We’re Too Old and Too Wise to Play “Katy Bar the Door”

Not for the first time I received a note on a story I wrote about American immigrants: people who sell and move to a perceived better location.

A reader wrote:

No, don’t come to Florida. We are losing our paradise because of overcrowding. Come visit, go home.

Therein lies the problem. EVERYONE says that. Visit, but go home.

Anyone who reads Outside Magazine knows what happened to those “great little sports towns” like Boulder, CO and Bend OR that “nobody knows about.” They are bursting at the seams, overpriced and over-crowded. Laramie is their latest; wait a while.

Of course, like those gorgeous towns in Montana that people saw only in movies like A River Runs Through It, wait until winter to discover just how wonderful those towns are, amiright?

You ask any Santa Fe Indigenous local who got priced out of that fabulous artsy little town by the massive influx of New Yorkers back in the Seventies.

Every pretty community, every state, every nice town, every single space in America says precisely the same thing. Has for years and years and years. Several aspects to this.

Let’s start with when I moved to Colorado back in 1971. The universal chant was “Don’t Californicate…