All Things Stewart Springs
Independent tribute, watchdog & blog site since 2011
Inside look at Mount Shasta Vista's first 50 years: 1965 - 2015 (+)
An informal history of a onetime de facto collective camp resort and
its frustrated efforts to grow into a standard community
...or remotest facsimile thereof

by Stuart Ward
Note: This page has nothing to do with Stewart Springs, which tribute-watchdog site it's in (only one that doesn't). It's about the writer's long-time, same-elevation home front across the valley from the Springs and it needed a home is all. To return to the Springs site any time if coming from there,
click or swipe back-page function.
Shorter version was first published
in the now-zombied Mt. Shasta Herald on September 22 and 29, 2021
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The once-sleepy 50 year-old backwoods subdivision underwent radical sea change in 2015. While "the Vista", as some called it, had already jumped down the rabbit hole ages earlier, it was then to discover even greater depths as a haven for unlicensed commercial cannabis grows.
The following crazy-quilt, time-jumping retrospective by a longtime resident deep dives into where the place was coming from leading up to that monumental year, which, notably, coincided with its fiftieth anniversary and California's imminent legalization of recreational weed. While also sharing a few incidents, happenings and personal experiences and briefly touching on post-2015 times, primary focus is on exploring why the remote development, well, went to pot...so spectacularly...on so many levels.
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"...the past is never truly past...it is always tugging up both
its treasures and its tragedies and
carrying them insistently into the future."
- Margaret Renk
"[the Vista is]...our home away from home, our frontier, our Shangri-la...there should be a constant flurry of barbecue parties, coffee klatches and just informal get-togethers all through the year.”
- George Collins, founding developer and fellow camper
[Part 1]
Wilderness condo, anyone?
The archway spanning the main entrance beckoned one. Bearing the words “Mt. Shasta Vista” in hand-scrolled, wooden letters, it made the more whimsical first-timers driving under it imagine they were perhaps entering some enchanted realm or quaint scout retreat rather than, in fact, a primitive subdivision of individually-owned, mostly undeveloped lots. One felt the hopes and dreams going into the sign. How the place's earliest property owners -- first only visiting summers from far distant cities for campouts and rendezvouses -- held an endearing affection for the fledgling development so neatly tucked in the high desert wooded foothills on Mount Shasta's northwestern slopes.
The sign, long gone, had imparted a certain grace to the entrance of the backwoods development begun in the mid 1960's. Located fifteen miles out from both Weed and Grenada on the mountain's sleepy side, its region reportedly once held one of the largest stand of juniper trees on earth (and was named, appropriately enough, Juniper Flats).
Happy campers turned modern-day settlers
So smitten by its charms were some among the flock of mostly older repeat vacationers -- largely from the Los Angeles area -- that they decided to actually retire here. Collectively they'd segue their individual lots from their simple first-generation recreational use into part of a thinly-spread proto community of full-on, code-legal retirement residences.
This wasn't as outlandish a move as it might've seemed. At formation, the land had been re-zoned by the county for single-family residency following developer petition. The community-building venture by the few dozen landowners was no doubt launched in hopes, by at least some, that like-minded others would soon follow suit, initially covering their own water, electrical and sewage needs like them until, over time, they might create more systematic and centralized infrastructure. They envisioned growing the place into a standard rural community of respectable, financially secure nature lovers willing to work together congenially for the common good.
That was the starry-eyed vision. Alas, things didn't quite pan out. Their apparent initial gung-ho efforts to build up common infrastructure beyond a few isolated power and phone lines and an informal community well appeared destined to fail...gloriously.
Among the many reasons why: bitter contention surrounding the land sale itself to the developer; lot owners' fallout over the campaign to electrify the place, shorting out initial, mostly unified, group efforts; the high cost of drilling often-deep wells to hit often-scarce potable water; and later -- coup de grace -- the arrival of younger countercultural back-to-the-landers bent on ignoring health and building codes as silly, overstrict and downright oppressive.
Long story short, forces would conspire to torpedo their fondest hopes. Theirs proved to be only a short-lived, idyllic enclave of transplanted retired city folks before things went seriously haywire. No more than ten to fifteen percent of the parcels ever got connected to the grid, and the cost of drilling individual wells often proved so high and finding good water so iffy that open non-compliance to codes -- increasingly less enforced over time -- became fairly commonplace.
The possibilities!
The brief idyllic honeymoon of the fledgling community was to be cut short as the place suddenly shifted gears -- more like stripped gears. Morphing into a bizarre limbo land, it became an incongruous oil-and-water mix of fully code-compliant residences amid decidedly code-challenged ones. Result: the Vista was always in hot water with county residential code enforcers...and forever at war with itself.
It seems that the developer, George Collins, had decided to play it by ear, lacking any well-defined long-range plans or visions for the place (made transparent, anyhow) beyond serving as a simple -- read primitive -- collectively owned and maintained, de facto recreational resort. It was all perfectly legal under California's then-existing super-lax subdivision laws. Then, on the wings of the Vista's launch, Lake Shastina, a full-on residential development with infrastructure out the yin-yang, sprang up practically next door. Indeed, new rural subdivisions were soon to be popping up all over the wider Mt. Shasta area.
The developer -- along with the select group of owners who reveled in their extended annual camping visits, often gathering together, mingling and brainstorming the place's possibilities, had fallen fully under the mountain's spell. So much so, they soon got ambitious enough to think, Hey, we're getting ready to retire; why not just move here and build our own rural residential retirement community? We've got the bucks and the wherewithal. Why not? What could go wrong?
Surely the group must've appreciated that it would take a critical mass of lot owners -- many of whom had bought the parcels primarily for being cheap and perfect for simple private retreats, and far more as strictly long-term investments or short-term, speculative gambles -- willing to commit the necessary time, money and effort to generate the critical momentum needed to pull off such an undertaking if hoping for it to become anything more than the few scattered residences amid a sea of empty lots that would then be compromised for dedicated camp use.
Maybe not, though. Maybe in the grand excitement of brainstorming and their determination to leave smoggy L.A. behind, they were winging it and in their haste hadn't thought things through enough to hammer out a viable growth plan and, holding a firm belief in law and order, hoping willy-nilly might be good enough. They seemed confident -- optimistic winds at their backs -- that they could play it by ear, that their good intentions, bolstered by deep resources, would carry the day.
Then there was a darker possibility: Maybe among the first settlers were some who didn't at all have any grand vision of creating a viable community, but were instead only interested in privately carving out their own new home front hideaway; beyond necessary nominal cooperative efforts it was everyone for themselves -- and the devil take the hindmost over fallout from other lot holders for having upended the place's idyllic use for camp retreats and the easy lot sellability for once having been dedicated to such.
No nothing
At first, it had appeared to be little more than a Good Sam’s Club of sorts, tucked away in the remote boonies. An unassuming rural development offering weary smog-choked city dwellers a mess of secluded, affordable, 2-1/2 acre-on-average parcels. A retreat where every now and then they could enjoy a bit of camping, unwind from city cares, socialize with kindred souls and breathe fresh mountain air while soaking in the mountain's serene majesty.
There was no water, no electricity, no sewer system, no gas lines, no phone lines. Forget paved roads or any community center, public parks or playgrounds. There was nothing but a lot of lots -- 1,641 (count 'em) -- plus a labyrinthine 66-mile network of modest red cinder roads and signage (plus one dauntingly tiny map) to access them all.
Called ranch roads by the developer, they were fragile affairs built up of a loose rock base over often deep, sandy soil with a red cinder topping from a close by cinder hill supply operation. As they were never designed to withstand constant heavy loads or frequent or fast traffic, a fifteen miles-per-hour speed limit was set to help preserve them, plus keep the backwoods' relaxed, tranquil atmosphere intact and the dust down. Ongoing maintenance was covered by the then-modest annual, mandatory-membership lot assessment levied on every owner, which were informally called road dues.
A sea of turn-key, primitive wilderness camping condos, if you will, with what at first appeared to be little more than a wispy dream of maybe someday growing into something more. A number of lot owners -- the relative few who actually made use of their new properties, or those waiting until others developed the place some before jumping in -- imagined all the possibilities the secluded, affordable lots with their sweeping mountain views readily inspired.
Converging factors
To better fathom the peculiar history of the Vista, it can help to appreciate the certain interrelated factors in play at the time: (1) the late sixties through the early seventies was a historic time of tumultuous, staggering social and political upheaval as well as one of a fitful grand mass awakening of spiritual awareness and expanding consciousness; a giddy exhilaration and sense of euphoria over life's infinite possibilities filled the air; (2) the land possessed a pronounced dreamy quality that could easily lead one to imagine the sky was the limit when it came to developing it without giving much thought to bothersome mundane realities; (3) a massive back-to-the-land movement was ratcheting into high gear; more and more individuals were fleeing urban areas to live closer to nature and simplify their lives; and (4), again, beyond simple road access, current law didn't require rural subdivisions to supply diddly-squat.
Combine these -- along with the Vista's super-affordable lot prices encouraging impulsive purchases lacking focused intent beyond hoping their values might rise -- and you had a more than a passing potential for some improbable, strange-magic lotus land like the Vista to emerge. A place where the inhabitants who quickly followed the first wave of dutifully conventional dwellers could pursue fantasies of idyllic carefree living deep in the bosom of nature, while blissfully ignoring any tedious downers like building codes lurking in the shadows beyond its borders.
Country comfort
Located a few miles uphill and northeast of the soon-to-be exurb of Lake Shastina, many of the realm's parcels held a profound air of stillness and solitude (or mind-numbingly stark isolation, depending on one's mindset). As most lots were one to five miles in from the nearest of its five blacktop entrances with their tranquility-eroding traffic sound, one might've felt more like a hundred miles, rather than the actual fifteen, away from the nearest town.
The embarrassment of wooded high-desert lots was spread out over seven square miles of mostly juniper tree and sagebrush, with an occasional cluster or solo stand of tall pine. Terrain was sometimes rocky and hilly, other times relatively rock-free and flat to gently sloping, yet other times a blend of the two. It spanned nearly six miles between furthest points, and National Forest or Bureau of Land Management lands flanked many of its borders, lending a wilderness feel to the place. The square-mile sections were platted into two giant clumps, separated by a square mile of federal Bureau of Land Management land and county highway A-12, which ran between the second, smaller clump of sections 23 and 13, near Pluto Caves and Sheep Rock, respectively.
As often happened in such country subdivisions, the developer's team had conjured up whimsical road names to try tickling the fancy of their target market: private vacation land seekers, impulsive casual land investors, and those seeking possible rural homebuilding sites. Evocative names like White Cloud Road, Zane Gray Drive and Happy Lane were plentiful. Also rich sounding names like Silver Lode Road, Golden, Lost Mine and Bonanza. One was perhaps meant to evoke the classic movie line: Rosebud. Another was a shameless pun: Frankie Lane. A few were named after saints, like St. George Drive and St. Mary Road, lending the development an air of being perhaps some unlikely Catholic summer retreat. Collins Drive and McLarty Road were named after the developer and his main man; a third, Ragan Drive, was named after the local realtor who joined forces with them to move the sea of parcels. For all anyone knew, some roads, like Mildred Drive or Dottie Lane, were named after one's wife, sweetheart or perhaps a namer's mad crush from third grade.
Born amid controversy,
place became instant problem child
The development officially gave birth on November 3, 1965*, brainstorm of developer George Collins's southern-California-based outfit, Pacific Shores Realty. It was on land he'd purchased from a member of the pioneer descendant Martin family (likely a great-great-grandson or so), which had laid claim to much of the wider region for ages. Longtime locals had long grazed livestock on the land, seasonally making grazing-rotation cattle drives right down the middle of the then uber-sleepy two lane highway. Old cow patties still littered parcels over a decade after the Vista's start.
The area had also been deemed among the best hunting grounds in the entire 6,278 square-mile county (California's fifth largest by area) for over a century. And before white settlers came, Indigenous peoples had seasonally hunted through the mostly waterless area; I found a complete obsidian arrowhead on my parcel the very first week. More recently, the region was picked clean of most of its tall pine by lumber baron Abner Weed around the turn of the last century; there were a few large stumps on my lot still leisurely biodegrading away some eighty years later.
The story goes that when Jess Martin sold the sprawling acreage to developer Collins, he hadn't first gotten permission from his other family members. Big mistake. Too late to stop the sale, they were reportedly livid over the commercial nonsense soon set in motion on their now-lost ancestral holding. The region's other longtime residents, sharing their outrage at the pending rude disruption to their bucolic way of living, no doubt took their fury to the halls of local government. This eruption of unbridled anger happened years before any handful of lot owners ever tried to grow the primitive realm into a de facto rural retirement village but then soon found themselves engaged in a take-no-prisoners war with code-ignoring land buyers daring to move in on the cheap...into what the former by then considered their domain.
The controversial land sale would set the stage for all future troubles to unfold. It laid a faulty foundation for the dizzying world of gnarly contention destined to practically define the place in the eyes of the public.
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* According to the date formal paperwork was filed and time-stamped in the Siskiyou county courthouse. This date was used rather than an earlier, yet to be filed, date of incorporation, August 18, 1965.
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Greenlighted by the
county board of supervisors
to their eternal regret
Locals grumbled how their longtime backwoods hunting, camping and grazing land was being closed off just so a bunch of rich big-city folk could lollygag about in their shiny Airstreams a few weeks a year.
The county's then-four member board of supervisors must've sympathized with the aggrieved Martin family members and infuriated locals; maybe they were initially skeptical of ever approving it. But due to Collins's persistence and earnest assurances, and his proven track record of successfully launching subdivisions elsewhere -- plus the board being super budget-minded for living in California's third-poorest county -- they were either won over or couldn't think of a valid reason not to approve it. They were no doubt aware of the fresh revenue stream the 1,641 individually owned and taxed lots would bring in, especially if developed.
Concerns were raised over the possible lack of dependable water and the lots often being rocky, volcanic land that would be hard-pressed to accommodate conventional septic systems, should owners ever want to build. Indeed, the board insisted his team first dig several test wells to show the land did have sufficient water. They must've finally decided it at least maybe appeared to have enough -- and trusted that any future, would-be home builders, in exercising due diligence, would realize the cost of bringing in deep wells (and electricity) might be prohibitive and iffy -- and hoped common sense would prevail.
So while the board finally approved the development in a three-to-one vote, once other requested specifications like enlarging the turnaround diameter of the cul-de-sacs had been addressed, the one dissenting supervisor, a Mr. Jackson, appeared to remain skeptical. The test well Collins drilled at the highest elevation to show that there was water everywhere if you went deep enough had only drawn five gallons a minute (minimal amount to be deemed practical). He'd maybe thought that wasn't enough to assure the place could provide adequate and affordable water for any vacationers opting to sink wells on parcels to avoid having to haul the precious and heavy liquid in. Or for possible would-be home builders for which having a dependable water supply would be required before becoming eligible for a build permit.
His skepticism was proved justified. He must've had to refrain from saying "I told you so" to fellow board members -- that is, assuming his lone dissenting vote wasn't simply a calculated sop to appease the infuriated citizenry. While many future residents hit decent water between 200 to 300 feet in lower sections, the required drilling depths in higher ones could run to 700 feet or more. And even then, some wells, regardless of depth, were plagued with iron content turning white laundry pink -- or worse, arsenic requiring expensive and laborious filtering systems to render the water safe for drinking.*
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*A retired couple on Gilman Road, the Kehners, lived a mile from the writer. They drilled a super-deep well with water having arsenic levels within the then-acceptable health department limit when properly treated with rock salt filtration, as they did. Not many years later they both died not far apart. While the writer never learned if arsenic poisoning was determined a contributing or lead factor in their deaths, not long after the county health department drastically reduced future wells' acceptable arsenic levels.
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Their faith in lot buyers to be law-abiding and do the right thing was about to be sorely tested. Over time there would evolve among county officials markedly shifting attitudes towards the soon-beleaguered realm: initial thoughtful, cautious concern first gave way to frustration, then grew to exasperation. As things really started getting out of hand and newcomers openly ignored health and building codes, sentiment turned to open hostility. Finally, as the county realized it had a perpetual problem child on its hands, it settled back into a rueful, oh-hell-what-can-you-do-about-the damn-place? dismissiveness and a sometimes stony, hard-bitten contempt; they were mad at the place and its quarrelsome owners and mad at themselves for being fool enough to have ever approved it.
Although it was later events that would really aggravate authorities, the downward spiral in sentiment beyond that of grumbling locals was undoubtedly first triggered by the lack of any easier water. It would lead, directly or indirectly, to almost all future problems. And the consequential ignoring of residential living standards, which of course included providing an adequate water supply, is what amped the local government's scorn and vexation over the misbegotten place through the roof. Ill regard for the place's eventual, seemingly hopeless, dysfunctionality, replete with chronically infighting residents, spread to every county department down to dogcatcher (with the obvious exception of tax collector).
Electrifying turn of events
Between the original owners' and locals' bitter feelings over their lost stomping grounds, the scarce water, distant power, and often rocky ground, all making code compliance extra challenging and costly, an already fraught situation was well on its way to snowballing even further out of control.
The handful of ambitious and adventurous lot owners -- after brainstorming the idea of settling and retiring as an urbane, ostensibly congenial group of shared-vacation buddies, each on their respective parcels -- would prove to be a scrupulously law-abiding lot. Each first drilled an approved well, paid into a volunteer-assessment power fund to get electrical lines extended, and installed a regulation septic system, thereby having supplied all their own needed infrastructure -- all before then applying for a home-building permit. That was issued only after submitting detailed construction plans, paying a fee, and agreeing to build "in a timely manner." Their generation -- having weathered World War II with its monumental civilian cooperation required to support the high-stakes effort to preserve democracy on the planet -- was used to toeing the line without question when it came to established authority.
Though maybe a few were hands-on owner-builders who lived onsite during construction, most would hire contractors and live elsewhere until their houses were completed and signed off by the county's building department for legal occupancy.
At first glance, it must've appeared that the place was on its way to becoming a respectable if ultra-sparsely settled rural community. Telephone lines were extended along with the few scattered power lines. Flowers were planted at entrances. But the change was coming at the price of disrupting the popular first-generation lot use as secluded retreats, for which purpose many had bought the lots. Such owners had zero interest in ever building fences, let alone homes; the place was too isolated, water-challenged, non-electrified, and tall-tree bereft to even consider. They'd hoped things would stay primitive so they could continue enjoying simple camping ventures and easily sell their lots if and when they wanted to. They wanted things to remain affordable: no special assessments to try "improving" things.
In their book the place already had all it needed: simple road access. Though the lots were indeed technically zoned for single-family residential occupancy, the land had been just so perfect for enjoying rustic getaways and retreats that it was hard imagining it being anything else; you didn't mess with success, trying to turn a place into something it wasn't well suited for. Especially when nowhere near enough lot owners appeared willing to get on board with the commitment and extraordinary expense required to make a successful transition from collective primitive campground into standard residential community. One with all the bells and whistles city dwellers took for granted and were so unabashedly hooked on: centralized water, electricity on tap and efficient waste disposal...not to mention paved roads.
Not another Lake Shastina
Consequently, hundreds of lot owners didn't support what they might've well viewed as a capricious and ill-advised changing of horses in the middle of the creek. The prospect of losing the pristine charm of their sweet-spot hideaways staring them in the face, they naturally refused to chip into the voluntary assessment power and light fund that Collins had rallied for. Camping out in view of someone's large living room window wouldn't have proven too enticing a prospect. Though the ambitious campaign to bring power to every parcel therefore failed for this and other reasons soon brought out, the thousand-plus individual contributions that were made had financed bringing in power to the few dozen Johnny-on-the-spot retiring couples who were keenly intent on establishing new, super-secluded homes for themselves.
Flush with cash from having sold pricey city homes and champing at the bit to move onto the land they'd fallen in love with, they had been psyched to move fast and simplify their lives, forsaking big city living and creating their own little rural retirement paradise. They'd envisioned luxuriating happily ever after amid the splendor of year-round woodland solitude and their own breezily urbane, transplanted So-Cal bonhomie. One that, to all appearances, was open to all comers willing to get on the same page. (Others need not apply.)
Due to the costly process of extending power to the remote lots, the earlycomers quickly exhausted the fund so many had chipped into, expecting it to be there for them when they were ready to build or for those parties they'd hoped to sell their lots to, garnering a better price and faster sale. It's unclear whether or not it was planned as only the first round of contributions, for greater cash infusions surely would've been needed to electrify the entire place. That is, unless the power company had maybe tenuously agreed to absorb some or all of the remaining costs provided everyone got on board and committed to building out the place; it would have been a no-brainier indication that there was a significant number of new, energy-thirsty customers itching to settle, as was currently happening in just-down-the-hill Lake Shastina.*
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* Formerly known by the slightly less euphonious moniker of Dwinnell Reservoir, Lake Shastina created by damming up converging creeks in 1927, along with building a long cross-country canal, to aid regional farmers.
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Hoping to goose parcel values
Significantly, beyond the handful of early house builders and mobile home installers and those considering building in the future -- plus the lot holders who'd hoped to keep the place primitive for retreat use -- were others, almost certainly the overwhelming majority. While they seemed keen on the notion of seguing the giant checkerboard of infrastructure-bereft lots into an actual, by-golly community, or at least some upscale-rural backwoods resort, it wasn't for themselves (perish the thought). No, they were detached investors, hoping to goose market values. With electricity available, lots were more likely to move faster and at a juicier profit.
Regardless of what some owners thought about the seemingly abrupt shift in land use and the embryonic rural community soon afoot, the tiny handful of owners of a certain age -- having the means and resolve to move fast and build up their own de facto rural retirement village, new homes sometimes companionably clustered, other times a quarter mile or more apart -- had gone for it lock, stock and barrel.
Inevitably, tempers flared once they quickly drained the power fund -- and the power company withdrew its tentative commitment. It had realized, much to its dismay, that there wasn't any huge drove of future power customers eager to settle on the remote lands and get hooked up to their mainline supply of go juice; there was only a thin scattering.
Power grab and possible skyrocketing line-extension cost
A giant chasm thus emerged early on among the lot owners -- along with a loss of confidence in the developer who'd zealously pushed the fund, confident he could get everyone on board and so perhaps wrangle a deal with the power company to subsidize further line extension costs. Or thought that -- in a dime, in a dollar -- owners would agree to further voluntary (maybe even mandatory) assessments down the road in order to keep the fund solvent.
But something more might've been happening. It's possible (maybe even probable) that the era's electrical providers as a whole became wary of investing so much money into new rural developments, with their relatively small (and delayed) profit return, just to accommodate the sudden advent of back-to-the-landers, many of whom (certainly not all) wanted power lines strung to their remote manors. Especially on realizing, in the Vista's case, with Pacific Power its provider, that the often seriously rocky ground made for difficult pole setting.
Possibly that corporation, after the first wave of settlers had moved in, decided to jack the extension per-foot costs to discourage such isolated extensions unless one was willing to pay dearly in order to protect its short-term bottom line.
A friend who lived in upper New York backwoods around the same time told the writer how, right after he got his lines extended, his local power supplier upped their line-extension price from fifty cents a foot to five dollars a foot -- a staggering ten-fold increase. If this was a national trend and the case here as well, it would've created an especially discouraging double whammy for any would-be Vista settler: The fund was drained and the power company now demanded new, sky-high extension fees that shocked senseless any would-be home or cabin builder or mobile home installer who had depended on an affordable line extension rate.
In any event, it turned out that well over a thousand property owners effectively subsidized the electrical hookup costs of a few dozen. It struck many as grossly unfair, somehow. Tempers surely must've erupted to match that of the long ago spewing lava of the place's namesake dormant volcano. Some might've jumped to the hasty and cynical conclusion that the developer intentionally misrepresented the financial realities involved to electrify the place just to aid the homesteading ambitions of a few he'd gotten cozy with. Or had otherwise fudged the facts, promising something he couldn't deliver. Or, perhaps the most cynical view of all, that he had no idea what he was doing.
Lookin' for a home in the country...
when worlds collide
Into this growing hornets' nest of snafus, misgivings, and sundry disconnects already plaguing the development, handicapping the lots' potential market values, then entered a wildly different breed of owner. One destined to put the proverbial cherry on top: instant homesteaders; young, serious back-to-the-landers who often bore rebellious spirits and little cash. (Or, in the case of some, having resources but wanting to embrace simple living and not waste them by being made to overbuild and thus defeat the purpose.)
Again, the historic mid to late 1960s through early 1970s period was, among other things. witnessing a phenomenal back-to-the-land movement. Initially sparked by the quickly emerging counterculture burned out on an increasingly industrialized and desensitized world and wanting to get back to nature, almost instantaneously there emerged a growing diaspora of people keen on fleeing Babylon (as some put it), a number that soon cut across class lines. The first excited residents, themselves burned out on city living, had gotten swept up in it. If untouched nature was so nice to visit, why not just live in it full time and be done with it? But, alas, in the Vista's case it was a luxurious notion that only the comfortably situated could afford to pursue if conforming to the costly and then-strictly enforced county health and building codes. They were made costlier yet for the lack of easier water, electrical extensions, and individually created sewage systems needed to meet what the powers-that-be deemed the minimum living-shelter standard to gain their seal of approval.
As anyone who lived through those purple-haze daze remembers (if not overdoing psychedelics), it was a time of astonishingly polarized social and cultural upheaval and fitfully expanding mass consciousness. With a stream of young, oftentimes financially insecure, freedom-minded, radical, in-your-face non-conformist dreamers making their escape from crowded cities to embrace simple living, it was only a matter of time before they too discovered the generous-sized, secluded lots with their inspiring namesake views and irresistably affordable prices that had lured the older set of retiring homesteaders.
Game changer
Some, and eventually most, of the young-ish newcomers would appear intent on ignoring any and all of the deemed-unreasonable codes, regulations and restrictions that dedicated law makers and bureaucratic forces had so diligently devised. Ones that insisted a person first drill what might prove a 700-foot well and pay an extortionate price to extend power lines and build a home to steep code requirements before ostensibly even being allowed to camp on their own parcel for more than thirty days a year. Or build anything other than a fence without first applying and paying for a permit after having submitted detailed plans for approval.
Screw that. They'd figure what one did on their own remote parcel out in the middle of nowhere was their business.
As the first wave of relatively affluent residents hadn't seemed to overly mind meeting the exhaustive, super-exacting building standards required to become legal residents -- it was simply the way things were done -- the local bureaucracy must have gotten used to the public dutifully complying with the full letter of the law, and they strove to keep a tight handle on code enforcement going forward. Maybe, too, they were coming under pressure from the state with its new, far more encompassing requirements to okay new subdivision developments. And possibly some less than solid-citizen type of lot buyers had already started dropping anchor by then, openly or furtively living in unconnected trailers and motorhomes, and the county felt a need to get tough with such ne'er-do-wells, outrageously bent on so blatantly disregarding their chiseled-in-stone regulations.
Oh, the camper and the resident should be friends...
One story circulated about how a respectable lot-owning couple early on tried following the rules but were refused a permit. They'd simply wanted to pour a simple cement slab for their brief annual RV vacation visits but were told no way; they'd have to first put in a well and septic system and hook up to power before they could ever pour that slab. Sorry, it doesn't matter if you only visit one month a year; the code's the code.
One suspects that the first wave of dwellers, having themselves gone through the mill, were more than a tad apprehensive that among the well over a thousand individual lot owners were bound to be some who'd try to end-run the system, refusing to play by the rules and render unto Caesar. Soon enough their suspicions were confirmed and they put pressure on the health and building department, immediately reporting and expecting quick action on every single infraction spotted. This, in order to discourage perhaps even 'respectable' vacationers as that couple, since they were now effectively intruding on the incipient residential scene scrambling to coalesce and stabilize. Legal dwellers expected -- demanded -- local authorities to enforce the same letter of the law with which they'd complied at great expense, time and effort, dammit. Fair's fair.
It might be said their collective attitude towards potential new lot-owner residents was something along the line of "If you've got the bucks to conform to code, howdy, neighbor and welcome; if not, don't you even think about it, buster."
However it all came down exactly, attempts at draconian enforcement of the codes on how to live on -- apparently, even just visit -- your own property out in the middle of nowhere had a predictable way of inspiring various people to view them as unreasonable and deserving of being ignored.
As the Lebanese-American poet and mystic Kahlil Gibran put it so well in The Prophet, "You delight in laying down laws, yet you delight more in breaking them."
When the flock of happy-go-lucky, rebellious back-to-the-landers, many of decidedly modest means, entered the scene stage left, intent on planting themselves on their newly bought parcels before the signature on the sales contract dried, that's when all hell really broke loose in the Vista.
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The Vista Thru Time
1965-2015
[Part 2]
Ephemeral community goes berserk
First there was the hostility of locals and landholding family members over the sale itself, before it was even developed, then the electrification brouhaha. Now came an eruption from within over an emerging plague of non-compliant-minded miscreants who were intent on settling into what they, perhaps understandably, given their huge investments, were territorially thinking of as being "their" place. The place's already testy vibe was suddenly shifting into overdrive. Dutifully rule-obeying residents, angst-ridden over how their new-born, respectable Shangri-la faced mortal danger as more "damn hippies" moved in, were unhinged. A snowball of contention grew to such monstrous proportions, it seemed as though perhaps some demonic force had taken over the place.
As a steady stream of back-to-the-landers continued invading their once respectable scene on the cheap throughout the 1970s and 1980s, it appeared a massive buildup of contentious vibes, baked into the Vista from its inception, was destined to bedevil the would-be peaceful realm for ages.
Its forlorn legacy lingers to this day.
In a nutshell: Between (1) an embittered farming/ranching community over time coming to view Vista's inhabitants through distorted fun-house mirrors as some weird invasive mix of imperious big-city exiles and irascible hillbillies; (2) teeth-gnashing, code-conforming residents on the warpath over the emergence of code-ignoring dwellers wrecking the place's respectability and property values; (3) disillusioned absentee parcel holders, most indifferent to the day-to-day realities and ongoing needs of its few residents to gain even a semblance of viable community, feeling stuck with lots they couldn't enjoy themselves or sell without losing their shirts; (4) non-conforming residents, taking heat from the aforementioned frothing-at-the-mouth community pillars and kicking back hard, defying a system they viewed as egregiously oppressive; and (5) put-upon county authorities, over time essentially giving up even trying to enforce the code in a place nobody had seemed to want in the first place...add these together and the place (you surely knew it was coming) never had a snowball's chance in hell.
A querulous spirit came to infect the once-tranquil backwoods. A contentious force field hovered over the seemingly serene high desert woodlands like so many storm clouds forever threatening to rain on the parade of everyone: detached speculators, absentee property holders, code-legal residents,and "outlaw" dwellers alike.
No matter how many residents might dedicate themselves to try turning things around over time and salvage the development's seeming one-time promise, the place would never rise above being a stalled-out, de facto primitive recreational resort and soured-investor, jinxed boondoggle that had failed to coalesce into a community, its potential likely arrested at the very start.
In realtors' stark insider parlance, the place was roadkill. But the plentiful, cheap parcels were a godsend for anyone on a tight budget who wanted to get back to the land.
