The Long Goodbye: Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods
posted in Arizona, The Move |
When we first moved to Arizona, we lived in the area of Former State Capital. OmegaDad would drive up to Small Mountain University Town on Monday mornings, and return on Friday evenings or when his field trip was over (at first, this was ten days out in the field, six days off). I would drive down to the Valley of Death on Monday mornings, stay with Great-Grandma in Sun City, and then drive back on Friday evenings.
Then OmegaDad’s job switched from term-temp (a two-year stint) to permanent. This is a Big Thing in fed work, and a Good Thing.
We knew that we could now depend on being in SMUT for quite a while, so it was time to look for a home.
The bankers we contacted pre-approved us for what was, to us, an ungodly amount of money. We shook our heads at each other and decided we’d look for something more in our range–which was, alas, quite cheap for SMUT. (Even then, housing prices in SMUT were outrageous.)
One place our realtor suggested we look when we gave her our price range was Mountainaire. We wanted Kachina Village. Or Munds Park. Anyplace away from the train noise. (I can live with train noise; I grew up in Chicago and almost always lived near the El. OmegaDad, however, thought that train noise would always intrude–he didn’t realize that the noise fades into the background when you live with it.)
Mountainaire was a small enclave in the forest, with about five hundred houses, half of which were used only in the summertime weekends by vacationing families. Once upon a time, it had been a logging camp. Then it became a vacation home area. At the time we were looking, it was becoming a place for first-time homebuyers, young couples just starting out.
As we drove through there, our immediate reaction was: “We can’t live here. It’s way too hippy-dippy for us. We could have lived here ten years ago, when we were young, but not now.”
The roads were dirt roads. The houses were mostly teeny tiny. There was a plethora of trailers-in-blankets–small trailers and mobile homes that had been covered over and expanded upon.
There were oodles of cute little A-frames that were (maybe) one bedroom.
There were a slew of houses that had simply accreted over the years, as owners had added on and added on as they got more money.
And scattered throughout, there were newer homes, especially at the back, up on the hill.
Rumor had it that one house, somewhere in Mountainaire, had a septic tank that was made of an old Volkswagen bus that had been set into a hole in the ground…
But we simply couldn’t live there. No way. We wanted Kachina Village, a slightly more upscale enclave across the highway. They had paved roads! And natural gas! Woot! Up-town style, dudes!
But I found this house on the internet. It was a log home (we had always wanted to live in a log home–we had spent a few evenings rhapsodizing about log homes when we first met). It was cute. It was up on the hill, so it wasn’t as dusty (the houses at the bottom of the hill, where the one road entering the enclave came in, were subjected to large amounts of traffic and dust). So I sent OmegaDad off to look at it.
He says he walked in the front doors, and said, “This is it.”
So we ended up living in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods after all, for nine years. And we loved it. We loved our neighbors. We loved the little store at the foot of the hill, owned by J and S and S’s parents. We loved the feeling of community. We loved that we could walk a few minutes and be out in the middle of the forest. We loved that, on snowy days, we could pop on our cross-country skis and ski down the street into the forest. We loved the pizzas and steaks from the Mountainaire Tavern. We loved that we knew the guy who walked his ancient old dawg every day, making sure he went slowly enough so that his arthritic companion could keep up. We loved that, by the time we left, we knew almost everyone who lived there, and most of the vacationers who returned year after year. Scruffy and down-at-the-heels as it looks, it has character and community.
