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A couple of years ago, Salida got listed in Outside magazine among the 10 up-and-coming great American places to live if you're really compulsive about outdoor recreation.
Mind you, this wasn't the top 10, just the places that might make it into the real top 10 a few years hence, perhaps when the last mountain low-lifes depart because it will be a felony to have a cigarette with a $5 cup of steamed coffee, a shotgun house fetches rent of $600 a month and the municipal dress code requires Gore-Tex and Lycra.
Naturally, the local movers and shakers were thrilled with the national recognition. It even simplified my life, as I discovered that less and less often did I have to start every conversation with a remote editor by explaining where Salida is.
But I suspect that if such recognition came today, it wouldn't get such a hearty reception.
This dawned on me last fall, when I was driving home from a distant meeting and stopped to see an editor I knew in a little mountain town, which must remain nameless because I don't want to add to its woes, or his.
How are things going around here?
I asked.
Hollywood types putting up trophy houses,
he
replied. Real-estate boom, of course, and all the
newcomers want to get rid of shacks and yards full of old
cars. Losing our ma-and-pa stores as the chains come
in.
Well, it's pretty here, and you've got a tolerable
climate for the mountains,
I noted. I've always
liked this valley myself. Can't blame people for wanting to
move here.
No, but we don't need to make it any worse with
publicity. If I ever see a writer from Outside magazine
here, I will personally chop off his head and throw the
body down an old mine. Frankly, Ed, I'm disappointed that
you guys let one get out of Salida alive.
About a month later, I was moderating a panel of environmental writers at the Denver Book Fair. Curious as to whether the attitude problems common at high altitudes had spread, I brought up Outside magazine.
It was like asking a panel of feminists what they
thought of Playboy, and one, Rick Bass, even drew a
detailed analogy, to the effect of They both run
glamorous pictures that say 'come and ravish me, but don't
develop any deeper relationship.' It's all superficial;
you're supposed to consume 'undiscovered' places the way
that the Young Man Who Reads Playboy consumes
'undiscovered' young women. Find one, use it until you're
sated, and move on to the next attraction. It's pretty
sick, when you think about it.
I spent a whole winter not thinking about it until High Country News arrived last week with a good essay on the back page by Rob White of Salt Lake City.
We need to think about the very concept of sacredness
of place,
he wrote. Making a place sacred once meant
protecting it . . . For us, making a place sacred assures
its profanity. We make it a national park. We write a
glowing natural history. We put it on a magazine cover or
mention it as a hot place in Outside . . . Brew pubs and
traffic jams are only a yuppie away.
Thus I was finally provoked to go to the library and
examine a few issues of Outside. Granted, there were paeans
to undiscovered
places for flexing your pecs and
waving your gold card, but the critics are missing the
trend.
For instance, one article explained how to select
light-weight equipment for the growing sport of indoor
rock-climbing.
There were many ads for exercise
machines that mimic the moves of cross-country skiing (and
no mention that Americans spend 350 percent as much on such
machinery as on actual Nordic skiing). Going to the North
Pole doesn't involve sled dogs and frostbite, but $14,900
for an officer's cabin in a chartered Russian
ice-breaker.
None of these adventures is really outside.
There
weren't any ads for water parks that could replace the
running of real rivers, but it's safe to predict that some
entrepreneur will soon convert an empty warehouse into a
challenging year-round indoor mountain-bike track, and a
little work with virtual reality and an oxygen-deprivation
chamber could provide an Everest experience to every paying
customer.
So there's no good reason for a rural area to fear being discovered and overrun by Outsiders in the future. That trend is passe; the real money will soon lie in producing wilderness experiences that are as close as the nearest shopping mall.
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