I lapse into smugness when
someone visits me early in the summer. The mountains around
Bozeman, Mont., are dazzling white, the fields emerald, the rivers
boisterous, the air clear. I first came here in the spring. I
remember how staggering it was.
It happened again
recently. A friend who had never visited passed through and spent a
day with me. A very pretty day. We decided to go for a bike ride on
the outskirts of town. He kept asking the names of mountain ranges
that came into view. I was busy being tour guide. The usual magic
was working its spell.
Then he was quiet for a while. We
were about five miles past city limits when he burst out, “This is
really gross!”
“What?” I said, startled.
“These
houses! What are people thinking, building these huge homes all
over the hills here — and even on the ridges?”
Jarred out of my reverie, I started looking around at the
development I’d grown used to over the years, the subdivisions and
ranchettes that used to be hillsides and fields and pastures. I
started to notice things the way he did, seeing it all for the
first time. When I put that lens on, he was right: Everywhere I
looked there were houses, roads, manicured lawns, pretentious and
oversized architecture. I considered the less-visible layer of
impact as well — the septic tanks, the wells tapping
aquifers, the pavement, and the additional traffic.
My
friend was doubly sensitive because he’d recently been overseas.
“You’d never see this in Europe,” he said. “When a town ends,
that’s it. You go immediately to forest and fields, until you come
to the next town, which also starts very abruptly.”
For
our entire 20-mile loop we kept encountering the developments that
now sprawl five, 10, 15 miles from town. Farm fields and open
spaces had become rare punctuations on the landscape. It was
shocking — both the extent to which the area has been built
up, and the fact that I have allowed myself to grow blind to it.
I remembered how, two decades ago, you could ride for
miles without being passed by a car. But every person in every one
of these houses is wedded to a vehicle. They don’t have a choice.
Every errand — taking kids to school or soccer practice,
going to work, going grocery shopping, meeting for coffee, taking
in a movie — requires a 20-minute drive. Multiply that by a
couple of trips a day, and it doesn’t take a calculator to figure
out that you’ve lost a big chunk of your life to sitting in a car
going nowhere special.
As we continued to ride, I began
to fantasize a different way of life. I imagined not only living in
a beautiful place, as I do, but having the city end at a definite
boundary and leaving the countryside to be countryside.
I
thought about a town where people could walk to the grocery store
for the odds and ends they needed, or to the post office or library
or swimming pool or movie theater. I thought about going to work
via an easy bicycle commute. I thought about all the gas, time,
traffic aggravation, and hectic-lifestyle blues we’d be able to
save.
Instead of spending 20 minutes lurching towards an
errand in city traffic, people would be having a second cup of
coffee with the morning paper, or playing catch with their kid, or
getting some exercise, or gardening, or playing the piano, or
sitting still, looking out the window. I thought about what a
luxury that would feel like to the people now spread out across the
landscape.
Then this, the other side of my fantasy
picture: I imagined going to the edge of town and having it really
end. Shedding society and entering landscape where elk graze,
mountains sparkle in the distance, and the smell of spring is
perfume in the air.
I imagined that it was early summer
again, and that I was falling in love all over with the beautiful
place that I am lucky enough to live in. I thought about sharing
the experience with a visiting friend, and how smug it would make
me.
Alan Kesselheim is a contributor to Writers
on the Range, a service of High Country News in
Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is a writer in Bozeman,
Montana.
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