Ernest Hemingway said, “Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start, and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously.”

 

Well, I’m screwed! I’ve waited for this opportunity since I first sat down at my dad’s old clunky typewriter, waited for someone to give me a writing assignment that wasn’t for a grade, for a chance to express myself in print. Now Missy has given me the chance to write this column, and I may not be qualified.

 

Here’s my problem: I’m spoiled. I don’t have a “personal tragedy.” I lack Hemingway’s only qualification for writing well (that and a bottle of Absinthe). He was the voice of what Gertrude Stein named the “lost generation” after all, the voice of displacement and despondency.

 

My biggest problem is that I’m from Durango. Oh, poor little middle-class white girl who grew up skiing and biking and kayaking and looking at mountains every day. It sounds idyllic, but think of the challenges one faces when forced to leave the bubble of beauty and ease we call Durango.
Sometimes, the real world calls us out of the bubble, for long or short term. I left when I was 18 in search of the great big world that’s rumored to be out there and to continue my education. Even Montana, with its rivers, mountains and famed “big sky” couldn’t compete. Where was my river running through town? Why were the mountains so far away that I had to drive to every trailhead? Where were my blue-bird winter days?

 

I learned what I should have known watching “The Wizard of Oz” hundreds of times as a child, but, like Dorothy, I had to follow my own Yellow Brick Road to realize everything I wanted was where I began my journey. I wasn’t going back to Kansas (honestly, Colorado’s better than Oz and even if there’s “no place like home” I don’t know who’d want to go back to Kansas, sorry neighbor) I was coming home to Durango.

 

Outside magazine has featured Durango almost annually, mostly in articles with such themes as “Location is Everything” (2011) and “Life is Better Here” (2006). Basically, Durango has won Outside’s equivalent of People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” several years running. Durango is the Johnny Depp of mountain towns. No wonder I’m so in love with this place!  

 

In its September 2010 issue Outside named Durango the best town for mountain biking, however it warned, “all too many starstruck new arrivals join the ranks of advanced-degree holders who end up waiting tables.”

 

I came home to play in the River of Lost Souls and ski on Purgatory Mountain and to wait tables and pour beer with hundreds of other well-educated, over-qualified members of the service industry.

 

Faced with the post-grad “real world,” I opted for the irresponsible freedom of skinning up a peak in the San Juans as opposed to the pseudo-prestige of an office job with a salary. I traded in company-paid health benefits for the benefits of a healthy life (waiting with trepidation for the inevitable ski injury). I’m in no rush to know what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, but I do wish I knew what I was going to do next.

 

My generation has been saddled with the idea that we can do anything. We have the burden of choice, and the burden of a world quickly burning under the doily of what’s left of the ozone layer.  So before it all goes up in flames, I want to follow my passions, to live a life less ordinary.

 

A gypsy-climber friend of mine said that she could pack everything into her car and move tomorrow, and she’d only miss her friends. Why trade freedom for the manacles of a mortgage on a house that you may never stop paying? Isn’t it for time that we work? Why not be glamorously immaterial while it is possible?

 

It’s not where we live, but instead where we get to live that determines the value of a job in the service industry.

 

But the piercing eyes of family friends asking me what I’m doing with my life while we are stuck in checkout at City Market don’t provide positive feedback when I say I just returned from a 20-day backpacking trip – and while that’s not comparable to a law degree on a scale of achievement, it gave me a sense of accomplishment.

 

Other Durangotans share my priorities, but there are still voices from the outside world that sneak in and suggest that money will buy happiness.

 

One friend, who recently got a more traditional “grown-up” job, expressed his frustration that everyone in Durango looks down at him for wanting to make money, but he’s sick of being poor. He hasn’t moved, and continues the tradition of an epic weekend bike ride, but is still chastised for “selling out.” He is, however, making a lot of money.  

 

Perhaps to some extent the materialistic axiom is true: money will buy me a new pair of skis and property in La Plata County, i.e. happiness. In order for me to change my professional situation, I’d have to venture out of the bubble again, into that dreary “real world” where the sun doesn’t shine as bright and the water isn’t as clear and get a master’s or law degree that doesn’t guarantee reentry into Durango.

 

So here I am:  24 years old, ready to do anything, qualified for nothing, wanting a career I’m passionate about (lucky me, I get to write about my passions in a column). I want to do something meaningful for myself and others … but I don’t know what that is. So I pour beer, I drink beer, I ski and bike and try to take advantage of living in Durango (though sometimes the beer-drinking and subsequent hangover interferes). What else should I be doing? (Ask my father, he has many suggestions.)

 

So I might as well be sitting in a Parisian café with Hemingway, drinking too many bottles of wine, (The Ranch is almost Paris.) Were I sitting there with him, I would ask him what I wish I could ask anybody with an answer, but especially one who saw the world and wrote brilliantly for a time. After all, he suffered from the same hurt as me: he was the voice of the “lost generation.”

 

I would ask, “What should I do?” Perhaps he would reply vaguely, being inebriated, or would give too much advice on the wrong subject. I would brazenly assert, confident of my life choices, “It’s going to be great, right? No matter what I choose to do?” Maybe he would tell me without too much slur in his voice, plagiarizing the last line of The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

– Maggie Casey