The Currency of Being Local
Part Five
There is a joke people used to make in Colorado, especially the people that lived up in the rural mountain valleys. People in Colorado take a certain sense of satisfaction knowing that California and Texas are both downstream. That is the whole joke. It does not need a punchline, because everyone in the room already agrees.
I want to start there, with me at my worst, because everything else in this essay depends on it.
When I finally went to work as a consultant, I gave my employer two conditions. I did not want state highway work, and I did not want to work in the northwest corner of Colorado. I had just finished a long stretch doing exactly those two things, and I had earned the right to be specific.
I then spent three years doing state highway work in the northwest corner of Colorado.
So when a federal lands project finally came open, the thing I had wanted from the beginning, I took it before anyone could reconsider. My contract manager said three weeks, finishing out a project someone else had started. I said I could do anything for three weeks. Then I asked where it was.
Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
I told him he was sending me into the heart of the beast. I meant it. I was a conservative man from Colorado who had spent nearly all of his life in Colorado, and San Francisco was not a place in my mind so much as a position I held. But three weeks is three weeks, and it got my foot in the door, so I went.
It ran nineteen weeks. I lived in Mill Valley, one of the most expensive places in the state. I ate in restaurants where the other tables held actors and producers and people whose names I would have recognized if I paid attention to that sort of thing, and the remarkable discovery, which I am slightly embarrassed to report as a discovery, was that they were all just people having dinner. The ocean was there. The bay was there. The whole place was staggeringly beautiful in a way I had not previously permitted it to be.
I had arrived with the place already priced. I ran the appraisal from a thousand miles away, using no data at all, and I was wrong about nearly every line of it.
That is the first thing I want on the record. Before I was ever the newcomer being misjudged by a town, I was the man doing the misjudging, sight unseen, and comfortable about it.
The lesson that actually matters came later, in a town I had never heard of.
I was driving south from San Francisco toward San Diego to pick up our oldest boy, who was getting out of the Marine Corps, when the phone rang somewhere around Santa Barbara. How fast can you get to Sequoia National Park?
I had never heard of Sequoia National Park. Second national park this country ever established, home of the largest trees on earth, and it was not on any list I kept. I said I would like to get my son home first, and asked about timing. They said the preconstruction meeting was happening right then. I said if I could get home, get my camper, and come back, I would do it. How long? Just the season.
It was two and a half seasons.
I lived primarily in a place called Three Rivers, and this is where everything I have spent four essays describing finally comes into focus.
When you deploy to a federal lands project, you are not visiting. You need to become a resident of that area, and, more to the point, the people around you need to understand that you are a resident of that area. So I did the work. It took about a month of eating in the restaurants and drinking at the brewery that became my regular haunt and the source of the best friendships I made out there. There was another place in town, not cheap but very good, where you would occasionally find yourself standing next to somebody famous, and nobody made anything of it, which is its own kind of local currency. This was the defacto meeting place for town council and the mayor and council were at the bar regularly.
Sixteen hours from home is too far to drive often, and I do not care for flying, so mostly I stayed. Kate came out when she could. And when she did, we did not move through that town like visitors. We did not narrate it. We did not compare it to home. We went where our friends went and we tried to make new ones.
And here is the part I want to be honest about, because it complicates the story I would rather tell. I was not just a friendly stranger buying rounds. I held real power in that town, every single day. The project scheduling ran through me, and when we stopped traffic, businesses did not open. Whether a restaurant served breakfast or lost the whole day came down to decisions I made. That part of California had long experience of government arriving to take something, and what showed up instead was a federal man with genuine influence over their livelihoods who listened, accommodated where he could, and used the influence in their favor when he did not have to.
By Christmas, the Catholic retreat in town was running its festival of trees, the fundraiser where you bid on a tree decorated by locals in themes of their choosing and the money goes to local charities. We bought two.
And by January or February, people had started saying, with the particular seriousness of a joke that is not entirely a joke, that Mike ought to be the next mayor of Three Rivers.
Three Rivers is not a town. It has no mayor. That is exactly what makes the sentiment worth reporting, because a place does not need to be incorporated to know who it belongs to. There is always a mayor. There is always a council. There is always a chamber of commerce, and not one of them requires a ballot.
I left Sequoia with it ranked as my favorite national park in the country. Yosemite is amazing in its own right. Rocky Mountain is in my backyard and full of people. Sequoia I actually love, and a few years earlier I had not known it existed.
So here is the frame I have been circling for four essays, stated as plainly as I can.
When you arrive somewhere new, you arrive bankrupt. Not poor. Bankrupt, with a balance of zero and no way to transfer funds in from anywhere else. Thirty years of competence somewhere else converts at nothing. The only deposits the local bank accepts are time, attention, showing up, and being visibly willing to let a place be what it already is before you develop opinions about what it should be.
Guffey and Three Rivers got the same depositor. Same man, same instincts, same willingness to sit in the same bar every week and learn people's names. In one of them, inside six months, strangers were half seriously nominating me for an office that does not exist, while I held their open-or-closed sign in my hand every morning. In the other, after years, I was called an empire builder for proposing that the place be legally prohibited from growing.
For a long time I assumed the difference was the towns. It is not the towns.
The difference is that everyone in Three Rivers knew I was leaving.