Down the rabbit hole
The more free-wheeling, non-compliant dwellers soon invading their once upright and reputable domain had jumped down the rabbit hole into their own private worlds that the realm's rarefied energies fostered. Soon enjoying wild Mad Hatter tea parties, all but oblivious to the outside world and its bothersome regulations ignored with pirates' glee, they dismissed as largely impotent the ravings of the Queen of Hearts in the guise of a largely-powerless property owners' board and its minions, who were all screaming "They'll build to code or it's off with their heads!"
Expanding on the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland analogies a bit more: Standing in for the mischievous Cheshire cat was the powerful spirit of rebellion afoot that rejected the dully accepted ways of a prevailing, sometimes overstrict, law-and-order mindset. And the hookah-smoking caterpillar? The stony, spiraling vortex energies of massive Mount Shasta itself; the backwoods development clung to its very foothills, a half hour away from any town's normalizing influence, so much under its surreality-inducing sway that it seemed it demanded to know of anyone venturing into its dreamy, topsy-turvy realm, "Who are you?"
According to a definition of vortex energy offered by Ashalyn, founder of a local outfit, Shasta Vortex Adventures, encouraging the exploration and embrace of the region's metaphysical energies for spiritual growth:
"A vortex is a confluence or coming together of planetary ley lines and guidelines. As these lines meet, they create a spiraling motion which can swirl down into the earth, up into the cosmos, or move in both directions at the same time. This movement increases the vibrational frequency of that area, making it easier to connect with the realms of spirit."
While some new-age thinking went so far as to claim Mount Shasta was no less than, variously, the root or crown chakra of the entire planet, most everyone agreed that it at least emanated some subtle yet almost palpable, powerful and mysterious force. One that affected everyone within its field -- and perhaps not always in a practical way if one's upper chakra circuits were unduly clogged.
In any event, being under the mountain's sway could induce some pretty wild fantasies, if not outright hallucinations. Add to this the Vista being such untamed land and it could erase from mind any bothersome notions of following the fading social order's wearisome, restrictive, sometimes seemingly arbitrary demands.
It doesn't even begin to describe their further to say code-compliant residents were upset when a quasi anarchic scene took off in their midst, by people most definitely not their kind, in almost spontaneous combustion (perhaps not unlike their own arrival). Their fledgling upscale-rustic community, one they'd banked such great hopes on and poured tons of energy and committed great time and money into establishing, was in gravest peril.
As far as their quietly upbeat, buttoned-down, and by-the-book, new rural lifestyle was concerned, they were facing an existential threat.
Endangered wonderland
If they didn't scramble to stem the tide and demand that the county continue rigorously enforcing the codes with which they'd so diligently complied, all would be lost...their nascent sweet-spot retirement hamlet, gone with the wind. So, at the Queen's behest, they summoned the Card Soldiers, in the guise of the county's health and building departments -- sometimes accompanied by a deputy should a situation threaten to be gnarly (and in time, as a matter of course) -- to restore law and order in the now fraught, overwrought wonderland.
Time would of course prove their efforts a losing battle; residential code enforcement was all but abandoned by county authorities after repeated efforts refused to take hold in the long run. And in much later years, a hemorrhaging county budget resulted in eliminating the enforcement post altogether for a critical half decade, sounding the death knell to ever regaining a handle on such matters in the Vista.
Code-compliant residents, stunned by the regional government's seeming increasing inability and or unwillingness to enforce its own blasted statutes -- the ones they'd honored and obeyed and deemed set in concrete -- were left spitting-nails mad, bent into pretzels, undies in a bunch, fit to be tied...pick your metaphor.
In short, they wuz pissed.
Despite what had at first appeared an auspicious start -- first as a de facto popular shared vacation resort land, then as a nascent rural retirement community -- the latter would, alas, only be briefly enjoyed by the few dozen from among the some 1,500 absentee lot owners (allowing for multiple-lot holders) before the place began its inexorable descent into chaos. It seemed predestined to become a hopeless oil-and-water mix of respectable code-approved homes and tumbledown trailers, tents, mobile homes and jerry-built dwellings, all thrown together amid a sea of empty parcels now compromised for recreational use and so increasingly unsellable.
A palpable air of chronic instability, uncertainty and gnarly contention filled the air. The occasional visit to the still mostly uninhabited regions by diehards hoping to avoid heated politics and still enjoy camping on isolated parcels no doubt resulted in a mixed experience.
The place was becoming hopelessly snared between two worlds. Skitzy in purpose, its reason for being was hazy all along: Was it a campground or a residential development? Either way, it seemed to be an unwanted child, bestowed with little or no support from the county or surrounding community...or even from its own, teeth-gnashing "children." Not to mention the myriad disenchanted investors scattered throughout the nation. Newcomers soon found themselves caught up in the deep polarization taking root between the defiant and the law-and-order camps.
Residents, like so many desperate sea voyagers finding themselves adrift in a lifeboat, were left to fume and squabble and bicker and antagonize each other til the cows came home. The Vista, frozen in time and nursing a serious identity crisis, was deprived of ever finding some rightful place in the sun.
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Emboldened by the realm's remoteness
Despite such a crushing load of handicaps, over time there continued to be a steady trickle of buyers, often of unconventional leaning, intent on moving onto the super-secluded, view-inspiring and irresistibly cheap parcels. Beyond long-term investors feeling stuck with holdings in the arrested development, disinterested speculators still hoping to turn a tidy profit, and those yet hoping to simply retreat on their parcels now and then -- beyond these lot buyers was that wild card always to be reckoned with: land-hungry people. People, often financially insecure, burned out on the high cost and hassles of city living and craving country solitude. People attracted to the affordable lots like moths to flame. The equivalent of one month's city rent could cover the down on a generous-sized piece of largely undisturbed land, which they could then live on and call home once scoring some old trailer or mobile, or simply camp out.
Forget nature-starved urban living and all its soulless overpriced ticky-tacks and greedy landlords.
They'd crossed their fingers and hoped to be left alone to live between the cracks of society with its costly living standards that so often made making ends meet next to impossible. While some of modest resources (including the writer) grudgingly bit the bullet and built to code, others, blissfully ignorant of or studiously ignoring the mundane, city-centric regulations trying to be enforced deep in the boonies, held a dismissive, Building code? What building code? You're kidding, right? attitude. One really couldn't blame them. People, if they have their druthers, unless masochists -- even those preoccupied with abodes being first and foremost investments and so willing to meet residential standards, even though they put a crimp in things -- wanted their living scenes to be as simple and carefree as possible.
The succeeding waves of non-compliant dwellers were emboldened by several factors. (1), again, it was historic times; a tectonic shift in human consciousness and radically changing lifestyles was underway; massive numbers wanted to get out of Dodge and back to nature; (2), the place was far off the beaten path, making it feel like its own little kingdom, a charmed outland, feeling safely beyond city-centric, restrictive regulations; (3), the abandoned -- but lingering in spirit -- first-generation, camp-use-only vibe created enough chaotic uncertainty to take ready advantage of; and (4), the increasing lack of successful and sustained residential code enforcement by the county, despite the initial solid core of code-compliant dwellers, once its earliest enforcement forays had been largely fought and won.
Some among the first non-complying builders -- variously labeled code violators, illegal residents and perhaps the unkindest cut of all, squatters (on their own land, mind you) -- moved in with a casual air of "Hey, what's the big deal? We're just building a little shelter on our parcel out in the middle of nowhere; c'mon, you can't be serious." Over time, learning something of the place's drawn-out code conformity battle and also of the increasingly spotty enforcement, various newbies made bold to go on the offensive. They'd pull in sundry derelict travel trailers and mobile homes or build ramshackle shelters on the fly and bear openly defiant, mocking attitude of "Hee, hee, what're you goin' to do about it, huh?" Or, like screaming eagles: "Hey, this was still America last time I checked; this is my land and I'll do what I want on it; back off if you know what's good for you."
A law unto themselves
Over time, non-code shelter construction and utility-unconnected, foundationless mobile homes became more the rule than the exception; unapproved structures sprang up like mushrooms after a drenching rain. While some such shelters were artful, others were bereft of any charm whatsoever except maybe to its inhabitants, proud of their handiwork and resourcefulness in fulfilling the primal urge to fashion a living shelter against the elements. It was almost as though their dwellers had time-warped back to the pioneer era when plains settlers built primitive earth-sheltered soddies and forest settlers threw together rude log cabins. As if, late in the twentieth century, the development had somehow magically became a latter-day frontier blissfully removed from modern times and its spirit-stifling rules and regulations over how one was supposed to live.
Though many such dwellings were never officially "red-tagged" by the county (that is, designated unlawful to inhabit, ominous warning notice posted on the door), they still held a powerful stigma. The disapproving and hostile reactions by code-compliant neighbors over the fact they existed at all could make enjoying staying in them with anything approaching peace of mind a tad problematic for all but the thicker skinned.
In time, certain "unofficial" residents -- feeling light years away from dependable and responsive law enforcement save for more serious matters (even then, a forty-five minute wait time wasn't uncommon) -- essentially deemed themselves a law unto themselves. Feeling the need to act as citizen deputies, as it were, to keep the rabble at bay and the realm law-abiding, old guard residents patrolled the sprawling backwoods roads like bloodhounds, sniffing out any reportable health or building code violations afoot. Some residents, even if themselves compliant, found this rigid obsession more than a bit off-putting -- and at times outright scary. Like some intolerant quasi-fascist regime had surreally cropped up in the middle of would-be tranquil nature.
Turning this prevailing vigilante tendency on its ear, one non-compliant resident, decades later in the late eighties, had just taken serious heat over being suspected of growing pot (he wasn't). It was a deed then very much illegal and vigorously prosecuted, state laws in alignment with federal statutes and penalties that included mandatory prison time up to three years, property confiscation, and fines of up to $10,000.
A Sheriff's helicopter had hovered dangerously (and illegally) close above the giant truck tarp he'd stretched between the trees over his old school bus home to provide some critical summer shade. No doubt having been reported by Vista board members as a troublemaker in their midst, they seemed convinced he was trying to hide a verboten grow. Outraged at the invasion of space and how the air turbulence was tearing his tarp loose, and by no means shy, he openly flipped them off. Naturally, they couldn't let this open affront to authority pass. Other sheriff deputies soon strode onto his land, without a warrant, loaded for bear. They pointed assault weapons at him as if just itching for an excuse to open fire. On the wings of this traumatic incident, he decided to displace some of his festering angst and maybe equal things out a bit by riding about on his motorcycle with a prominently visible sidearm and confronting various residents about things he disapproved of once introducing himself as "the high desert sheriff."
Buy in Haste...
No doubt many impulsive among the land's buyers interested in actually using the land were, at best, no more than vaguely aware of the place's sundry handicaps and liabilities, any number of which turned off your more circumspect land shopper, exercising due diligence. They were giddy being able to grab such a nice-sized piece of unspoiled land in a popular recreational region at such a dirt cheap price. Eureka! It was practically the modern-day equivalent of history's Forty Acres and a Mule government giveaway (if with likewise deemed-marginal land). The parcels proved so affordable, any normally felt need of making a judicious assessment seemed to fly out the window, aided and abetted by the mountain's powerful spell.
Parcels got snapped up like bargain basement steals.
Before the place's sundry disheartening realities at last percolated the grey matter, the would-be, latter-day pioneers spun excited dreams and schemes of how they'd enjoy their new secluded woodlands, so nicely hidden away amid the maze of private country roads, safely beyond modern times' slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Add to these legal residents the more thoughtful and involved investors who, despite the discouraging trends unfolding, stubbornly clung to the idea that the parcels might still make good retreats and were worthy of maybe someday building homes or cabins on, either for themselves or others they'd then sell to. Also, the many parcel flippers, who grabbed the lots imagining how quickly they'd move them up the food chain as the number of code-legal structures increased, making easy money... Add these together and the overall property ownership was hopelessly deadlocked in a tangle of conflicting intentions and forever working at cross purposes. The inevitable result: the Vista was in a perpetual state of chaos and discord.
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Hey, why don't we just move here?
The first-generation settlers had at first themselves seemed no more than adventurous vacationing campers who simply wanted to enjoy Mt. Shasta nature for a spell. But even as they relished being on the land, willing to make generous allowances for the lack of infrastructure -- even welcoming it -- some no doubt were, all along, sussing the place's possibilities for settling.
While the infrastructure lack had presented little or no problem during the first years of sole camp and retreat use -- trailers being self-contained and one otherwise resigned to making like a bear in the woods a while -- the situation was flirting with sure disaster when, years later, after having built their approved residences, various and sundry resource-shy others would roll the dice and start dropping anchor seeking no one's approval but their own.
Consequently, over the decades the Vista had morphed from primitive camping lots to fledgling standard rural community to a mongrel, anything-goes outback. It was a wayward realm the county threw up its hands at in utter exasperation and bewilderment. It almost seemed as though they had allowed some dread Frankenland to be created, threatening the villagers and serving as an ongoing embarrassment and thorn in the side of the county authorities.
Officials despaired over how to stem the apparent anarchy and lawlessness emerging amid the thin scattering of approved homes. Some of them, maybe most, began taking refuge in magical thinking, imagining the whole place simply disappearing. Being such a remote location made this fairly easy: 'out of sight, out of mind.'
The onerous building code & the owner-builder
Unsanctioned shelter building flourished in the Vista from the 1980s on. More and more, buyers eager to settle appeared to lack the funds and or willingness to build anything to code. Especially since one couldn't get a house-building permit before first springing for an approved well and septic system and almost always a power-line extension. Again, freer spirits considered the exacting codes needlessly over-complicated, outrageously intrusive and exorbitantly costly for any rural owner builder to ever even consider trying to comply with. Some no doubt felt they only reflected the cushy living standard of the more affluent strata of society, that they were oppressively being imposed on others of lesser means in order to keep them under their thumb.
One might say it was America's economic caste system; they insisted everyone face the music and dance to their tune...or else.
But hoping to avoid such stringent codes -- and the inflated lifestyles of would-be upward mobiles, many tempted to live beyond their means and soon drowning in debt -- was the very reason so many moved to the Vista in the first place: to get back to basics, to live more simply, in closer harmony with nature, within one's means. Of course, some were doubtlessly only thinking short-term, intending to only stay as long as they could before gaining too much negative attention over their non-copacetic shelters from upset busybody neighbors and the authorities they ratted them to.
The train of thought of more reasonable souls was that it was one thing to have a few commonsense ordinances in place in order to avoid getting unsightly and flimsy owner-built structures that might blow over in the first strong wind, and to ensure critical hygienic standards for the sake of public health and safety. But it was another altogether to demand that one living on their own land out in the middle of nowhere be made to construct a continuous and massive foundation, build a minimum size structure, overbuild by a safety factor of five, install double-glazed windows, super-insulate the roof, fully wire and plumb the entire structure, install a fire sprinkler system...
Somewhere along the line appeared to be an extraordinary disconnect from reasonableness.
During the 1970s a grassroots effort came about led by a group of outraged Mendocino county, California, rural owner-builders after being evicted from their hand-made cracker box palaces -- in the dead of winter, no less -- for code violations.* They encouraged the state legislature to establish less onerous building requirements for anyone building on their own land. It resulted in then-governor Jerry Brown approving a Class K housing bill specifically with such rural owner-builders in mind. But it got so watered down in 1981 by an apparently construction-industry friendly state assembly that it was left to each county to adopt or not.
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* See the classic 1976 book, The Owner Building and the Code: Politics of Building Your Home, by Ken Burns. (Out of print but used copies are around.)
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Only three did; Vista's Siskiyou county wasn't one. Its building department, at home dealing with contractors who knew the drill in their sleep, seemed to be owner-builder hostile. They just didn't want to waste time guiding amateur builders through the myriad steps involved in conforming to the quagmire of regulations and specifications that they were paid to enforce. "If you can't understand it, hire a contractor" was their dismissive attitude. They assumed -- not without reason, given the code's incredibly far-reaching, pricey requirements -- that many owner-builders would only reluctantly conform, that they'd try to 'cheat' the code at every turn. Over a decade after getting my own tiny house green-tagged (despite having indeed cheated on a few minor specs, while exceeding code on others), I ran into Mr. Fiuk, the by-then retired head building inspector, at the local post office. He had come out once, at the start of construction, no doubt to strike fear in me to conform. Perhaps intuiting I hadn't fully toed the line and wanting to take me to task, he furrowed his brow and asked doubtfully, "Did we ever sign you off?" My strategy all along had been to keep calling them up and bugging them with questions on specifications, to the point they'd gotten so exasperated they copped an attitude of "Just build the damn thing and leave us alone."
While such draconian requirements no doubt discouraged many earlier would-be non-compliant builders, in later times the once-iron grip of regulatory bureaucracy's enforcement had slipped, and a rebellious spirit was gaining serious ground. People aspired to build rural shelters on their own land however they fancied, thank you, never thinking to get any friggin' Mother-may-I? permission from a meddling bureaucratic authority and then, adding insult to injury, have to pay for the privilege. Though on a much smaller scale, in some circles playing "Beat the building code" became as popular a cat-and-mouse game as the "What pot laws?" mindset of current times. Bound and determined to live on bought-and-paid-for property and figuring possession was nine-tenths of the law, many Vistans' head space was, again, "Hey, this is my property and I'll do whatever I damn well please on it; go jump in a lake if you don't like it."
...regret at leisure
As the place's long-festering problems became all too clear to parcel owners, an intense love-hate relationship pattern with the land emerged. Especially among those who'd hoped to settle on their lots long-term and enjoy some long sought solitude. It was "Buy in haste, regret at leisure." Over time it became a sad familiar song. Lured by the rural development's affordable, remote parcels with what at first appeared a refreshing absence of any "Thou Shalt" authority, leastwise ones with any teeth, more than a few buyers learned to tune out the posted signs as little more than ineffectual, blustery Barney Fife bluff. But then, any buyer who leaned towards wanting to be at least nominally law abiding realized with sinking heart that the signs sometimes really did mean business. If wanting to make use of the place beyond just camping up to thirty days a year and not risk the rug suddenly getting yanked out, the lots' woeful lack of infrastructure would require shelling out a small fortune to get things squared away.
It was like ten-cent parcels had a hidden million-dollar spoiler attached.
For the same or related reasons, parcels became an albatross around the necks of investors, speculators and would-be vacationers alike. With holdings no longer part of a simple de facto recreational development once homes and power and phone lines started cluttering the once semi-pristine landscape, they couldn't sell them at a profit as either camp vacation lots or building sites. At least not to anyone knowing the score and convention-minded. And that didn't take much sussing to discover. One had only to talk to your typical, walking-wounded, teeth-gnashing resident. Their ears would soon be singed from the aggrieved party who, warming to their task, proceeded to rake the place over the coals with almost demonic intensity.
It was a buyer-remorse pattern fated to be many an owner's relationship with the peculiar development.
But the seductive lure of the affordable backwoods parcels, being under the protective presence of a magical mountain and worlds away from noisy, over-wound city living, kept grabbing flocks of would-be residents and impulsive investors alike. While the latter only thought to flip the obviously undervalued parcels, growing numbers of the former settled in and came to ignore mundane concerns like conforming to the eventually only sporadically enforced codes -- until, out of the blue, it might bite them on the backside and they joined the full-throated chorus of grievously disenchanted.
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Lots practically sold themselves
As mentioned, though the lots were technically zoned for single-family residences, they'd initially been marketed primarily as simple recreational lands. Maybe in time owners would get together and get ambitious enough to grow it into something more, maybe not. Though having no clear residential plans in the beginning likely created inertia for things to remain exactly as they were, the sky was the limit if one had the bucks to conform to code and supply all your own infrastructure needs and liked the idea of living so far off the beaten path among kindred souls.
And, again, probably some who had conformed weren't actually all that community-minded, or would cease to be once things turned gnarly. Some likely didn't give a hoot if the place grew out or not; they had theirs. Maybe they even hoped it wouldn't -- more seclusion for them.
While the bare-bones development was all upfront and legal under existing California laws covering rural subdivisions, developers knew something was in the wind. Soon new legislation would require new starts to agree to supply all the supporting infrastructure before being approved. It was the last chance to make a fast buck with minimal outlay, developing recreational property subdivisions lacking any amenities whatsoever beyond road access and whatever nature might provide gratis.
Developer Collins had maybe sensed he needn't risk investing any more time, money or effort in the project to move the lots than he did. He likely lacked an assurance a standard residential community could grow here. (But if owners decided they wanted to settle the place, hey, they'd just take on what was needed to be done themselves.) If so, he was right. While it appeared enthusiasm over the chance to wing it and spend time amid the solitude of one's own bit of woodlands, serene Mt. Shasta watching over big as life, proved contagious during the time the back-to-the-land movement was ratcheting into high gear, there appeared insufficient interest of more than a handful to actually live here. But then again, maybe it became at least in part a self-fulfilling prophesy.
In any case, with a bit of sizzling ad copy, the lots had practically sold themselves.
After springing for drilling test wells and buying an existing well with an impressive replenishment rate just off Vista land to satisfy the county that there was indeed water, he'd likely been hopeful that every part of the elevation-varied realm might provide enough water, should people want to settle on their parcels -- or even if just visiting and wanting to have their own well. That said, he'd likely downplayed the extreme depth of the water table for bringing in wells in the higher elevations. Instead, he doubtless talked up a happy picture of the unofficial de facto community well that every lot owner was more than welcome to use.
Bottom line: he'd created, at the very least, a simple, collectively owned wilderness retreat realm in a growingly popular vacation region. One with the potential at least to become something more.
For what it was worth, each of the lots, most then having immaculately well-maintained road access, were platted to a fare-thee-well, corner boundaries marked by short, soon-rusted red steel pipes and ribboned lathe sticks with exact, scrawled bearings. Some ninety percent offered frequently staggering views of Mt. Shasta. Who needed anything more? In those giddy times of increasing awareness of life's possibilities, it was a perfect whatever-it-was just the way it was.
But the spiel and cheap prices indeed also attracted many who never had any camping or building interest in mind...almost certainly the overwhelming majority among the some 1,500 initial parcel buyers. They snapped them up as long-term investments or short-term speculations, happy to have gotten in on the ground floor on what appeared to be maybe a sure thing. They imagined others -- not them, thank you -- soon clamoring to enjoy camping on the lots, or building homes and vacation cabins to code, both scenarios working nicely to drive up property values.
Yet others, though primarily speculating, would maybe sample their untamed properties a time or two, curious to discover what it was exactly they'd snapped up sight unseen. No doubt there were those who had never owned land before and were excited to have it but not sure what to do with it. Some the land might've grabbed and they decided to hold onto their lots long-term. They maybe flirted with the idea of building dwellings if and when things progressed enough to enjoy visiting and live in them a while before selling at a tidy profit once the enchantment of Vista living began wearing thin. For so many Americans, restless, rootless and periodically on the move, appeared to view their current shelter primarily as an investment, first and foremost; the notion of ever dropping anchor and cultivating a long-time residency anywhere, at least before reaching retirement age (if even then) seldom seemed considered.
Giant monkey wrench in the works
The writer guesstimates that no more than maybe ten percent of lot owners kept entertaining any thoughts of building that they might've had for any reason once the campaign to electrify the entire place had failed and ignited a major falling out among lot holders. It threw a giant monkey wrench in the works. Some degree of cohesive group vision and a willingness to work together in common cause was needed for the place to serve long-term the mutual benefit of such a diverse group of lot holders. Now it appeared there was little if any vision left to be had, for love or money. The hazy if glorious fantasy of the few who'd gone for the gusto was being rudely awakened by the backlash from the many who bore limited and mundane interests, at increasing odds with their community-building resolve so long as more money was asked of them in the special assessments that they overwhelmingly voted down.
But everything had seemed just so hunky dory in the beginning; psyched new wilderness-land owners saw the place and its bright promise through rose-colored glasses. One was blissfully ignorant of the festering behind-the-scenes storm clouds over the place's very formation. And of the longtime locals' resentment over a bunch of high-and-mighty city folks crowding in and taking over their backwoods and crimping their long-accustomed way of life.* And in the following years, excited new lot owners wouldn't realize how much the county -- once lot owners started building in the often rocky volcanic foothills and struggling with water and in time blowing off code compliance altogether -- regretted ever okaying the dratted place. How they viewed the forlorn development as a lemon vehicle they'd bought against better judgement and were now hopelessly stuck with, forever casting a jaundiced eye towards the festering developmental misfire and its bickering residents with a rueful, what-the-hell-did-we-ever-approve? chagrin.
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*As mentioned elsewhere, even into the early eighties local ranchers seasonally led sporadic cattle drives right down stretches of Vista's A-12 highway frontage, between range-grazing areas. One got the feeling they seemed to enjoy pretending that any vehicle traffic, impatient to get through, wasn't even there, that they'd time-warped back to the pre-auto 1800's Western frontier era. Git along, little doggies.
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Idyllic backwoods camping
With no such distressing undercurrents apparent at first, the earliest nature-hungry city vacationers had felt fancy free to enjoy their idyllic backwoods enclave with the often prevailing lighthearted spirit of the times. One had the convenience and luxury of camping on their very own piece of land for up to thirty days a year rather than pay daily to chance camping at some place with others maybe set up twenty feet away with a passel full of squalling kids.
The majority of original parcel buyers, again, had hailed from the smog-choked Los Angeles region, where the developer was based and launched his marketing campaign from. Others were from the Bay Area and the Central Valley. Purchasers merrily pitched their tents and rolled in their travel trailers and RVs, content to savor the serenity and drink in the clean mountain air.
The terrain was known as high desert woodlands: high, dry and wooded. Though powerful seasonal windstorms often proved treacherous and unnerving -- roaring through like a runaway freight due to the massive mountain displacing and condensing storm air currents in a Venturi effect -- the place, like nearby Lake Shastina and Juniper Valley, otherwise had enviable banana-belt weather. While summers were typically hot and bone dry, plenty of junipers trees and, on a few parcels, scattered tall pine, provided welcoming shade. Some years might see a summer thunderstorm or two to cool things down. Those in the northwest end of the Vista were a short hike away from Lake Shastina's secluded cross-country irrigation canal to take a refreshing dip in. And the mountain’s spectacular northwestern, glacier-clad side did wonders keeping one feeling cooler just by gazing on its chilled splendor.
"Bye 'n' bye" came fast
Significantly, developer Collins casually hinted early on how the place might make a dandy place to retire to "bye 'n' bye." He appeared to be responding to a growing enthusiasm among fellow repeat campers to the very notion. But then, maybe he had it in mind all along -- evidenced by having gotten the lots rezoned for residential use at formation -- and was now deftly orchestrating owners' growing eagerness like a maestro. He'd intimated the idea in the official newsletter periodically sent to property owners and avidly read by the small segment of co-owners who were enjoying vacationing every year at their new wilderness outpost. They responded to the hint, stoked at the vision of growing the place into something more ambitious. Located at the central top of the Golden State with Mount Shasta its regal crown, it proved hard for the nature lovers not to be smitten by the subtly charmed realm -- enough so for some to decide to actually settle on the secluded parcels full-time on retirement (or even before and then split time between two residences).
Since practically next door Lake Shastina was springing up -- initially as a second-home vacation community -- along with several other regional rural subdivisions, bye 'n' bye came fast. It gave the handful of so-minded Vistan landholders the impetus to follow suit, with a twist: build structures not as second homes but, as Collins suggested, as retiring lot-holders' full-on primary residences.
Like Lake Shastina, the Vista usually received far less snowfall than nearby Weed or the City of Mt. Shasta, offering an attractive climate (minus severe windstorms). This was due to the region's phenomenal crazy-quilt of micro-climates, again the mountain's doing. Usually there was just enough powder to enjoy a winter wonderland now and then without getting a sore back or frostbitten hands shoveling snow or putting on chains to get out on the then never-plowed roads. (Long ago the place had tried plowing roads after one of its rare heavy snowfalls; the equipment blade tore up the cinder roadbeds so badly, requiring expensive regrading work, that it proved impractical; thereafter, for decades -- until the heavy February 2025 snowstorm hit, with magnitudes more residents -- everyone was left to their own devices.)
Con su permiso:
dealing with an exacting building code
Of course, it was understood it was up to each would-be resident to spring for drilling an approved well, install a regulation septic system, and get power lines extended -- all before the county would deign to issue a building permit, on submission and approval of exact plans that met exhaustive requirements and paying for it based on the square footage of living space specified. Only then did one have the legal right to live on the land more than thirty days a year. By then you could live in any sort of structure you fancied, as it ostensibly served as an on-site work shelter during construction, be it trailer, shack, or a hole in the ground.
While building was expected to proceed "in a timely manner," many, far from being in any real hurry, could make a remarkably leisurely effort of it. The writer himself stretched out his own home-building period some forty-two months while living in a tiny, mostly underground hobbit home that was, most decidedly, non-code. It tickled me how the building inspector cast such a wary eye at it each time he strode by to check the construction site's progress beyond it; no doubt he suppressed an urge to red-tag it on the spot.
Once a structure was completed and signed off, the post office assigned a legal street address (or technically, released an already existing number that had been long ago assigned by bureaucrats to every recorded parcel in the county), thereby enabling one to receive mail at the blacktop entrances' boxes. Such an address was also ostensibly needed to gain a state driver's license, register to vote, and qualify for FedEx and UPS home delivery.
As one might suspect, the extensive health and building codes included endlessly detailed particulars about everything: foundation; precise framing method; itemization down to the grade and variety of lumber and size, type and spacing and specific kind and size of fasteners; thorough electrification; insulation specs; complete kitchen facilities; indoor plumbing; minimum water pressure... Any unconventional design, like a geodome, earthship, cob house or earth-sheltered residence, required hiring a qualified engineer to certify the submitted plan would prove structurally sound and then had to otherwise meet all general specs. As mentioned, most early Vista owner-builders hired contractors to do most or all the construction and didn't move onto their properties until the building was completed and given official blessing by being signed off after final inspection and 'green-tagged' for legal occupancy.
Building codes were first aimed only at cities
Although the Uniform Building Code had been around in the U.S. since 1915, enforcement was no doubt relaxed to nonexistent for ages in more rural areas. Primary focus first concentrated on crowded cities, with their close-packed structures built by detached contractors who'd never live in their creations and who could be tempted to take shortcuts on building integrity that might result in shoddy construction and sometimes tragedy for structures' eventual inhabitants. As the founder of the UBC, Rudolf Miller, himself stated early on, he never envisioned the new regulations being applied to rural owner-builders: “…[W]hen buildings are comparatively small, are far apart, and their use is limited to the owners and builders of them, so that, in case of failure of any kind that are not a source of danger to others, no necessity for building restriction would exist (italics added)." His commonsense view was obviously abandoned as living densities increased and government’s bureaucratic, power-hungry, freedom-crimping regulatory powers grew exponentially along with the increased complexities of living in general.
For a long time country property owners could build cabins and cottages to suit themselves, at their leisure, maybe even play it by ear, an overall design perhaps emerging only half-way through, if at all. After all, it was their land; they could build whatever they blame-well pleased on it. But with bureaucratic regulations' tendency to be adopted by ever-greater numbers over time (some might say spreading like a cancer), until at last universalized, government authorities began insisting that the same exhaustive guidelines demanded to be adhered to in the teeming cities by indifferent contractors churning out cookie-cutter abodes for others to inhabit be followed by owner-builders deep in the boonies on their own land for what would be their own private home.
