Picture perfect

As you can imagine, being a newspaper, we get all sorts of letters, solicited and unsolicited, warranted and unwarranted. Most end up on the following pages in the forms of letters to the editor, while others are unfit to print or would put us at risk of running afoul of FCC decency rules. Then there’s the occasional personal attack (we in the profession like to think of these as “fan mail”) and the illegible stuff, which we’d like to print if only we could decode beer-soaked chicken scratch.

However, every now and then, we get something in our mailbag that doesn’t really fall into any of these categories, but we feel is pertinent to share with our readers anyway. Take an anonymous submission last week, postmarked Denver, that recommended a “thumbs down” for “a beautiful tourist city like Durango” having an “eye sore” of a residence on a particular downtown street corner (which will remain nameless to reduce rubberneckers.) “Unbelievable!” the aghast visitor wrote.

Well, “Unbelievable,” we couldn’t agree more – and as residents of this beautiful, tourist city, boy, are we embarrassed. In fact, not only do such architectural atrocities deserve a public flogging in the form of a thumbs down, but perhaps a swift and merciless date with the wrecking ball. After all, we are a beautiful tourist city, not a real place with road rage, homeless people, out of control housing prices, an abundance of stray pets, noxious weeds and a disgruntled, underpaid work force. And even if we were, we certainly shouldn’t go flaunting it on city street corners. I mean, what are the tourists going to think when they find out our garbage stinks just like it does in Topeka? Well, I’ll tell you what, they’ll stay in Topeka or find another beautiful tourist spot without all the messy problems and smells of the real world, you know, like Disneyland.

I, myself, have seen the “eye sore” in question. Although never particularly pained by its sight (mostly due to the fact that it’s obscured by the “landscaping”), I can appreciate how an upstanding, god-fearing citizen of the world would be hesitant to park his or her Minnie Whinnie adjacent to such a property of obvious ill repute. Picture coming back from an afternoon of T-shirts and Frappucinos only to find the low-life heathen who dwell there have actually stirred and are outside drinking alcoholic beverages and, gasp, listening to offensively loud rock and roll music. Before you know it, your women and children have disappeared, the whinnie is up on blocks, and you’re wandering the streets in a contact-high induced haze looking for your cell phone and wallet, which in all likelihood were pickpocketed.

And I speak from experience. You see, since coming to Durango broke and unemployed almost a decade ago, I have lived in several of these so-called eye sores, with green shag carpet thicker than David Hasselhoff’s chest hair and more linoleum than the entire Brady Bunch subdivision. When you weren’t stuffing Thor-lo socks into the cracks in the windows, you were attempting to blow yourself up with the pilot light on the leaky gas stove that never did anything but spew carbon monoxide. Definitely not behavior befitting a resident of a picturesque town such as Durango. Never mind that you blew your entire, three-figure paycheck on rent, the point is that such Third World conditions belong in the Third World, not in our quaint, mountain Shangri La.

There’s no doubt – something has to be done, and quick, before people find out that the residents of Durango do occasionally ransack their couch cushions in search of loose change, hang their laundry out to dry and allow weeds to grow between the cracks in their sidewalks.

For starters, all those eye sore houses, and you know who you are, need to clean up your acts. No more peeling paint and dog poop in the yard. Or better yet, scrape the whole thing in favor of something respectable, like one of downtown’s newer residential developments. And remember to keep it safe, preferably something in a neutral-toned, box formation with no windows, so you can’t look out, and more importantly, tourists can’t see in and be scared by your empty pizza boxes, unmade beds and dirty dishes.

As for the inhabitants of such eye sores, they no doubt should be thrown out on the streets (or alleys so as to avoid making a scene) along with any belongings that could be construed as unsavory, including all that stinky bike and boating gear. Let them live somewhere else, so we can make room for civilized, well-dressed folk with 401Ks who don’t consider cinder blocks a viable form of décor and old skis prized antiques.

While we’re on the subject, it seems there are an awful lot of motorized eye sores out there as well. Anything so much as sporting a speck of primer gray, a tape deck or a manual stick shift should immediately be taken to the scrap heap. Same goes for those old clunker bikes you all call transportation. Durango needs more shiny, brand new SUVs in keeping with its postcard allure. Besides, why go to all the trouble of building that white-picket mansion when you go and wreck it by parking that dirty old Subaru out front?

And what about all that disgusting brown water flowing in the river? Can’t something be done about that? People aren’t paying good money to raft in a river with dirt in it. In fact, come to think of it, this whole town is dirty. How do you expect anyone to enjoy those beautiful views with all that dust flying around?

What Durango needs is a good, thorough cleaning. Think of it as an “extreme makeover” for the whole town. Out with the tackiness and in with the whitewashed, Stepford town. Sure, it may be hard to tell your house from the identical one next door at first, but you’ll get used to it. And don’t worry that Durango has lost its charm, individuality or quirkiness – the overwhelming beauty will more than make up for it. Besides, deep down inside, I’m sure we’ll all still be the same old, lovable dirtbags. After all, beauty is only skin deep.

– Missy Votel