Bloggerdad sent me this article today about the transition from the Old West to the new, and how it's playing out in Montana. There's a similar thing going on in most of the states in the mountain west, including Oregon. I'm of two minds on this. Obviously, I'm not a native westerner, and tellingly, I've met very few people since moving to Portland who are. I can probably count them on both hands. (Hi, Tony!)
But humans have been doing this since before they started walking upright and stopped picking nits off their mates -- that is, getting defensive about others who would encroach upon their territory. I'm amused that some caucasian westerners grouse about these modern interlopers with no sense of irony whatsoever. The relatively tiny speck of time that the descendants of Europeans have populated the American west is still apparently long enough to allow them to forget how recently their ancestors were the interlopers, the land thieves.
Still, this is a matter of significant concern:
Montana still amazes -- with beasts, with distance, with its famously big crystalline sky that doesn't get all soupy in high summer heat. Yet, as a morning in Malta, in the plains of northeast Montana, and an evening in Bozeman, in the mountainous southwest, clearly show, this iconic Western place has been reformulated: cut into separate and unequal parts, cleaved along a fault line of wealth and bankruptcy, growth and decline, ebullient newcomers and aging descendants of the homesteaders.
****
All of which leads me to my supper in the so-not-dying city of Bozeman, the heart of Gallatin County. It is the fastest-growing county in the state, a place where residents -- compared with the average Montanan -- are richer, better-educated, more likely to have been born in another state and much more likely to be living off investment money.
Ebullient newcomers. That stings a bit, but I recognize the truth of it.
Our house is not in Bozeman, or any of Montana's "big" towns. It's near a small northwestern mountain town decimated years ago by asbestos mining and the ills that came along with it. A few years ago, the sawmill -- the last big employer in the area -- closed down, taking jobs along with it. You can still get a four bedroom house in the middle of town for less than a hundred thousand dollars. But that's dwindling fast, because even that little corner of the state is giving way to the phenomenon discussed in the article. Retirees and seasonal visitors with money are moving in. Hell, I'm one of them and my father-in-law is one of them, as are my brother and sister-in-law. Real estate appreciation has been clipping along at ten percent a year, until last year. When it skyrocketed. The industrial economy is out, the retiree and tourist economy is in.
This might be great for the older Montana natives who own their homes -- they will receive more equity in their real estate than they ever probably imagined. But what about their kids? What about the kids who want to stay in the lovely place they grew up? Will they be able to afford their own homes when they have to compete with people like me, raised and educated elsewhere?
But what if people like me and my father-in-law weren't interested? Where would the town's economy be then?
But what of this:
To the regret of many longtime Montanans, these New Westerners are getting awfully thick on the ground, especially in Gallatin County. They are building monster houses, seeding the periphery with big-box stores, and sullying the Montana that they and their birdhouse-building kids came to celebrate.The only thing I can offer as an individual is that I love the place, and I try to respect it. When I'm there, I try to be polite. If I need something, I buy it at small, local establishments instead of bringing it in or, say, picking it up at a big box store when I'm in Kalispell. I try to be mindful, and I hope others like me will also try to be so.
It's the last sentence of that quote that scares me the most.
|