Of course, if the occupant later sold the place to another, that's when things could get complicated. This was no doubt the rationalization behind universalizing building codes: to assure that a minimum level of comfort, hygiene and safety standards existed in a living structure no matter where it was or who owned it at the moment. And, more importantly, to assure the banks that floated the loans for home construction on properties and or purchasing the properties had a sell-able commodity to get their money back if the borrower defaulted.
It was having such perceived-as-oppressive ordinances in place in the Vista (and no fine-empowered board of directors to keep a handle on things for the ostensible good of the community) that in time caused a growing erosion of respect for certain areas of the rule of law by its more nonconformist -- sometimes, simply desperate and cash-strapped -- inhabitants of the charm-rich, water-poor land.
Priced to move
At its launch, Vista parcels were indeed priced to move. The writer remembers reading in the Vistascope newsletter archives how they went for between $750. and $975.* Prices varied according to parcel size, location, terrain features and vistas (a few dozen parcels had no view, or only a partial view of Mt. Shasta). The developer enjoyed a relatively low overhead and wasn't out to get rich off the project; he was already successful from past urban development ventures and could afford to be generous. And he appeared to hold a genuine affection for the land, actually joining in with others camping on the parcels the first few summers. He wanted the lot sales to feel like the feel-good bargains they were, or seemed to be, such as they were and whatever they were.
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*In 1968 dollars. Adjusting for inflation, that'd be nearly ten times more in 2025 dollars, or about $9,000, still relatively cheap for such a good chunk of secluded land. The price that undeveloped lots fell to in 2022 when the market dropped out -- $10,000 -- made the market value pretty much the same, once adjusting for inflation, as when the place first launched 57 years earlier. In other words, the lots had zero appreciation in market value after all that time.
_________________
There'd been no steep infrastructure costs beyond putting in and maintaining the sixty-six miles of red cinder roads (many of the main arteries were traced over preexisting logging, livestock-tending and hunting/camping/partying roads); surveying and marking off parcel boundaries; erecting entrance and section corner signs; and planting first-generation, short, four-by-four-inch wooden road sign posts painted yellow, with stenciled black lettering, many soon camouflaged by fast-growing sagebrush always threatening to reclaim the land.
All sorts of first-generation buyers had purchased the lots for all sorts of reasons. But again, countless grabbed them out of pure speculation: "Hey, they're not making any more land." Many no doubt never even set foot on them, let alone camped on them. Though a tiny minority were indeed psyched at the prospect of having their own private campgrounds and entertained thoughts of maybe someday building a home or cabin, arguably the overwhelming majority were simply betting on the place and the actions of others...hopefully a good number of others. They anticipated making out like bandits once the place grew in popularity, maybe becoming something of a giant, KOA-style camp village, loaded with amenities and services and attracting a flood of campers tickled to have their own recreational properties nestled amid the vacation lands of Mount Shasta. Maybe they'd even launch time-shares for the more improved, secluded lots for the turn-key camping later to be dubbed glamping.
That or, as instead happened, the place segued into a thinly inhabited, briefly standard community. One that might've actually succeeded and thrived, indeed driving up parcel prices over time, had every future would-be resident taken responsibility for meeting individual infrastructure needs and built to code, as had almost everyone among the first wave of transplants (and as is, of course, always the case in your more populated areas with any new development).
Obviously they didn't. And so fortune passed the place by. Pouring heavy investment into such primitive, cheap land could feel counter-intuitive. Something maybe considered only by certain people reaching retirement age, flush with cash from selling big-city homes and bewitched by the wooded high-desert lands they'd discovered and shared during euphoric times, and so set out to make their year-round Shangri-la. And those with the willingness (and then far-stricter eligibility) to take on major debt and, unless a contractor or hiring one, having the disposition, fortitude and determination needed to deal with the time-consuming, niggling, hoop-jumping, monumentally exasperating process of conforming to the code requirements demanded of an owner-builder working under the watchful eyes of county building inspectors.
Understandably, their vision didn't elicit any ringing endorsements from the later, considerably less solvent parcel buyers -- many of whom would move onto their new lots in a twinkling (hey, why else buy them?). They had maybe only enough to cover the modest down and score some old trailer or throw up a makeshift shelter on the fly from scrap materials or a small lumberyard splurge and call it okie dokie.
Place's primitive, camping-only origin lingered on
It really seemed cheap land and cheap shelters could go together. It certainly proved true in the Vista's case, in any event. Since the lots had been enjoyed originally as de facto primitive camp parcels -- and then were often later handicapped by difficult water and rocky terrain and distant power lines, discouraging standard development -- time seemed to prove it impossible to ever fully erase the place's primitive recreational-use-only beginnings; it seemed to be permanently baked into every parcel left officially undeveloped -- which was an overwhelming ninety-six percent, or 1,575, of them.
Earliest investors and speculators likely hadn't considered the possibility of such a wrinkle cropping up. How an epidemic of non-compliant structures -- along with at times questionable land use -- would drastically and almost overnight erode their holdings' sellability and desirability as a place to either camp or build at, at least for any conventional-minded individual. Between hearing about the dozen or two full-on, code-legal homes springing up and developer Collins talking up a rosy picture over the place's bright future, they naturally assumed everyone would build to code.
Significantly, many speculators, on hearing the momentous plans of what turned out to be only a tiny number of lot holders, were almost certainly misled into imagining there had been far more property holders all gung-ho on building up a standard rural community than actually ever existed. No doubt they'd started salivating like Pavlovian dogs, anticipating the place following Lake Shastina's lead and building out in a giddy, mad scramble, lots commanding ever-greater sale prices.
Congratulating themselves for having gotten in on the ground floor of what promised to be a easy slam-dunk moneymaker given time, parcel investors just sat back and waited for things to take their merry course. Meanwhile, some would eventually join in and likewise built on their lots, thinking to live in the structures a while before selling and thus making even greater profits, or become likewise enamored by the land and, resonating with the retired dwellers' bonhomie, decide to stay. But most, having little or no interest in the day-to-day realities of the place's eventual few, widely scattered residents -- or the serious commitment needed by enough lot owners to reach a critical tipping point to transform the place into a functionally effective community -- couldn't be bothered to even see the dots, let alone ever connect them. Largely clueless, they just twiddled their thumbs, biding their time, waiting for the parcel values to take off like so many race cars in the Indy 500.
Time machine boom
They'd only have to wait a half-century.
In 2015, parcel prices began an astonishingly delayed, dizzying flight to the moon.
Long depressed values of unimproved lots suddenly soared, from going begging at $5,000 that year to commanding prices over $150,000 with bidding wars by 2021. This was, of course, the result of a national red-hot realty market coinciding with the place's discovery by a flood of audacious cannabis growers who anticipated California imminent legalization of recreational pot and what would prove to be -- perhaps predictably, given the modern-day gold rush of scofflaw entrepreneurs flooding the state -- largely unenforceable regulations. Especially in a relatively poor rural county like Siskiyou. In Vista's case, it turned out to be overwhelmingly Asian-American Hmong buyers who would snap up the long-fallow parcels by the hundred, along with the majority of existing homes, as owners lost heart (but were quite gratified with the sale price) over the realm's radical transformation into what became a growers' Shangri-la.
The new California cannabis statutes would decriminalize unsanctioned commercial grows to a civil misdemeanor -- the only western state to do so. This was the reason (beyond the state being fabled for growing fabulous weed), for attracting so many, er, informal commercial pot growers. The new laws specified leaving it up to each county whether or not to allow regulated commercial grows in its unincorporated areas (that is, beyond city limits). Conservative Siskiyou County, Reefer Madness mindset prevailing, respectfully declined. But then had no choice but to suffer towns like Weed and Mt. Shasta voting to allow pot dispensaries, as was their right, and having the option to approve regulated commercial grows.
Therefore, from 2015 out Vista lots sold like crazy for reasons totally unrelated to infrastructure build-up, still almost nil; any new, formal development plans, still nonexistent; or, for more than a few, being a place to want to settle at long-term, at least not after a widely shared fantasy vision -- complements of that grand fantasy inducer, Mount Shasta -- of building a thriving, proscribed-grow-based community met with the chilly winds of reality.
The startling phenomenon would only prove to be in keeping with Mt. Shasta Vista's perpetual boom-bust nature. One that -- due to factors well beyond the scope of this writing (specifically, 2021's water truck ban, the Lava Fire, and the controversial fatal shooting by authorities) -- caused unimproved lot prices to plummet in 2022, when there'd be few takers at $10,000. ("Price reduced $80,000.")
The place's extreme boom-bust cycle might be likened to a bone dry desert that experienced a brief flash flood every decade or two. A deluge of land-hungry would-be country squires, gambling underground pot entrepreneurs, and/or cagey realty speculators periodically rained down on the region, driving up the depressed prices of the problematic parcels -- or tried to -- through the roof. Then, as things didn't pan out, market values fell back to their default, bone-dry level, softer than sponge cake.
The more philosophically inclined might've concluded that it was simply a strange and wild volcanic land that refused to be tamed and too difficult and remote to make a happy home in.
Land, ho!
According to an archived copy of the Vistascope newsletter sent out to lot holders after the place's late sixties' start, every single lot was snapped up in eighteen months.
This fact belies a much later assumption that the developer had somehow gotten stuck with parcels nobody wanted. People wanted them then all right -- or thought they did, at first; the lots had sold like crazy. It was only later that hundreds of absentee owners and those they'd sell the lots to, once realizing the hapless development had gone seriously cattywampus, couldn't get rid of them fast enough. But they didn't want to sell at a loss. So, the odd if beguiling lots, initially charming to anyone valuing rustic seclusion, sweeping views, and affordable prices, had substantial deal breakers attached.
And so in time they became a drug on the market.
Despite being offered for a song compared to similar regional properties, over the decades they'd often find few takers once their bizarre pedigree -- a jinxed development that had obviously flown off the rails, rife with angry-native social climate, glaring absence of infrastructure, and prohibitive cost to gain code compliance -- became fairly common knowledge to anyone doing even the least bit of sussing.
But at the Vista's inception such major stumbling blocks had yet to emerge (beyond the obvious lack of infrastructure). With the back-to-nature movement in full sway, the tiny minority of older, relatively well-heeled parcel buyers -- stoked at the prospect of retiring to their own bit of secluded, unspoiled nature -- in becoming its first residents saw in the far-flung primitive development the chance to make it their own boonies paradise, to mold and control as they saw fit.
And they hadn't been alone in their feel-good enthusiasm and optimism over the place's prospects.
Excited to have discovered such an affordable wonderland to vacation at, maybe someday move to -- at least a sure-fire investment -- everyone and their uncle was jumping down the rabbit hole.
The Vista Thru Time
1965-2015
[Part 3]
Mt. Shasta Vista was...well, different
In some ways, the Vista, with its 1,641 two-to-three acre lots, was a breed apart from the other regional subdivisions that were emerging about the same time.
And there were new rural subdivisions popping up all over the wider region. They included nearby Lake Shastina, its 3,200 lots averaging .2 - .3 acres each (one-tenth the size of Vista lots), started in 1968; McCloud area’s Shasta Forest, 791 lots of 2-1/2 to 5 acres each, launched in 1966; practically next door's Juniper Valley subdivision, some 240 lots of varied 10, 20 and 40 acres each (four to 16 time larger than Vista's), exact founding date unknown; Hornbrook region’s Klamath River Country Estates (KRCE), with its 2,050 lots of one to 2.6 acres each, begun in 1967; and Hammond Ranch, launched in 1969, some 430 lots of .35 to .55 acres each.
One big difference -- apart from the iffy water situation -- was that it happened to be the very first.
On forming in late 1965 a year or more before the rest, there was an as yet unproven market for rural developments of such sprawling scale in the region. Developer Collins maybe felt the lots had to be priced cheap to attract buyers and get the ball rolling. Being the first developer, he perhaps thought it too risky to invest in any infrastructure beyond basic road access. Maybe the place would be deemed too far from town to ever attract people who'd want to actually live here, and so might only prove successful as a seasonal primitive vacation land; there was no telling. So he played it safe, feeling no pull to hammer out any ambitious master plan. He was content to launch a simple, bare bones, de facto recreational development, as state law still allowed for a few more years -- and then see what happened.
He displayed a perhaps cagey, nebulous, tomorrow-never-knows air over its potential to someday become something more -- something far more.
Hedging bets
Even though he must've been aware of the back to the back-to-the-land movement then emerging, perhaps keenly so, sensing an almost-certain new land market opening, he also knew most potential buyers might resist wanting to build homes so far from town and have to drill such deep wells and pay dearly to have power lines extended. Moreover, he knew how up in arms the farming//ranching locals were over his cockamamie commercial scheme. So much so, he'd perhaps opted to go slow, as if giving them time to adjust, marketing the lots primarily for seasonal recreational use. Just visiting, folks, no worries. (Let the buyers deal with the locale's angry hornet's nest themselves if they're brave enough to try actually inhabiting their long-time backwoods stomping grounds -- not me, thank you).
In any event, the wording of the Vista's ruling documents (CC&Rs, or Covenants, Conditions & Restrictions), was your basic boilerplate. Once the place's first few parcel holders dropped anchor and began rendering the original legal framework inadequate, it could spell almost certain disaster, if not making extensive revisions. Such a re-imagined plan was deemed crucial by some if the place was ever to provide a solid avenue for building out with some rhyme and reason...provide guardrails to steer the development in agreed-on directions by its volunteer board members and other involved land owners that met accepted living standards.
It might've created, for instance, the legal power for the board to fine errant owners for infractions to agreed-on appearance parameters and home restrictions like bans on changing vehicle oil, hanging out laundry and solid fencing, as had some others, thus ideally working to maintain a certain common lifestyle. This power could enable slapping a lien on one's owner title for chronically blowing off payment of any ticketed infraction and so establish an at least grudging respect for the rule of law. It served to potentially discourage non-copacetic behavior by property owners and attraction by land hunters bent on sometimes egregiously inappropriate lot use.
Of course, it was always a two-edged sword. As was pointed out in the periodical The Week, quoting reporter Sarah Holder, "About 74 million people in the U.S. live in community associations, mostly HOAs, [homeowner associations] which create their own regulations meant to keep behavior polite, aesthetics consistent, and property values high." But, she went on to say, "...the rules can be capricious and penalties for violations steep...One Colorado couple, Jose and Lupita Mendoza, say that a series of minor violations, like failing to remove a dead tree, snowballed into the HOA's foreclosing on their home despite their never missing a mortgage payment."
Without an overarching plan for residential growth or vision beyond what little the general boilerplate gobbledygook provided, Mt. Shasta Vista was forever left to struggle swimming against the current. It was vulnerable to the vagaries of the place's latest resident owners' arbitrary druthers -- even as the more community-minded among the fitful, ever-changing flock of dwellers hoped to transform the place from its primitive beginnings into an actual, by-gosh community that dwellers might actually take pride in, rather than simply use and tolerate for a while.
Interest flatlines
With so many parcel owners absentee and seldom if ever visiting, from the start it seemed the overwhelming number of title holders were indeed just betting on the place and the anticipated actions of others: initially that tiny minority of owners who enjoyed vacationing here, and later, the even smaller number who actually dropped anchor, both of whom naturally felt inclined to work to further the place along and improve its livability (and thus, also its marketability). Surely they were only the vanguard of others to follow. Meanwhile, the former twiddled their thumbs, content to let others do all the heavy lifting. They maybe liked to imagine an army of worker ants industriously at labor building up the place and its value before they then either began enjoying the place themselves or -- more likely -- simply cashed in and made a respectable chunk of change for their trouble.
It would of course prove to be worlds more trouble than they could've ever imagined in their wildest dreams. Holders were destined to lose heart in droves not long after the development's early burst of improvement efforts came and went and contentious vibes over various and sundry daunting snafus swept over the place.
Water was always a pressing concern. By the early 1970s, visiting repeat campers and residents-to-be briefly rallied, pulling together to develop the informal community well with an impressive flow rate on Juniper Drive. It sported a huge holding tank with giant overhead valve for rapidly filling 2,000 gallon water trucks and included a garden spigot, thus serving both campers and presently well-less home builders. Collins, with his usual largess, had sold the association a water truck for a dollar. About the same time, many paid into the volunteer fund to get electric power lines extended to lots on which owners had committed to building to code. A long mobile home was pulled in which to hold the first few of the state-mandated monthly board meetings.
After this initial flurry of action, though, enthusiasm for common improvement efforts seemed to run out of steam. The new residents had switched gears, scrambling to each carve out their own little backwoods mini-kingdom in the semi wilderness. It was often all they could do to build up things well enough to provide for their own needs. Other parcel holders, if wanting to join them, would have to generate their own infrastructure, same as them.
For better or worse, it was simply the way things were.
As earlycomers had built the place's first county-approved living structures, it at first appeared to be momentously shifting away from being a de facto shared camp land and into the start of an actual community. Albeit one spread so thin amidst the vast acreage that dwellings might've appeared surreally misplaced to any impressionable visitors who chanced to be cruising the labyrinth of back roads, nothing but trees and brush for long stretches, then rounding a bend and suddenly! a full-on estate jumped out at them.
Neither fish nor fowl
Interest in enjoying one's parcel for camping no doubt nosedived overnight. Those who'd roughed it there were by then either themselves noisily building homes, grumbling about those who were, or thinking of abandoning ship and selling the first chance they got. To the recreationally-minded newbies, the place had irreversibly lost its pristine charm: the one-time collective camping wilderness was now getting cluttered with the man-made trappings of civilization they'd come here to get away from. It was an oil and water situation, refusing to mix.
Almost overnight, the place was becoming neither fish nor fowl.
Fast forward, and once various unapproved shelters of code-nonconforming inhabitants began flooding the scene, the realm's fledgling legitimate community -- one its residents had poured personal fortunes into, representing a lifetime of work, and blood, sweat and tears -- was in dire straits. Without updating the CC&Rs, or at least every future would-be resident toeing the line and meeting county health and building codes and enforcers on the ball to put the kibosh on unlawful attempts to move onto parcels, legitimate residents faced an insurmountable impasse. They'd be stymied at every turn, their most diligent efforts to preserve the place's upscale-rustic charm as a respectable community rendered useless.
At one point early on, the association's few residents had managed to get it together so far as to appoint informal block captains for each of the seven mile-square sections. They worked to alert other residents and lot owners of any dubious goings on within their respective domains, driving about regularly, scoping the scene and relaying the latest intel to board members to suss over at the monthly meetings and deal with if action was deemed warranted. This phase of organized grass roots government showed that, despite the growing unfortunate developments, there was a strong sense of public-minded cohesion among many or most of the earliest residents. (Cynics might read it as only a strong motivation to protect their investments.) Their rudimentary organized grassroots vigilance effort grew into an informal phone-tree hotline once too many barbarians started storming the gates to keep a handle on things at monthly meetings alone.
Even if the primary incentive was only to try nipping in the bud any incipient health and building code violations, it at least displayed a civic-minded spirit -- albeit one more intolerant and exclusive-minded than altruistic. One that might've served the place well in the long run, had it morphed from its reactive, intolerant law-and-order policing into a more fair-minded, live-and-let-live mindset. Obviously it didn't.
Some older residents were by then moving on, devastated, their fondest dreams of enjoying retirement years in a sweet spot of peace and tranquility being dashed to hell and gone. They hadn't the heart or, for some, the strength, to take arms against the sea of trouble brewing and deal with any ongoing battles with unruly interlopers invading the realm by mounting a desperate Hail Mary campaign in efforts to restore the place's early law and order.
Those staying demanded the county enforce its own friggin' codes, dammit.
But as more and more lot buyers over time made bold to occupy parcels they'd snapped up, seemingly defying anyone to do anything about it, the soon overwhelmed, increasingly weary county enforcement officials appeared to have been outmaneuvered: They were unable to stem the lawless tide despite their most rigorous efforts.
At some point they gave up on the place as a lost cause.
Result: the soon-minority, flying-by-the-seat-of-their-pants, shocked senseless respectable legal residency, standing firm and braced for battle with an unruly rabble, soon found themselves between the devil and the deep blue sea.
The white elephant time forgot
With such a daunting series of snafus and the resulting chaos growing like weeds, outside interest in the wayward development flatlined...for decades. After it had outgrown its first-generation, recreational-only use and stalled out trying to be something more by accepted standards, its parcels were massively devalued -- deemed practically useless -- in the eyes of the buying public.
The development became an unmanageable white elephant of odd lots, more trouble than they were worth trying to move and earn a measly commission on, to the way of thinking of more than a few of the regional realtors.
Perhaps it was not too unlike other largely failed rural subdivisions various ambitious California developers had hatched over time. Like the controversial 15,287 one-acre lots of California Pines outside Alturas, in the northeast corner of the state. Or California City, "America's Largest Abandoned City," some fifty thousand lots, spread over 204 square miles, all platted and roads made, in the barren, treeless Mojave Desert. (Interestingly, it was launched within a month of the Vista; perhaps subtle influences were then afoot -- both terrestrial and celestial -- that somehow made it a time of unrealistic development vision.) Like them, the residency-challenged, one-time, de-facto rec-land of Mt. Shasta Vista seemed destined to become just another place time would forget...or try to.
Eventually this suited perhaps more than a few actual Vista residents just fine -- those who'd stay despite all, or bought homes from those who had bailed. And, especially, those who had grabbed parcels and thrown together humble shelters on the fly. Various dwellers, doing their best to tune out the long simmering, often gnarly politics, grew accustomed to the generous solitude. It was addictive. It could seem to make up for the place's sundry shortcomings. They relished the park-like setting that had first inspired its first incarnation as a happy-go-lucky, secluded co-op campground. So few residents amid so much nature proved utterly delightful.
But it was terrible for investors and speculators. They found it hard to sell holdings no longer having anything going for them to entice would-be buyers beyond being cheap, secluded, with nice views. Such parcels, no longer dedicated to camping yet requiring huge outlays before one could live on them legally, therefore found precious few interested 'respectable' parties.
And, again, it didn't help sales efforts that the place had from its very beginning -- at its very conception in the womb, even -- gotten such a bad rap, furiously resented by longtime locals for intending to co-opt their longtime backwoods stomping grounds. And then seen as terminally problematic by county authorities. Many of the latter no doubt early on had played soothsayer: "It'll be a disaster, mark my words; wait and see. Wanna bet? I'll give you three-to-one odds."
The county rejected the misbegotten child left squalling on its doorstep. The place's resulting negative image was readily sensed by any of your more aware land shopper, alert to the not always so subtle negative currents surrounding the place. (The signs screaming No This and No That had perhaps offered a clue.)
"Just a matter of time"
Many parcel owners held onto their apparent boondoggle, even so: in a dime, in a dollar. They doubled down year after year, paying the piper in the guise of the ever-increasing annual road assessment through gritted teeth, determined not to take a bath on what they had at first thought a sure thing. In denial, they thought their investments would surely pay off some day, that the lots would eventually prove a nice place for someone -- just not them, thank you -- on which to build a home or, at the least, a vacation cabin, and enjoy the camaraderie of congenial fellow part-time and full-time backwoods dwellers once the place got itself together.
After ages, convinced the out-of-kilter place appeared to have zero chance of ever right-siding itself, many at last bit the bullet. As fed-up owners unloaded the clunkers en masse, resigned to breaking even or even taking a loss, the still-cheap parcels flooded the market.
But there were often few takers. This, despite in the late 1970's a $1,200 to $1,750 asking price and easy terms -- roughly the same price they'd paid once adjusting for inflation.Those who did snap them up were often themselves only other disinterested professional investors, making small side bets on the place and parking a bit of extra cash a while, confidant the right suc -- er, buyer -- would sooner or later come along. Or were yet other uninformed casual investors, infected with the latest round of speculation fever, often stoked at being able to buy so much scenic land for so little: "It was so cheap, I couldn't resist." And, again, the die-hard optimists, thinking they'd maybe enjoy the parcels themselves once the place got more organized, as surely it would. At the least, they'd have something interesting to leave their families (and then let them figure out what to do with the buggers).
But beyond such calculated dice rolling, impulsive moves, and hopeful, "some day" thinking was always a sprinkling of land buyers psyched by the notion of -- novel idea -- actually moving onto the parcels. And willing to build to code. Those wanting to fulfill the age-old dream of chucking city living and becoming respectable country squires. To them, the lots were pure catnip. Some wanted to make like Thoreau, live simply on the land and let the rest of the world go by. Maybe some hoped to establish home businesses over time (despite the county having severe restrictions on the books for doing such) -- or commute to work, the place over time becoming a de facto bedroom community of sorts.
Others -- entirely too many to the thinking of the teeth-gnashing, ax-grinding remnant of code-legal residents -- seemed only to be looking for cheap land in the boonies for instant residency, to avoid city rent with its steep first and last plus security; or to hide out in the outlands, some probably dodging child support, others maybe even having an outstanding arrest warrant or two. Even if it meant roughing it, drastically downscaling one's standard of living by hauling in a derelict mobile home or trailer, setting up a tent, or fashioning a ramshackle structure from scrounged materials and generating cesspools at best as an non-ecological waste-disposal set up. And then have to haul in every drop of water. Plus have to fire up a generator or go without go-juice. For even if a power line teasingly skirted their property line, it couldn't be hooked up to a structure without first satisfying a blizzard of code requirements.
It made for primitive living on primitive land, but the heady sense of freedom it offered for so little cost seemed to make it all worth it...at least for a while. They'd cross their fingers and hope the powers that be would let them be. But with the eighties' still-prevailing, heavy-handed mindset and strict code enforcement holding sway, there was fat chance of that.
Round and round...
And so the mirage of a Mt. Shasta Shangri-la, dreamy backwoods realm undervalued and under-exploited, kept proving irresistible to all sorts for all sorts of reasons. As the land kept seducing detached speculators, hopeful investors, and would-be residents alike, a distinct pattern of owner relationship with the parcels emerged.
Sporadic cycles of short-lived buying mania with maybe a curious camp visit or two followed by a long-term absence of any interest whatsoever, ephemeral fantasies the dreamy land fostered having been played out -- this was commonly the Vista lot owners' dance. Even after decades, hundreds of parcels were -- apart from the occasional campfire stone ring and driveway roughed in, perhaps a dead tree or two cut down and a bit of brush cleared, maybe an outhouse built if really ambitious, or a soon-abandoned trailer rolled in -- still clinging to their relatively pristine states. And so they kept luring new impulsive buyers who were wowed by the land's trifecta of allure: generous-sized woodland parcels, sweeping mountain views and dirt-cheap prices.
Similarly, the long succession of casual small investors and speculators routinely soon enough lost interest in the first-beguiling lots and any belief in their potential profitability...or livability. Some parcels doubtless changed hands over half a dozen times through the years, always attracting new buyers who were powerless to resist grabbing such bargain properties in such picturesque settings..a place that, to all appearances, seemed safely hidden away from the more aggravating aspects of so-called civilization.
And so the massive-mountain presence in the place's very backyard kept emanating its powerful, almost palpable force. Those leaning towards new-age thinking felt that it could work to over-stimulate a person's upper chakras if not better grounded. The thinking went that such people on arrival had their imaginations and visualization powers over-amped. Under the mountain's enticing spell the mind reeled, bursting with excited fantasies of what all they'd do with the fabulous, off-the-beaten track properties they'd been lucky enough to snag at a bargain price.
In a way, it was California dreamin' full tilt.
And so, the luckless development kept spinning round and round on its own little short-boom-long-bust merry-go-round. Riders reached out for the ever-elusive brass ring of easy country living or fast turnover profit while select realtors, trying to make their nut moving such low-end "road kill" properties, kept cranking the calliope's shrill but hypnotic melody.
Stymied by a sea of disinterested speculators
and investors feeling nickeled and dimed
It probably can't be over-stressed: competing with the place's host of other drawbacks -- water scarcity, lack of power, absence of any development plans, often rocky soil and steep-sloping lots, incensed locals, and the prohibitive cost of meeting code -- was, though subtle, in a way one of the biggest drawbacks of all: the adverse effect a teaming sea of detached absentee lot owners had on it. They'd invested in or speculated on the place and over time became so disheartened -- some quite bitter and hostile -- and so supremely indifferent to the needs of the subdivision to save itself from itself, that their collective discontent only reinforced the overwhelming sense of futility already infusing the misbegotten realm.
They'd been chagrined to realize they'd gotten stuck with a soft-market lemon that required an annual shelling out through the owner-association assessment; it left them feeling nickel-and-dimed to death. It seemed like they were essentially enabling a few lot owners to live here while they paid for the upkeep of roads they themselves never drove on. Meanwhile, lot values stagnated. Such a feeling of acute buyer remorse no doubt worked on the subtle plane, no less than the lack of water, to undermine the most determined efforts of whatever civic-minded resident there were to try salvaging the place's onetime promise and move it onto more solid footing.
For, all other problems aside, how could the Vista ever move forward with so many of the some ninety percent absentee ownership harboring such downright indifference, apathetic to the notion of ever doing anything to redeem the floundering would-be residential development? Not if it meant sinking one more penny into it, through proposed special assessments to fund project proposals. Not even if such a project -- like creating a community center -- would ultimately increase parcel values for making the place more livable and, thus, parcels more desirable and easier to sell and at an actual profit. That's how jaundiced and cynical some had become towards the luckless subdivision.
To many, the place was just a money pit, pure and simple.
Countless lot owners lost whatever faith they might've once held for the Vista and its potential to be more then the chaotic, infrastructure-shy disaster area -- which, again, perhaps a bit perversely, many of its few residents seemed to prefer it being. For it made for leaving an embarrassment of undeveloped, park-like land all around them, the thoughtful, stuck investors having so generously provided the luxuriant buffers in the guise of their unsellable lots.
Not another red cent...
Those who opted to keep the parcels despite everything, or tried unloading them but couldn't at a decent price, along with the latest round of new, soon-disillusioned owners...both felt burdened with dud properties in a dead-in-the-water development. As it was, the annual assessment bite was often paid amid much grumbling and whines of "I don't even live there, so why the hell should I have to pay for the upkeep of roads I never drive on? Answer me that."
For what it was worth, the annual membership assessment was far cheaper than that of other regional rural subdivisions with the possible exception of next door's Juniper Valley. When the writer arrived in the late 1970s, it was only about $20. a year. (By 2024, it had grown to $280. While having become a bit ouchy, it was still easily one of the cheapest -- nearby Lake Shastina's annual bite had become some $2,200.) But no matter. They still felt bled, shook down for the latest assessment every fall, many no doubt feeling like trailer park mobile home owners, the structure being theirs but then having to pony up rent every month on the space it perched on lest it be grabbed away through foreclosure -- in the Vista's case, by the Mt. Shasta Vista Property Owners Association, of which, perhaps ironically, every lot owner was a mandatory member and so was, on some weird level, foreclosing on oneself.
Cynics thought the whole set-up smacked of being some sort of racket.
Left for dead
Perhaps predictably, due to the many absentee parcel holders' pronounced disenchantment with the stuck-in-the-mud place -- left for dead in more of the realty world's humorously stark insider parlance -- the association often suffered late annual payments and non-payments. Initial optimism for the place having long ago evaporated and a growing share of absentee owners reluctant to pony up every year, the wording on the annual billing statement grew more than a mite testy. Key words in large black boldface letters defied ignoring the association's demand for prompt payment by shouting, "PAY WITHIN 30 DAYS TO AVOID SEVERE PENALTY OR FORECLOSURE."
