Civilization
Civilization is nothing more than a lot of local successes, allowed to multiply. People do so well at something that doesn’t have to do with some special talent, and some that do, and we all want in on it. It seems coherent, but it doesn’t have a mind. We imagine the collective minds of those around us, and project that upon civilization, mostly.
In the sense that it is discovered, not invented, it is like a story that was always written, or land where the places to put all of the roads were obvious. No matter if we don’t know the whole of it, some curious one among us will always be brave. They will come back and tell, and it will all be true.
We probably don’t know every weird tale, or potential tale. There is always tension in families for a reason. We know all of the ways that the average clever person can take advantage of us. All of us have had someone get lucky on us. Did we complain about it? Most likely.
We know enough. We take chances that those we meet aren’t crazy beyond that. It seems enough for us to make that deal with the devil. God forbid we actually meet many corporate executives.
We do that in the name of seizing opportunity. Our common expectations determine for us what sort of world we will live in. It is where we truly meet other people.
We meet nature through others. We, also, meet nature directly. How we meet nature through others, though, tells the tale, when it come to civilization.
People are fond of saying that nature is always relegated by civilization. It isn’t, though. It is simply compressed into the human experience. That is the only reference we understand, that of the human animal.
Our understanding is that we have to overcome, or subdue, nature. We can get along with it, alright, but that is usually the resort mindset. That’s always been just a thin subset of the overall economy. Can we use the resort mindset in the same manner that we have used the service economy to bridge a gap?
The problem with the resort mindset is, of course, how it deals with ordinary people who are also around, who are working and not enjoying themselves. The more their compartmentalization, defining them as the work they do, advances, the farther from an answer they seem to be.
They don’t get respected in the economic structure. They don’t have the earning power. But they can enjoy nature as well as anybody. The ability to do that is a subtle part of their pay, or so they are told.
That’s not really any different than what happened with the workers at the Gdansk shipping yard. They had a union, in a system that was supposed to be all about workers. They had grievances, big ones.
The whole resort thing is all Kumbaya and campfire songs, when it comes to acquiescing to nature. They don’t care so much about their fellow man, though.
But they had better care about their fellow man, if we are going to continue to use civilization as a metaphor moving forward. Civilization has got to care more, and better, about nature. It needs to borrow from examples like the resort mindset.
We are going to need the resort mindset to back off of what are, otherwise, normal human tactics. For the resort mindset was always ever made possible by the successes of those who were inclined to invest in it. They didn’t invest because they didn’t want a slice of the pie. All of the real estate that gets developed at resorts gets developed for the investors. They either want to live there, or they want to take advantage of the leverage they can get in real estate having gotten in at their level.
All bets are off, once the thing gets going. Money doesn’t care who owns it, or does it?
You have to wonder about the attitude toward nature under the resort mindset, can it be sustained if the suffrage is extended?
And how many bums would show up if local government had to supplement working people that steeply? They could claim that they had as much of a right to lever into an unemployed situation in a resort town as anybody else. There is freedom of movement. They have to start somewhere.
It is the modern day equivalent of not allowing non-landowning people to vote, they might say, to not allow us to take advantage of what it is like, the improved atmosphere, in a resort town. They would say that they aren’t being allowed to start from zero, but are required to pay a sum to enter into the game. They would say that is fundamentally unfair.
The investors would say that is the whole idea. They didn’t create this as a public good. Whatever consideration workers get, should be what the market determines. They don’t consider the market to be rigged. And the market only takes cash, not houses or situations. Never you mind that development has brought along with it certain municipal constructions, those were built to relieve capital of the trouble of managing the local infrastructure. They weren’t built to correct anything.
Yet, all those workers live somewhere. It’s only once the resort area has gotten big enough, many investors have had success, driving what was special about undeveloped land, hemming everyone in, away, that workers can’t afford to live where they work anymore. When there isn’t a town that is close enough the workers have to live where they work. If one, or rather the equivalent of one, grows up because of development, workers will be displaced.
It’s not as big a deal to commute in a city as it is in a resort town. The places workers can afford, once they discover they cannot afford to live where they work, may be a great distance. If the situation is new, the infrastructure may not be up to snuff. Worst of all, it may cost them exposure to nature. It’s not the same to drive by what you could inhabit.
It is an antidote to that fixed in place mindset that people said to be buried in nature have always been accused of. Think about how up until not long ago there were still people in England who hadn’t ever been as far as the next town, except on special days. It does make people get out and experience what they wouldn’t have without the prompting.
Too much of that sort of alienation, where workers run gauntlets in order to get to work and the resort mindset fails to provide for enough people that civilization can use it as a metaphor for dealing with nature. Civilization picks on poor people, alright, but it also has built into it an understanding of social safety nets and other such things which speak to a wider suffrage than that of the resort mindset under such conditions.
