Social Contracting
The presence of the wealthy in our small backwards town fascinates me. I grew up in farm country. We were cash poor, but on excellent terms with the bank. That sort of life skews one's perspective. People who were poor bought big things, like tractors and cows. People who were well-to-do could buy smaller things, like t.v.s and sofas. I eventually became an academic, thus, chronically poor, and surrounded by people who competed with their wits rather than their wallets. It’s ironic that my first real experience of the spending class has come in middle age, while living in a struggling mountain town. Our permanent population earns an average of about $35,000 per household. A young single person makes only $19,000 to $24,000 a year, according to the Census. Most two-parent families hold down two jobs; the second job brings in little cash but provides the health insurance. The behavior of anyone who is lucky enough to make more is noticed, naturally. I’ve heard stories about the doctor’s wife who travels two hours to get her hair cut. Then there’s the marvelous recounting about the party one of our friends went to on the promise of “something really special” for dinner; the meal’s highlight was deli bagels shipped in from New York. But the truly startling moments come from the visitors. We get all types: the skiing socialite, the summer migrant, the second-home squire…I don’t have to work for them, so I usually encounter them in grocery stores and other public places. Shopping in the dairy aisle one Saturday, I overheard a man dressed in expensive hiking gear discussing camping supplies with his girlfriend. “Do we have to get butter in sticks?” he moaned. “They’re so hard to spread.” I don’t know what they had planned for the day, but I hope she had oxygen ready. My husband’s favorite outburst-- also in a supermarket, coincidentally--involved one woman expressing her displeasure over the chocolate selection: “Now I’m REALLY mad! There’s nothing but Godiva! There’s NO Lindt!”
Those who have to work for the outsiders store away the most indelible impressions. A friend who runs an antique store notices that the husbands she sees in her store are unfailingly polite. They are away from the office, they are wearing comfortable clothes, and life couldn’t be better. They chitchat pleasantly with her while the wives flail about with tape measures. A landscaping friend experiences the opposite: the husbands quibble about the price of a tree in a damn wilderness area, for God's sake, while the wives, often serious gardeners, hurry to hush them up in embarrassment.
The contractors have priceless anecdotes. You might think that the guys who do the dirty work have little contact with the truly rich. Even from a distance, though, the workers notice. Line item budgets help to underscore the peculiarities of the boss. “We worked on one boathouse for two months last summer,” one man was telling me. “She argued with us over every beam. The roofing was too expensive, why on earth did we need this size timber for the dock, whatever. Then she spends thousands, I mean thousands, on two lamps for the entry. You just wouldn’t believe it.” Oh, I would. Petty quibbling over minor issues is common. I know one mason who built a chimney under the scrutiny of an elderly camp owner who would survey the work through a pair of binoculars. The son visited one weekend and noticed Pa tracking the mason’s trowel movements. “Geez, I’m sorry about that,” the guy said. “Does he watch you like that all the time?” “Yup. Says he likes to see that I’m efficient.” Gave the son something to reflect on while driving home, probably. My own family once hired a crew to work on our roof. I was gratified by how courteous they seemed and how cautious they were about their language in front of my then-five-year-old son. When I thanked the supervisor for his crew’s behavior, he laughed. “Oh, they’re used to it,” he said. “We just came off a job where the home owner has all the rooms bugged.” “Bugged?” I asked. “Yeah, she’s a nervous type who lives alone when she comes up here, so she’s got mikes in every room. No cussing on that job.”
Locals particularly love to describe how the rich waste their money. Spending money is not in itself funny. We would all love to have more of it. It would be too painful to describe the beautiful vehicles, the strip-planked canoes, the cathedral ceilings heated with expensive fuel oil. Anyone could be envious of these. The good jokes resonate with senselessness and ostentation. If the money wasted causes actual discomfort for the residents, so much the better. When my husband rented a heavy lifting crane to help move some of his workshop equipment, he joked with the men about the difficulties of the job. “This is nothing,” one man replied. “We fit a three-thousand pound granite tub through a second-story window into this guy’s bathroom last week.” “Three thousand pounds of granite?” “Yeah. Imagine how long it takes to heat that sucker up!” I revealed my envy of a birch bark ceiling to one acquaintance who worked in a realtor’s office. “Oh, we had one of those when we first moved into this building,” she remembered, shaking her head. “Every time we shut a door…instant dandruff.”
The most incomprehensible are those who refuse to admit that conspicuous spending defeats the purpose of life in the mountains. The choice to live up here is supposed to put us in awe of our surroundings, not of ourselves. A local electrician confessed that the easiest money he ever made was the month he spent stringing up halogen lights for one man’s rec room. He had been paid to reproduce the constellations of the heavens in wire and bulbs. “He wanted to look at fake constellations?” I said. “Yeah, I had to follow this astronomy guide. Crazy, right? Like he doesn’t have a door to go outside? I didn’t care. It was great money. I love these guys.”
