How You Tell Them Apart
Part Two
In the last piece I made an argument I still believe: that the weight you feel about a place you've lived a long time is not disappointment, it's information; and that the burden of discovery is the evidence you actually lived somewhere instead of visiting it at length.
Here is the problem with that argument. Sometimes leaving is the right answer, and the heaviness feels exactly the same from the inside.
I lived twenty-two years in a town I swore I would never live in. I said it growing up, I said it in college, I said it again when I went to work for the highway department. By 1998 that is precisely where I was, and I stayed until my kids were grown.
Every reason I stayed was a good one. The work was there. After a divorce, the boys were there, and that is not a thing you optimize around. My father was there. My brother was there for a while. My mother was there and following the death of my Grandfather, my Grandmother was there. All of us were transplants from roughly the same area on the other side of the mountains. Any one of those reasons would hold a man in place for a few years, and I had all of them at once, pointing at the same address, for two decades.
That is not the burden of discovery. That is the weight of a place you never chose. You only ended up in it, and then kept having reasons.
Both of those feel like heaviness. Telling them apart is the whole trick, and I did not do it by feel.
Somewhere around 2011 we took a family trip, the last one before everybody scattered. Out through northwest Colorado, around the Green River country, up through Wyoming to the Tetons, north to Bozeman, west to Missoula, then down into the Idaho river country and a week in the town my wife grew up in. On the way home we got as far as Banks, Idaho, decided we were not finished, and turned north over the Sawtooths instead.
Every corner of that trip, one of us said some version of the same sentence. My God it's beautiful here. I wish we could figure out how to live here. We said it in Montana. We said it in Stanley. We said it in Ketchum. Nothing came of any of it, and at the time nothing could have. Neither of us could have done our work from that kind of country. The connectivity did not exist yet.
Then we crossed back into the desert on the last leg home. Nothing to look at. The stretch you drive fast. And somewhere in there I looked over at her and she looked at me, and neither of us said anything for a while.
Just before the state line one of us finally said it: what in the hell are we doing living here?
For years I misread that moment. I thought the trip had shown us somewhere better. It hadn't. What the trip had done was show us, corner after corner for two weeks, what a chosen place feels like, and then set us back down in the one we had never chosen. The look wasn't about the desert. It was about the twenty-two years.
But a look across a truck cab is not a decision. It took nine more years.
Here is what actually happened in between, and it is less romantic than the look.
We stopped asking where we wanted to live and started asking what we needed. Which turned out to be a short list. A small distillery. Not a manufacturing operation, just enough to make what we wanted to make when we wanted to make it, and to do it legally. Room to live. Zoning that permitted both.
That is not a feeling. That is a specification. And once you have one, you can test a place against it instead of admiring it.
The first test we failed ourselves. We had a deal on a building downtown, in the town we were trying to leave, with people my wife knew from work. We signed a lease on it. We moved the distillery equipment in. We started the process with the city. And then the structure of the financing got too frightening for them and they pulled out of their own sale. We took every piece of equipment back out of that building. They sold it not long after for about half of what we had agreed to pay.
That was the first hard lesson and it had nothing to do with geography: wherever we land, it has to be ours, and it has to be solid. Not promised. Not arranged. Ours.
The second test was a place in eastern Oregon that I still think about. Fifty-eight acres of timber with a seven-thousand-square-foot lodge on it that had run as a restaurant in its day. It was beautiful. It was, on paper, everything.
And sometime in the late eighties the state had rezoned that ground as forestry primary. Which meant we could cut down all fifty-eight acres of trees if we wanted to. Every one of them, right to the dirt, perfectly legal. What we could not do was run a restaurant, run a distillery, or live on the property.
I want to be clear about why that one matters. There was nothing wrong with the land. The land was gorgeous. The rules were fatal, and the rules are invisible from the driveway. You cannot feel a zoning designation. You have to go look it up.
The place we ended up in came out of a Zillow search on a snowy Sunday morning. I put in the number we could spend, the acreage, and the commercial-use requirement, and the whole state returned two results.
One was in a town in northwest Colorado where I had already lived and already knew the winters. The other was where we live now. We emailed the agent, saw it during second rifle season, came back a week later during third season to see it again in the snow, and had it bought by January.
That is the least poetic paragraph in this essay and it is the one that changed our lives. A filter, two results, and two visits. One of them deliberately in bad weather.
So: how do you tell them apart?
You write down what you need, and then you make the place prove it.
The place you should leave is the one you never tested. Not the one that let you down. The one you never held up against a standard, because you never had one, because the reasons for being there were all external and all legitimate and all somebody else's. Twenty-two years and I never once asked that town to qualify. It didn't have to. It had my kids.
The place worth carrying the burden for is the one that passed a test you set before you loved it. That order matters. Criteria first, affection second. Everybody in the trades knows this and forgets it the moment the property has a view: you do not accept the work and then write the specification.
I would add one more thing, and it is the part I would go back and tell myself in that truck.
The look across the cab was not a decision, and it was not wasted either. It was the alarm going off. Nine years is how long it took to go find out why it spoke: through a lease that collapsed, through fifty-eight acres we could legally clear-cut but not live on, through a filter typed into a website on a snowy morning.
Trust the look. Then go do the work of proving it.
I did the work. I typed the filter, I read the zoning, I visited in the snow. What I did not know, and could not have known from a Zillow listing on a Sunday morning, is that a rulebook can be wrong. Not silent. Wrong. That is the next essay.