A man with a departure date is not a claimant. Whatever he deposits, he can never withdraw, because he will not be there to spend it. His respect is a pure gift. His labor is temporary. His opinions, and his power, expire on a date everyone can see. So the town can afford to be generous with him. It can afford to be fond of him. It can even joke about making him mayor, precisely because he will never be mayor, and every person in the room can hear that the joke is safe.
I live in Guffey. I am staying.
That is the whole difference. Every deposit I make here is also a claim. Every skill I demonstrate is a capability I keep. Every relationship I build is standing I could one day use. There is no expiration date on me, which means this town cannot receive my deposits as gifts. It has to price them as investments, and investments imply a return, and a return has to come from somewhere, and everyone already knows where.
The town was not wrong about that. I have said so before and I will keep saying it.
And there is one more thing I have to put on the record, because without it the rest of this is not honest.
I bought in Guffey for the same reason everyone else did. For twenty two years I lived in Grand Junction, and when people asked where we had bought, I would say Guffey, and they would say, where the hell is Guffey. And I would say, that is why. That was not a joke. I wanted to be somewhere that did not appear on anyone's list.
So when I took the office, I already knew what was out there. Not from files. From living there. Additions without permits. Structures that would not have passed a look. Work that was never brought to the county and was never going to be. I knew, because everybody knows, and because I had been the neighbor before I was the inspector.
And I told them what I would do about it, out loud, in public, more than once. If a person signs a complaint, we investigate. If a complaint comes in anonymous, it gets noted and nothing else. If one of us drives past something on our own, we do nothing, because we do not have the resources and because that is not what the office is for. And the first thing we ask a signed complainant is whether they can work it out with their neighbor.
I held to that for my entire tenure. I never turned in a single person and I in fact directed staff to prioritize signed, legitimate complaints before tackling any new issues. We simply did not have the satff and you cannot turn back decades of complacency in land use in two years.
It made no difference at all.
It took me a long time to understand why. I had told them the truth, the truth was verifiable, and it changed nothing. What I finally worked out is that nobody was pricing my conduct. My conduct was not the asset being valued. The office was.
A building department that does not function is safe, because it cannot do anything to anyone, including the things it is supposed to do. A building department that works can. Not today, not by me, but someday, by somebody who never stood in a public meeting and made that promise, and who never had to. Every backlog I cleared and every process I fixed made the office more capable, and capability is inherited. The man is not.
They were not afraid of what I would do. They were afraid of what the office could do once it worked. And I have had to sit with the fact that on that narrow point, they were not wrong.
There is a saying we use around here, and I believe in it. In Guffey, we know what we have, and we know what we do not have, and we make accommodations for the difference.
That is not a complaint. It is how a small place survives. When the pool of available people is small, you work with the people who are available, and you carry them further than a larger place would have to. I have made those accommodations my whole time here and I will go on making them.
But accommodation is not absolution. And the tolerance band depends entirely on what the organization does. A construction company that runs sloppy loses money, and a good superintendent can absorb it. A public safety agency that runs on informality and personality is not risking a schedule. It is risking the people who call at two in the morning and have no other number to dial. That is the whole reason the boring paperwork exists, and it is why the band there is narrower than almost anywhere else in ordinary life. I serve on the board of one such agency now. That is all I will say about it here, except that the principle is not negotiable, and the plates are still spinning.
I would like to close this warmly. I am not going to, because it would be a lie in my own voice and you would hear it.
What I will say is this. The currency is real, it is earned honestly, and it converts at a rate you do not set. In a place you are passing through, deposits buy affection quickly, because affection is cheap when the account closes on schedule. In a place where you have hung your hat for good, the same deposits buy something slower and stranger and more grudging, and they buy it from neighbors who are entitled to ask what you intend to do with the balance.
But I have spent five essays auditing myself, and an audit with one ledger open is not an audit. So let me put both of them on the table.
Mine reads like this. I moved faster than the account could cover. I answered questions about gallons when I was being asked questions about safety. I treated a challenge as an error to be corrected, which is a fine instinct on a job site and a poor one on a porch. I built before I taught. I believed the record would speak for itself, and the record does not speak. It sits there and waits for someone to read it aloud.
Theirs reads like this. A stamped set of engineered plans should take about thirty minutes to review, because the stamp is the review; the engineer has already accepted the snow load, the wind load, and the code. Instead, those plans took as long as sixty two weeks, because the county was paying another county to re-review engineering that nobody on a twenty two person staff was licensed to question. My first week in that office I asked one question: which of you holds a PE? The answer was the whole problem. A definition that classifies a small pub distillery as a fuel plant is not a tradition worth preserving. It is an error. Twenty four public meetings full of residents saying what they wanted, taken apart afterward and reassembled into approximately what already existed, is not prudence. Five people at an interview table asked, in those words, for a paradigm shift, and then could not tolerate one, and that is on them and not on me.
So the humility in these essays is about method. It was never about whether the work needed doing. I was wrong about how. I was not wrong about what.
I do not have this solved. Hope is imminent. It is just not adjacent to where I am standing.
But I know the exchange rate now, and I know one more thing besides, which California taught me before Guffey ever got its turn. Sometimes you are not the newcomer being misjudged. Sometimes you are the man who priced an entire state from a thousand miles away, called it the heart of the beast, and had to drive all the way into it to find out he was wrong.
I have stood on both sides of that counter. Only one of them is comfortable, and it is not the side I am standing on now.