Sunday's Snapshots

Before moving here, we lived in a tourist trap of a town at an elevation of 4200’ in the mountains outside of San Diego, California. We’d get more snow there in one night than we’ve ever gotten in an entire season here in Thompson Falls, but the trouble was as soon as it snowed you couldn’t leave your house. The citiots, as we called them, appeared in droves blocking traffic for 20 miles in both directions and turning the hour-long commute into a three-hour crawl.

The problem was our sweet little town with zero traffic lights and two stop signs wasn’t made for today’s traffic. The town consists of three blocks of gift shops, one soda fountain and a town hall. There’s a museum, a cemetery, and an old gold mine turned tourist attraction, one bookstore, four pie shops, and a place to buy booze on every corner. There are plenty of places to stay the night if you can’t see all three blocks in one day, a gas station, and a library - my one requirement before considering living anywhere.

Our home was at nearly 5000 feet with a view out to Borrego Desert and the Salton Sea, the sunrises epic. Access to our home came off one of only two highways into town and when it snowed, we stayed home. During Apple Days, when the apples and pears became available for picking and the town held events for the you-pickers, we stayed home. When one of the many music festivals came through town, we stayed home; film festivals, same. It isn’t that we didn’t want to go enjoy those things too, it’s that they required us to sit through traffic and hassle to get to the things we’d hoped to leave behind by leaving the city.

Over the 10 years we lived there, the situation got worse and worse. The accidents on weekends, more numerous. The wails of the ambulances out to help another downed motorcyclist harder to ignore. There was one year we decided not to go see family for Christmas, the traffic having already been blocked for hours with people stopping on the highway to play in the snow - we knew we’d never get back home that night and we had to be home for Santa.

There’s not much difference between our old town and this one except elevation and kinds of trees. We see elk now instead of mule deer. I run into fewer coyotes and mountain lions, and more black bears. There’s still only one highway in and out, until the pass opens a few months out of the year. I hear complaints that you can’t turn left on Main Street in the summer, and it’s true. It’s harder to find parking for weekly trips to the library, harder to get the grocery shopping done with the influx of snowbirds and travelers. But for much of the year, our little town remains little.

This weekend my family and I went to Ronan for St Patrick’s Day. The parade was sweet with a requisite 4-H float and kids on hay bales, with emergency and first responders running their sirens, with a fantastic color guard, and a decent set of kilt-clad bagpipe players. It was everything you want from a small-town parade and the weather was phenomenal. So why was I so disappointed?

There was nothing disappointing about the parade itself, let me be clear. My boys collected more candy than they can eat in a month. They came away wearing beads and slap bracelets and sucking on Otter Pops, of all things. It was all magic as far as they were concerned. And I was happy they were happy.

It was as we sat in traffic trying to get back on the highway, as the stop lights turned red and the cars and trucks had nowhere to go, as the car behind us swung through a closed business’s empty lot to jump out ahead of the light, and the line at the McDonald’s’ drive-thru wrapped around the building and into the street that I realized what was so disturbing: this could be our community, too.

It would be so easy to become a community overrun. The gas stations are ever-expanding, not just in number but in size, the neon lights of their billboards garish in the evenings and when driving to Plains for a midnight emergency room visit. So easy to become a community where the issues and frustrations become a problem not of tourist season but of year-round occurrence. A traffic light here, a fast-food restaurant there, add a Starbucks… the vision before me is terrifying, but hopefully only a nightmare.

If you build it, they will come – if you don’t build it…they come too. Maybe the lesson is we should stop looking for small town living in an ever growing world. And maybe that’s a take-away I refuse to take-on.

Sunday Dutro is an internationally published writer living in Thompson Falls with her beautiful family. Reach her at [email protected] or sundaydutro.com.