(click to hear this song)
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there's doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

-Malvina Reynolds

Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where all your dreams might not come true. Your blogger sits in another stew, what's new, says you...okay, that was an unintended bit of rhyming, and it should probably stop now. The stew this time is one that boils a bit harder every time B and I sit and do nothing for any length of time, and we actually make conversation, and we discover that we agree on a fair amount of philosophical ideas when we take the time to express them, but that one of us then immediately wants to act, to do, to be, to go, while the other is much more responsible and knows that all may not necessarily work itself out. Following one's dreams is so easy to talk about, but the doing can be problematic.

Part of my problem this week has been road construction. Not the road construction itself, because I know that the little boxes on the hillside (I think of the song every time I drive through the pastel cluster of single-family homes and duplexes) above the trailer park need that water main, but the fact that I must then take a detour through Summit Cove to get home. And this detour takes me on a winding road through McMansions, million dollar, log-sided homes with pretty rock work and wrap-around decks and too many north-facing windows that must take a fortune to heat and that house only a family of four and that, after dark, glow brightly with too many lightbulbs while the successful, and undoubtedly happy people inside eat their saturated fat and watch TV and play Guitar Hero and do homework.

Every time I drive through, a little knot tightens on my insides, half envious of them, half defiantly proud of my little green double-wide, a little bit of a feeling of superiority because of our lack of debt, a little bit of curiosity about the people who dwell inside such palatial homes. A small hint of doubt, maybe we should have been doctors or lawyers or business executives, maybe we are squandering our best years and in the end we will wonder why we were not driven to acquire because we will feel left behind by our country-club peers.

This week, we got away for a few days. Not actually away, we just took the camper down to Lake Dillon for two nights, then to Green Mountain Reservoir for another night. We would have preferred to do Green Mountain Reservoir the entire time, but we worked the two days we camped at Lake Dillon. Green Mountain has no cell phone service, so we could only go out there on our actual day off. (No, I have not changed the subject. This relates to the stew.) At lake Dillon, we enjoyed two nights of campfires, borrowed a canoe that, at the end of our stay, got "borrowed" to us permanently and now resides in our back yard. We paddled across glassy water to Sentinel Island and back and ate too many s'mores and slept in a comfortable bed in the tent-end of the camper and it was fun, but it was a bit of a pain because the neighbors were close and the camp host was watchful and Andy had to be leashed at all times. We did not actually relax until we got out the Green Mountain the third night, found a spot beside a trickling stream, set Andy loose, and plopped down beside a fire. I read a book until it got too dark to read, something I have not done in far too long, then we sat and stared into the glowing embers and I melted the bottoms of my shoes against the metal fire ring and visited with my husband, something else that almost never happens. And somewhere in there, between the water falling musically down the hillside to the lake, the flickering glow of firelight in the trees around us, the cool breeze blowing off the water, the exhausted dog draped awkwardly over several peices of firewood, and the murmer of our own voices, in the words of the Shins, "something bad inside me went away". In that moment I knew exactly what I wanted, and it did not involve work the next day. It involved less stuff, less push, less stress, less racing, less running, less competing, less arguing about money, less arguing about arguing, just less. Just us, and what we need. A trail, a mountain bike, a home on wheels, a road.

Of course, there is that small problem called money. The making of it, the keeping of it, the spending of it. The retiring without it. The sending the potential kids to college without it. And it is not as though we are opposed to working for it. It's the staying in one place that gets us. The world is big. Even the United States is big. We want to see it all and do it all.

This morning, I could not stop my imagination. It kept pretending we really were those lucky, mythical people who can live on almost nothing, somehow have enough money for gas and food, who can live on the road. Even as we were driving home, I could not help pretending that we were going to keep driving over Vail Pass, just keep going.

We came home by way of McMansion drive, and the knot came back. I tried to tell B what was wrong with the picture, but he didnt get it and told me that these people had their priorities too, and if they could afford it, what was wrong with it? And I sputtered a bit about the pointlessness of the American dream and he told me I had been born in the wrong decade. I should have been in a VW van, getting high at Woodstock, driving around and camping and protesting war. I'll leave that one alone, except to say that I've met several people who drove vans to Woodstock. Now they own big houses and play golf.

So here we are, at heart happy vagabonds, in flesh working a job, caretakers for the million-dollar mansions that never feel quite as comfortable or luxurious as one thinks they look from the outside. Will the two ever compromise and come to an understanding? Will we ever decide what our priorities are? Will we ever feel as though we are exactly where we belong, when we belong there? Will we ever fish, plunge into a plan for our future, school, buy a business, settle in, or cut bait, like we threaten to do as we stare into embers and talk is cheap? Stay tuned. The answer in...the next decade or so.