Becoming Local: Notes from Guffey, Colorado

I moved to a town of about a hundred people at eight thousand six hundred feet, and I thought I knew what I was getting into. I had lived in small places. I had worked in smaller ones. What I did not understand was that you do not move to a town like this. You apply. Nobody hands you the application, nobody tells you it exists, and the review takes years.

These five essays are what I learned while it was being processed. They are about wells and water, about telling one kind of local from another, and about the strange arithmetic of a place where everyone is counted. I wrote them because I could not find anyone who had written them for me.

I am still becoming local. I suspect that is the only tense the word comes in.