Things obviously were a far cry from earlier times' lighthearted communication tone with its merry spiels of carefree vacationing and the exciting thought of maybe retiring to the enchanted land bye 'n' bye. The situation had taken a hard, no-nonsense turn. The reason: Board members were grappling with keeping enough revenue coming in to cover the constant maintenance needs of the sixty-six miles of cinder roads that would otherwise return to nature -- and then have angry visiting owners hounding them to get on the ball or they'd refuse to pay. They were in a pickle, a Catch-22, damned if they did and damned if they didn't, stuck between a rock and a hard place...
Such chilly exhortations only seemed to encourage some to finally blow off paying altogether. "They're daring me not to pay, huh? Well hell, I think I'll take them up on that; they can have the damn parcel back...worthless piece of crap; why I ever bought into this screwy lotus land it I'll never know; 'FUBAR Acres' would be a better name for the place...mumble grumble..."
Sometimes iffy roads
As more people moved in, legally or otherwise, and the endless fragile cinder roads got increased wear and tear, the one-man road crew increasingly became unable to service them all in any timely fashion. And perhaps none anywhere up the immaculate zen standards of earlier, simpler times with worlds fewer residents, when the back roads seemed to encourage one to drive at a mosey to unwind from the highway and to better drink in the splendid scenery. (The roads had been irresistible to mischievous kids, often the visiting grandchildren of over-indulgent residents, to gouge deep donuts in the deep, freshly deposited cinders while roaring about on their chainsaws-on-wheels called dirt bikes.) Regardless, one good gully-washer of a rainstorm could wash away the loose cinder topping and cut hazardous mini canyons in the sand underneath on downhill stretches, even if having been carefully groomed just the day before.
Again, this caused more owners, especially the resident ones, to protest paying for roads that weren't being kept up -- leastwise not theirs -- the lion's share going to the most heavily trafficked. Like, by far, the most problematic one of all: the half-mile long, steep uphill stretch of Perla Road at the front of section 13 by Sheep Rock. It gobbled up thousands of dollars a year to maintain, especially with so many residents and visitors ignoring the attempt to make it a downhill-only road and the wrong-way sign at its base; the constant steep uphill driving, wheels scrambling for traction and making deep ruts, kept tearing it to hell and gone. Most sparsely settled and non-settled regions might not see the road truck for a decade or more -- and then, finally, often only after some visiting owner, having driven hundreds of miles to vacation on their remote parcel, only to get stuck in deep sand on the home stretch and forced to call a tow truck, raised a royal ruckus. Rightly furious, they held the association board's feet to the fire, demanding they cover the tow bill. Such ire would bestir the now-harried board members to scramble and at last address the neglected stretches in the more remote hinterlands -- and raise the annual assessment fee to cover the increased work load, rising material prices, wages, insurance, workman's comp, gas...
Problems like these seldom made for happy campers.
This, in dramatic contrast to the first visiting owners. Those who so thoroughly relished visits to their lands that they actually moved onto them with the infectiously high spirits often prevailing in the wondrous, "God is alive, magic is afoot" period of the late sixties through the early seventies. A time when waves of feel-good euphoria might wash over one out of the blue, even if your only drug of choice was a Valium or good stiff martini.
Raise high the roof beam, carpenters
At its start, many Vista lots felt almost pristine. (Some still do.) Sure, some bore old rotting stumps from lumber baron Abner Weed’s having scythed the area’s tall timber early in the twentieth century. And the bulldozing needed to make the network of new roads marred the front of some parcels. (The KRCE development northeast of Yreka was born similarly, re-purposing tree-harvested lands into rec lots and the promise of future home sites for nature-deprived city folk.) But a substantial number of parcels, largely left undisturbed for ages, were part of a rich fragile high-desert woodlands ecosystem. One that could feel enchanted to anyone appreciating its subtle, almost primeval, charm, any who didn't need towering trees and crystal streams before embracing and respecting nature.
The land held inviting groves of old junipers, some with almost Day-Glo chartreuse moss growing on their northern sides. It held furry lichen growing on deep-shaded rocks, riots of colorful wildflowers in spring and early summer, and occasional stands, or single, towering pine trees. And dramatic rock outcroppings, sometimes perched on by a mountain lion on the lookout for deer that occasionally meandered through.
Many areas lent something of a rarefied atmosphere that invited one to wax poetic over. It struck some as an extraordinary, mysterious realm. A place where time seemed to stand still.
Fresh high-desert air, balmy sunshine, often-profound quietude, plus a giddy sense of freedom for being in such secluded backcountry, reigned over by a majestic mountain...all combined to inspire excited repeat vacation visits from six hundred miles away, trekking from the bottom of the long state to the top. Enough so to move the select handful to chuck city living altogether and retire here to enjoy the tranquility and solitude of country living year-round. And so it was that the place had ephemerally become a respectable residential Shangri-la for every nature-loving retiree making the urban exodus...and having the bucks to build according to their accustomed lifestyle, which, happily, more or less coincided with the county's by then rigorously enforced residential building codes.
But rumor had it that the very earliest comers in the mid to late sixties -- among them one simple cabin structure on White Drive, built by two older brothers from San Francisco, and another, far more ambitious, the Spencer house on Heinzelman Drive -- hadn't even needed building permits to construct their respective cabin and full-on, multi-story home. Code enforcement had apparently yet to gain a solid foothold in the more remote hinterlands of sparsely settled regions. If true, this possibly set a precedent for subsequent owner-builders feeling they needed no more than their own permission to build on their lots. And the building department was forever left playing catch-up, saying in effect, "Hey, you really do need a permit now...no, we mean it. Seriously..." (Meanwhile, maybe thinking: "Mind you, I don't necessarily agree with the policy, but it's my job.)"
No more sketchy subdivisions
By the early seventies California had become so wary of mostly-unregulated developments like the Vista that legislature passed a flurry of landmark regulations known as the Subdivision Map Act, which covered all new subdivision starts. " [A] new attitude of comprehensive planning and environmental protection emerged,” wrote realty attorney James Longtin. The Vista, along with all the others in the region, had barely gotten in under the wire before the vast regulatory changes made impossible any longer spinning out such bare-bones, quick-buck, often-problematic rural developments.
After it passed in 1974, developers were henceforward required to first gain local approval and make legally binding commitments to provide all basic infrastructure for any new residential subdivision proposed. Plus, if approved, over time spring for public improvements like parks, playgrounds and community centers. It seemed that our place, though grandfathered in under the earlier, worlds more lax requirements, came to feel intense pressure from the county -- in turn under the gun of the state with its new exacting standards -- whenever an owner wanted to build a house, or even a cabin, on their one-time campground parcel in the primitive development so unabashedly bereft of any infrastructure whatsoever beyond simple road access and a few isolated power and phone lines.
Would-be Vistan homesteaders who believed in following the rules found themselves jumping through all sorts of complicated, time-consuming, expensive hoops to earn the right to reside on their lots...the first and perhaps most daunting being, before anything else, once passing a perc test, to bring in an approved well...often a fairly deep one...sometimes a really deep one...and hitting water...hopefully good water. And then install a septic system, plus shell out another substantial chunk of change to get electrical lines strung to one's property.
All before ever qualifying to apply for a building permit.
Who’d want to live in the middle of nowhere, anyhow?
To build or not to build community
Maybe county officials had crossed their fingers, hoping there'd never be any who for some strange reason actually wanted to live on such raw, bone-dry lots out in the middle of nowhere. For each new building permit okay-ed would mean several long, time-consuming drives to inspect and sign off each of the numerous construction phases. They had better things to do.
Jumping ahead, residents had better things to do than foster any dubious notion of organized community. Polarized energies, bearing remarkably cynical short-fuse attitudes, discouraged it at every turn. More people moved here expressly to do their own thing and be left alone: hermits united (or disunited, as it were).
It often seemed residents worked together only reluctantly. A visit to a monthly board meeting, where the place's buzz-saw, contentious dysfunctionality (or it's flipside, an apathetic, what's-the-use? mindset) was on full display, offered a quick cure for anyone nurturing some errant notion to try helping out the misbegotten place.
Any vision beyond the usual volunteer fire department and rummage sales and such to support it, maybe working to get a grant to fund making the area safer from wildfires, just didn’t seem to go along with the dirt-cheap lots with their striking absence of infrastructure. One of course paid dearly for such added features in your more developed subdivisions -- paved roads, electricity, water, gas, sewage, fire department, security... When you bought land cheap, expectations were low to nonexistent. Some people, craving a bit of natural solitude more than anything else, had bought here expressly because it lacked such trappings. To their way of thinking, any hum of structured rural community, residents scrambling to get on the same page, too often resulted in everyone getting in everyone else's business, cannibalizing one another's energies, thereby keeping the age-old quest for idyllic stand-alone rustic living unfulfilled.
Not so for those first-wave, affluent modern-day pioneers of yore. They'd been so bewitched by the realm’s unspoiled charm during simpler (if more rigid) times that they eagerly invested their sweat, fortunes and fondest hopes into making it their new home front. Most appeared to be stoked at the prospect of working together to carve out a congenial rustic retirement community -- both for themselves and for any others who liked what they were doing, enough to muster into the emerging enclave of urbane respectability. It had thus briefly enjoyed being an embryonic hideaway sanctuary of decent folk intent on living far from the madding crowd. A haven where one might enjoy retirement years in peace and tranquility deep in the bosom of nature (plus absolute control over their spanking-new domain, naturally). As a song lyric of the time went, they anticipated “...going where the living is easy and the people are kind."
Kind of something in any event, as it turned out.
______________________________________________
The Vista Thru Time
1965-2015
[Part 4]
"Welcome all!"
vs. "Up the drawbridge!"
Many among the second wave of new residents, like those of the first wave, also felt grateful to be here. Swept up in the grand pioneering adventure of it all -- living on newly opened scenic land with so few others around, after having endured the teaming city or suburb living forever -- they were eager to share their good fortune with whoever might arrive to fill some of the empty parcels. They offered cheerful assistance, wanting to see the fledgling backwoods community grow and flourish. To them each new denizen of the sparse backwoods settlement represented a welcome addition during the heady late-frontier days of the 1970's, helping further settle the realm, such as it was and whatever it was.
These more altruistic neighbors were usually residents of dwellings whose original inhabitants had fled once the charm of Vista living began losing its luster and what they'd once deemed a rare gem worryingly appeared to now be morphing into cheap paste jewelry. The second-generation newcomers hadn't experienced the latter's ordeals of complying with codes, only to have others blatantly ignore them, eroding the place's brief cachet as an exceptional rural retirement enclave. They hadn't borne the battle scars from the earlier vandalism and theft by mischievous and malicious-minded offspring of embittered locals during the visiting-only years. They were more live-and-let-live, happy-go-lucky. Some might invite a newcomer to share an afternoon 'drinky-poo' on their front porch or offer to freeze water in repurposed milk jugs to help one weather hundred-degree heatwaves -- even invite an under-prepared newcomer to winter in their vacating snug cabin, as happened with the writer.
Others, almost invariably among the first wave, weren't anywhere near so welcoming. Newcomers increasingly seemed to be definitely not their kind. Since there were no guardrails in place, no fine-tuned master plan of CC&Rs to guide it along, each new arrival was instead summarily vetted. Bearing a no-nonsense, "our-way-or-the-highway" stance, they'd instantly judge each newcomer to be either one that would fit in and help foster the nascent respectable community along or stick out like a sore thumb and undermine their efforts to keep the place a respectable and law-abiding one. The latter, they felt, needed to be dealt with in a gloves-off manner, surgically excised from the realm like a disease through strict ordinance enforcement with all due haste.
Whereas others had done all the heavy lifting and fought battles of attrition with a hostile local population, newcomers felt free to relax and enjoy the fruits of the former's labor. They savored the moment and embraced the region's seeming deep tranquility. They appreciated the deep seclusion and those around them, irrespective of a newcomer's circumstances or intentions. Even though many firstcomers were grinding their teeth and poisoning their mindset with bitterness over how the riffraff were -- as they saw it -- illegally horning in on their hideaway, there was at the same time yet a lingering afterglow of the initial euphoric pioneering spirit filling the air. It was a vibe many could sense -- a wonderment and sense of gratitude for having found such a tucked-away, affordable rustic domain with such generous-sized lots that were located not too far from town. It appeared a situation that anyone who valued tranquil living amid nature (or at least what tenuously appeared to be tranquil living) would treasure and relax into.
Instant homestead
But no longer the original residents. They were seething mad, bent into pretzels by the endless trials they faced just when they thought they could finally relax, after a lifetime of hard work, and enjoy their golden years in peace and quiet (and, naturally, total control). Unlike their former neighbors who, disillusioned and discouraged, bailed on the wings of the unraveling scene, they had dug in hard, here for the duration come hell or high water; peace of mind became a thing of the past, a luxury that they could no longer afford.
Stern law-and-order folks, they scrambled to pull up the drawbridge and threw away the welcome mat, even as existing entrance signs incongruously continued welcoming one and all. Beyond the now-hollow welcome, the huge signs held a foreboding vibe. Placed everywhere, they snarled at drivers, almost as if daring you to even breathe. Facing a torrent of problems, the earliest residents had been bound and determined to reverse the dire situation and salvage things by flexing some no-nonsense authoritarian muscle and kicking the unruly rabble out -- and, by thunder, keeping the damn buggers out.
They had to protect their rural outpost from being overrun by such misguided souls...undesirables with the unmitigated gall to invade their would-be respectable rural enclave on the cheap...especially those revved-up younger folks of threadbare means...most especially those pot-smoking hippies and beer-guzzling bikers of threadbare means, plus that peculiar new hybrid, the pot-smoking, beer-guzzling redneck-hippie, all of whom they thought they'd at last left behind in the teaming cities.
They knew such lot buyers and hopeful instant settlers would be worlds away from ever deferring to their tight-wound, conventional ways and thus prove disastrous to the newly-established order. of things. They had to mobilize and get them evicted and nip such intolerable nonsense in the bud. Girding their loins, they took on the sea of trouble with a ruthless, full-court determination, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. They demanded every property holder earn the right to live on the land, just as they did, end of story. They had to meet all health and building code requirements, no matter the cost, time or effort. And if you couldn't afford it or didn't want to go down that path for some reason, well, too bad; the place obviously wasn't for you...so don't even think about it, bub.
But word of the cheap secluded parcels had gotten out; the floodgates of land searching opened wide once realtors advertised the embarrassment of lots for sale cheap on their coast-to-coast multi-listings. So, despite residents' best efforts to deter further would-be unqualified newbies from invading their paradise and insistence that existing miscreants be kicked off, it would prove a losing battle in the long run. But they never gave up. The home guard sailed clear around the bend, permanently unhinged. Nursing boundless teeth-gnashing rage, they became like so many crazed Don Quixotes, forever tilting at windmills.
As mentioned, some among the pretenders to the realm no doubt had the bucks to build a respectable little shelter for, hopefully, low-key stays of varying lengths, but did so without bothering to seek any county bureaucrat's blessing. Why sink a fortune into building on cheap land? It didn't compute. Others, of more modest means, simply erected long-term tents or pulled in humble trailer or mobile home or built a tumbledown structure from scrap material scrounged at the dump, then hung their hats, wanting to think they were home, sweet home.
They were lumped together, one and all, deemed little better than criminals, a viral infection threatening the security and well being of the realm's legitimate tax-paying residents.
Brazen newcomers
The brazen newcomers, in turn, often appeared oblivious or indifferent to them. Why should they care what a few scattered retirees, most living miles off, thought of them or their new presence amid the giant checkerboard of mostly empty lots so far out in the boonies? It was either "Hey, what's the big deal?" or "Mind your own damn business." Many clearly didn't appear much concerned over the county ordinances they were openly defying, having tuned out the barking signs as mostly toothless desperation. It seemed being out in the middle of nowhere on remote lands could dull a notion to conform to such bureaucratic nonsense -- the legal gobbledygook of city-living mindsets born of the complicated realities for so many living so close together. News flash: The place wasn't a city; more relaxed country ways should prevail.
The happy illusion of one's secluded Vista property being a stand-alone lot existing independently of any outside control whatsoever -- rather than in fact one among 1,641 lots, each ostensibly subject to a sea of regulations -- was just too seductive not to succumb to. In fact, it might be said that one's sense of well-being depended on it.
So it went that the growling No This, No That, and No the Other Thing signs erected everywhere were dismissed as the all but unenforceable bluff of a few well-healed, uptight residents who appeared to be trying to bogart the entire place for themselves, demanding everyone conform to their la-di-da bourgeois living standards or deal with the consequences. Even so, more and more newcomers went their own merry way, "doing their own thing", the vital watch phrase from the rebellious sixties' being taken to heart by greater numbers with each passing year, as people left behind a former times' fading rigid authoritarian-leaning mindset of blind conformity -- again, the long lingering military vestige of the devastatingly oppressive World War II era that had bent the planet's collective mindset so seriously out of shape.
When errant newcomers were rudely awakened after an unpleasant confrontation or two with the compliant residents gone nuclear, and the all-business county code enforcers they summoned, it did little to make them ever want to comply, even if they could afford to. The firstcomers, in their scramble to preserve the emerging, predominantly La-la-land-ish, country club enclave from imminent rack and ruin, had adopted such a furious zero tolerance stance against newcomers daring to ignore the codes they'd deemed etched in stone that the more rebelliously-minded land buyers, scoping their over-wound headspace, thought, Screw 'em, I'll take my chances.
Fraught, distraught and overwrought
While the modern-day pioneers had dutifully conformed to every last legal residency requirement and expected every would-be resident to do the same, it soon felt to them as though such rules didn't even exist. The place was becoming so dysfunctional, aggravated by the escalating battles over lifestyle, code compliance and polarized mindsets, that it beggared belief.
Practically overnight, their fledgling one-time safe-haven backwoods retirement community had turned into its own madding crowd.
Not all newcomers were such brazen anarchists, of course. Actually, very few at first. Some of lesser means were by and large law abiding, only nurturing similar hopes of living out their own, but with simpler visions of tranquil country living for not having the bucks to meet any steep code demands. They couldn't believe the sign's warnings of strict code regulation would actually be enforced in such a wild backwoods area. Or that people living miles away could get so upset over how others chose to live on their own private property. So, while they had no real intent to buck the system per se (at least not its reasonable rules), their fondest dreams would be blown to smithereens upon receiving an antagonistic 'unwelcome wagon' visit from hitherto unknown neighbors from hell, an overbearing delegation of high-and-mighty hard-asses who swooped down out of nowhere to read them the riot act.
Others were thicker skinned. More ungovernable and less concerned with rendering unto Caesar, they dug in hard and kicked back, giving as good as they got. In the early 1990's, an unsanctioned neighbor with such pronounced confrontational tendencies had just been given walking papers. One day he spotted the current board president driving about and began aggressively tailgating him for miles along otherwise empty, isolated back roads, sticking to him like glue. While the man no doubt became alarmed on looking in his rear-view, realizing he'd somehow gained the ire of an apparently crazed madman, some might've concluded that he was only reaping what he and earlier board members had sown for holding such an intolerant, depressingly over-rigid (some might've said fascistic) attitude.
Home in the country
Flashing back again to the early to mid 1970's... After the first wave or two of settlers settled following a few late sixties' early birds, a sprinkling of maybe thirty year-round, mostly compliant, residences dotted the landscape. While the code defiant trend had yet to gain a substantial foothold, a momentum matching the dizzying speed of changing times was growing. The genie was out of the bottle: There was cheap Mt. Shasta region land, just waiting to be snapped up and settled on by anyone not overly concerned about a safely distant bureaucracy's sometimes oppressive notion of how they should live. Various and sundry leapt at the chance to make the Vista’s sprawling juniper boonies their home, too.
Indeed, in the bigger picture the notion of one not just visiting but actually living amid nature was taking off in the public's mind. “Head for the hills, brothers!” became the clarion call as more and more city-weary, nature-hungry souls of all sorts joined the back-to-the-land movement. For some it would prove just a few years' respite from urban or suburban living; for others, it became a whole new way of life.
As people's interest soared in making the great escape from the frustrations of city living, the Vista gained something of the air of a time-release Oklahoma Land Rush. In leaps and bounds, excited new arrivals were discovering the affordable backwoods, staking their claim and settling in quick as a wink...or trying to. With the place having no master plan and the once-iron grip on code enforcement slipping, each newcomer went for it, winging it, flying blind to develop their own private piece of terra firma. The backwoods experienced fitful, frenzied bursts of shelter construction, some still to code but more often not. Industrious sounds of hammering and whining circular saws and power generators filled the air. The writer guesstimates that by the mid to late seventies maybe sixty to eighty residences, now of markedly varied degrees of ambition and code compliance, were sprinkling the seven square miles of remote high-desert woodlands...a woodlands that increasingly seemed be existing in its own special world.
Those opting to ignore code requirements and play it by ear in the frenetic scramble to settle were intent on getting a toehold while the getting was good. It was always harder telling someone they couldn't be there after they'd already fenced off the property, built a full-on shelter and posted their own signs ('Posted No Trespassing' and 'Private Property Keep Out' being popular), moving in lock, stock and barrel.
It was the territorial imperative writ large.
With so many hypnotized by the land in a way that might preclude practical concerns, a strange wonderland at increasing variance with mundane reality was emerging despite the most dedicated and frenzied efforts of outraged residents to arrest the sorry trend.
CC&R revision effort busted
It's unknown if some of the seriously-invested first wave ever thought to try getting the CC&Rs revised. Conceivably it might've enabled a more orderly growth into a standard community, one in which things were better spelled out so that each would-be resident knew the score in no uncertain terms beforehand. Before doing anything more than visit, one would realize that they'd have to first bring in an approved well (or share one with up to three adjacent lot owners), usually pay to have power extended, and install an approved and inspected septic system -- all before even being eligible to apply for a building permit -- and then toe the line and conform to the blizzard of all further health and building codes. This -- for better or worse -- was the accepted reality of places like nearby Lake Shastina (and, for that matter, most any American city or suburb).
Not in the Vista, exceptional problem child that it was. Though first settled by solid law-abiding citizens, it was the rebellious sixties and early-seventies and long accepted ways were getting turned upside down. It was predictable that the era's spirit of Anything Goes would burst their bland, convention-minded, happy bubble, mindsets firmly locked in the Nifty Fifties, like it didn't exist. Perhaps the situation was aided and abetted by the early vacationers themselves for having built up such an exuberant (if fully law abiding) spirit on the land, a freedom-minded spirit that could eclipse concern for mundane realities beyond conforming to code, each determined to be king or queen of their own regal wilderness mini-realm and doing whatever it took to preserve it, even turning on your fellow man. Even so, one wonders if even such a CC&R revision would've assured that the place would gain a solid footing and grow into a 'respectable', recognized community...one that in time might've gained at least a grudging respect and acceptance by the surrounding community and county authorities.
All a moot point, of course. With ninety-eight percent of the property owners absentee and living all over the nation -- many by then nursing serious buyer remorse, some mad as blazes at the heavily-invested first residents for having gobbled up the power and light fund, ruined the place for camping, gotten so insufferably territorial, etc. -- they would've realized they'd never get the two-thirds vote needed to tackle such a costly and time consuming legal re-structuring. Besides, they were retirees; their days of heavy lifting were over for tackling problems greater than deciding whether to paint the living room taupe or beige, or whether to install the two-person or four-person Jacuzzi, once the building of their new homes was a done deal.
Or so they'd thought...
Bogarting Shangri-la?
The more cynical view, as noted, might've held that the first year-round residents must've realized that constructing full-on homes amid a sea of raw parcels that had in its first years just been a popular camping retreat was bound to create certain thorny problems down the road, but they didn't care. They had theirs, for whatever remained of their time on earth; let the chips fall where they may. But since the lots were in fact zoned for single-family residency, they might've thought, What's the problem? Camping had only been an ephemeral first-generation use of the parcels. Many had maybe hoped others would likewise get enthused about the evolution of land use they'd spearheaded and follow suit. But if not, no matter. They must've realized that if enough people didn't join their number, the overwhelming majority of raw parcels would languish, undeveloped, unattractive as building sites and now compromised for camp use, their market values turning softer than cotton candy. It was unfortunate, but hey, it was always buyer beware.
The way they saw it, they'd earned the right to claim the place as their own for having complied with every last, golblamed, nit-picky, costly, time-consuming, peace-of-mind-eroding, legal residency requirement the bureaucracy saw fit to throw at them. And, again, it was the developer himself who'd first suggested retiring here "bye 'n' bye". Blame him if parcels no longer served as the backwoods retreats you bought them to be.
And blame him they would -- but the residents, too, for draining the power fund, wrecking the scene for pristine camping, and being less than gracious in welcoming such visiting owners, still hoping to eke out a pleasant rustic vacation.
In any event, not unreasonably the tax-paying homeowners now reigning over the land expected prompt county code-enforcement response to keep their new-born rural community thoroughly respectable and aboveboard. Later, while still loaded for bear even as the system began failing them, their resolve would switch gears to one of venomous retribution: "And if we can't get you out, we'll do our damnedest to make your lives here a living hell."
For better or worse, the shape-shifting, neither-this-nor-that place had, all along, effectively been left a blank canvas. One to be painted on and painted over and painted over again by whatever the latest in an ever-changing succession of residents and visiting campers aspired the Vista to be (if anything). Each among the more dominant and involved inhabitants in a given period advanced their own notion of the way things should be, trying to convince others it was the best way or the only way to go. The situation was perhaps akin to excited kids building sandcastles on the seashore...until the high tide rushed in and in a twinkling erased the most ambitious efforts. Later, new castles were built by others, likewise unmindful of the next inevitable incoming tide. Or like creating an image on the popular Etch-a-Sketch toy of the time;with a shake of the hand, even the most elaborate design vanished, as if it had never existed.
Dime a dozen
While legal requirements for homebuilding ostensibly fell within the bounds of county, state and federal authorities working together -- which ordinances and codes the development's future parcel owners were then ostensibly obligated to conform to, it being a condition for the place to have been greenlit -- these were never easy to enforce by the sparsely-populated county's undermanned staff tasked with such matters. A tiny dwelling amid a sprawling sixty-six-mile labyrinth of private unpaved roads out in the middle of nowhere was not easy to track...or be aware of as even existing short of pouring over satellite photos (which, of course, in time became the standard procedure by the county to boost property taxes for any lot improvements*). So, wanting to be helpful, livid code-compliant residents burned up the phone lines screaming bloody murder over the latest noncompliance that, in a never-ending succession, they uncovered, but always expected rapid response like the fate of the world depended on it -- as, indeed, the fate of their own little world really did.
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*Once, a neighbor resident found his annual property tax bite assessment had been raised. He inquired as to why and was told he'd built a new metal roof on his seasonal cabin, thereby constituting a land improvement. He successfully argued that it wasn't an improvement, but only replacement maintenance for an existing structure. They lowered assessment back.
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It was an impossibly tall order. In fast-changing times, with the heady sense of freedom living in the secluded back-country enclave provided the newly-rusticating dwellers, compliant and 'outlaw' alike -- often no one else living within a quarter mile or more in a county too poor to hire enough manpower to enforce its own codes should enough people choose to ignore them -- something of a pronounced libertarian, even anarchistic, spirit took root. Especially among the system-defiant, minimalist-lifestyle baby boomers who, fast on the wings of earlier waves, had felt pulled to the mountain like a tractor beam on Star Trek: The Next Generation. They weren't about to be told how to live on their own property by a bunch of uptight busybodies.
Parcels, having thus lost their brief upscale-rustic cachet of respectability and being irreversibly compromised for any pleasant retreat use, flooded the market at a dime a dozen. Excited land shoppers wouldn't stop to wonder why they were going so cheap. It maybe struck them as one of the last few bargain land deals around, and they'd simply been lucky enough to discover the gems before someone else had grabbed them. While it might've seemed an extraordinary deal too good to be true, land-hungry buyers maybe liked to believe such pricing only reflected the way things should be. (Affordable living...what a concept.)
Doing one's thing
Such a free-wheeling spirit might’ve been fine had the place from the start built a solid foundation of infrastructure support and appropriate CC&Rs. Obviously, it hadn't. Cheap land really could create cheap intentions. The place's recreational use period had run its ephemeral course and now the varied crowd of instant homesteaders pouring in were psyched to do their thing and be left the hell alone. Not for a nano-second did they ever buy into the ephemeral retirement community's notions of the way things were supposed to be.
During the radical late '60's to early '70's -- as different ages, headspaces, lifestyles, incomes, awareness levels, land-use intents and widely varying respect for the rule of law thus threw themselves together in one glorious mess within the giant cookie-cutter of a bare-bones subdivision -- it often seemed that the only common ground cultivated was everybody agreeing to disagree with everybody else.
It's safe to say the eventual unwillingness of so many to build to code was sparked in large measure by the extra-high cost of having to supply one's own water, power and sewage system. The ensuing rebellion from the perceived-as-oppressive and overly expensive building code requirements tore to shreds what little of the place's threadbare social fabric and community sense had been knitted. It would spark the long pitched battles between the staunchly compliant who stayed, braced for battle, and the merrily (and not so merrily) rebellious, who came and likewise dug in. During those astonishingly polarized times, the former viewed the latter as invasive illegal residents who only deserved the bum's rush, while the latter viewed the former as uptight control freaks with too much money and one serious need to chill.
That said, there were, again, sundry causes that contributed to making a place so festering with irreconcilable differences that it effectively sabotaged itself to death. A place built on such shaky footing, lacking water, electricity and fine-tuned CC&Rs; 'What code?' attitudes; an overwhelmed county's inability and/or unwillingness to effectively enforce them; a place rife with contentious energies aimed at it by disgruntled locals bearing ugly resentment it even existed...all were baked into the special but monumentally unlucky development. Such a laundry list of hindrances all but guaranteed that whatever elusive hopes more civic-minded residents and concerned property holders might've nurtured to try turning the place around would be forever doomed six ways to Sunday.
Property owners' board: hardball with a vengeance
Reflecting and amplifying the place's many woes was, of course, the property owner association's board of directors.
Formed to fulfill the ongoing legal obligations for being a nonprofit public-benefit corporation, the board, composed of six member-elected, volunteer land owners serving staggered two-year terms, was required to meet monthly and be open to all lot holders. In earliest years it was mostly only concerned with road maintenance and signage. For a while, it appointed a "sunshine committee" to send get-well cards to any in their aging, shrinking circle, as some had perhaps waited too long to retire and enjoy their golden years and the stresses of a gnarly situation likely aggravating already fragile health. Since to be eligible all board members had to live in approved structures and be in good standing (i.e., paying the annual dues), or at least be a member in good standing if living elsewhere, the board led the charge in declaring war on the scourge of non-compliance amidst the Vista's myriad isolated parcels.
Universal health and building code conformity in the Vista had -- significantly -- been critical if a legal resident ever decided to move on and hoped to sell at a decent price. Once realizing the good ship Vista was sinking fast by the port bow, their anger was magnified for the bleak situation having hit the money nerve. They knew they'd lose getting any kind of fair return after all their hard work and expense in creating legal residences once the place lost its brief pedigree as an enviable backwoods domain of respectable oldsters. Indeed, maybe it was this, as much as or more than their being insufferably blind law-and-order zealots per se, that triggered the lion's share of their boiling-over rage. But it was all interconnected: Most wouldn't have wanted to sell out in the first place had the place remained respectable.
