A Tale of Two Cities- Fresh Hell Style

I'm claiming a small share of geezer status before my time, and including here two places in the US that I believe have been completely ruined and shorn of their beauty by being constantly hyped.

1. Telluride, Colorado - I first went to Telluride in 1974, eons before movie stars and media moguls thought it was cool. The mountainsides were empty of anything more substantial than pine trees, and the several lakes and box canyons in the surrounding areas were pristine and unspoiled. If one camped at Trout Lake as we did that summer (located in another box canyon a few miles south of the town), it was in a roughly finished wood cabin with very little in the way of mod cons. (I think there were indoor facilities, but if there were they were quite rudimentary - in a way, it surely prepared me for my future wrestling with the vagaries of North African plumbing.)

There was a lot of mud, as I recall, but the rainbow trout fishing was phenomenal, both in Trout Lake itself and the many meadow streams flowing from the tops of the moutains. Our days were spent blissfully fishing and hiking.

Telluride itself was a ramshackle conglomerate of a dozen streets, populated half by flannel shirted, tobacco chewing, crusty miners driving rust-riddled pickup trucks, and half by bonafide pot-smoking hippies complete with patched jeans, bare feet, long hair, thriving communes and blissful expressions. This wasn't a town where you went to shop, for crying out loud; you went to the laundromat to wash your clothes, the general store for your provisions, and the bait shop for your tackle and fishing wire. Precious antique stores and restaurants menu-laden with fennel flavored sausage & tofu pancakes came much later, after Hollywood et. al discovered the place and trashed its pristine beauty beyond all recall. I can't even think about it without heaving a tortured sigh - it was so wonderful then, in all its wildness - so complete even with such a light footprint upon its throat.

2. San Francisco - I was privileged to visit San Francisco in 1976, the summer after my father's death. One of my paternal uncles lived there, and my sibs & I trooped out en masse for a few weeks during summer vacation. The streets, laid out gracefully in an arc around the marina with row after row of pastel Victorian houses, complete with plate glass veranda bay views, were breathtaking in their quiet pomp and ordered circumstance - the marina and ports were not yet engulfed and overrun with kitcshy tourist haunts, studiedly upscale restaurants, or boutiques filled with elegant yet completely unnecessary items. The streets were incredibly clean yet very lively. There was even a studied quaintness to be seen in the fey denizens of Castro & Polk Streets (although I'm sure that many of them were probably zoned out of their heads - their benign gazes were likely more influenced by quaaludes than gaiety).

It was a city of sparkling white views, a conveniently sordid underbelly kept tidily in its allotted corner, and the all time hands down best Chinatown in the world. I ate Peking Duck there for the first time, in one of Chinatown's most exclusive restaurants - it had to be ordered 24 hours in advance, which was done by my aunt's Chinese assistant. Marin County was sparsely populated then, and the majesty and coolness of Muir Woods was unparalleled - one felt, surrounded by giant redwoods and the calm and quiet of an ancient forest, that one had dropped out of civilization itself. Anyone who has been to San Francisco in the last 15 years will know the liveability and charm has all been leached from the city and impossibly ruined by the huge influx of population and attendant business, accomplished without an eye to appreciating or enhancing the grandeur and character of the city. The infrastructure has been unable to grow swiftly enough or cope. San Francisco is no longer a glittering jewel in the Bay, but yet another sprawling polluted filthy mega-city with traffic enough to defy Los Angeles on a good day.

It would be proper, I suppose, to leave this post on a high note, which is admirable but something I'm loathe to do - the biggest part of me would rather wallow in nostalgia for these places remembered in their heyday of unexplained, unexpected, and unparalleled beauty.