A Comfortable Fit

Let me tell you a little bit about my town. First off, it’s a town, as you may have just gathered – a town as opposed to a city. It’s not a place where everyone knows everyone else’s dog, but it’s small enough that when you go to the post office or the market (notice: not called “supermarket”), you usually see four or five people you know, and that’s if you’re just an average wallflower. If you are big on people, on the other hand, you may know about 80 percent of those you come across.

Our little town is comprised of about – oh, I’d say 20,000 people. It has over 5,000 homes, and a wall encircles the entire place. It is such that the town cannot be expanded beyond its borders. The walls are where they are, and that’s the end of it. So though it’s not a huge place, it’s also not the smallest of populations, either.

On your way to our little town, you have to drive along one of two routes. Route 66 is the one most traveled, and it’s a pretty frightful drive from the 15 to our turnoff. It’s riddled with abandoned shacks and broken-down shanties, all uninhabited. Without pictures, it’s really hard to fully do its description justice (so expect another post, pictures included). Just trust me for now when I say, it’s a little like driving through a poverty-stricken third-world country. The few visitors we’ve had that have come this route usually step out of the car, faces sheet white, genuinely concerned for our financial and physical welfare. There are also some really nice homes along the road, however, some even built in the last few years, so the mismatched grouping of structures is a bit of an oxymoron.

Usually, when I give people directions to our town, especially friends from “down the hill” (yes, we actually do use this phrase for folks from L.A.), I purposefully tell them to come the other route, which is 395. It’s definitely less disturbing of a drive, and they end up feeling less sorry for you when they come this way.

Once you enter our town, it’s a bit of an oasis, a golf-course resort community nestled amidst two man-made lakes. It’s such a contrast from the barren, nothing-but-Joshua-tree drive. You find yourself drawing in a breath of fresh air once you pull up to the little waterfall that sits at the entrance, where you gratefully realize you have not entered the Twilight Zone or that you’ve traveled past the moon and are now safely back on Planet Earth.

We all share the common plight of having to drive 20 minutes to get to any real shopping attractions, like Vons or the mall. It can be such a pain, especially with gas prices rising alarmingly, so we often call one another and ask, “I’m going to Victorville today; do you need anything?” We are there for one another; there’s really no one else around here, anyway, which is also the reason you don’t stay mad at each other for long; you'll be seeing them tomorrow when you go to the open board meeting.

I’ve lived here since graduating high school 17 years ago (wow, has it been that long, really?). I tried to move away when I started work on my master’s degree down at Biola, but as many will tell you, I couldn’t escape our little town. Not only could I not escape, I dragged my Portland-bred husband up here as well -- needless to say, a difficult transition for him.

I make it sound dreadful to live here. It’s not. It’s home now, and it’s a comfortable fit.