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Salida has been discovered
again, this time by
Outside magazine, whose August edition proclaimed The
New Best Places to Live and Play.
There are 20 of these
Dream Towns + Adventure Hideouts & Sweet Land
Deals
that are underpopulated and undiscovered
slices of paradise
which offer a lifetime of wild
fun.
Perhaps they were undiscovered last month. But we were
already among The 100 Best Small Art Towns in
America,
and we have also been discovered by various
publications devoted to mountain-biking and kayaking.
The Outside piece was reasonably accurate, as opposed to some of the other recent discovery accounts; one put us in the San Juan Mountains, which are at least 100 miles away, and another gave highway directions that involved unpaved back roads through the subdivisions on the south edge of South Park.
To gauge local reactions to this Outside piece, earlier this month I attended a meeting whose very nature indicates how much Salida has changed in recent years: A single-malt scotch tasting.
It's not that I have any special affection for scotch
whisky, be it single or multiple malt. My tastes in hard
liquor run to an occasional shot of rye, whatever rotgut
Kirby Perschbacher has in his pocket flask when we run into
each other at various events and, from Thanksgiving to
Christmas, cheap rum with eggnog. While other tasters were
murmuring comments like good sooty aftertaste
or
clean fruity aroma,
I was thinking I sure hope
I'll be able to walk the five blocks home after we're done
here.
I had expected the gathering to be rather snobbish, but
as Outside noted, Salida is sweetly unpretentious,
and after a few comments on the contents of the two
bottles, the topic moved to Salida's discovery by Outside.
My fellow tasters generally agreed that this was a good
thing because it meant we might be able to sell our
real-estate here for a lot more than we paid for it years
ago, and that's about the only way to make money around
here.
As Outside noted, this is a great place to Live and
Play,
not to Live and Work.
There aren't many
jobs here, and most of them don't offer much in the way of
pay or benefits.
Many people who work here can't afford to live here. Property prices are driven, not by the local market, but by Outside factors -- the growing attractiveness of this area to a leisure class. (Please note that I do not want to disparage the leisure class; I've been sick of working since I first punched a time clock when I was 13 years old, and I have long aspired to join the leisure class.)
A decade ago, I would have worried about the effects of Outside publicity. But the things I would have worried about then have already happened, and this remains a pretty good place to live. Except I couldn't afford to live here if I hadn't bought in a long time ago, and like many of my friends, I wonder how much longer I will be able to afford to live here.
It all seems so strange. Fifteen years ago, we bought a bigger house. We put our old one on the market for $28,500 for nearly three years. We never got a single offer.
In those days, a lot of us felt we were marooned in Salida because we couldn't sell our houses, and so we worked to make our situation more tolerable.
Some of us agitated for improved parks and trails, others labored to expand the library, and bring in public radio, and convert an old generating plant into a theater, and dozens of other efforts which, we thought, would give us a better town to live in.
Apparently, we did a pretty good job with this ramshackle old railroad town. Trouble is, most of us are working too much these days to enjoy it.
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