In any event, infuriated board members, in doggedly reporting to the county every last violation found out through their dedicated policing efforts, developed a stony policy of scorched-earth overreach and ruthless hardball action destined to become the downer gravity center of the realm for ages.
Building a fence without a permit? Report the bugger. Thirty-two days camping out? Get that lawless interloper thrown off. In the course of such efforts, they alienated everyone who hadn't likewise made the steep commitment to rigorously comply with the strict code requirements. Sometimes they upset even those who'd bought their approved homes and begun to court serious misgivings for having moved into such an uber-contentious outback zoo. One in which it almost seemed normal for everyone not busy escaping the untenable situation by getting drunk to gnash their teeth over one grievance or other. A common lament: What were we thinking, moving here?
For decades, the place experienced what many thought to be something of a mini reign of terror. Various board members and their minions went about with a balls-out ruthlessness, confronting miscreants, trying their damnedest to stamp out the affliction plaguing the once-was-and-by-damn-and-by-Jesus-will-be-or-should-be-again, serene backwoods enclave of upright, God-fearing, law-abiding citizens...and everyone else could go to blazes.
Ah, the serenity of country living.
It came as no great surprise then that such dizzying intolerance made the place more than a tad undesirable for one to want to live in. Doubtless it scared off some of your like-minded, would-be code-compliant owner-builders from ever opting to settle on their lots -- or to buy them for such use. The latter heard war stories from sullen or spitting-mad residents they approached to ask how they liked living here, or got weary sighs and rolling eyes from health and building department workers the second they uttered the dread realm's name.
While time ultimately proved the code conformity battle a lost cause, a Whack-a-mole effort that did little to stem the tide of unsanctioned building in the long run, it nonetheless remained a cause celebre, kept simmering on back burner; "The law's the law" stayed the hardline stance for all the good it did. The issue swept up everyone into the fray, or tried to; there were no innocent bystanders. Those who refused to take a side -- "Sorry, we didn't move out here to get mixed up in any local politics" -- were scornfully dismissed as do-nothing enablers and so part of the problem.
Man the battle stations
The enforcement system they'd fully depended on had failed them abysmally: It had allowed barbarians to storm the gates...and stay. Shocked over their vision of tranquil retirement and living among kindred souls in the bosom of nature going to hell in a hand basket, some indeed seemed to take a certain grim, warped-out satisfaction in trying to exact a pound of flesh from every transgressor they encountered in their vigilant rounds, threatening them with dire consequences if not toeing the line. Even when they knew such threats had become mostly empty bluster, they must've felt that in venting their spleens with such unbridled anger they'd make at least some feel so unwelcome that they'd start packing, just to get away from the obvious whack-job neighbors with bees in their bonnet.
Indeed, some of your more unwitting transgressors, having no stomach for such testy confrontations, promptly gave up and moved on, stunned and devastated. (The writer almost became one.) And a few knew they were probably courting trouble but weren't attached to lots so cheaply gotten, and left muttering, "Oh well, worth a try." But others, having thicker skins and perhaps more combative natures, dug in hard and escalated right along with the would-be enforcers, daring them to do their damnedest. They fenced off their places and posted their own gnarly signs. One of the more chilling: beneath a cross-hairs symbol was the stark warning, "If you can read this you're within range." Others, perhaps having too much time on their hands, actually seemed to enjoy taunting the sometimes bumbling and blustering enforcement crowd; it was an engaging cat-and-mouse pastime that defined their stay, in some weird way, and kept the adrenaline pumping.
There was yet another reason for the code compliant to man the battle stations, Klaxon horns blaring to wake the dead. Since the Vista was a nonprofit mutual benefit common interest corporation and its volunteer board of directors legally mandated to make a good-faith effort to have association members abide by county, state, and federal laws and ordinances, technically they could be held legally liable if found negligent in enforcing them. Board members could be sued.
As if to show there could be no doubt whatsoever that they weren't shirking their duties, they reported every last infraction their frequent searches discovered in their ongoing hunt for wrongdoing.
Again, short of extra-legal vigilante efforts, the place was fully at the mercy of the county powers-that-be to keep things copacetic. Once the Vista started derailing, it was still on the county to make things right. As taxpayers and association members with no legal fining powers, old guard residents held that the stretched-thin county enforcement agencies were duty-bound to resolve the intolerable situation and return the realm to 100% code compliance...no matter how long it took or how much it cost in county treasury.
For what earthly good were such ordinances if not enforced? Failing that increasingly impossible dream as the overwhelmed, underfunded, increasingly unmotivated enforcement system broke down, at least then it'd be on them. (And then maybe they'd get sued.)
Instantly radicalized
While each land buyer had indeed signed an agreement to abide by all aforesaid applicable laws, regulations and ordinances on purchasing a given parcel, it was naturally buried in a boilerplate sea of legaleeze fine print. So, beyond the more flagrant law breakers of latter times were those who, in the rush to pursue elusive dreams of country living, remained blissfully ignorant they'd ever agreed to any such thing. As a result, they were shocked silly when told -- usually with a fire-breathing intensity -- how you couldn't do this or that and don't you even think about the other thing. People came to feel foolish and misguided for having responded to the siren call of affordable land and what had at first blush seemed such a low-key charming place (apart from those weird barking signs), but which for some unfathomable reason appeared hellbent on trying to give new meaning to the phrase gone off the deep end.
Such hardball tactics radicalized one against the local powers that be in a heartbeat.
The more cash-strapped, instant-sanctuary sort of newcomers, hoping to buck the system, only knew they'd snagged an affordable piece of rural California; they were psyched to do their own thing and be left the hell alone. Maybe over time they'd try for a well; maybe not. They'd connect with kindred souls who would advise them, "Hey, ignore the board; I do -- hell, everyone does; It's just a toothless tiger, buncha retired power-freak busybodies with nothing better to do than try telling others how to live. Screw 'em and the horses they rode in on."
The very nature of any good-sized rural subdivision, a crazy-quilt gridwork of myriad lots tucked in the boonies, could make things problematic even with supporting infrastructure and CC&Rs. While it enabled anyone so inclined to buy a bit of rural land affordably -- rather than, say, shelling out for a far pricier stand-alone ten, twenty, forty or eighty acre parcel and then have to deal with road access and maintenance all on their lonesome -- the hidden costs of cheap rural subdivision lots could prove steep. People found themselves living amid a potluck assortment of strangers, concentrated together in the middle of nowhere, mandated by law to cooperate yet isolated from the high-density town and city lifestyle that could make such a plethora of rules and regulations feel normal...yet so insufferable out in the boonies.
It was that crowded, super-regulated, intense urban reality many wanted to get away from that had led them here in the first place.
Sharing the fantasy
The fact that people wanted their own land -- a place where they could live in closer harmony with nature and a respectable distance from others -- often made it difficult due to the contentious forces afoot to ever warm up to the reality that others were sharing the land. This, despite being a far thinner density than your typical urban scene. While you often couldn't see another's house from your property, lending the illusion you maybe had a larger area to yourself than you actually did, everyone was, for better or worse, on the mundane level inextricably bound together in the overarching legal structure, with all its edicts and restrictions. It felt like the bureaucratic city mindset was attempting to be surreally superimposed on the untamed countryside. As a result, optimistically thinking the place would offer independent country living often proved to be little more than a cruel illusion.
Steve Dockter, a late neighbor of the writer's whose laconic manner of speech and wit bore a striking resemblance to that of the actor Sam Elliot, once noted in a droll, understated way, "People need to learn to share the fantasy." While many could feel they owned maybe twenty or forty acres, or at least had one heck of a buffer zone surrounding their two- to three-acre parcels, they needed to allow others to enjoy the same illusion, being mindful of their needs and rights as well as their own. Otherwise the potential for ceaseless territorial squabbling, indifference and thoughtless behavior could -- and often did -- result in a chaotic wild-frontier social climate that could ruin it for everyone.
No surprise, the Vista's laundry list of neighborhood grievances often appeared endless.
Between barking dogs, roving packs of the same, discharging firearms, blasting stereos, gunning vehicle engines, driving about fast and recklessly, vandalizing and stealing road signs, burning toxic materials in backyards rather than haul them to the dump, tree poaching epidemics, juvenile dirt bikers roaring about and tearing through the unfenced lots of absentee owners, epidemic roadside littering and mindless garbage dumping, strong winds blowing one's property detritus to the four corners with zero concern, despoiling the landscape... Between all these intrusions into blissful country living, there was usually always something or other to raise one's hackles.
In sheer exasperation, residents kept up a constant stream of complaints to the mostly powerless board, usually to no avail -- and to county authorities. They, in turn, were often so caught up in the swamp of slow bureaucratic procedure, one reflecting an older populace's relatively set rural ways -- and often feeling hostility or indifference to the development that their predecessors had shown the poor judgement in approving -- that they might've also felt powerless and/or disinclined to work to try resolving its ongoing grievances. Among the more benumbed and burned out on elected public service, there were no doubt those well-practiced in the political art of the two-step avoidance dance in response to constituents' wails of "Can't you do something?!" It seemed the buck never stopped anywhere. Instead it circled endlessly: "Well, unfortunately there's not a whole lot we can do"; "Sorry, but it's not our problem"; "You see, it's complicated"; "You might give Neighborhood Watch another go"; "I suppose you could try suing"...
Beyond that element in local government seemingly indifferent to the Vista's ongoing trials and tribulations, for others it perhaps wasn't so much not caring as it was that the county's rural population -- embracing a relaxed stand-alone country lifestyle and the time-honored Code of the West championing rugged independence -- simply hadn't the inclination to play cop with fellow residents. They thought people should work out problems among themselves. Many in government beyond actual law enforcement seemed to lack the disposition cultivated living in your denser and edgier urban climates to grab the bull by the horns and confront thorny problems of the sort routinely faced by those living out in the boonies that eroded the fuzzy dream of easy country living.
That said, stretched-thin authorities depended on the vast majority to be dutifully law-abiding. The largely rural county simply didn't have a big enough treasury to enforce its own ordinances should enough choose to simply ignore them.
If that happened, the county could find itself in deep doo-doo.
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The Vista Through Time
1965 - 2015
[Part 5]
Subdivisions aren't organic
For anyone whose imagination could sometimes take a surreal turn, it might've seemed that the state, in approving such rural subdivisions, which each county then oversaw, was perhaps employing social scientists to conduct some weird social lab experiment, like wanting to determine how many strangers could live together in the middle of nowhere for how long, while dealing with a given load of over-exacting rules and regulations, before it drove them all nuts. "Hey guys, I think we might have a new contender here..."
People moved to the country for peace and quiet. To enjoy fresh air and the quiet and live more simply...and be left alone. They no longer wanted to have to deal with the intrusive bureaucratic mandates of dense city living. Naturally, they did their best to ignore them in the Vista -- even if in the process it might've allowed for unintended consequences, like an infusion of perhaps less than law-abiding persons who became attracted to the wayward place as a promising cheap "badlands" hideout. Some might've even said the very word 'subdivision' handicapped developments from thriving, as the word itself sounded so, well...divisive.
Historically, when a settlement was founded by one or a party, unless a boom-town, it evolved slowly. There was an organic process at work. New residents gained a sense of belonging and a measure of empowerment within the slow-growing community in which everyone played a role and pulled their weight.
The Vista, in stark contrast, was founded by a realtor who lived six hundred miles away; he had every last bit of the land cookie-cutter-platted into 1,641 lots before the first parcel buyer or future resident ever set foot on it. It was his creation, such as it was, at first seeming to aspire to be no more than a simple shared recreational land, where one could enjoy roughing it in nature a few weeks a year. Then, after a few excited owners got ambitious and moved on the land, apparently hoping to grow it into an actual, by gosh, community, with the developer's active support, the lack of any systematic residential growth plans and vested, unified interest by the majority of lot holders severely handicapped even their best efforts. The approach seemed to have been to play it by ear: "Hey, let's see what we can maybe do here if enough of us can get on the same page." (And, again, the possible darker, less altruistic mindset of some might've been more like, "We're going for it and, frankly, don't give three hoots in a holler what happens to the rest of the place.")
Of course, nowhere near enough ever got on that same page. It soon became obvious that a wildly diverse ownership, their interests and intentions for the parcels at perpetual odds, more than reading different pages -- or even different chapters -- were apparently reading different books.
Vista's already trey iffy situation was made iffier still once various one-time residents started leasing their homes once the blush of Vista living was off the rose for them. Such lessees as non-owners had zero say in how the place was run as far as board eligibility, even if one might've grown an interest in getting involved and helping the place along. That is, beyond joining the volunteer fire department, doing fundraisers for it, or spouting one's two cents' worth at monthly meetings (if allowed to, that is, being non-property owners).
And, again, the place's myriad problems were exacerbated by the legion of disinterested absentee parcel owners who long constituted over ninety percent of the association's membership. They dwarfed the tiny number of actual residents, yet held equal voting power for any proposal. To many of the purely speculative, the place had become a gone-sour investment they'd sell the second they got any decent offer. In the meantime, they'd scream and holler over every cent of annual dues increase, right along with the few scattered residents, many of whom over time likewise became indifferent to the outlandish notion of ever trying to help the one-time wilderness condo that had obviously long ago lost any chance of redemption.
Why bother?
The professional association manager eventually hired by the board in the 1980's was relied on to take care of mundane everyday things like legal matters, routine billing, accounting and budgetary concerns. By then, things had been going wrong so long that many felt there was nothing meaningful anyone could do except nurse the wobbly operation along the way it was and hope for the best. Long-established residents had their own social scene wired, thank you, and were all too aware how steeply the cards were stacked against the place ever turning itself around. They'd reject as naive and unrealistic (if well-meant) the pipe dreams of those who hoped to straighten the place out.
Cynicism ran so deep, hope had become another four-letter word.
A prime example will show how widespread the lack of civic-minded spirit got. One day in the 1990's, dozens of orange plastic bagged phone books had been dropped off atop the busy Juniper Drive entrance's mailbox complex -- and were promptly swept to the ground by one irate resident, no doubt taking umbrage at their presence and being just another of the competing local phone books annually cranked out. They stayed there on the ground for weeks like some weird avant-garde art installation. While it created an obvious eyesore for everyone each time driving by, over a month went by and still no one bothered to deal with it. The disbelieving writer (who didn't live in that part) held off, waywardly fascinated by such monumental indifference. (Finally, I gathered them up for recycling.)
No doubt many had grumbled to themselves how someone ought to clean them up, but of course never thought to be that someone. Disheartened and disgusted over the place being so untogether, they probably felt a perverse rush every time they drove past, mentally raking the board over the coals for being so discombobulated that it couldn't deal with even such a simple matter. The place really was like a rural parcel condo: Its already overworked one-person road management was also expected to keep the common grounds tidy -- not us. Earn your keep, ya slacker.
A more far-reaching example: In 1981, a majority of association members overwhelmingly defeated the proposal made by then-board president Eric Prescott. He had envisioned the Vista building a modest multi-use community center on one of the hundreds of empty lots for the mutual benefit of residents and owner-visitors. The place, then still more or less code-abiding, was growing quickly. It would’ve meant only a modest extra assessment for two years to fund for the cost being spread out among so many, and would've benefited myriad parcel holders over time, fostering a better sense of community for being a dedicated relaxed place where residents and visitors could meet and trade notes, brainstorm and coordinate civic activities, and so would've almost certainly increased lot values. But the sea of terminally disillusioned absentee parcel holders shot it down. Their blinders firmly in place, they had chorused their favorite refrain: Not One Cent More! (Telling result: though Prescott and I moved here at the same time in the late seventies, we would never even meet.)
Many embraced the notion that once they bought the land, except for annual property taxes -- some newbie landowners no doubt weren't aware of that recurring expense -- they were home free. So absentee lot holders took strong exception to having to feed the parking meter every year for road maintenance on roads they never drove on lest their property get towed away by the Association through legal repossession...for resale to the next, possibly equally clueless buyer.
Sweet someday...
Not to paint the situation with too broad a brush... There were also a few absentee owners who, despite all, still treasured the land and its possibilities. They felt nothing but a kind regard for the place, admiring those who'd made the grand leap to backwoods living, and held wistful hopes its promising beginnings might yet resurrect. Some no doubt still entertained hopes of maybe moving here and joining their number once it finally pulled itself together...or even as-is and hoping for the best. And a few others still enjoyed their periodic camping retreats on lots located furthest from the main traffic arteries and the established residences, which were often found clustered along the few power lines and within a mile or two of the blacktop.
But such fond sentiments always faced gale-force headwinds of the all-is-futility, long-entrenched cynicism of other lot holders, those who felt hopelessly stuck with a sucker investment they'd been fool enough to sink hard-earned money into. And it seemed most owners -- jaded residents and disillusioned absentee owners alike -- held a callous contempt towards the fanciful Pollyanna notion that the place could turn itself around. Leastwise, not if it meant prying one more penny from wallet or purse. To them, it was obvious (in perhaps self-fulfilling prophesy) that there was zero hope for the outlandish basket case of a failed subdivision to ever redeem itself.
Many who wished the place well, but not at their additional expense, thought that surely some portion of their annual assessment fee could go towards funding whatever civic improvements community-minded residents thought would benefit the place. But the annual budget was invariably stretched to the breaking point over the high cost of maintaining sixty-six miles of fragile roads. Plus, the board repossessed parcels of defaulting owners that couldn't be resold readily, and their annual county property taxes were absorbed by the association, until finding a buyer in the super-soft market, which further ate into available funds. Then there were vandalized, damaged and stolen road signs needing frequent replacement (back when it was still done, and in a timely manner). And skyrocketing insurance rates. And thorny legal matters with potential lawsuits, requiring keeping a pricey attorney on retainer. And...
Disinterested association managers &
board president with conflicts of interest
As mentioned, the association had started shelling out for the annual salary of the professional association manager. Things had gotten far too complicated and time-consuming for volunteer board members to deal with without expert help. Most were not versed in legal matters enough to grasp the intricate procedures required to run the development according to Hoyle, especially once the state legislature in 1985 enacted the flurry of new regulations for California subdivisions, soon to be known as the Davis-Stirling Act.
It would add insult to injury when one of the salaried managers (the place has had two) -- whom residents naturally assumed would work for the good of the place, it being a nonprofit public benefit corporation after all -- himself brokered lot sales by working as a realty agent on the side. In itself, this was maybe no real issue. But then, in 2015, he joined the flurry of realtors hustling to actually sell lots to the flood of anarchistic pot growers then obviously intent on claiming the under-exploited place as their own for private gain. He, like many, seemed indifferent to the chaos and disruption the sales would unleash on the laid back, serene lifestyle that the Vista, at its best, had enjoyed for decades by its few hundred residents.
And while some, maybe even most, volunteer board presidents, themselves residents, had tried to keep the well-being of the residency in mind -- balanced with reasonable concerns of the sea of absentee parcel holders -- one would herself later on play a vital part in the full-tilt realty effort to move parcels to the incipient flood of rough-and-ready pot entrepreneurs. Her outfit sent out letters to every single parcel owner, inviting them to sell, knowing how many long felt stuck with unsellable lots (having pitched something along the line of "Believe it or not, there are actually people interested in Shasta Vista property!") and that they would pounce at the chance to finally unload the clunkers. (And, as would turn out, at a surprising profit.) She had always held that it was the right of each property owner to do with their lot whatever they wanted. "One can cut down every tree on their parcel if they want to", she'd opined at one board meeting. In her book, doing whatever one wanted on their lot trumped any consideration for the well-being and quality of life of the community as a whole. With such a mindset -- willing to lead the charge in pulling the rug out from under the place's long-established, fitfully tranquil air, just to make a buck -- long established residents were suddenly left feeling like expendable pawns on some realty market's chessboard.
Though the development was ostensibly a nonprofit public benefit corporation, there was so much blatantly for-profit, make-money-anyway-you-can-off-the-lame-ass-dead-in-the-water-parcels hustling going on by self-interested parties, it beggared belief. It made your average just-in-it-for-the-money, for-profit concern look like a piker in comparison.
No there there
Many residents had had low to no expectations going in; they'd accepted that there wasn't any more there, there. Nothing beyond the junipers and sagebrush and simple roads amid the mishmash of wildly varied dwellings. Maybe they were even relieved; it suited them fine. Some parties would just use the place as a temporary perch, a transition zone, ready to move on if and when something better opened up.
Many of those that the realm attracted indeed seemed to be far from your conventional sort. They'd moved here to get as far away from over-complicated, peace-eroding, over-concentrated urban forces as possible yet be not too far from town; they didn't mind a few inconveniences. As one late section 13 Pilar Road resident, then president of the Siskiyou Arts Council, said gleefully during a public radio interview, "We live out in the middle of nowhere and we love it!"
Those who had conformed to code requirements, or bought places that had, at least potentially possessed the peace of mind to enjoy them as law-abiding citizens. But even those who hadn't, who were hunkering down, hopefully under radar, seemed to feel they had the same inviolable right to enjoy their parcels any way they chose and not get hassled -- while at the same time naturally ignoring laws and ordinances they didn't approve of.
Handy place to perch
Thus it was that the Vista, an arrested de facto recreational subdivision, which had failed to segue into a recognized community beyond its fleeting early incarnation, for decades remained an embarrassment of mostly empty lots amid the thinnest scattering of approved residences, while nursing a growing ungovernable spirit.
The situation struck all sorts of refugees from urban life as making a dandy place to land: cheap and remote, but not too remote, with scads of undeveloped acreage all around. The code-compliant could enjoy simple stand-alone country living, while the non-compliant could often get away with not conforming to code or suffer singed feathers at worst. Both paid the mandatory annual dues (usually) and as a popular pastime demonized the property owners association board as the source of all evil. With a remarkable shortsightedness that living in the place seemed to foster, it was the fly in the ointment interfering with carefree country living.
The more cynical held the board setup was bogus, probably illegal. Corrupt as hell, anyhow. "Someone oughta sue", "Why I ever moved here...", "This place would be just fine if it weren't for...", "They can't do that, can they?", "This place is friggin' nuts!", ad infinitum. Unfounded rumors of corrupt board members dipping into the treasury were rife.
Though such gnarly energies weren't always evident, it could often feel that way. There were, in fact, welcome respites, pleasant lulls, when the dread fire-breathing beast of contention slumbered. During such times -- especially during gentle springs and balmy early summers -- a peaceful laid-back spirit prevailed over the land that, despite all, felt blessed with a rich tranquility. Polarized energies checkmated, grateful denizens relished the solitude living in such a secluded domain provided.
Such idyllic periods, alas, seldom seemed to last long.
Perennial joker in the deck during
the Intolerable Years:
mid 1970s through mid 1990s
While there was something to be said for the place making everyone feel like a king or queen of their own mini kingdom, their own little backwoods hideaway bought for a song, one had to keep tuning out the perennial joker in the deck: the endless battles over code compliance. It could make the less affluent instead feel more like oppressed serfs, living under the yoke of overlords who'd met the county's strict legal residency requirements and were determined to try enforcing them by any means necessary short of armed vigilantism. Sometimes they succeeded; other times they came off more like so many bumbling Barney Fifes.
This joker in the deck, like a rude Jack-in-the-box, kept popping up to put a crimp in the lives of countless non-complying dwellers during the Intolerable Years, which spanned roughly between the mid 1970s and mid 1990s. As said, domains furthest away from the blacktop often had so few others near that their inhabitants could easily imagine their digs being more like pioneer homesteads of yore rather than any dratted modern-day subdivision parcels subject to a slew of nit-picky, spirit-stifling rules and regulations. But even then, the latter reality would sooner or later usually assert itself to put a decided damper on one's day.
Some (certainly not all) board members and their cohorts of that period -- fondest hopes for the place having faded into oblivion and, consequently, minds bent into pretzels -- went on a mad drunk with the intoxicating absolute power being a board member seemed to confer. They ran amok like so many little T-Rexes. With barred teeth and razor claws, the uber law-and-order champions wielded a ruthless authority over the domain, or tried to; they were dead-set on heroically salvaging what they could of their Shangri-la rather than just stand by helplessly and watch it circling the drain.
In pursuing such desperate efforts, they made life hell for everyone.
Fast forward and board members, though still grumbling over all the rampant non-compliance going on ruining their property values and quality of life, seemed to gradually become more or less resigned to what finally appeared to be an unsolvable problem. Board meeting members and attendees, many mindful of the brief idyllic times of yore, at some point sank into a collective why-even-try, depressed mindset.
Perhaps it wasn't surprising that, even as the once iron authority started rusting away, inertia prevailed; residents still somehow felt that they couldn't do diddly-squat without first getting the seeming do-nothing but still all-mighty's board's approval -- and then grow old waiting for it. ("Matter tabled til next month (yawn); motion for adjournment?")
The same if one wanted to start a volunteer effort to try helping the woebegone place along.
Beleaguered crew of the foundering HMS Vista
One day at a monthly meeting held in then-president Bonnie Jolly's living room, the writer had volunteered to become the subdivision's unpaid custodian; I wanted to tackle the epidemic of road litter and windblown detritus that so often despoiled the endless miles of otherwise scenic wooded roadsides. They apparently seemed to think it was a good idea and voted me into the new position. But it was an unreal experience; it was almost as if they'd approved the post in their sleep. They didn't bother to address any of the details the position would require, like supplying trash bags or possible reimbursements for dump fees, or perhaps a nominal gas allowance stipend; nothing. (I hadn't thought to bring them up either.) So I quit my official post before I'd even started, knowing I needn't bother saying anything to anyone.
Their hearts simply weren't into such things. Burned out volunteering and used to receiving only grief for their efforts and depressed over the hopelessly sorry state of affairs in general and coasting on automatic pilot, they could only muster enough energy to cover the routine matters like road maintenance. (I'd continue gathering road litter informally, as did a few others who were likewise concerned.)
The way board members often seemed to so woodenly go through the motions, calling it in, other residents, knowing the beast was losing its teeth, began tackling things as they saw fit on their own, not seeking the board's permission. Like setting aright a road sign that had been struck and was precariously listing or fallen, or themselves repairing a stretch of road in front of one's place, rather than go through stupefyingly sluggish channels.
Apathy and a sense of hopelessness in the place in time became so chronic and entrenched, we were like a beleaguered crew aboard a foundering ship, lacking the will to do anything more than bail just enough water to keep from going clear under.
What rules?
Jumping back once again to the earlier, super-intolerant years... Despite a seemingly bonkers board throwing its weight around, on nearly constant red alert, remote circumstances had still somehow lent a tenuous assurance that, even then, one could do (or should be able to do) whatever the heck they wanted to on their own land. No uptight board -- lacking credibility and legal fining power and over time receiving less and less support and cooperation from county authorities -- could stop them, regardless of how much ruckus they might raise.
Private-property rights were sacrosanct, after all. The more independent-thinking dwellers blocked from mind the reality of being part of any external, uptight world's standard rules and regulations -- and especially any busybody board of meddling "directors." It didn't register as something needed in their realm; it was too invasive, too arbitrary, too self-defeating to the reason one moved here.
Nudist preserve
At the risk of overstating a point, the illusion of anything goes manifested in profound measure due to the overwhelming majority of parcel owners being detached investors who lived far away and rarely, if ever, visited. To actual dwellers, they seldom held more than an easily tuned out phantom presence. Inhabitants came to view the thousand-plus vacant, undeveloped, seemingly forever-unsellable parcels as a de facto permanent park commons. As a result, residents could feel like stewards over not only their own inviolate mini fiefdom of two to three acres, but oftentimes luxuriant buffer zones of dozens, even scores, of empty parcels that absentee owners had been thoughtful enough to provide them. It made one feel land-rich indeed. And made for conditions so isolated -- nobody anywhere near to say boo -- that certain, sometimes oppressive social norms, even deeply entrenched ones, might fade away over time.
Like mandatory dress.
The writer was one among a handful living in Vista's more remote reaches who for decades was surrounded by hundreds of such undeveloped, unfenced -- not even posted -- lots. One, if he or she had a mind to in nice weather, could, as the writer did and a select circle of bohemian-minded others did, stroll about the vast, uninhabited region not wearing a stitch, free to enjoy the exhilarating rush of intimate oneness with the elements that being liberated from clothes allowed. Oftentimes no vehicle might drive through for an entire week or more and almost no one else ever walked along the furthest back roads. Such a situation in time naturally inspired more than a few of your less clothes-minded denizens of the Vista to seasonally luxuriate in such freedom, being naked as jays all day long -- both on their own lots and while meandering about and exploring the surrounding quasi wilderness.
One obvious benefit of the Vista being such a vast, failed subdivision was that it became a nudist's paradise.
Who's minding the place?
Some residents beyond board members in contact with absentee owners might've vaguely sensed the latter's displeasure over how the place was doing. At times, it was truly a disheartening situation. One that often allowed firewood-selling tree poachers to raid absentees' unfenced lots at will. Sometimes parcels harbored actual squatters, and it let off-roaders tear through absentee owners' usually unposted parcels at will with zero concern for it being someone's private property. Though perhaps having no one to blame but themselves for having been dumb enough to buy into what proved to be such a colossal developmental misfire, it was easier to blame the residency and the mostly powerless board, who together might give the impression they didn't care diddly-squat about what was happening. (And, indeed, some, only trying to make the best of a bad situation for a while, actually didn't care -- some even participating in various lawless misdeeds themselves.)
Whether or not one sensed this subtle yet pernicious force at work, the absentees' combined ire over the sorry state of affairs was part and parcel of the overload of corrosive influences at work. It gnawed at one's peace of mind -- if only vaguely and on the unconscious level -- right along with the in-your-face, code compliant dwellers waging war on the non-compliant and dealing with the scarce-water situation. The huge absentee ownership -- which as a whole never mustered enough public-minded energy to help the place out of its dire straits by seeing fit to even vote for a basic community center -- was definitely one of the many straws that, heaped together, would break the camel's back.
Vigilante episodes
inside an intractable tract
In the early 2000s one of the few residents then furtively growing illicit cannabis for the underground recreational market -- long before changing California pot laws effectively decriminalized such once-nefarious doings -- one day found himself with some new neighbors. They appeared intent on doing the exact same thing he was. Wanting to avoid increasing the possibility of bringing unwanted attention to his own clandestine operation, he confronted them, persuading them to leave by threatening violence, in no uncertain terms, if they didn't.
An isolated few others were also discreetly growing small patches of pot outdoors by then (plus maybe one or two indoors, using grow lights), mostly for their own enjoyment, but maybe also to generate a bit of extra income. The place had a nice sunshiny climate for it (if not ideal soil) and was remote enough to pursue such cultivation without getting hassled if one kept the operation low-key.*
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* The Vista's early pot grows, limited as they were, of course helped set the stage for the later, scaled-up unsanctioned cultivation phenomenon, showing yet again how the remote place was an irresistible draw for all sorts, for all sorts of reasons.
California legalized medical marijuana in 1996, the first in the nation to do so. In the years preceding recreational pot legalization by voters in late 2016, which would dramatically change the rules, a few enterprising Vistan residents had pooled together scrip from the sea of registered, mostly-sham medical-marijuana 'patients' ("I can't sleep, Doc"..."Hey, slip me a Franklin and your troubles are over!"), entitling them to grow six plants a year for each one. In effect it had legally allowed them to grow up to 99 plants, thereby ostensibly supplying sixteen 'patients', while still technically keeping in compliance with state law and not triggering possible unwelcome federal interest by growing more.
