End of an era

Eagle-eyed readers will have seen, a few weeks back, that I mentioned my husband and I were moving back to civilization. It’s taken a little longer than anticipated, but we’re now on the fast track to leaving behind our mountain home.

In some ways, I can’t help but feel this cabin journey in some ways coincided with a larger movement that reached its zenith during covid, where vast numbers of people became obsessed with getting out of the city or suburbs and out to the wild places. Hubs and I might’ve been doubly struck because we were at another crossroad: with lockdown, I no longer had to attend meetings in D.C. as a consultant, and we were finally free to live wherever we wanted.

I don’t regret our six years full-time on a mountain in West Virginia. It was an adventure and it came at the perfect time. We learned we could be more self-sufficient than we thought. We learned that we loved the big night sky, undiluted by light pollution, the green vistas that seemed to go on forever, even the lowing of cattle down in the valley in the pre-dawn.

But I’m no longer completely besotted with cabin life. We rarely partake of things such as campfires or mountain hikes. We don’t visit the special little places that only locals know about for freshly picked apples or the best hamburgers in a three-state area. We don’t engage with the community here as much, as my work has picked up. At the same time, the long, long drives for everyday necessities increases the stress on my schedule.

The area we live in has changed, too. For one thing, it’s more active, whether the people have moved to the area or are vacationing (the percentage of second homes in our county has jumped considerably). You used to rarely see any other cars while on the main highway; now, there are always at least a couple cars in view for your entire trip. That may be laughable to D.C. commuters, for whom roads routinely resemble parking lots, but it represents a significant increase in six short years. There are more stores and conveniences. You don’t feel quite so out of touch.

We’d been advised by long-time residents that there’s turnover in second-home properties every ten years or so. People tire of making the long drive, or they want to go to the beach instead of the mountains. Too, our area has been flooded with short term rentals. Whereas only a few neighbors rented out their cabins when we arrived, many places have been sold to be run as full-time Airbnbs. It changes the atmosphere of the place. There are fewer familiar faces, more entitled strangers who treat the neighborhood like their own personal playground.

I came out here because, between covid and retiring from my career, I’d felt the strong need to escape. To do something entirely new. I’m a little nervous that feeling will come back once we’re again hemmed in. This apprehension is likely because we haven’t found a place to move to yet. It’ll be easier to picture how we’ll fit in once we know the perimeters: how much land will buffer us, how close the highways.

The housing crisis is real, folks. Not that we have any right to complain. We are lucky to be in a good position. But we’re seeing houses sell overnight, bidding wars. Prices in the area we’re moving to have doubled in the six years we’ve been away. I hope to have good news to share before long, but it might be a long, stressful summer.

Book recommendations: A new book from Paul Tremblay is always a cause for celebration, but maybe more so for DEAD BUT DREAMING OF ELECTRIC SHEEP because it just sounds so darn intriguing: “In an age of shredded attention spans and never-ending attempts to turn art into 'content,' there’s power in seeing an artist make a stand in defense of his principles (in fiction or in real life..." - NYT

If you’re in the mood for something slipstream, a bit scifi, a bit horror, all of it good, you should check it out. And, it’s another book with an eyeball. Just one eyeball. Maybe it’s a trend.

There’s still time to enter to win an ARC of Incarnate on Goodreads.

Maybe more to the point, there’s still time to pre-order Incarnate.