First came the Thai
restaurant, then the jazz nightclub. Pretty heady stuff for a dead
railroad town with a population of 1,900 in the far northern
reaches of California. There’s a sense of anticipation, of
wondering what will happen next.
Along with our fancy
restaurant and a couple of art galleries, we’re starting to attract
some pretty sophisticated immigrants. A Berkeley professor moved up
here part-time, and an artist from the Napa wine country bought the
old stone house on Oak Street.
One professor, one artist
at a time, the town of Dunsmuir is gradually joining the “New
West,” or as a clever demographer has labeled it, the “Cappuccino
West.” The Old West was cowboys, miners and loggers; the New West
is artists, writers, professionals, entrepreneurs of all sorts and
retirees with discretionary spending money. In the Old West, the
boss man created the jobs, and the cowpokes drifted in to fill
them. In the New West, the newcomers bring their jobs or their
portable incomes with them.
A 2001 study by the U.S.
Department of Commerce traced the decline of the cowpoke and the
tree-feller. It calculated that 8 eight percent of all personal
income in the West came from resource-based jobs, compared to 20
percent as recently as 1970. Another 2001 study by the Fannie Mae
Foundation found that rural counties with service-based economies
grew at four times the rate of resource-based counties between 1950
and 2000, and they now account for one-fourth of the population of
the rural West.
We need the new blood in town as Wal-Mart
and other big box retailers wipe out what’s left of our
small-town businesses. Here in Dunsmuir, we still have our hardware
store, but you have to buy your underwear 45 miles away in Yreka.
Instead, we have the jazz nightclub and niche businesses,
like the guy who makes bamboo fishing rods. Dunsmuir is a major
sport-fishing destination since the Sacramento River runs right
through town.
The newcomers also bring with them ideas
for restyling the town along the lines of the place they came from.
Don’t get me wrong; some of these ideas are good–turning the old
elementary school into a performing arts center is one that comes
to mind. But there has to be some sort of screening process to weed
out some of these ideas, or City Hall, which is all of five people,
wouldn’t have time to get the potholes filled.
The job of
screening new ideas is undertaken by a few of the town’s seniors,
who show up at city council meetings with a collective scowl on
their faces and a facility for coming up with all sorts of creative
reasons for not undertaking any new project whatsoever. Thus we
have no new performing arts facility and no new expanded library,
two fairly recent proposals. But we do have a youth center and
downtown street trees thanks to persistent folks who’ve managed to
get past the grim-faced gantlet.
Dunsmuir has weathered a
long period of economic decline, starting with cutbacks in railroad
crews in the 1950s, the closure of all the town’s lumber mills by
the early 1960s, and a devastating 1991 toxic spill in the river.
The spill wiped out sport fishing until recently.
For a
while, it looked as though the town might evolve into a bedroom
community, with a skeletal downtown business district. But the
creative immigrants of the New West are riding to the rescue
— reshaping the town and their own lives as well. The guy who
makes those bamboo rods used to install refrigeration units in
trucks. The guy with the flyfishing shop used to write TV scripts.
More power to them, I say. I’m hoping we’ll eventually
have an economy that’s both vibrant and environmentally friendly,
one that celebrates our mountains and rivers by encouraging hiking,
fishing, boating and skiing. I certainly don’t want us to be one of
those cutesy towns, with a main street full of boutiques selling
soap and T-shirts. My attitude is, if we’re going to go to
all the trouble of re-inventing our town, let’s do it by
sending people on mountain adventures and to healthy streams
holding healthy fish.
Tim Holt is a contributor
to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
He is an environmental writer who lives in the Mount Shasta region
of Northern California.
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