I'm afraid to share my thoughts with my husband. While I tend to be the more practical one and he the dreamer, I know that if he shoots down my notion with the fair dose of reality it, quite frankly, deserves I will be crushed. I feel I have never been so on fire about anything in my life. Did I think I was motivated in the past? Because THIS is motivation. This is the real deal.

But he doesn't shoot it down. We see eye to eye through that tiny sliver called hope. Chance. Daring. Craziness, boredom, burnout, inspiration. Call it what you will, but we're going for it.

How to Move to the Country (without getting run out of town).

In 2003, our family of four found the Wet Mountain Valley in Custer County, Colorado. Some people would call it a "God thing"; I had been researching beach vacations for months when my husband informed me - in May, no less - that he "needed to go to a mountain". Through a friend we found space at a Christian camp and, though we bristled at the thought of nightly praise and worship and no television we forged on. A year later, we moved.

We have resided in a tiny community boasting fewer than 5,000 residents countywide since the summer of 2004. We moved from the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex, which is populated by millions. Dubbed The Crisis Chronicles after our family's shocked murmurings following our moving announcement, this is our story.