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 Colorado.”

Californians are universally vilified. People forget that there was a wholesale influx of people to that fine state which effectively “ruined” it decades and decades ago. Those natural-born California folks were none too happy about that either.

Of course, ask Mexico, who were the inhabitants of much of Western USA, about the Treaty of Hidalgo:

This treaty, signed on February 2, 1848, ended the war between the United States and Mexico. By its terms, Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory, including the present-day states California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. Mexico also relinquished all claims to Texas, and recognized the Rio Grande as the southern boundary with the United States.

The irony. Please.

Plenty of those tribes moved, too, and warred, and invaded, taking lands and food…