When the big cats own all the hilltops

Writer Barbara Ehrenreich grew up in Montana and now lives in Florida. In her books such as Nickled and Dimed, she tracks the inequities in an economy where the rich get richer and then filthy rich and then obscenely rich, etc. And most of the rest of us don’t exactly get poor, we just lose our dignity, our houses, and – gradually – our views.

"You can’t eat the scenery" is a phrase heard often in Wyoming, more often in bust times than in booms. Scenery is nice, but it’s tough to admire the view when you’re unemployed and the kids are hungry. You may like the idea of living in Jackson or Santa Fe or Red Lodge, but you and your spouse can’t work enough jobs to afford it. So you find jobs in a less scenic place and, at night, dream about the Tetons.

Turns out, you can eat the scenery if you’re rich. Ehrenreich discussed this strange fact in a June 30 column for Alternet, "The Rich Have Priced the Outdoors out of Everyone Else’s Hands."

Here’s the opening paragraphs:

I took a micro-vacation last week -- nine hours in Sun Valley before an evening speaking engagement. The sky was deep blue, the air crystalline, the hills green and not yet on fire. Strolling out of the Sun Valley Lodge, I found a tiny tourist village, complete with Swiss-style bakery, multi-star restaurant, and "opera house." What luck -- the boutiques were displaying outdoor racks of summer clothing on sale!

But things started to get a little sinister -- maybe I had wandered into a movie set or Paris Hilton's closet? -- because even at a 60 percent discount, I couldn't find a sleeveless cotton shirt for less than $100. These items shouldn't have been outdoors; they should have been in locked glass cases.

Then I remembered the general rule, which has been in place since sometime in the '90s: If a place is truly beautiful, you can't afford to be there. All right, I'm sure there are still exceptions -- a few scenic spots not yet eaten up by mansions. But they're going fast.

Ehrenreich relates how she and a friend rented an inexpensive house in Driggs, Idaho, ten years ago. Located just over Teton Pass from Jackson, Driggs was an affordable alternative for those who worked The Hole’s restaurants and hotels. But now, gazillionaires such as Microsoft’s Paul Allen brewing magnate Augustus Busch III, have discovered Driggs, forcing up land values and prices and taxes. Where will the Driggsians go now? The rich buy up great gobs of land, forcing the have-nots away from the scenery they love so much they keep plugging away so they can stay.

I know people who moved to Jackson and Aspen in the sixties and seventies. Not all were hippies or back-to-the-land folks. Some were ski bums and entrepreneurial drug dealers. But it didn’t seem to matter. Some stayed in Jackson to make a home, finding a way to survive. A writer I know worked a series of service jobs for two decades before he could (kind of) support himself in Jackson. A woman friend founded a little bistro that thrived with the influx of trust-fund babies and telecommuters. Others just gave up and moved on, back to their hometowns in Maryland or Texas. They found jobs and spouses and, eventually, discovered ways to get back to the mountains, if only for one week each summer.

When I was hitchhiking around the West in 1972, I was tempted by Jackson and Driggs. My girlfriend Sharon from the Boston burbs was skeptical. She knew that two college drop-outs couldn’t make a living in tiny Driggs. Jackson would be better. Missoula even more so. But still we moved on, wending our way through Seattle, Portland, and Berkeley and through the deserts and mountains back to Denver. I had relatives and friends in Denver. We could have landed jobs the first day, work our way through the service industry and college to an affordable fixer-upper on Capitol Hill or Washington Park and then have a few kids and then visit Driggs and Yellowstone on summer vacation. That was the only way we could get a piece of the scenery. Some people back in Boston might say we had a nice view right there in Denver.

That’s not the way it worked out. We left Denver and moved to Boston. After six months in that dreary city, I quit it and the relationship and returned to Daytona Beach, Florida, where Sharon and I first met. Beach town, you say, the big blue Atlantic right at your doorstep, surf and sand and wahines. But by then I had mountains on my mind and didn’t care about the view from the beach. So a couple years later, after graduating from college on the seven-year plan, I met a beautiful woman and we moved to Denver. I’ve been Out West ever since, always within sight of the Rocky Mountains. Not bad, really, when you consider the alternatives.

It addresses a key facet of life – the need to be attached in some way to the landscape. Here’s how Ehrenreich describes it:

I take this personally. I need to see vast expanses of water, 360 degree horizons, and mountains piercing the sky -- at least for a week or two of the year. According to evolutionary psychologist Nancy Etcoff, we all do, and the need is hard-wired into us. "People like to be on a hill, where they can see a landscape. And they like somewhere to go where they can not be seen themselves," told Harvard Magazine earlier this year. "That's a place desirable to a predator who wants to avoid becoming prey." We also like to be able to see water (for drinking), low-canopy trees (for shade), and animals (whose presence signals that the place is habitable.)

Something basic about our need to be part of the outdoors. You don’t have to be a mountain climber or a long-distance sailor to be part of it. Sometimes you just have to be able to see it. As we keep getting moved back from the scenic places, maybe that will incite a fear in us that we are more prey than predator. The big cats now control the high places. They can look out from their perches in the Rockies and see the prey spread out below. That's the way they like it.