Upside of Small Towns

In October I moved from the suburbs of San Francisco to a small mining town in the Sierra Gold Country, right on Highway 49, itself named for how it winds between the Gold Mining boom-towns and ghost towns. Donner Pass is about 45 minutes away, up Highway 20, and Reno is 90 minutes away to the East over that pass and down the far side into the northern Mojave Desert. Most people up here drive down towards Sacramento for shopping or work if they can't find it locally. I used to live here with my retired parents, working at the local County offices as a professional cartographer. It wasn't exactly what I was trained for in college, but it was one of the skills I learned there.

Here in the Gold Country, it is pines and mesquite and chapparal. The climate is ideal for deer, which is also ideal for cougars and coyotes, so we have those here. Barely 20 miles to the west is the wide and flat Sacramento Valley, with its swollen rivers, levees, and the rice fields of Marysville and Yuba City. We can see them on a clear day, down the mountain, backed by the jagged Sutter Buttes.

The foothills are conveniently populated where the gold is/was. When the mines closed, most of the miners children stayed here. The money was good enough to justify converting the original tents and shacks, favelas really, into Victorians and upscale mountain cabins. When the Baby Boomers found those pretty and started buying them to retire in, schools got better, streets were paved, and some high tech industries arrived. So there were upscale jobs. Not to say the mines should have stayed closed. There's still $6B in the ground beneath my feet, literally beneath my feet, since the hard rock mines underlay every home down to 11,000 feet.

It is also fortunate that the gold happened to occur below the snow line of 3,000 feet since above that line means tire chains, studded tires, unreliable power, generators, big pantries of food, shivering cold, splitting cords of wood by hand, ash cans, 4WD, continuously dirty cars, mud, and no emergency services. Down here, a mere 500 feet lower, it's sunny and warm and while we do get blizzards, they melt within days. That's the sort of living you want. If you want expensive adventure, live above the Snow Line. Locals know this. We always ask when meeting someone new. It explains a great deal. It provides context and reasons for empathy.The locals here all know each other. They've been through the same things and the shared eyerolls are amusing.

This weather advantage of this sub-snow elevation means you can do business during the winter, like anywhere else. You can commute to a job in town, run a small business, pickup your kids from school or let them walk home with friends, do your grocery shopping. It has good schools and a college. It has low crime. It is largely white. It's what America used to be before it got lost in racial guilt and stopped treating people fairly based on ability rather than excuses for skin color. Before we allowed those in charge to take advantage of us.

Where I live is what people like me want from their community. It isn't completely perfect, thanks to the "homeless" druggies wandering around, and it could use more jobs so the people who want to work here could, for more than minimum wage. The end of the Dollar actually helps that situation. We soon won't be able to afford to import goods or replacement parts to keep those goods working. We'll have to make it here, and fix it here. And make it so it can be fixed. The good news is the Makers can do that, and are doing that without international funding, just screwing around in their garages. Thus the importance of the garage.

I'm a big fan of retasking objects and real estate so they are useful. The Hipsters are reusing old vintage motorcycles, the Standard bikes that nobody makes anymore because the motorcycle companies are still locked on the idea of competing with Harley Davidson in the USA, when people who want a Harley just buy a Harley. I am rather convinced Marketing people are lazy in that industry. Maybe they just want catering? Considering that the Suzuki TU250 is actually a good-selling standard, but there's no standard bikes in the 500-750cc displacement range for actual grown ups and highway commuters, Japan is really dropping the ball. It implies a great deal about their nation if they can't offer to America what they sell to the rest of the world. We make do, fixing up their bikes from 20-30 years ago, better than new. Still: "WTF, Japan?"

In a small town like this one, there's an actual Main Street, full of shops with sidewalks and awnings. There is not nearly enough parking for those shops. The street is really narrow. Sometimes people lunge out between cars without looking, expecting a driver to stop. And mostly they do, but no always. There literally isn't an alternative to allowing traffic there, and removing the parking would kill the businesses. Removing the street would kill them worse. The upside is Peak Oil will fix it. Peak Oil gets most of the irrelevant traffic off the roads, and gets the vehicle sizes down. It is already increasing the bicycles, scooters, and motorcycles on the road. The more of them on the road, the more drivers see them, meaning fewer accidents. Someday all the roads will be crawling with 2-wheeled vehicles. And That Guy(tm) really wants a TukTuk for his daily commute in Hillsborough (Portland suburb) because it is tippy and absurdly underpower and loud, thus a hilarious mode of transportation. And sometimes you need absurd.

True, its warm and dry here every afternoon, nicer than the Sacramento Valley because we don't have fog while they do. We're up above the Tule Fog. This means that in places where there's good topsoil and access to irrigation water, you can also grow crops here. It costs more than in the Valley, but it can be done. Someday it will be. There's plenty of orchards, but not enough, not like they would have in China, for instance.

And people do have agriculture here. Even if your local soil is crap, or contaminated, it can be fixed. There are types of plant which extract heavy metals. Once its clean, you build it up to what you want with the right balance of clay, silt, and sand, then add sources of humus to enrich the basic nutrients. From nothing to excellent is about 4-5 years. It can be labor intensive. But it can be done. The Polderlands in the Netherlands, where they grow tulips below sea level behind dikes holding back the sea, is entirely man made soil, using manure and wheelbarrows and careful and attentive conservation for the last 450 years. It is the best and most fertile soil on Earth. Utterly man-made and organic because that was the only way to do it back then. So yes, we can make soil wherever.

Rather than go to space, just look at your abandoned landscapes and ask: "could this be turned into farmland? What needs to be done?" Most of that starts with water. Which they have here. Bring water to the desert and you can grow food, which leads to housing and schools and boomtowns and real estate agents, who are the great Agents of Change in The West.

For now, this is a real estate haven for retiring Baby Boomers abandoning the racial violence and crime of the Bay Area and settling down in a place where nice people will push your car out of the snow drifts with a smile and a wave, and the big news is who won the spelling bee. The big social event is the emergency services fund raiser at the local Fairgrounds. Around here, people in traffic wave to people on the sidewalk because they're friends they grew up with, known since Kindergarten. That's how awesome this community is.There are still troubles here, like druggies, and druggies burglarizing homes but muggings are unheard of, rapes don't seem to happen though cougars tend to get their lovers and themselves killed by their angry husbands. Other than that its just drunk/medicated driving incidents and the power going out when one of those hits a power pole. The crime blotter is rather unimpressive compared to the "peaceful" Bay Area town I last lived in. I witnessed or heard 4 murders while I was there for the prior 8 years. That's a murder every couple years. Since the economy went south, the murder and suicide rate went up. I wonder if those people didn't realize they would LEAVE the Bay Area and start over somewhere smarter? Somewhere like this.