After 2016, the 99-plant figure reportedly became the tacitly agreed-on limit, barring filed complaints, to the overwhelmed Siskiyou County authorities -- regardless of whether one had scrip paperwork or not. The six-plant limit the State specified for private individuals growing on their own residential premises, applying to all except licensed commercial operations, was openly ignored by the enterprising, unregulated growers who poured into the Vista and adjacent areas starting in 2015...along with, eventually, the 99-plant limit.
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Between a critical handful of the more defiant ignoring any and all rules and regulations interfering with doing whatever one wanted; a county seemingly throwing up its hands and abandoning the place as a hopeless mess, actually deleting its residency-code enforcer post for several critical years; and radically changing times in general -- between these, respect for the rule of law in the Vista got on some mighty shaky ground.
A few more examples will show how shaky.
As mentioned, some less than civic-minded entrepreneurial residents (as well as invading outsiders) routinely poached trees on empty lots and adjacent forestry land to cut up and sell for firewood. They felled scores of standing snags, sometimes even living trees, including some of the few tall pines that had long graced the region, leaving behind unsightly stumps and slash piles on once relatively pristine parcels. A forestry department rep once showed the writer a regional map in his office with a rash of what must have been over a thousand tiny red dots, each dot representing an illegal cut.
Another party set up a huge dog-rescue kennel on an unimproved, mostly treeless parcel in section 21; neighbors up to half mile away suffered enduring the endless barking of dozens of unhappily caged residents, often left baking in the sun, for over a year until the operation was finally shut down.
Bolder souls took the law into their own hands. When a resident towards the top of White Drive discovered that the surveyor had long ago made an error on his lot boundaries, he actually tried to close off the major through road running past his place. He built up a posted gate across it, despite it being ages too late to legally remedy the error. A young devil-may-care neighbor, Billy Bracken, who regularly used the road, didn't think twice on encountering the sudden barrier: he backed up his bad-boy truck, gunned the engine, and smashed through the gate. End of problem.
Yet another neighbor, on McClarty Road, furious over how certain parties routinely roared by his place twice a day and raised clouds of dust just to tick him off, one evening furtively dug a slanted trench across the road. That night they sped by as usual, promptly lost control, and ran into a tree. As they staggered back, shaken and furious, to confront him, he proved even more furious: he shot at them. He missed, but was arrested and tried. On another occasion, a resident on Cardinal Road saw red on learning how a scuzzy neighbor had tried hitting on his young teen daughter. Along with a wrecking crew he rounded up, he descended on the culprit's land late one night when they knew he was on vacation in county lockup; they vandalized and looted the place to a fare-thee-well. And when a Black man briefly occupied a vacant stone cottage (yet again on McLarty) and was discovered one night by its absentee owner, the latter held a shotgun on him until the sheriff deputy arrived, a half hour later.
Multiply the writer's knowledge of the goings in his own section alone times six, for the other sections with doubtless similar histories of edgy incidents happening over time, and there was indeed trouble in River City.
Obviously, the place's auspicious start during simpler times -- its relatively homogeneous, upbeat if convention-minded, law-abiding dwellers first sharing a euphoric bonhomie in camping, then settling on the land -- was ancient history, blasted to smithereens long ago, the quaint way of life of a misty bygone era.
Blame it on the mountain
One could maybe blame the energy of the mountain at least in part for Vista residents not working any better together. As mentioned, its natural force field or whatever energy one sensed it emanated, was thought by some to stimulate one's upper-body chakras. While initially revving the imagination, in time it could work to pull one meditatively inward. Bolstered by the development's founder who, as an enthusiastic fellow camper in the first years, championed the freedom to do whatever one wanted on their parcels (within the bounds of the law and existing norms of propriety, of course), the mountain's influence might've indeed worked to make one feel their lot was akin to Superman's impregnable Fortress of Solitude.
Long after the honeymoon camping period and the early homesteading years faded into memory and "casual" living scenes had become entrenched, people for a while actually competed to get voted onto the board. Some no doubt hoped to mellow the place, willing to turn a blind eye to the unenforceable county ordinances, so long as residents were otherwise peaceable, hoping to make the best of a bad situation. Others, bearing no such live-and-let-live inclinations, kept grinding the code enforcement ax, bound and determined to keep alive the by-then mostly toothless hardline campaign against unsanctioned dwellings, their dwellers, and pretty much anyone who even looked at them cross-eyed.
That relative community-active period passed soon enough. Fast-forward a decade and the place was so overwhelmed with openly non-compliant, what's-it-to-you? dwellers, there emerged an air of pronounced civic indifference: We're doing our own thing, bugger off; no one can do anything about it. The ungovernable atmosphere, aggravated by and reflecting the 1990's spiking national crime rate, was punctuated by the helpless wails of long-suffering compliant residents: “What’s happening to this place?”
Lost in a fog, we were a ship at sea without sail or rudder, aimlessly adrift. "Water, water, everywhere / nor any drop to drink."
Rambunctious Whitney Creek
In supreme irony, sometimes the residents on the water-parched lands had to scramble to keep water out. Snow melt could pour in from next door's seasonally-running Whitney Creek if it went on a rampage, flooding areas of the adjacent section 28's lowlands at Buck Horn Road or Rising Hill Road (depending on the sometime creek's changing course). After years of silt-laden or muddy floods washing away vulnerable roads and eroding parcels, the Association in the eighties sued the U.S. Forest Service for having allowed the course of the creek -- actually a seasonal snow-melt wash -- to be diverted towards the then-new subdivision by removing a dam built above State Highway 97 by people in the area who'd owned what later became Lake Shastina and no longer had need of it -- or wanted to deal with reversing the diversion themselves. (Then-emerging Lake Shastina obviously hadn't wanted to, either.)
Our association won the suit and the quarter-million dollar settlement went to fund creating the massive earthen berms kept up to this day along Buck Horn and what's left of Rising Hill to protect the place from future floods. Between annual bulldozing efforts to repair the latest erosion from the previous year's water action and the creek sometimes cutting new courses through the dried silt (or a massive mud flow causing the same) the waters have mostly been kept out of harm's way.*
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* But not always. In August 2022, part of the Buck Horn Road berm was again breached by water and mud flows. After prolonged record 100 degree weather generated extraordinary amounts of snow and glacier melt, possibly built up in an ice dam up mountain that at last burst, land was flooded by water and mud flow on both sides of the berm, prompting a Code Red evacuation alert.
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Bored writer joins the board
In the early 2010s, after over thirty years feeling little fondness for the board -- at times being demonized by some of its members in return, short fuses being common all around -- the writer actually went and joined it. At the time volunteering for the board had hit an all-time low. It was hard-pressed to fill more than three of its five seats, three being the minimum needed for a legal quorum to conduct essential business like approving road maintenance outlays.
They obviously weren't too picky about who volunteered just so long as one was a code-compliant resident or an absentee owner in good standing. If not rallying, the place could conceivably go into dread state receivership as a failed subdivision and face monumentally unpleasant and costly consequences. As I was one of only a few who even sporadically attended monthly meetings, one evening in 2012 I was roped into serving on it as secretary by then-president and fellow longtime resident Pam Simpson before I knew what had happened.
While it turned out the development's actually defaulting never posed an imminent threat, it did seem to at least flirt with such an ignominious fate now and then. It felt like no one gave three hoots in a holler what happened to the misbegotten place. Certainly few appreciated how various residents were volunteering their time to serve as members and meet the state's mandate to do what was needed to be done to keep alive some minimal level of functionality. For all their troubles, volunteers were routinely vilified as power-crazed busybodies interfering with other residents' would-be tranquility. (My non-compliant neighbor acquaintances instantly became more guarded around me once I joined, as if I'd possibly gone over to the dark side.)
With so many members -- resident and absentee alike -- routinely damning the board, or at least being supremely indifferent to it, all but its more determined and thick-skinned members soon burned out on serving, becoming overwhelmed, jaded, embittered and or discouraged in record time. Those who hung in could appear like charred remnants of their former selves. A few were like dogs with a bone at the monthly meetings, determined not to let go of the reins for fear no one else could or would do an informed job. One gent, who owned some eight parcels, always voted vehemently against increasing lot assessments, even with the budget hemorrhaging; the obvious conflict of interest was apparently never thought important enough to even bring up.
Indeed, from time to time the board seemed to attract would-be volunteers with private agendas up their sleeves. One appeared intent on sabotaging operations just to protect his own non-copacetic goings on. At the least, some only sought the dubious prestige and sense of empowerment that being a member might confer without having to do any actual work.
As the writer soon learned first-hand, the board's pressure-cooker meetings could easily undermine one's peace of mind. One had to be in full psychic armor, ready for battle if, say, an outraged resident or visiting owner attended, sitting there glaring like a ticking time bomb until given their three-minute window to vent his or her spleen. Or, more often, one was forced to endure soul-crushing boredom. And be made to do dirty work if told by the manager to, say, sign stacks of legal foreclosure papers on property owners who'd either given up on the place, were in dire financial straits, or both.
One struggled to rise above the sea of paperwork and dry formal meeting procedure suffered in the cramped, cold-fluorescent lit fire station backroom if hoping to ever accomplish anything one might be conceivably proud of. Spirits were often so subdued, we might've appeared to be in some clinical group depression. It was as if everyone felt the thankless grand futility of it all but plugged away anyhow out of a misguided sense of civic duty. With my replacement post on the board expiring at the next election. after having served eighteen months, my name was put on the ballet without anyone asking me if I even wanted to run. (Predictably, I was burned out by then and so declined to serve further, even though duly elected.)
Over time, the development now and then appeared to be maybe getting back on track (as much as any track existed) under the guidance of the more capable, on-the-ball and altruistic-minded board members. They scrambled to get the place back up to speed once tackling remedial catch-up chores. Then it'd derail all over again, due to the endless shuffle of new, sometimes less motivated and or knowledgeable volunteers coming on board the board. There was always a lot of slow on-the-job orientation and a steep learning curve. By the time new volunteers got a tenuous handle on things, they were usually burned out. And so the learning process began once again with other newbies from an ever-shrinking pool of willing resident volunteers in good standing.
All is futile...
born under a dark star?
No doubt like countless well-meaning board members before and after me, I'd hoped to somehow help turn the place around. The situation just seemed so ridiculously depressing, so needlessly downbeat, so absurdly all-is-futility-why-even-bother. Surely it couldn't take too much effort to reverse such a dispiriting downward spiral.
You'd've thunk.
But of course I struck out just like everyone else. While some of the newsletter features and editorial write-ups I penned seemed appreciated, it was too little too late to make a bit of difference in the long run. The beleaguered ship Vista had by then not only left the dock but sailed halfway around the world, hopelessly lost at sea. The die was cast, the dismal course set. Barring some miracle, it was wishful thinking to imagine that concerned board members could ever pull the place out of the quagmire it was stuck in.
We were dinosaurs floundering in a tar pit and lamenting our sad fate.
Though various mindful visitors over time often sensed the land's at times pronounced serenity -- some overnighters reported having the best dreams of their lives here -- cynics (not without some reason) came to dismiss the troubled realm out of hand: “No water, no trees, nothing but desert and rattlesnakes; it's a friggin' wasteland, I tell ya.” To them, it was just a sketchy substandard rural bedroom community; a hideout for hard-drinking loners, small-time growers and spaced-out nature freaks; maybe a few respectable, hardworking residents, hoping to play out an elusive dream of idyllic country living and obviously having picked the wrong location.
The way so many routinely slammed the place, one might've concluded it was born under a dark star, a wicked witch’s cauldron boiling over with gnarly contentious forces, any effort to avoid its sorrowful fate sheer folly.
Resistance was futile.
A bit of esoterica:
Vista's astrology and cardology
Those familiar with astrology might appreciate knowing the celestial forces at work the day the place legally came into being: November 3, 1965. This calendar date shared a birthday with TV's Rosanne Barr, football's Collin Kaepernick and actor Charles Bronson. Some might say the resulting early Scorpio, brooding, super-wound energies imprinted on the development at its birth guaranteed the place would always be a tad on the intense side.
Lightening the mix, Mars and Venus were loosely conjunct in nature-loving Sagittarius, along with having a compassionate, dreamy Pisces moon. But then, Jupiter was retrograde, potentially causing a struggle to find a meaningful direction to take. Saturn was also retrograde, and, according to Vedic astrologer Nidhi Trivedi, this placement tends "to instill a serious attitude towards life, emphasizing discipline and responsibility. The placement can lead to a strict or overly demanding nature, resulting in challenges related to authority and self-worth."
Then, related, there's cardology, or the study of planetary influences forming a unique DNA signature for each day of the year, symbolized by the corresponding playing card's identity (some days share the same card, but each has a unique variation of meaning). The Vista's 4 of diamonds birthday, according to the book Cards of Destiny by Sharon Jeffers, created an "innate restlessness, possible dissatisfaction with what one was doing," and could make one "...a dreamer who doesn't always allow dreams to become reality."
The last surely fit the Vista to a T. It was a dreamland, its denizens often unable to manifest their happy visions in waking mode.
Perfect storm
Somewhere along the way the once openly shared, carefree vacation land had reached a critical tipping point. Once past this point of no return, anarchistic-leaning residents became increasingly emboldened to do their own thing, lawful or not, while hundreds of absentee landholders filled with buyer remorse had little or no interest in the place except to cash out the clunkers the first chance they got. Most would-be residents had lost any inclination to build to code. One contractor who in later times actually appeared to have built a two-story house up to code, on Catherine Road, minus well or electrical hookup, deprived the county of conferring its official blessing. Why bother? The county had dropped its residential code enforcer position and a fully code-legal place wouldn't fetch enough return to justify the added expense required to bring in a deep well and extend power lines if deciding to sell for it being in such a squirrelly mishmash of a place.
Countless daunting factors holding the place back, piling up over the decades, would combine with changing external realities, which, taken together, appeared to be on course to maybe one day creating the perfect storm.
Circumstances were already letting any so inclined have a field day pursuing whatever dubious land uses they might conjure -- junkyards, dog kennels, meth labs -- for being on such remote, private dirt roads tucked away from all but the prying eyes of a few nosy neighbors who seemed powerless to do anything about things, anyway. No matter if such dubious land uses upset the peace and quiet the code-compliant had dropped anchor here for and built up decades of sweat equity establishing homesteads, or had bought places from those who did and paid accordingly. The place, long ago given up as a lost cause by the county and even its own residents, was the poster child for a failed rural development.
Meanwhile, more and more denizens of the wayward realm were belting out the rousing chorus of the old Cole Porter's tune, "Anything Goes".
Without any better harmonizing force, one with at least a semblance of pro-active community concern and respect for the reasonable rule of law, a disorderly spirit was gaining an outsize influence. It seemed the majority of less-vested residency were so used to the place being dysfunctional -- a quirky, cheap, low-key hideaway with a powerless board and unresponsive county authorities -- that they couldn't be bothered to read the writing on the wall. Or read it but felt nothing could be done.
The place was leaving the door wide open for yet even greater misadventures.
One didn't need the omniscience of 20-20 hindsight to realize that by the early teens two things had become abundantly clear: (1) The Vista was a rudderless ship, vulnerable to drifting into perilous straits, and (2) its residents either didn't give a flying leap or felt helpless to do anything to try preserving the (despite all) oftentimes relatively tranquil rural lifestyle that was by then dully taken for granted.
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The Vista thru Time
1965-2015
[part 6]
Knowing where the Vista was coming from could go a long way to understand where it went. Was the place's metaphorical foundation (as it were) only coming around full circle? First trailers set on sand. Then conventional homes built on rock. Then more trailers set on sand.
It's the water
Whatever happened or would happen, lack of water always played a major role. Klamath River County Estates (KRCE) landowner Will Jensen, in long ago reporting in his blog about an exhaustive search to find the ideal affordable rural home property with an inspiring Mt. Shasta view, noted, “No matter who we talked to we were warned away from Mt. Shasta Vista...we were told repeatedly that Mt. Shasta Vista was bad for wells.”
Wanting to remedy the chronic water shortage, in the early 2000s a few solution-minded residents would apply for a government grant to fund a proposed centralized water distribution system. It was rejected, deemed too much cost and effort to help too few.
The realm's need for dependable water was highlighted for being such arid high-desert land -- usually baking hot and bone dry in summer -- and further aggrivated for being a hydrologist-baffling volcanic terrain that often made hitting water through lava strata and voids touch and go and, even if successful, sometimes resulting in water undrinkable without treatment.
Once, an early owner couple drilling for water hit a lava tube. They felt a steady cool stream of air pouring out of the ground and, after sinking a well elsewhere, harnessed the chilly air with a fan and naturally air-conditioned their eventual home. (More on wells and water in part 7.)
Back to the ‘80s
By the mid 1980s, the Vista had grown to maybe between 150 and 200 residences, its dwellers of widely varying ambition and code compliance. Scattered over the nearly seven square miles, it was still a mere sprinkling; the development was yet worlds away from even beginning to be built out. Some inhabitants truly felt something akin to being land barons -- especially those on lands furthest from the blacktop.
It seemed that many owners were allergic to unpaved roads; they never learned to accept and respect the place's cinder surface thoroughfares as the honest country roads they were. Adverse to having to drive slow over them and get their nice clean vehicles all dusty and ruining the latest car wash, they rejected the notion of having to endure up to five miles over the sometimes narrow, winding cinder roadway to reach a property. A half mile of unpaved road was more than enough to suffer.
It seemed that the desire for seclusion was duly balanced against the desire for an easy in and easy out. One might've said such people were only flirting with country living. They struck a compromise, settling on lots a relatively short distance from the highway. A segment of dwellers seemed to dislike the roads so much that at one point they bandied about the wild notion of paving them all and covering the prohibitive cost by special assessments, which the sea of absentee lot owners would've then disproportionately shouldered. The idea obviously would've never gotten the needed two-thirds vote. But they really seemed to think that the cinder roads were the main thing holding the place back. Their heads were so stuck in city-centric ways that they couldn't appreciate how the place's lack of paved roads was probably the least of its problems.
In any event, with so many of the deemed less-desirable parcels scattered so deep in the hinterlands, there was, again, a grand buffer of some thousand empty parcels overall, which lent the more remote regions a profoundly tranquil, park-like ambiance for any willing to go the distance and adapt to the wild environment.
But it often felt like no matter how much pristine land one might (tenuously) enjoy, a foreboding undercurrent was forever lurking just below the surface. One that could seriously jam one’s peace of mind and ability to more than fitfully enjoy the oft-heralded joys of country living. Between a regional community that never accepted the place and the dead set resolve of code-compliant residents to battle the insufferable code ignorers dragging down the place's livability, desirability and market values, one was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Even if a resident was compliant, an almost palpable tension could fill the air. On the subtle it was like living in a crowded tenement, angry landlord pounding on the door for the rent.
This was one of the grand ironies of living in the Vista. Either you detached and became philosophical about it all or you found yourself perhaps over-identifying with artist Munch’s screamer.
It would drive more than a few to drink.
Missing word sank efforts
Around 2012, a long overdue effort was launched by a handful of the more civic-minded residents. A committee had been formed to try revising the hopelessly outdated CC&Rs. Not overhaul them outright, mind you, but at least tinker a bit around the edges, trying to make them at least a bit more relevant to current realities. After much slow sledding, a glitch in the progress report that was printed up and sent out to every owner promptly sank the effort. The pamphlet cover’s title was supposed to read: “Proposed Changes to Mt. Shasta Vista Bylaws." Somehow the all-critical first word Proposed was left out, making the changes sound like a done deal.
This of course prompted a barely peaceable pitchforks-and-torches crowd storming the next monthly board meeting. Residents who normally avoided meetings like the plague came out of the woodwork, convinced the board was maybe trying to stage some sort of coup.
The long and winding roads;
Whitney Creek revisited
While you had your own private parcel, the modest annual ‘road dues’ assessments were often much resented and frequently contested by residents not getting their own roads better maintained (if at all). Various absentee owners added to the chorus, claiming they could barely reach parcels located in more remote reaches; some roads would not be touched in years, some for over a decade. The most neglected stretches could develop deep dry pools of tire-grabbing, quicksand-like silt so bad that AAA tow trucks eventually refused to come out to rescue trapped members' vehicles, after once having gotten their own rig stuck in turn and having to call out a monster tow truck to rescue the rescuer.
It didn’t help matters any that our part-time neighbor, Whitney Creek, running along the border of section 28, sometimes got rambunctious as summer temperatures soared above 100 degree F. The product of the mountain's often heavy winter snow pack, its surging snow melt could cut new courses and eat through the earthen berms. It once actually put much of Section 28 under nine inches of water, forcing an evacuation and making regional TV news. Long-time resident and native Arkansan Bill Waterson hyucked for the camera, finding it amusing, perhaps because as a resident since the early seventies he knew the place's wayward talent for experiencing one disaster after another. The worst of the many floods over time until the massive earthen berm was built, it washed away some roads so thoroughly that the board finally abandoned them and bought up the parcels of those who could no longer reach their them short of driving a Hummer. They figured it was cheaper than having to keep rebuilding the periodically washed out but little used road stretches.
Three-fourths of Rising Hill Road, the southernmost road in the Vista, eventually vanished -- and the area was still vulnerable to flood. For ages, delivery people and first-timers, using an outdated map or relying on sometimes misleading Google Maps, got seriously confused, if not hopelessly stuck, looking for nonexistent roads. Also for roads that were no longer maintained. One time I caught up with a UPS driver who'd relied on an obsolete map showing a road connecting two sections by way of Country Road over a mile of abandoned hillside roadway, across BLM land. For a while the board had paid to maintain the road, but soon decided to abandon upkeep since it wasn't even the association's property. It soon became severely washed out over long stretches. The deliveryman had barely managed to traverse it, appearing amazed to have actually navigated the nearly impossible gauntlet without getting hopelessly stuck. Roads wiped out by creek floods also waylaid countless.
Finally, the Association -- decades after there was a crying need for them -- installed warning signs at the front of all the dead-end roads branching off Starling Road, and the earthen berm on Buck Horn Road discouraged use of the increasingly sketchy hillside shortcuts. (For a while it seemed mostly only thieves and "salvagers" used the road anymore, sneaking up into the higher section's back entrance in the dead of night to check out the pickings on what were deemed abandoned properties.)
Train wreck of a place
Vistan parcel holders were often by and large a frugal lot: bought the land cheap, moved in cheap, wanted to keep things cheap. They frequently harbored pronounced stand-alone tendencies. It could seem futile to try rallying for community awareness and cooperation in a place harboring such ornery, "leave me alone and we'll get along fine" attitudes. The socially-challenged situation was, as stressed, always compounded by the sea of absentee owners who'd detachedly bought parcels as speculative investments alone and came to regard their unsellable holdings as so many albatrosses hanging about their necks. And nothing more. The widespread disenchantment of lot owners, both resident and absent, was guaranteed to arrest any errant inclination one might've felt to try rescuing the wayward realm from its dire straits.
At some point, having no solid foundation on which to sustain and build a recognized community, it had been overwhelmed by the torrent of adverse circumstances...and simply shorted out. It became the arrested development that first-time visitors dropped their jaws over. Such a "left for dead", train wreck of a place, set amid an otherwise seemingly peaceful and charming backwoods, struck many as surreal. Like it was some long abandoned film set for a low budget Western, left to gather mothballs in outdoor storage. Or a place that had grown too big for its britches in trying to rise above its lowly station and was now paying the price for its rank impertinence.
The earliest settlers who'd built their full-on, code-approved homes knew it would take everyone following health and building regulations if the development was to endure and grow as a recognized community. But of course people swooped in on the cheap, some with an innocent "Hey, I'm just building a little vacation cabin here, no biggie" sentiment; others bearing a more defiant, "Whadarya goin' to do about it, har-har?" attitude, or a "My land; bugger off" stance. The firstcomers had realized with sinking hearts that their one-time idyllic law-abiding retirement hideaway faced imminent danger. Their only recourse laid in demanding that county authorities step in with rigorous, no-nonsense enforcement of the county health and building codes.
Anything short of that, the place was toast.
Still a nice place to live, kinda sorta
Over time, the realm -- having become a haphazard and unlikely mix of approved living structures, unsanctioned makeshift dwellings and derelict trailers, mobiles, RVs and tents -- stabilized, after a fashion. It became perhaps not too unlike a cake that had stopped rising in the oven, was removed, partially collapsed, then dried out and solidified. Though essentially left precariously between two opposing worlds, the Vista was de facto recycled, its residents making like hermit crabs, moving in among the abandoned rec land lot shells and houses "abandoned" by the previous, disenchanted owners. Many and sundry came to consider the development a nice place to live despite its litany of shortcomings and dubious pedigree. Sure, it was a failed subdivision, but, hey, it was our failed subdivision.
Living in the Vista was perhaps like wearing a comfy if disreputable-looking old pair of sneakers that had yet to develop any worrisome holes in the soles.
Such kind regard toward the place was not shared by most of the some eighty percent of property holders, as of 2010 over 1,200 owners who constituted the absentee membership, scattered over the nation; they were definitely not enjoying their land. Some, possibly hoping for a miraculous turnaround, clung to the title deeds for decades, gritting their teeth, doubling down and shelling out each year for upkeep on roads they never drove on lest their lots be repossessed -- as countless hundreds were over the years. The sentiment of such clueless owners of their repo-ed lots: "When I invested in the place, I didn't realize I'd have to keep investing in it." Some, it seemed, couldn't get rid of their lots without practically giving them away.
Many finally dumped them in dismay if not outright bitterness, taking the loss. They leaned towards having distinctly unkind thoughts towards the once-promising place that, alas, proved to be a glorious half-baked fantasy that never panned out.
This churn rate of lot ownership changing hands -- lending a pronounced sense of impermanence to the development gone haywire -- worked to create extra billing time for the salaried manager to process reams of legal paperwork, helping drive up association dues. And generated quick commissions for the profit-motivated realtors who kept offering the embarrassment of beleaguered, low-end lots as sleeper land steals to gullible, desperate, and expedient- or flip-minded buyers. It seemed they often didn't have to say a word; the subtly charming dirt-cheap lots, with their sweeping mountain views and deep seclusion, kept selling themselves.
Meanwhile, absentee parcel holders -- like the hapless characters in the play Waiting for Godot -- patiently stood by, hoping for values to rise so they could finally lose the clunkers at a decent profit or at least break even. Or the place improved itself to the point they might actually enjoy visiting, maybe build a shelter for a part-time retreat. Or, if they could afford it, construct a full-on code-approved home and leisurely sample Vista living before selling at a nice profit once the charm began wearing thin, as it almost invariably did, a pronounced disenchantment setting in. "You'll love it here"..."Then why are you leaving?"..."Er, well, ..."
Beginnings re-visited:
ten-cent parcels with million-dollar views
Earliest campers in the newly formed shared wonderland had savored it like fine wine. In spring, the realm delighted the senses with surprise splashes of lavender, purple, red, and yellow wildflowers. Rich lichen moss on aging and dead junipers and shaded rocks seemed magical, dazzling the eye with bright, near-phosphorescent green. After a good drenching rain, the pungent earthy scent of damp juniper and sagebrush smelled like perfume.
Abundant wildlife included deer, coyotes, jackrabbits and cottontails; birds of every kind; friendly, curious chipmunks; less-friendly polecats, porcupines and, yes, rattlesnakes (now mostly, if not entirely, gone); a rare mountain lion or other wildcats; tiny, endangered kangaroo rats with their impossibly long tails, hopping about at dusk...
The place's first vacationers returned home refreshed, anticipating next year’s visit to their new shared wilderness hideaway and all the improvements they’d work on during rendezvous with friends new and old. People were keen on the vision of building an idyllic rural community on the deliciously secluded lands.
Seldom heard: a discouraging word
The vacationers gathered at night to enjoy campfire get-togethers. Coyotes yipped up a storm in the distance, no doubt time-warping the more suggestible back to days of the Old West and inspiring spontaneous renditions of “Home on the Range” and "Red River Valley." Hearing a distant train rumbling by further the mountainside might've sparked a rousing rendition of "I've Been Working on the Railroad." They enjoyed their daytime potlucks and barbecues under the unfailing majesty of Mt. Shasta’s northern slopes. (The locale offered such staggering mountain views that the later-prominent City of Mt. Shasta photographer, Kevin Lahey, would race over to snap the spectacular, almost surreal, lenticular clouds that sometimes flew off it, or an impossibly huge one hovering over it like a visiting mothership from Venus.)
Judging by the writings in the association's twice-annual Vistascope newsletters, visitors shared in the euphoric waves of feelgoodness sweeping much of the planet during the rarefied purple-haze days of the late 1960s to early 1970s, along with, of course, all the gnarly uprisings, wars, race riots and protests.
...and the saucers flew by-y-y all night
Even if one was a hard-line Nam war hawk and hostile to the emerging counterculture with its disturbingly pronounced convention-rejecting, liberated ways, spirits ran high...no doubt aided and abetted by their own mind-altering drug of choice, alcohol, maybe a Valium or two.
But their group buzz might’ve been further heightened by something more, something quite extraordinary: unknowingly copping a contact high from parties aboard UFOs then frequently spotted darting about the mountain, briefly making national headlines. The embryonic community had possibly gained a rarefied cosmic super-charge from curious advanced beings from other worlds checking out the singing earthlings were so heartily enjoying on the mountain's sleepy side.
Dreamland
To any susceptible to the subtle charms of high desert woodlands, magnified for being under the mountain’s magic spell, it was a nature lover's paradise. One that the new parcel holders dutifully worked on to make nicer for all. The light-duty cinder roads were kept immaculately groomed by the membership’s workhorse of a road truck. Flowers were planted at highway entrances. The welcoming archway sign was lifted up into place with high hopes.
It’s said in metaphysical thinking that the imprint of earliest inhabitants of a land starts up a vibration it then forever after resonates with, no matter what might happen to it over time. If accepting this as maybe true... Prehistoric indigenous people had seasonally hunted game here but didn’t settle, probably over the lack of water. Beyond them and the first isolated white settlers on the land -- like Eli Barnum by Sheep Rock in the 1850s and, later, hunters and livestock grazers, including Gold Rush 49er Robert Martin whose descendant would sell the land -- it might be said that the first major, indelible human imprint on the land was made by none other than those modern-day settlers.
If so, their earliest years of extended camping and, soon, settling bestowed on the land an euphoric, industrious, decidedly conservative, somewhat topsy-turvy energy, a DNA signature that the land still resonates with, even though often buried below the surface.
Apart from such possible influences on the subtle plane, whenever mindful visitors unwound and tuned into the land they sensed a pronounced, soft, almost-otherworldly quality. In spots beyond earshot of highway wash, with no jets droning overhead or freight trains rumbling by in the distance, the land held such a profoundly dreamy quiet that one might actually sense the Earth breathing. Repeat visitors and residents alike, on adjusting to the all-enveloping silence, came to embrace it like a long-lost lover. (Explorers of Pluto Caves, just beyond one of the Vista's borders, might've experienced something of the same etheric quality and all-encompassing stillness.)
However, as said, the dreamy atmosphere came with a serious downside. Tenuous new residents, wowed by the lightly wooded parcels bought for a song, could get so caught up spinning fantasies that they never integrated being on the land with doing what was needed to be done to get things squared away with the powers that be and so allow their brainstorms to manifest. Instead, they often remained just so many pipe dreams that the region's rarefied energies so readily fostered.
