Letter from Slim Wolfe
Mountain Life – February 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
Winters are slow here, which is natural and good, but for those of us self-employed in building trades, a bit of December income is advantageous, even if it means a long commute. High-end subdivisions, though, always come as a bit of a culture shock to a low-end desert rat like myself. Big, clumsy, angular, high-ceilinged homes, failing to take advantage of southern exposures, pretentious signs (Sherwood’s Castle, Dun Diggin’ Ranch), spiffy appointments in guest rooms though the kids would probably just as soon stay in town where they can let their hair down. Grandiose entries, huge kitchens, the manifestation of success triumphant: waste.
When I moved here, to the region, in ’78, I didn’t encounter much of that. Spiffy clothes, high-tone digs, fawning waiters and kowtowing clerks, these were frowned on. If you worked your butt off at the ranch or in the mine you could come up with a ranch-house and a nice truck on borrowed money. High country millionaires tended to be workaholics with overall pockets crammed with wrenches. There were exceptions, but it seemed to be the closest I’d come to finding a classless society. The harsh climate and spareness of facilities demanded a sensible existence, I thought. Should it bother me that clerks and waitresses now have to dress like parlor maids and houseboys because we have a new toney set in the neighborhood who need their sense of hauteur?
Sure, it turned out that the homeowner was a regular guy, not at all class-conscious. He builds his own cabinets and other items in his garage; he even helped us out a bit. He lives in overalls, too, and the whole shebang is to please the wife. Sure, he’s an industrial engineer and maybe that’s why he thinks on a large scale, and by golly he employed a lot of high-quality craftspeople to give the place a bit of individuality. He’d be a great neighbor to chat with if I could afford to be his neighbor. In a supposedly classless society like the Soviet Union, he would have used his talents and connections to come up with a similar dacha (cottage) for a retirement plum, and why not?
By chance I was reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Orwell left class-bound England as a reporter during the Spanish Civil War and was so impressed with the spirit of equality he found in Barcelona that he enlisted in the militia and sustained a serious wound defending the new society. How many millions fought and suffered, in the twentieth century, in the name of a classless society, only to be bested by the Francos and Pol Pots, and by the subterfuges of the CIA, the KGB, or some similar schemers?
Small consolation, then, that a bit of the classless society held sway for awhile in the remote mountains of Central Colorado. The overall picture seems more like a revolving door, some do good while others do greed and we start all over again. The rich man gets his dream fireplace, the poor mason gets a few bucks to enjoy some quiet time at his chateau d’ghetto down on the flats below. Given a future of unlimited time and space, what could be wrong with that? After all, if Trophy-home ridge sinks a few feet under the weight of all that concrete, well, they own it, they paid for it, and who am I to complain?
Funny thing though. If I find some bit of equipment fallen off the back of a truck on a county road here in the agricultural San Luis Valley, I’ll set it off to the side so some hardworking stiff can come back and find it. Somehow, I can’t make that fair-minded spirit follow me up on trophy-home ridge. The winner-take-all attitude up there must be contagious. If I don’t snag it, somebody else will.
Saddest of all, all of these decades after Lennon wrote the song Imagine and Malvina Reynolds wrote the song Ticky-Tacky, these motivated, educated, successful people choose to live in high end ticky-tacky which all looks the same and shows not one drop of imagination (unless you count a few thirty-degree offsets). Never a round shape or a non-standard color, no murals, banners, nothing but rigid, formal, and frigid, an architecture of closed minds and dictated principles. Oh, for splashes of pastels and a bit of junk in the yard. Oh, for the squalor of Walsenburg. Oh, for something to spark the imagination of children, so they don’t have to take their guns to school just to vary the routine. When Barbara Kingsolver described genetically modified foods as a slap in the face of God, she might have included these computer-generated towns as well. All get in line, you rocks, and pretend you’ve become flat and regular like the rest of the known universe.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