Yes, you can accuse society of messing that up. Society is guilty of allowing such egregious violations of decency, in that it permits the sort of income inequality that it does.
You could say that, when you view how everything is actually distributed, society has gotten it worse than the resort mindset. It isn’t like we are talking about access to a national healthcare system or anything like that. In America, aid is probably whatever they call food stamps these days.
There used to be more argument about what the role of unemployment insurance should be, but those days may be over. The pandemic may have stolen the thunder from that argument. I know, those who never cease to complain about government waste haven’t yet seized upon everything that happened. I hope they lose themselves when they try, that the very effort causes them to fall and not get up. I like that people had a net to save them.
As per our inquiry, there seems to be something important about the involvement of nature. Maybe it just isn’t much of a resort if too few people use it?
We are talking about civilization, anyway, which is several steps above society. Society is just the collective now, and the aftermath of however many collective now’s there were leading up to this point in time. They speak to our understanding of what civilization is, but can’t replace it just like that.
Civilization, as we know it, is informed by more than the most successful country, or system. You could say that America runs its own brand of capitalism. There is a European one that civilization takes just as seriously as the more successful form.
So, yeah, you can say there is an embedded understanding and that, at best, forces may be at work against it, but it stands up to say that civilization understands the concept of a safety net. Society needs to be convinced about nature, but more so does civilization. Civilization is what actually dominates the planet.
Speaking of size, how big is a resort? It has to be big enough that its development has economic meaning. That is, when investors take the risk, they expect to see rewards if they are possible.
I was a little kid in Vail, at the very beginning. I suppose Vail qualifies as a resort that is large enough that it can be treated to arguments like those already mentioned? As far as I know, the people who actually live there enjoy nature. Vail employs a lot more people than are represented. A lot of Vail’s workers commute.
My dad was Vail’s first commuter. I was born in Leadville, but that was because my mother was able to get to the hospital there to deliver me. She wasn’t so lucky with my younger brother. He was the first baby born in Vail. He was born in the Red Lion. His baby picture is up on the wall. A bone doctor had a practice in the basement there. He was called upon in an emergency.
My first memories are of growing up in a cabin at the foot of the Potato Patch area. I used to be able to remember the inside of the cabin with more detail. I think it was a big rectangle. It may have had a dog leg. That has faded. I can still vaguely make out the linoleum tiles. They had a cool pattern. Any pattern was cool to a one year old.
The Potato Patch area is miles away from what was developing in early Vail. It’s an easy drive today, but wasn’t so easy back then. Just imagine Vail as nothing but US 6, and you can see.
My best early memories, however, are of outside of the cabin. I was so small that the grass towered over my head. It was just the local grass, that might grow wherever you go that has sunlight and is far enough away from the scalding influence of man.
I remember being able to see the cabin as I followed my older sister into the grass. At some point, though, it disappeared. All there was was sky, and tall grass stalks. I wasn’t lost. I was fascinated.
The road that is the frontage road went right by our cabin. There must have been a little set back, enough for multiple cars to park. I don’t know if it went beyond it at that time. It might have been old US 6. I was pretty small. Dad never took me around to show me everything. I only ever got to see Vail from the window of our car, when we went to Georgetown, where my mom grew up, or Denver, for some reason.
The cabin was one of those old timer’s cabins, I think. My dad didn’t build it. He took it over. He, and his growing family, fit into it. He had plans for a house for us, but first he had a ski area to build.
Dad built the house up above us, in Potato Patch. He had the right to build in Mill Creek Circle, but they made a rule, I was told, that said that to take advantage of building there one had to build right away. My dad had a ski area to build, and he couldn’t afford to hire someone else to build his house for him.
They must have made that rule specially for him? I don’t know. You can see how it kept pure speculators out. I think they said they wanted to fill that area in quickly, it looked better for the growing enterprise. It really served to separate the founder from the investors. When you know the whole story, you can conceive that is what they really wanted.
As it was, I watched my dad build our house. My little brother was with us by then. He must have occupied the same cradle space in the old cabin as I did. I vaguely remember the weird sense of looking on at something I was so recently the recipient of. But I don’t think my brother was anything like the baby I was. My mom called me easy.
Dad took a bulldozer to the land, and made a nice foundation hole out of a hillside. He built it at just the right place, where the slope was about to take off. The slope dropped down, and you could walk along it to the cabin. It was too far for me to go that way alone, but it couldn’t have been that far, maybe half a mile? It was high up enough to have a nice view. It was always very hard to spot from the highway. You would see a portion of roof, letting your eye know it was on the spot, but, mostly, you recognized the trees. It was easier to spot when I wasn’t the one driving.