Over time countless one-time owners had come and gone, happy bubbles burst after a few months or years of either ignoring or being ignorant of the sundry mundane regulatory realities fitfully being enforced by the county government. Ordinances that legally obligated would-be residents to first establish a well, septic, and power and only then get the green light to build...to steep, pricey standards. Out of the blue, a reality check shocked them awake like a bucketful of ice water over the head.
It was a predictable pattern. The serene enchanted land for sale cheap kept grabbing newbies psyched over the remote parcels' possibilities. It was like a 'Star Trek' TV episode in which our intrepid space explorers beam down to a strange new planet that at first appeared a wondrous paradise, then its fatal flaw is discovered and they're lucky to get away alive.
A fine place, by George: further speculations
on why things went so far south
L.A. developer George Collins had seemed no less smitten by the land's charms than the earlycomers he sold the lots to. As said, he joined in with them on vacations during the place's first, camping-only years. He became a super glue holding the place together, serving as father, midwife, cheerleader, first board president, fellow vacationer and daddy moneybags all in one. He pitched in with funds and resources to help the place along at every turn. “...I consider myself privileged to be a neighbor to each and every one of you,” he said in an early newsletter, showing real emotion, going on to wax poetic how the place was “...our home away from home, our frontier, our Shangri-la...there should be a constant flurry of barbecue parties, coffee klatches and just informal get-togethers all through the year.”
But alas, he'd begun what was destined to become a major developmental misfire, a stalled-out, bare-bones recreational subdivision that lacked any formal vision for development, or critical infrastructure to facilitate its growth by accepted standards. Circumstances made the raw land super-affordable but ultimately would cause endless headache and heartbreak for latter-day, would-be and actual residents and campers alike. But he was far from being your stereotypical slick disinterested land developer, one who just took the money and ran. He had nurtured the place along, wanting to see it flourish, at least as a collectively owned, primitive rural resort -- and maybe even more, just so long as it was understood he wasn't on the hook for further outlays to fund it; lot owners would have to pull that load themselves.
Let George do it
He was so central in the place's beginnings on so many levels that other property owners no doubt grew accustomed to leaving everything in his experienced hands. Perhaps on one level they'd become like land tenants, relying on their kind overlord to do whatever needed to be done: "Let George do it."
In essence he had become the place's benevolent master, doing all the heavy lifting and sparing others the bother. In turn, he was acknowledged as the main man by his willing and grateful subjects. As long as he stayed in the picture, few likely ever felt motivated or empowered to take on any major group responsibilities to grow the place according to their own lights. Up until the time people actually started building and moving onto their parcels, it was his baby.
When at some point he bowed out -- for exact reasons uncertain, but no doubt connected to new residents with serious skin in the game empowering themselves -- vacationers and new residents, their 'father' having abandoned them, were suddenly forced to scramble. Left to their own devices, they faced a steep learning curve in assuming responsibilities and grappling with ongoing issues, some of which they'd probably never known existed. One might've concluded that it was at this point that the good ship Vista first began to founder. Sure, it'd had its problems before, bothersome leaks requiring bailing efforts to keep on top of things for the ship to remain seaworthy. But Collins, a seasoned subdivision developer, had seemed to know -- up until the electrification brouhaha began unraveling the owners' tenuously unified efforts -- how to deal with whatever problems might crop up and quickly resolve them. Now property owners, forsaken by their captain, were left struggling to keep their bearings and steer a course under their own steam while at the same time bailing to stay afloat.
Alas, no critical mass
Apparently enough lot holders had appeared jazzed at the idea of building up an infrastructure-loaded, recognized community that Collins's hopes had risen after having first cautiously played it by ear. "If enough of you want to build up a community, I'm your man to get it done -- on your dime", might've been his attitude. But after the few dozen firstcomers settled, the compliant population base never grew to the critical-mass level of committed property owners needed to successfully keep the land a standard community, and not unravel with non-code residents moving in. Water was often so deep, power so pricey -- and, yet again, so many were increasingly disappointed speculators who were unwilling to sink one penny more into the place by special assessment for any reason whatsoever, its chances seemed iffy.
Especially after it became obvious it was only that tiny number who seemed keen on moving onto the land in the first place. It must've appeared they'd be throwing good money after bad in a boondoggle that would likely never amount to more than a sparsely settled, organizationally challenged, would-be community stranded amid a sea of empty, retreat-compromised lots. One too far out in the sticks to attract any attention beyond that of a few well-set retirees and their antithesis, younger land-hungry, would-be homesteaders living on a shoestring, plus maybe a few rural-friendly working folks who wouldn't mind commuting.
Beyond the power and light fiasco, Collins no doubt had begun to further lose heart -- and his grip on the situation -- as builders and would-be builders felt frustrated and testy over the lack of any easier water -- especially on realizing that people fifteen miles away could hit good water at seventy-five feet. Vistans would routinely have to drill down at least five times that, shelling out a fortune, and then, assuming they hit, maybe have to deal with arsenic and iron content.
It's said that it's easy to come and go but hard to stay. Lot owners moving onto the land knew they'd have to carry on under their own steam -- each supplying their own water, power and septic, all at great effort and expense. Collins's role and influence shrank as people per force began acting on their own. He'd maybe become something of a tiresome cheerleader by then. Owners were facing sudden, complex and costly challenges and lost confidence in his ability to continue steering the place along. Feeling hurt after all he'd done to birth and nurture the place, and seeing bitter divisions splitting the ranks along with an eroded regard for him as he lost control (maybe code violators had by then already started settling), he might've at last just said the hell with it...and his former blessing turned into a curse. Or, at the least, he copped a bittersweet "Hey, I wish you all the best of luck, but I'm outta here" attitude. He had more than fulfilled his legal financial obligations and now washed his hands of any further involvement with the place that he'd birthed and nurtured and held such high (if perhaps unrealistic) hopes for.
And so his and others' fading, happy vision for the Vista began its long fade into oblivion.
Something had happened between Collins and his one-time fellow vacationing lot owners, then emerging as independent, modern-day homesteaders, plus the countless absentee lot holders miffed at the electrification effort failing, that turned the wine into vinegar. Something, or a series of somethings, happened to change the ephemeral Shangri-la from idyllic rural retirement sweet spot into emerging bad dream.
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Hundred times cheaper
Vista’s raw parcels on a per-acre basis were at once ten times cheaper and ten times bigger than those of almost next door's exurb of Lake Shastina started a couple years later. That meant that for any land shopper not unduly concerned about its serious lack of infrastructure and relative remoteness, or the quirky haywire nature of the place, the Vista offered a deal literally a hundred times cheaper. But to others, those of the more conventional lifestyle and home-as-investment-first-and-last persuasion, it had no value at all once the lots' reason for being had gotten stuck between serving as recreational getaways and as residences. While the Vista first attracted an equally financially secure crowd as the second-home buyer group in Lake Shastina -- which developers courted with full-on infrastructure plus a man-made lake and golf course, and touted the relative closeness to town amenities -- the Vista's population base shifted so radically once enough building-code ignorers moved in that its brief cache as a happy, respectable rural village evaporated into thin air.
Trying to compare the two became like comparing apples to oranges. One was a full-fledged standard community, the other either only aspired to become one, or most of its less finicky denizens appeared to be okay with it just the way it was, warts and all.
Lookin' for a sign amid a maze of roads
The one thing the Vista long kept on top of was road signs, even if the initial tiny wooden ones had proved sorely wanting.
Road signs were of course crucial inside the endless sixty-six-mile maze. Even longtime residents like the writer sometimes got lost if hazarding off a habitual route and venturing into other sections. One moonless night, I was driving about and suddenly realized I had no idea where I was. Disoriented, I finally reached an intersection and spotted a modest stenciled 4X4 inch wooden road sign post. I climbed out and hopefully shone my flashlight on it, expecting to regain bearings with the help of my trusty tiny road map. But the painted lettering had faded to illegibility, done in by the elements, and I was still lost in a place I'd called home for decades.
The second generation signs were equally small, four-foot tall vertical painted steel affairs that over time rusted out. Delinquents would steal them -- as well as the current third generation, tall, rust-proof, reflective-green metal signs. Perhaps they felt that the latter's slick, citified appearance especially clashed with the place's rustic ambiance. Or they maybe wanted to make it harder for anyone to find their place if they didn't want to be found, leaving those unfamiliar with the roads getting so hopelessly disoriented that they'd switch gears to try to find their way out of the bewildering maze.
Place haunted by sheer
number of 'phantom' residents
Countless original lot holders snapped up the cheap parcels out of pure speculation -- plus maybe, for some, simply to gain bragging rights for owning a piece of the Golden State and experience the novelty of actually being a landowner -- hoping that eventual improvements like a centralized water supply and extended power lines might someday skyrocket parcel values.
Being the first kid on the block in the wider region's advent of rural subdivisions, the Vista might very well have served as a de facto test run for the many California realtors soon to develop the rural region. While others took note and proceeded to fine-tune their new babies with infrastructure and formal plans once the Vista's fast lot sales proved there was indeed a healthy market, the place remained largely unfocused. Beyond its initial primitive camp use, its sea of absentee lot holders were fuzzy over what the place was all about exactly -- but simply couldn't resist the price.
Perhaps that old saying of "What we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly" applied here.
Over time, properties traded hands like so many baseball cards at school recess. If each parcel on average changed ownership three times over the fifty years (probably an underestimate), the place up to 2015 experienced a rotating ownership of some 5,000 individuals spread throughout the nation. If you include two family members per parcel also getting involved, the number increased to 15,000 people, all of whom held some interest in the place.
Fifteen thousand people, the overwhelming number absentee owners, was guaranteed to keep the isolated place feel more than a little sketchy around the edges.
It might've struck some that the place had always been more of an abstract commercial aggregate of raw land commodities, solely to be speculated on like soy bean futures, than any organic development whose lot owners beyond a tiny number ever aspired to grow it into an actual home-sweet-home community. Massive speculation eclipsed any appreciation for the possible practical, useful value that the lots as a whole might possess.
After the original retiree clique had faded away and a wildly diverse population came to dominate, civic interest became remarkably iffy. Latter-day newcomers who plugged in and involved themselves quickly became aware of the realm's powerful psychic undertow and its veritable Mt. Everest of inertia. Such forces -- magnified by the board, the only organized group the place had, other than its volunteer fire department and an auxiliary fund raiser -- soon shattered one's dreams, fostering a sense of abject futility over the prospect of being able to ever fix anything.
The place was like a disastrous big budget movie misfire, in which everything goes wrong after a promising start, the creative vision never being realized.
Initially-involved newcomers gave up in keen disappointment or hastily dialed back the errant urges to get involved. The few undeterred, more thick-skinned and unwavering, could appear like so many Don Quixotes tilting at windmills.
Up until 2015's extraordinary sea change, absentee owners still outnumbered actual residents by roughly seven to one.
Tellingly, the Vista’s fiftieth anniversary, occurring as it did November of that critical year as the place was in the throes of being radically re-purposed, was an event noted by few, if any, besides the writer -- let alone celebrated. But such a milestone, occurring as it did when recreational pot was on the verge of being legalized in California, was, as will be explored later, very possibly influential, on the subtle, in sparking the subdivision's sudden turn into becoming a veritable pot growers' mecca.
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Reprise on Setting the Standard:
"You gotta permit for that?"
The first wave of firstcomers had been predominantly L.A. region retirees, flush with cash from selling their big-city homes and psyched at the prospect of becoming modern day pioneers and establishing a law-abiding tamed wilderness community. They must have nurtured hopes of the place blossoming as other retirees, plus maybe some decent working folks willing to kowtow to their way of running things, joined the trey-conservative group of oldsters, who were perhaps a bit drunk with power over their sudden liquid wealth. (With the through-the-roof, big-city home prices they cashed in on, they could afford to build a modest home here and still have a small fortune left over.) It would've been a place in which they, as founders, had established a comfortable living standard that others who were similarly financially secure would gladly conform to, no problem.
It might be hard to appreciate in the present rarefied, anything-goes times how health and building codes could've ever been so rigorously enforced on such remote lands. But they were. Or tried to be. And the first wave of owner builders, staunch, law-abiding citizens that they were, jumped through every single blasted hoop, never thinking not to, and fully expected everyone else wanting to live here to do the same.
The way they went so bonkers once parcel "squatters" became such an invasive force, the more observant might've concluded the entire situation smacked of supreme irony: A place whose owners started out championing as primitive rec properties had, once building their homes, come to view anyone still using them for such use with instant wariness. It was an incongruous turn of events, fraught with paradox, as the place turned 180 degrees, residents becoming so leery of campers that, if they lingered, they'd practically be viewed as wanted criminals, and they'd zealously track their permissible days left before they could throw them under the bus in righteous fury.
The place had started out as a collection of do-your-own-thing recreational lots, then unsuccessfully tried transforming into a residential community, then its reason for being got so murky it ended up supporting being neither.
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The Vista Through Time
1965-2015
[part 7]
Power to the people (some, anyhow)
In the early seventies, the handful of property owners keen on building their retirement homes here needed electricity fast, and power lines were nowhere near. Others maybe wanted electricity available for camp visits in their appliance-loaded trailers and RVs (though, perhaps unknown to them, authorities and the power company might never have allowed such temporary hook-ups).
But others, almost certainly the overwhelming majority, in pursuing the power fund had simply wanted to goose lot values and sellability by adding such basic infrastructure, making the lots' more attractive to those willing to build to code, even if only for a vacation cabin.
Enough seemed interested in making go juice available -- but not enough for a mandatory assessment -- that they'd decided to make a volunteer assessment to help spread the otherwise prohibitive cost of extending power out to remote parcels. Possibly Collins had this in mind all along, or at least did once seeing Lake Shastina taking off. The big question: Were there enough owners truly interested in the place as an incipient standard development (that is, conforming to code), enough to want to grow it into an actual community? Or were most content to let it remain a de facto seasonal primitive camp resort and cheap sleeper investment?
If the former was true, it wasn't an option but a given that the ubiquitous energy elixir so much of humanity was unabashedly hooked on needed to be brought in. If the latter was the case, bringing in power, while maybe goosing property values, would sound the death knell to the once-championed recreational use of the place, and the special assessment be a waste of money.
Mount Shasta's dream factory was once again at work. Ambition seemed ready to make a quantum leap as property owners, led by Collins, envisioned extending electrical lines to every last lot. Why not? The power company -- again, no doubt on the strength of developer Collins’s assurances he'd work to get everyone on board -- reportedly made a tentative commitment to extend power lines throughout. As speculated, possibly getting everyone committed, forking over further money as needed to keep the fund solvent, was a condition the power company had made in order to absorb or subsidize further line-extending costs. Maybe they had become wary once learning the assessment was only a volunteer one, showing a less than unified financial commitment by lot holders as a whole to what would doubtless prove a massive undertaking.
In any event, the Vista was reaching a critical turning point: If enough went along, it might be on its way to transforming into a bonefide community. Or at least have far better prospects of becoming one. It would have met one of a place's three crucial infrastructure needs, leaving adequate water supply and hygienic waste disposal means yet to be reckoned with. The way some envisioned things going, individual owners would continue being held responsible for generating these until the place grew enough to develop more systematic and centralized infrastructure.
The backwoods realm appeared on the verge of transforming...if only in a seemingly haphazard, scrambling to catch up, slapdash sort of way.
But nothing comes easy. While three in four, or some 1,200 parcel holders, chipped in -- either fired up over the prospect of building or thinking adding power would boost parcel values -- a quarter of the membership rebelled; some four hundred lot owners flat-out refused to chip in. This, despite the membership newsletter's pleaful pitch from Collins in the newsletter that began, "I know you each bought a lot out in the middle of nowhere that you could do with whatever you damn well please with it, but...", going on to try convincing the hold-outs to reconsider.
To no avail.
It seems that many who actually visited their parcels had been all hunky dory with enjoying the primitive parcels just the way they were, thank you very much. They'd relished roughing it on their own bit of wilderness. They felt adding unsightly power and phone lines, with their dead-tree, creosote-soaked poles, would ruin things, mar the realm's magical, semi-pristine charm. They'd bought primitive parcels cheap for simple camp vacation use, never intending to do anything with them beyond, at most, roughing-in a driveway and building a stone campfire ring, fashioning an outhouse if really ambitious.
The whole idea of the place as they came to see it was to serve as a getaway from the complexities of modern city living -- including electrical dependency and telephones (this was of course decades before the advent of cell phones and solar power) -- and get back to basics, not drag in the buggers. Push the reset button and tranquilly recharge amid the primitive realm's restorative properties. Bringing in electricity and extending phone lines would only defeat the purpose. Probably those leaning this way had deemed the place so remote that further development had appeared unlikely and so they'd come to hope that their parcels would permanently serve as private refuges over time.
Even though the lots had been zoned from the start for single residency occupancy by the county, providing potential avenue at least to building out a living community, it must've appeared to many of those declining to chip in that speculation fever was out of control and unrealistic. People were betting on robust growth like in Lake Shastina, when it was only a tiny minority of lot holders who appeared keen on building up an isolated fringe community for themselves, their efforts bolstered by the countless detached lot owners blindly hoping to goose lot values for others to build on (but not them, are you kidding?).
Too late, they realized there were no others.
Sea of disinterested speculators
It's possible some of those refusing to chip in had themselves been disinterested investors and speculators. They'd already soured on the place they'd somehow managed to get themselves tangled in against their better judgement. Property values were failing to increase as expected. The anticipated making of easy money was proving to be a cruel mirage. And now they were asked to sink more money into the apparent boondoggle? No way. The place was bearing the obvious earmarks of being a money pit.
It'd been easy for the cynically minded to jump to the conclusion that it was a select few parcel owners, psyched on making the leap and building new homes, who had selfishly attempted to get everyone else to go along with the fund just to minimize their own construction costs. The minuscule number had seemed to be trying to turn the place into a whole new critter, one that would, over time, doubtless require more, probably bigger -- maybe even mandatory -- special assessments...regardless of whether or not a critical saturation level of support, needed to successfully grow the place out, was ever reached.
They were, quite understandably, loathe to sink another blessed cent in it. Some might've reasoned getting power to every lot in itself couldn't appreciably increase the parcels' market values, due to the remaining iffy water situation and the at times problematic waste-disposal matter. Their possible further thinking: Not enough would ever want to live out in the middle of nowhere, so far from accustomed city conveniences, beyond a few kooky retirees who, it appeared, were wanting to leave the whole blooming world behind. And now they had the unmitigated gall to try snookering the other thousand parcel owners into subsidizing their costs?
A place no longer dedicated to recreational use, yet apparently likely to fail ever getting enough interest to build a regular community, had become desirable to neither interest.
The misbegotten outland was left twisting in the wind.
Sorry, out of luck, schmuck
The power and light fund turned out to be a flash in the pan: first come, first served, good 'til gone. It was gone fast. The couple dozen parcel owners went for it -- jazzed at the idea of living in such splendid seclusion...or building structures for others to get enthused about after having briefly enjoyed them before the novelty of Vista living wore off and they sold to others and made far juicier profits. The power company, initially hoping for a flood of new power-guzzling customers moving onto the parcels and building out the place, soon enough backed out of their tenuous commitment. They'd been discouraged, anyhow, by the frequent drill bit-shattering lava rock strata encountered, requiring expensive replacements. (A similar problem was no doubt experienced by various owners trying to excavate workable conventional septic systems on rocky and or sloping parcels.)
By the time the tide turned and the ambitious plan fell through, the power company, displaying an initial good-faith commitment, had already planted, wired, and connected to the grid tall street lamps at all five highway entrances. They'd perhaps still be shining away at night today but for the beacons -- which gave off an eerie cold bluish glow -- continually being shot out by rowdy locals. No doubt their tribe was still fulminating over the subdivision existing at all. They must've taken especially keen delight in being able to sabotage the place without even having to leave the blacktop. After a few rounds of such target practice and the power company's repeated repairs, the latter finally gave up and removed the street lamps. The five highway entrances were once again swallowed in darkness after nightfall.
This perhaps shows better than anything how deeply locals' bitterness ran towards the upstart development that had dared to try taking over their longtime stomping grounds; they'd cast one powerful evil eye indeed on the place.
A vicious circle went round and round
As already related, only about ten to fifteen percent of the 1,641 parcels ever got connected to power. Some who contributed to the fund doubtless had made tenuous plans of building sometime down the road. They were so distraught by the fund being gobbled up by the earliest builders -- and the power company possibly jacking up prices of any further line extensions -- that they sold their lots, or tried to, in dismay if not outright disgust and spitting-nails rage. Some of the less informed who'd chipped in had probably kept their lots thinking to build sometime and then lost it when they realized they'd been left out in the cold; when ready to build they were told that the fund was dry and then the power company quoted them a shocking five-figure figure.
Many couldn't help but feel that a handful of fellow lot buyers had somehow or other snookered them and managed to rob them blind, and or the power company had reneged on its commitment through a bait-and-switch tactic. The eventual firstcomers, wired to Vista's developments, had known the fund would only cover line-extension costs to a limited number of lots. (By 2024, the extension cost was over $53,000 a mile, or $10. a foot; unknown what it was at the time.) Being new retirees who had the means and desire to re-settle, they'd moved fast, maybe having gotten inside skinny on extension rates about to skyrocket, and so hastily tapped the funds dry. The limited-fund situation had definitely favored the quick and the bold.
So it was that lot owners had failed to get on the same page at a critical moment. Instead, they had a grand falling out, one that set the stage for the far greater and gnarlier contention to erupt years later over ''illegal" residents.
It was funny in a way, viewed from the perspective of the grand tragi-comic human drama that one can either cry about or laugh over (or both by turn). Earliest campers and residents had become the bad guys to the locals who resented the land takeover; then those who drained the power fund became the bad guys to the other lot owners who'd taken the land away from the locals; then those who ignored the building codes became the bad guys to those who'd hogged the power fund away from those who'd taken the land away the locals; then unsanctioned commercial pot growers became the bad guys to the code-legal residents who'd hogged the power fund away from those who'd taken the land away from the locals; then the few residents who didn't sell and move on who suspiciously weren't growing pot (why else be here?) became the bad guys to the growers who... The vicious circle kept going round and round. (And this of course doesn't even include the pioneer white settlers who'd crowded the land away for use by longtime seasonally visiting Native Americans.)
Place failed to catch the solar-electric wave
Later, the place missed a sure bet not embracing solar electricity. What with the place's enviable banana-belt micro-climate, advancing solar technology and, in time, the cost of panel costs plummeting some eightfold, it seemed the perfect way to create needed go juice. It could be so sunshiny on some March days, one might be enjoying soaking up the rays while in Weed, fifteen miles away, hunched-over snow shovelers were still dreaming of spring.
The first solar electric system in the Vista was installed by 1970s' legal resident Brian Green, late co-founding photographer for Homepower magazine, which in time became the premier global go-to resource guide for creating alternate-energy home systems for off-grid do-it-yourselfers, long before big industry got involved.*
In contrast to the Vista, the McCloud region’s Shasta Forest subdivision was even further off the grid, yet its lot owners, code-compliant, embraced solar full tilt as an affordable -- not to mention environmentally friendly -- solution to supplying power needs for similarly remote residences.
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*While the later owner of Brian Green's home sadly lost the place to the Lava Fire of 2021, one thing miraculously survived unscathed: the latest bank of solar panels, safely perched high on its metal stand in a clearing amid the devastation, looking for all the world like nothing at all was amiss.
The writer in 1989 became one of only two Vista residents to embrace solar. In my case, it was sunshine or bust -- no backup generator -- which even now powers this online book's sporadic reworking. For anyone curious, a 1992 HomePower story on my modest system was featured in issue #30 as an example of a small set-up, showing that one didn't have to spend a lot to create an off-grid system IF content to have just a few basic electrical amenities like lighting, home entertainment and computer, then go with alternate power sources for other needs, like wood heat and propane for cooking and refrigeration. (Homepower ceased publication November 2018, after alternate energy went mainstream, but its entire archives are available to download for free with simple sign-up at homepower.com.)
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Well, well
As related earlier, developer Collins and the early group of owner volunteers had gotten together and established an informal, de facto community well. They constructed a huge holding tank and supplied an enormous overhead valve, which all Vista lot owners settling were then welcome to use by filling up with the community water truck until their own wells were in. A garden spigot was also provided to fill containers for camping visits. When the truck was later switched to fire use only, those with prohibitively deep water tables -- mostly in section 23, where 700 foot or deeper wells were required -- still found getting wells problematic. (One, ironically named Waterson, had three costly drilling misses.) Affected parties formed Property Owners Without Water, or POWW, a perhaps apropos acronym, given the place's testy social climate, and got another water truck together, which, last known, still sits as a relic on the late Waterson's Meadow Road corner lot.
Closing down the quasi community well
In 1980, it came to light at the county health department on the wings of steeper California water-use laws that the unofficial, never officially sanctioned community well was technically illegal. Plus the water truck, as it wasn't certified to deliver potable water. Then-department head Dr. Bayuk promptly capped the 26-resident club membership with an iron fist. He told us at the specially called meeting held at then-board president John Shelton's house on McLarty Road that since he held discretionary powers to allow a code variance, he'd let current POWW members -- but only POWW members -- continue drawing from the well and haul water to their homes.
This consideration was given only in light of so many respectable members having sold their former homes and built in the Vista on the strength of realtors’ assurances that there was a community well, so one needn’t bring in a well before building if so opting. It seems the health department took pity on them (or maybe wanted to avoid a lawsuit against the county if he tried shutting off the long-established well use to everyone). The county building department went along with the variance, issuing building permits to any well-less parcel holders who were POWW members and then expected them to conform to all other regulations.
He insisted that every other lot holder henceforth had to drill an approved well before they could get a building permit, and so in time gain the legal right to live on their properties. That is, for more than thirty days a year, without being made to feel like outlaws for overstaying welcomes by the ever-vigilant busybodies forever bent on trying to keep the rabble out and giving a hotfoot to those who'd managed to sneak in. He envisioned the POWW memberships -- nontransferable to any subsequent home buyer -- fading away over time as people got wells in, or their properties were sold to new owners, who'd then be expected to drill an approved well before themselves being allowed to move in.
But here's the thing: we were on the honor system to comply. And inertia -- ridiculously strong in Vista's dreamy manana land -- reigned supreme. A way of living had long been established. Some who were otherwise compliant, rather than spring for a well, resigned themselves to keep on hauling water as the price one paid for living here affordably. And non-compliant dwellers hunkering down hopefully below the radar of snoopy neighbors and the powers that be kept filling up at the well, as usual. Residents wanted to avoid spending a fortune (assuming they could afford to) on drilling efforts that might not hit water, or good water, or enough water, plus the often-steep expense of getting electricity extended to power the pump.
As a result, while POWW membership's water-hauling rights were technically nontransferable, the regulation was seldom -- if ever -- enforced. It became yet another of man's myriad rules and policies ignored like it didn't exist.
Decades later, there were still over a half dozen otherwise code-legal homes in one section alone for which water hauling rights had technically been voided ages ago through ownership transfers, yet the current owners were still merrily hauling away. The county apparently didn't feel a need to mess with homes once they'd passed final inspection, the code enforcers' job being done as far as they were concerned. Never told anything differently, new homeowners assumed that the water hauling rights were transferable.
Unfortunately, this lent the impression to prospective new residents that one needn't bring in a well before applying for a building permit. It seemed that you could build first, then sometime down the road try for a well at your own convenience -- or not. This misunderstanding was destined to further baffle many future would-be residents: "Lots of homes don't have wells, but they got building permits; why can't I?"
While Dr. Bayuk had cautioned Vista board members to forbid anyone from using the well beyond POWW’s now-closed membership, efforts to restrict access of course proved sketchy to none. Obviously no one wanted to volunteer for guard duty, and fencing off and padlocking access was likely seen as either unfeasible, impractical, or more work and expense than anyone felt it their civic duty to mess with.
As time went by, ever-changing board members apparently either lost track of the county's well-use stipulation or turned a blind eye to it along with the county. Perhaps some felt the well symbolized the one thing property owners had successfully worked on together towards forging an actual, by-gosh community. Amid all the sorrowful confusion and contention that befell the place, the well had served as an enduring reminder of its once-promising prospects and residents working together for the common good of the place.
Hey, it comes with the property
Fast-forward decades and things were still out of control over well use. Residents living on the cheap, never intending to drill, kept tapping it. Again, they'd vaguely assumed it was a permanent water-rights amenity, available to all lot holders. One neighbor on Placone Road made daily hot-summer water runs for his teeming menagerie of thirsty livestock in an ancient Cadillac, backseat removed and crammed full, along with the trunk, with lidded five-gallon buckets and Jerry cans.
Some reportedly even copped showers there. Risking a quick shower in full view of the then-infrequent traffic going by sixty feet from the well was, no doubt, felt worth it for the chance to luxuriate in a fast cool down and rehydration on an tropically hot day. Since, as mentioned, some freer-minded dwellers during nice weather often went about with few if any clothes (albeit mostly in the privacy of their own secluded properties), this maybe wasn't so shocking as it might've seemed; the Vista seemed to be such a natural rarefied spot that in another time and circumstance it might've made one dandy nudist camp.
Finally, Vista board members, led by then-president George Gosting, were royally fed up; they were fearful of getting fined by the state -- or sued by the membership. Well-owning residents were livid over their annual dues going to replace the pump and cover the monthly power bills; they felt they were enabling -- and subsidizing -- rank code noncompliance. So the board came up with a simple solution: get rid of the bugger. They hastily sold it outright, with no discussion with or prior notice to association members. Done deal, end of story. Except for the unbridled fury of countless well-less, mostly non-compliant residents suddenly left high and dry.
And they got sued anyhow, by an irate section 23 couple, Alex and Debbie Blume, who had an otherwise code-approved but well-less modular dwelling on Stewart Road that had been originally owned by a POWW-member family, the Millers. The suit pressed some sort of far-fetched racketeering charges. They'd likely leaned on the erroneous assumption that their home had indeed come with water-hauling rights to the well. Alas, they quickly lost the case and the lawyer, for his trouble, got an almost new, convertible Cadillac signed over as part payment.
“It’s all a big scam, I tell ya…”
Between earlier, fitfully enforced legal-residency codes and the demise of the longtime community well, it must've seemed to non-compliant dwellers, suddenly told to get a well or else, that a draconian building moratorium had been clamped on the place. Of course it was all standard procedure to gain legal residency anywhere in California. But our place had always felt exceptional somehow...perhaps for having such difficult water and for being in such remote hinterlands -- and for being under Mt. Shasta's enchantment spell, with its almost otherworldly emanations.
For the Vista was indeed a dreamland, pure and simple. Somehow it just felt beyond the pale of the mundane world with all its sundry nit-picky rules and regulations. It was a realm unto itself, operating on its own frequency, penciling in rules as current residents saw fit...and, even then, only suggestions.
As a result, various land-hungry buyers on a shoestring, lured by the bargain lands and failing to exercise due diligence, felt majorly scammed when at some point they got hassled by irate residents and the county and told they couldn’t stay on their properties more than thirty days a year before first doing this, that, and the other thing. They’d accuse the Association board, management and realtors of somehow all being in cahoots, each passing the buck, no one willing to give the straight of things. To a suspicious mind not able or willing to understand and deal with the often unreasonable, even outrageous, ways of the world, it might've indeed appeared that they were all slyly working together to churn the problematic, marginal properties for quick gain, all the while keeping rigid control over things. Greedy forces seemed to be shamelessly preying on people's desire to own their own land, all too aware how many couldn't even begin to afford to meet legal residency requirements, short of winning a lottery or some rich old aunt dying. But hey, it was always buyer beware.