He made the nicest thing out of what he had left, considering the rule they made that kept him from building in Mill Creek Circle. He accepted it. He believed that he had to live by the rules. I don’t know why.
He built his hideaway house, and he commuted. But these people who have to commute now, they are asked to accept it for their own reasons.
Sometime later, my parents sold the Potato Patch house. After my dad was let go by Vail, we went to Georgetown for a while, where, like I said, my mom was from.
Turns out, I didn’t get to just know one ski area founder, my dad, growing up. My mom’s dad was best friends with Larry Jump, who founded Arapaho Basin. Larry was a real character. I got to meet him while I lived in Georgetown.
Yeah, but while Larry spent all of his time going deep sea fishing, or otherwise having a good time, my dad was depressed. He thought he was going to have a living coming out of Vail for the rest of his life. It was his idea, not Pete Seibert’s. And he built the place. He didn’t get treated any differently than any resort employee does today. The lack of consideration began that early. His contributions were not considered as capital.
Yes, he did get stock as part of the original structure of Vail Associates. He sold that to keep his family afloat. It didn’t last all that long. Vail, I’ll have you know your founder was once reduced to having to choose whether he would become some kind of apprentice plumber for his brother in law. He was faced with that choice after so many other things he tried didn’t work. He couldn’t do it. It would have paid. There was a time when it wasn’t easy for him. He could not always swallow his pride like he could later on.
But when he was the only one who knew how to build a ski area, to do literally everything, they didn’t pay him as if he was that valuable to them. Neither did he insist upon it. He knew they couldn’t afford that. As it stands, though, I have it on video, straight from the horse’s mouth, that he made more money per week mucking out a mine in Kokomo years before he ever formed Vail in his imagination, than he ever did building the place. Everything else I say here is a mountain of speculation, brought about at the behest of, at best, a two year old’s memory, but I can state that about my dad’s earnings, when he built the place from scratch.
Well, he built it to the point where they could just make a decision, and let him go. But, you see, they made that decision long before the day it was handed down. It would have been very difficult for them, indeed, if they had let him go and he had a house in Mill Creek Circle. Somebody may have been thinking ahead, which was not my parents forte. They knew that.
We had to be placed on some different scale than those other capitalists? They were all in on the 10th Mountain Division thing being a thing, while my dad fought somewhere else. He actually helped build Camp Hale. He was from the area. He wasn’t from back East. And he only had a grade school education.
He was pretty smart. I don’t think anybody else could see mountains like he could. I mean, he had vision. He didn’t just see Vail, but Beaver Creek too. He wanted to do even more, but for some reason, nobody would ever come along with him on those journeys.
He even broke down and tried Disney. Imagine what could have been launched in the world of yesterday, that could never get past the first Forest Service inspection today? He wasn’t able to get into the whole social circle thing. He couldn’t see that they were camped against him. That is the only way he differs from those who have to commute to work, by the way, I think. They know exactly what sort of treatment to expect, whereas he was a pioneer!
What I am describing isn’t anything different than what happens to people who discover they can’t live where they work. It’s just as hard for them too, and, as we have seen, for many of the same reasons.
As it was, we had a house in Potato Patch, which was fairly out of the way at the time. My parents rented it out, and the tenants quit paying rent. They had to be evicted.
I suppose it was too much, this grubber rubbing my dad’s failure in his face? They sold the house. Joe Staufer owns it now. I’ve been back to it once. My dad and I visited, I think when Pete died. I sat next to Gerald Ford at the ceremony that day. I helped dad get to where he was supposed to be. Afterward, I said something to him about the old house.
The Staufers have done wonderful things with it. The downstairs, where my bedroom used to be, is made of blue Italian tile. It’s the huge en suite bathroom to a master bedroom, that looks out upon the down sloping view. It seems so small, like all of these things from our pasts do. I found that I could go right to the false wall that my parents always said could be broken through, in case there was a fire. I wondered if the Staufers knew about it?
I was glad to see a copy of Churchill’s writings in their bookcase, along with a lot of other books. I had a point of contact I could make with these people. They seemed like pretty good folk. They didn’t rob us. My dad just gave up. They may have even been some kind of bridge.
Dad didn’t object to the idea. He didn’t have any qualms about going to see if they were home that day. He was, like I am, that way, we don’t impose, as a rule.
They must have been at the same ceremony? I don’t know. When we got there the Staufers were dressed like they had. We probably talked about Pete, or dad and they did. I remember dad was comfortable with them. When we drove away, he may have said as much. We were both glad they hadn’t torn the old house down and built something much larger in its place. Everything else in that neighborhood was gargantuan. I mean, motel sized, at least. But looks like a chalet.
growsomeart 