The unending cycle, as uninformed parcel holders saw it: a lot was sold after the realtor downplayed the legal problems of residing on it as-is, maybe offering a wink as if to say the rules often went unenforced; then the purchaser, disillusioned once getting roused by angry compliant neighbors, the board, and or county authorities, quit paying annual POA assessment in protest; then the lot was foreclosed on and the Association, repossessing it, re-listed it, and realtors waited for next sucker to come along.
In later times, many buyers obviously did know the score but didn’t care. In a new era with a radically different social climate and sketchy building code enforcement, they were game to join Vista’s growing non-compliant-and-proud denizens. Again, they'd been emboldened after the county axed its residential-code enforcer position during the critical five year period starting with the Great Recession of 2008-09. By the time the position was brought back, it seemed to lack the will to resume enforcing residency requirements -- leastwise, in the Vista. Clearly, the county had dismissed the Vista as a hopeless mess, best ignored.*
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* The writer attended the county board-of-supervisors meeting in which the position was finally re-funded, in the mid-teens. I was struck by their reluctance to act, how remotely detached they appeared to be to the significance that the regulatory role played for tax-paying residents who wanted peace of mind at their home front by assuring a certain standard of living in their neighborhoods was maintained.
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Such a situation easily lent the impression that most anything went in the far-removed high desert woodlands. While it was indeed always Buyer Beware, you’d think your more sporting realtors might’ve at least posted this sober reminder over their doorways.
People with enough resources to pay maybe $30,000 or more to put in a well and perhaps half again as much more to get power extended, had enough to buy land -- and more than any piddly 2½ acres -- with easier water access and unencumbered by the endless squabbling among disaffected neighbors. Why would anyone spend so much to buy into such a discombobulated and sub-standard place?
Cheap land with million-dollar views could only go so far, after all.
Plenty of room left in Hotel California:
Early trouble in River City, revisited
As related, most if not all of Shasta Vista’s founding families appeared to have known each other from down south or had met during the annual summer camp vacation rendezvouses. Mostly retirement-age couples flush with cash, they could easily afford to build full-on legal residences and so become instant lords and ladies of the fledgling remote backwoods realm. The territorial imperative being strong, they aimed to grow the one-time camp lands into their own vision of an ideal de facto rural retirement hideaway -- and let the chips fall where they may. Too bad if it disappointed or angered those who'd bought parcels only for camp retreats. Or wanted to build but waited too long to tap the power and light fund; you snooze, you lose. Or investors became stuck with ungainly white elephant properties in a market so sleepy it bordered on catatonic.
Theirs was a distinct culture. The alphas of the group had a pronounced buttoned down, breezily urbane SoCal sensibility -- and a full-bore Law-and-Order mindset. One that some might've viewed as a tad out of place at the top of more freewheeling northern California (even allowing for being in a conservative rural part of it). It struck the more impressionable that a L.A. culture had somehow been surreally transplanted, fully intact, onto the top of the state's wild and woolly hinterlands.
In ways that counted, the Vista became their place. Their tight-wound influence lingered for decades, long after their one-time exclusive Shangri-la had been largely taken over by the rabble. It would continue shaping the development's social climate and collective mindset through the mostly-futile efforts to salvage what they could of their one-time paradise. Or at least arrest further degradation.
The modern-day pioneers felt such angst seeing their place lose its brief legitimate-community status once the flood of non-compliant invaded that, gone bonkers, the board scrambled and self-appointed duties expanded to include blowing the whistle to the county over any and all unapproved construction or over-long camp visits brought to their notice by bloodhound cohorts who combed the endless backroads as if in search of escaped convicts.
Early in the code-enforcement battle and desperate to try preserving their clearly endangered retirement haven, they had rung code enforcers' phones off the hook. Board members demanded county authorities hold the latest-discovered scofflaw's feet to the fire for having so blatantly tried to invade their respectably law-abiding domain on the cheap -- especially those with an infuriatingly taunting, "hee-hee-whadaryagointodoaboudit?" attitude that drove blood pressures through the roof.
Bottomless cup of trouble
If enforcers didn’t do their job and the non-compliant got away with it, it would've amounted to selective enforcement, possible grounds for a lawsuit against the county. And so for many years the stretched-thin code enforcers had dutifully obliged, trying their damnedest to stamp out the scourge on the land.
At some point, though, they gave up. They'd ground their teeth to the gums dealing with the perennial problem child with its relatively slim tax-generating base. One whose situation, no matter how much they tried getting a handle on it, appeared to be one bottomless cup of trouble. It was like a boat springing new leaks faster than one could plug existing ones; bailing seemed futile.
Of course, this seeming shirking of public duty had been deemed unacceptable to the heavily invested residents. Gone around the bend, they clung to the belief that rigid enforcement of law and order was the one and only means of protecting their community. But in seeming denial of the insurmountable challenge, the population of brazen code ignorers growing like hydra heads, their volunteer search parties continued blitzing the land, combing the giant maze of roads, determined to run to earth anyone who dared to be in the Vista if so blatantly ignoring the health and building codes and statutes thought etched in stone.
With their Whack-a-Mole efforts in overdrive, posse members stopped even trying to talk to the culprits and point out the error of their ways; operations went covert. They'd maybe tried earlier, some no doubt in an imperious manner, then got huffy when told what they could do with their rules and regulations. Realizing they were dealing with shameless, possibly violent, scofflaws, they began driving by furtively, stopping just long enough to scope the scene from the road and ascertain the lot's exact location, then get the parcel assessment number from the master map index and call in a formal complaint -- for every last minutiae of intolerable noncompliance their zealous efforts had brought to the light of day.
Sub-zero tolerance
It was for such scorched-earth campaigning that the unkind moniker of "the gestapo" was soon bestowed on the board of directors by the Vista's more live-and-let-live residents. Some had themselves gone through the compliance wringer or bought from those who did; they knew how unreasonably steep and expensive code demands were to anyone wanting to live in the country and simplify their lives if on a modest income. They were stunned and dismayed that such a ugly zero-tolerance attitude had erupted; playing such ruthless hardball somehow just didn't seem to go with living in the would-be tranquil realm.
Even though the place had derailed remarkably from the conventional person's viewpoint, people must've thought there surely had to be some better way to resolve matters. Maybe not, though. Not short of changing legal-residency regulations or suing the county for selective non-enforcement. Maybe it was just the way the place was, through a cascading series of unfortunate events, its residents locked into being forever at odds with each other and expecting country officials to constantly referee.
In time the situation had become so far gone, one might've thought that the only thing left for the twisted-into-knots, compliant residents to do was to face facts and accept that their one-time paradise was history. That, shockingly, the system they'd depended on and supported all their lives had failed them miserably. But that would've been too painful, so they lived in denial. As dubious consolation, they took a certain grim satisfaction in making things as thoroughly unpleasant as possible for every miscreant who dared to crash their party -- even long after the party was but a fading memory.
Driving around the deep hinterlands of neighboring Section 13 in the nineties, the writer one day met a high-spirited man and his very pregnant partner at the front of their remote parcel on Bounty Road. He'd just thrown up a tiny makeshift two-story cracker-box palace of 2 X 4's and press-board: instant home. A goat or two grazed contentedly on nearby brush. I returned with a sense of foreboding a month or two later. Sure enough, they were long gone and their shelter bulldozed to the ground, looking as though it'd been hit by a tornado.
It was far from an isolated incident.
One might've said it was people's own dumb fault for not doing more research on the way things were. But some knew the score but rolled the dice anyhow, thinking it was such cheap land that it was worth a shot to try end-running the system.
Bottom line: the fondest dreams of many would-be country dwellers of cultivating simple, affordable backwoods living here were obliterated during the Vista’s Intolerable Years. Here and there half-completed structures of varying ambition and construction levels stood forlorn, mute witnesses to their own disaster, abandoned and radioactive from code-violation busts, or builders having run out of cash, and or willingness to comply. In time many got picked off by furtive lumber 'recyclers'. "Hey, it's just going to waste; I'm doing a service, doncha know." Such people considered any parcel fair game that appeared more abandoned than inhabited, there being no recent vehicle tracks at the entrance and vehicles on the property.
Thus, the place's seemingly affordable, easy-come, easy-go lands often instead proved to be more of an easy-come, hard-go.
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Welcome to Mt. Shasta Vista, now leave:
writer's first impressions
Large imposing signs planted at each of the place's five county road entrances, plus every section corner, made the board's policy crystal clear in large, black boldface print. It practically shouted:
HEALTH AND BUILDING CODES STRICTLY ENFORCED
Woe betide any poor soul who failed to heed such a clear, no-nonsense warning.
So along comes your land-hungry writer. A rambling, residence-shy 29 year-old would-be nature boy, of threadbare means, burned out living on the road and nurturing a vision of building a bower in the wilderness. With champagne taste but eking by on a beer budget, I soon warmed to the notion of settling in the bone-dry yet largely wild and super-affordable juniper outlands instead of the redwood creekside of my dreams...to blasted code if that’s what it took and as my meager resources and a steep learning curve allowed. Though it would prove by far the biggest project of my life up to then, at least lumber was still fairly cheap and the building code a smidgen less onerous -- if then rigorously enforced -- to comply with. I planned to join the POWW's water-hauling group and so avoid having to drill a well, which I couldn't've even begun to afford, squeaking by month to month on a fixed income.
To my impressionable mind, the growling entrance signs were, of course, of more than a passing concern. Even if the lots were cheap -- most listed between $1,500 and $1,750, with easy terms of $250 down and $25 a month -- the place obviously appeared a smidge unfriendly somehow. To me, the signage seemed to say, “Welcome to Mt. Shasta Vista. No this, no that, no the other thing under penal codes such and such; violators will be hung by their toenails; in fact, we DARE you to even enter, bub”. Or, more directly, "Welcome, now leave."
Or, perhaps most to the point, like the scrawled-in-blood-red greeting sign posted on the outskirts of town in Clint Eastwood's Western revenge flick, High Plains Drifter: “Welcome to Hell.”
On reading the further warning, in more huge black lettering -- “Private Property -- Trespassers will be Prosecuted” -- part of me felt I might get arrested any second for having so foolishly driven in. Like I’d stumbled onto a top-secret government compound and should turn around while there was still time.
But, as was the case with countless land seekers on a shoestring both before and after me, cheap lot prices won out over common sense, eclipsing first impressions screaming red alert.
Such sign wording, of course, had served many purposes. Yes, it was meant to discourage would-be substandard dwellings and, perish the thought, any white trailer trash, hop-headed bikers, or scraggly hippie types from trying to invade the would-be respectable scene. But it was also meant to dissuade wood poachers, unlicensed game hunters, trash dumpers, vehicle abandoners -- and, in the earliest, vacation-only years, miscreants harboring designs of plundering the goods vulnerably left in trailers and mobile homes on absentee owners' briefly visited, often unfenced parcels. Even decades later, with hundreds of residents spread throughout the domain, once a huge 12 X 40 foot, long-vacant mobile home was boldly snatched in the dead of night from one lot and hauled over two miles to another with zero consequence.
They'd probably needed that loud bark (for all the good it did).
...with screenplay by Rod Serling
However, the working principle of Chinese feng shui holds that the given energy at an entrance sets up a vibration that the whole place then resonates with. Sadly, the essence of such gnarly wording indeed seemed to ripple throughout the realm, especially when reinforced by similar huge signs planted at every section corner. Acquaintances visiting me decades later, as if playing it safe and not wanting to risk their vehicle getting towed off, parked it forward of the baleful sign on Bonanza Road and walked the entire way in, over a mile.
Indeed, entering the Vista the first time could feel like walking into the middle of a movie and trying to figure out some bizarre plot that seemed in turn scripted by Zane Grey, Rod Serling and J. Edgar Hoover.
That nice welcoming wooden arch that once spanned the main entrance? After the writer in due course was treated to his own 'unwelcome wagon', he felt it might've just as well proclaimed:
Abandon All Hope
Ye Who Enter Here
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The Vista through Time: 1965-2015
[part 8: Conclusion]
Lost cause revisited, one last time
It perhaps came as no surprise that the Vista entrance sign's snarly energy had been on display full force at its monthly board meetings. Open to all parcel owners and their family members, the proceedings, dull as dishwater sometimes, other times were a caution. Gnarly shouting matches were not uncommon; once, a fistfight broke out on the floor.
It was as if the place had developed a deadly cancer that, left untreated, was fatally metastasizing. The tsunami waves of bickering among malcontent dwellers was so extraordinary, it would've made perfect fodder for a treatment by the late gonzo journalist-author Hunter S. Thompson: “Fear and Loathing in the Vista.”
The first excited residents must've felt something akin to the first-comer prospectors of California's 1849 Gold Rush. While briefly having the rich diggings all to themselves, feeling intoxicated with their good fortune, things instantly turned to pandemonium the second the flood of fellow prospectors of the prized yellow stone poured in like the sea.
Similarly, earliest Vistans, beyond the occasional visiting camper, had briefly luxuriated in having the idyllic woodland domain all to themselves; they'd transplanted their conservative So-Cal ways to the top of the state and had blind faith in local government to keep law and order in their incipient rural village. But, like the first miners, they soon got run over without ever getting the number of the truck. Eventually, beside themselves with profound distress, they became like so many mad King Lears, shouting their imperious commands to the winds.
When less-solvent people had begun moving in and making bold to ignore the health and building codes, firstcomers still had the ball in their court; they'd established relations with county code enforcers and had a lock on board membership, and so ran with the ball, clinging to it for dear life. They'd dismiss as idiots anyone at meetings who took exception to their hardball tactics in dealing with the lawless intruders in their happy kingdom; such people obviously didn't understand the dire gravity of the situation. Beyond desperate, their bottom line was that, come hell or high water, they'd dedicate themselves to keeping county health and building codes enforced full bore. The alternative was unthinkable: inevitable wrack and ruin.
To arms
Desolated and shocked beyond endurance after the depended-on county enforcement became infuriatingly sketchy, overwrought board members and their cohorts, never say die, remained loaded for bear and clad in armor, mace and sword at the ready. Desperate beyond measure, they 'd engage in full-on, take-no-prisoners battles of intimidation with any and every code ignorer, county support or no county support. They must've hoped that, through sheer will and collective determination, they'd stem the lawless tide and win the day.
Steeled to win or go down fighting, for a while at meetings they'd try dodging public discussion on hot-button issue proposals by steamrolling their everyone-must-obey-the-full-letter-of-the-law-or-else agenda through. they'd mumble, “public comments?” out of the side of the mouth before taking a fast vote: "Motion?...second?...all in favor...motion carried." They had banked on newbies’ unfamiliarity with formal meeting procedure; shouts of protest once concerned newcomers got hip to their trick were countered by simpering yells from the board's fellow hardball-policy supporters: “Robert's Rules! Robert's Rules!”
Despite their most dedicated efforts, the well-heeled firstcomers’ dream of forging a idyllic backwoods retirement haven was surreally turning into a nightmare; the Vista as they knew and treasured it was tearing apart at the seams before their very eyes.
As more and more lot buyers settled amid the junipers and sagebrush -- many of such limited means and rebellious mindsets that the notion of building to code was never considered -- the limited-resource country's code-enforcement officers' responsiveness reached its tipping point. Beyond it they were unable and/or unwilling to effectively enforce the codes and ordinances (the very ones that people living in town, nowhere to hide, perforce toed the line on). This, despite -- or perhaps because of -- being continually appraised and updated of the intolerable situation by the seething-mad legal residency that harangued them without mercy with the latest discovered infraction demanding swift response. The thought of taking an early retirement had no doubt started looking good to some.
So it happened that in time authorities had all but abandoned code enforcement in the misbegotten realm. One got the distinct impression officials liked to pretend it didn't exist (not unlike the place's scofflaw dwellers towards their building ordinances). That is, not beyond the county's property tax collectors' and property assessors' unfailing attention -- eventually via satellite zoom-ins to every last parcel and precisely what improvements, if any, were being made -- to squeeze every shekel possible through annual tax assessments.
Before that tipping point was reached, it seemed the only responses made, other than for actual emergencies, were to the more persistent calls from fuming parties who knew the law and possibly threatened legal action if they didn't respond and earn their salaries, dammit. They became such pains it was finally easier to drag themselves out and tell the culprits, "Hey, you can't be doing this, you'd better stop or else; we mean it" and hope such admonishments would stick. Some scofflaws indeed at that point cleared out, their fantasies of cheap and easy country living clobbered by a rude reality check. Others, more hardened, kept right on living the way they were and devil take the hindmost. They felt that inertia and property rights, plus the county's enforcement resources being overwhelmed, would ultimately win the battle.
Eventually, they'd prove themselves right.
White bread outpost
Though later arrivals often felt a strong disdain to the firstcomers' intolerance of non-code construction and septic, and the guilty parties' aggressive response, one couldn't help but sympathize with the former's plight. What a heartbreaking situation it must have been, seeing the place they had invested so heavily in, nurturing fondest hopes of enjoying their golden years in, irretrievably slipping away. The Vista could’ve, should've, would've been such a nicely settled, enviable, peaceable backwoods community of forthright, hail fellow well met, law-abiding residents...
...if still only a white bread one.
For while in later years at least, absentee ownership appeared to become a bit diverse racially -- based on observation and the file list of actual residents in 2014, then numbering maybe 300 to 350 -- it was still overwhelmingly white. Though there were a few Hispanics and a Native American or two over time, there were zero Blacks or Asians, to the writer's knowledge. Growing up in the polyglot melting pot of San Francisco, I didn’t find anything too amiss about this...other than wincing whenever a neighbor might drop the ‘n’ word so matter-of-factly in casual conversation (and later, the 'c' word). I’d learned to adapt to any ethnic mix -- or lack thereof -- of a place, given an even playing field and lack of any expedient intentions.
The scene perhaps reflected rural Siskiyou county as a whole, so largely white that it might've appeared -- not without a dollop of truth -- as a narrow minded, passively (and sometimes overtly) racist backwater to any people of color arriving from large melting-pot cities that leaned towards a mutual racial tolerance and inclusivity born of everyday intercultural mingling over time.
A more diverse Vista residency from the get-go might've made the would-be community culturally richer. But it was a moot point; Wonder Bread it was for a full half century. Then, starting in 2015, residents living in an all-white world were shocked to suddenly find themselves surrounded by new Asian-American neighbors. People who many had probably never interacted with as equals were suddenly everywhere, working together in an astonishingly high gear to effect a quantum leap within the once sleepy subdivision.
It goes without saying that mutual assimilation of races, always problematic, in the Vista's case might've gone easier without a world of unsanctioned pot growing going on to hopelessly complicate matters. And cause newcomers to call the race card, sometimes justifiably, but also used as an age-old tactic to obfuscate matters and leverage the guilt of a white-dominated society to one's advantage, in this case to divert attention away from the egregiously audacious proscribed-pot enterprise afoot.
Fine line
Anyone respecting the reasonable rule of law held that a development needed its residents to work together on some level and follow established rules to keep things safe and pleasant -- the acid test being for one’s own children -- for everyone committing to hanging their hats there. Otherwise, the weeds of civic indifference and unruly attitudes and goings-on easily spring up, filling the social vacuum and choking a place's livability.
But, on the other hand, it could make simple country living all but impossible if the rules were TOO strict, too expensive, too onerous for the majority of would-be legal residents to want to even try conforming to.
It has always been so in the Vista, there being a fine line between having enough rules and regulations to keep a semblance of fair-minded order and having too many and courting sure rebellion. In any event, as said, developer Collins could never have gotten the place greenlit had he not set up the CC&Rs so that every buyer would agree by signing the legal title paperwork to conform to every last nit-pickin' county, state and federal rule, law and ordinance under the sun. (A cynical Vietnam War vet neighbor once told the writer, "The government makes liars, cheats and horse thieves out of us all.")
But the rush of having one’s own land, in such a relatively remote region under the often surreal sway of Mount Shasta's energies, could easily obscure the reality of there being any such regulations to conform to. There wasn't anyone around to say 'boo' -- especially after the county abandoned its residential code-enforcement in a drastic budget-slashing move, for some five years, during the first half of the 2010's.
As respect for the rule of law appeared to be on the wane over time, the chances became greater that the Vista, its very reason for existence hamstrung, its thousand-plus empty lots lying fallow for decades, would become irresistably attractive to those -- in this case, unapproved, predominantly Asian-American pot growers -- chasing the lure of fast riches that unlicensed pot growing provided, and who were willing to roll the dice on not getting busted. They saw the subdivision, with its sea of going-begging-forever parcels, as just what the doctor ordered.
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“I say we got Trouble...with a capital ‘T’...”
Writer's own tale
(Note: the reader might opt to skip the following section, shoehorned in here. It offers a personal account of some of the writer's earliest experiences in the Vista.)
In October 1978 I snapped up a nice gently sloping lot with an inspiring mountain view for $1,750, $250 down and $25 a month for the balance. That particular month the national economy was experiencing the tightest dollar in ages; I think I'd come to value the land all the greater for feeling I paid for it so dearly on my limited means.
I'd get by for eleven years on kerosene lamps and candles before going solar in 1989, when solar panels cost some eight times more than now -- not even adjusting for inflation.*
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* A one-by-four foot, 50-watt panel ran $400 then; factoring in over 35 years of inflation driving prices up over 2.5 times, that'd be like having to pay over two thousand dollars for the hundred-watt panel that now one might grab almost as an impulse item at a Harbor Freight store.
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It proved to be an early fall, and I scrambled to set up a quick camp. While the days were still pleasant enough, overnight temperatures plunged to a bone-chilling 13 degrees F (-10 C). My first night was spent shivering in a shallow trench with plastic sheeting thrown over set sticks.
I was heating water for coffee the next morning and defrosting myself over a small rock-lined campfire in a clearing when I heard an approaching pick-up truck. Its occupant, an older man, slammed the brakes on spotting me. Perhaps he wasn't part of the volunteer posse, but he was definitely wound up and on edge, the same as most every other compliant year-round resident who felt that the place was getting overrun by shiftless yahoos like me who needing to be told what's what. He climbed out, stared at the campfire and asked point-blank, “You gotta permit for that?” Thus spoken were my first words of welcome from the would-be community, before I could even manage to get my first sip of morning coffee. Things weren't encouraging.
Fast-forward six weeks and I'd apparently waited too long to apply for a building permit -- and, crucially, join the POWW water-truck club in lieu of drilling a well, in order to qualify for getting said permit. As a result, I was destined to get the full "Unwelcome Wagon" treatment from the sundry busybodies of the development I was unwittingly hitching my wagon to. One that was, I'd quickly learned to appreciate, more than a tad squirrelly around the edges.
I had of course intended to conform all along, if reluctantly, essentially being a timid soul and law-abiding citizen, if also possessing a contrary, intellectually radical streak (perhaps making me your typical walking human paradox). But I was gearing up slowly; it was such a momentous project, by far the most ambitious I'd undertaken. Over winter I planned to research tiny home design, study construction methods and building codes, and fine-tune a design plan that I'd then submit in spring. I was staying in a third-mile distant, 12-by-16 foot cabin that a kindhearted neighboring couple, the Schumachers, had generously offered me to winter in out of the blue in our first and only meeting. They'd been out for a walk and getting ready to leave as the fair-weather season wound down and took pity on my situation.
This so I wouldn’t freeze to death by camping out in my cabin tent, as I'd at first resolved to do. I'd wanted to stay on my brand new land and future homeland no matter what. Cold alone could be endured with my accustomed spartan lifestyle, plus extreme-weather bedding and a jury-rigged wood stove in my cabin tent (not recommended). But, unbeknownst to me, the region was notorious for its seasonal severe windstorms, which were of such magnitude they beggared belief. Seemingly coming out of nowhere, they roared over the land like a runaway freight; seventy to eighty mph wind speeds were not uncommon. In the late 1980s, we'd get hit with one storm that actually punched hundred-mile gusts. Years later, while visiting my neighbors, the Sheltons, I noticed some old wreckage in the yard and I asked about it. "That's what's left of our old trailer," he said matter-of-factly. "It went airborne after a mini-twister got it; it sailed fifty feet before smashing it there."
December storm assaults kept blowing my tent down no matter how thoroughly I tried securing the guy ropes. When it collapsed yet again in the middle of a howling blizzard one night, I finally surrendered. Grateful I had the option, the next morning my black cat and I moved into the couple's vacated cabin a third mile away. Thereafter I made a daily hike to work on my place and clear brush, rough in a roadway, and build an earth-sheltered shed that would become my legal onsite construction dwelling once securing the all-important building permit.
Before I could get it, though, I seemed destined to experience the full wrath of my unknown neighbors with their zero tolerance for anyone not doing everything according to Hoyle. It seemed that the ever-vigilant Vista board members and their cohorts had established a pipeline with local realtors for every Vista parcel sale made. My so-called neighbors, most living miles away, had learned how yet another rambling upstart of likely threadbare means had dared to invade their respectable domain, doubtless with no intention of ever paying the piper. My Strout Realty seller gave me a head's up, telling me later that while he'd admitted selling a lot to a certain young man, he refused to say where.
I found that sporting, at least.
Now a determined posse was hot on my trail. They systematically combed the endless backroads, determined to run me to earth. (My you-gotta-permit-for-that? neighbor, Ceburn, to his credit, hadn't reported me and turned out to be a decent guy.) Weeks later they discovered my lair while I wasn’t home. They'd taken one look at my thrown-together, mostly underground, then strictly store shed, plus the verboten outhouse, and promptly screamed bloody murder to the county health department. They didn’t know -- or, I suspect, much care -- that I had earnest intentions of complying and building to code. (Again, it wasn't that I particularly wanted to, but I valued peace of mind and I knew I'd never have it if I didn't toe the hard line.)
Their scorched earth policy allowed for no such wiggle room; I'd already been on the land longer than the thirty-days-a-year rule allowed. Equal opportunity hasslers, anyone and everyone non-compliant -- especially those they didn't cotton to as one of them (and so maybe deserving some leeway) -- was zealously reported to authorities like they'd uncovered the lair of one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted.
Busted
I was duly summoned onto the carpet of the then-head county health department honcho, Dr. Bayuk, who'd just capped POWW membership, determined to henceforward make every other lot owner sink a well before becoming eligible for a building permit. No doubt smarting from the wrathful earful he'd endured over this latest upstart's scofflaw audacity, I was given the full bum's rush. He promptly read the riot act, but then, oddly, offered me an out: he'd give me 120 days to get compliant by installing a septic system -- even though I wouldn’t have a completed cabin to connect it to for years -- and then build a temporary outhouse over it. Otherwise, he said, he'd see to it that I'd be thrown off my land by the sheriff. “And don’t think I won’t!”, he growled, jowls shaking like Nixon's. He no doubt felt I needed an extra dose of fear to get me properly motivated.
It turned out that at the last moment another kindhearted neighbor had come forward on my behalf and explained to him how they'd promised to let me join their by-then membership-capped water POWW truck club once I was ready to build. He thus grudgingly allowed me to slip in and become the truck club's last and twenty-sixth member.
Being thin-skinned, the experience would thoroughly traumatize me. It happened within months of my arrival overflowing with excitement to fulfill a decade-long ambition to settle my own land. Despite the last-minute reprieve, I'd all but given up on the place that, now obviously, seethed with intense hostility and sky-high intolerance. Devastated and demoralized, part of me, even with the reprieve, felt like I was fading away in a cruel world. Instead, though fondest hopes and dreams had been hopelessly mangled, wind gone from my sails, I dredged up reserve willpower from somewhere to try to make the best of a bad situation.
With renewed determination, I paid the $125 water-truck membership fee and rekindled a resolve to invest whatever required time, money and effort was needed to get legally squared away. Then I'd at least be able to live on the land with a modicum of dignity and hopefully salvage some of my original enthusiasm for my poet's dream of building a bower in the wilderness. This while doing my level best to tune out those who seemed to live to give others grief -- due to their own fondest dreams having gotten mauled by the vicious circle sadly afoot in the wayward backwoods realm.
I passed the percolation test and dug and installed an approved septic system. As per agreement, I then built an outhouse over the top of the tank once it and the leach field had passed inspection and was back-filled. In part for the benefit of any busybodies driving by to check out the scene of the troublemaker's almost-bust (Damn, I thought sure we had him), no doubt hoping to find some new reportable offense, I painted on the side facing the road in big bold blue letters: “Welcome Halley's Comet in 1984.” That should baffle 'em. Then I built another outhouse more to my liking, using it until moving into the completed cabin years later. It was a low-slung squatter affair cleverly disguised as a doghouse, water bowl and leash in front, a piece of plywood and big cushion hiding the opening. No one ever discovered the ruse.
Over a leisurely three and a half year period I then built a code-approved, one-and-a-half story, solar-tempered little-big cabin (625 square feet). Meanwhile I lived twenty feet away in my tiny hobbit home (8 X 12 feet). On its door of salvaged planks I posted a Shakespeare quote from Hamlet: "I could be bounded by a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space..."
I used only hand tools, wanting the building experience to feel intimate and relaxed, and having energy to burn for being in my prime. I briefly hired help for the open-beam roof and electrical work. I scrounged recycled lumber whenever possible. It appeared I was on the verge of becoming a quasi respectable resident... not that I was longer interested in being accepted as such by the place's apparent league of dedicated hasslers. It was like the classic Groucho Marx quip made over a restrictive country club's at last offering him a membership despite his being Jewish:" I didn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member." It'd be decades before I'd warm up to the board and appreciate its potential (at least) to do good for the hopelessly floundering, perpetually at odds with itself community in the boonies that I'd fatefully thrown in with.
Working under the gun of county code enforcers -- who I imagined were trading notes with wary Vista board members and their cohorts on demand -- would prove so depressing it drove me to drink. I learned firsthand how board members and their ilk had a special gift for radicalizing the place's denizens in their woebegone efforts to try returning the place to its former glory -- or, in some abject, warped-out consolation, demand a pound of flesh, giving holy hell to anyone non-compliant. It felt as if the place was permanently caught up in an indescribably gnarly spiral, locked in a perpetual, contention-drenched time loop.
On the wings of getting my new shelter signed off in early 1983, I was a timid if somewhat rebellious 33-year-old who was by then thoroughly resentful of the Vista's imperious would-be overlords.
Rainbow fever hits the Vista
Naturally, I soon got myself into even greater trouble. It seems I decided to celebrate the return of Halley’s Comet by hosting a months-long rainbow family camp right on my parcel.
In 1984 the annual national alternative-culture rainbow family gathering, with deep hippie-countercultural roots, was going to be held in California for the first time ever since its start some twelve years before. It would be in an area two hours distant in the Warner Mountains wilderness, a ways from Alturas and Likely, in the remote northeast corner of the state. Come spring a flood of psyched early-comers, some returning for the first time in decades to their new-age roots, would be pouring in from everywhere, including overseas. Many would have nowhere to go until the public-forest site could be determined, months away.
Wanting to reconnect with my countercultural roots after fifteen years adrift, while evening up the ledger for the countless people who'd helped me along over the years I was Dharma bumming on the road -- plus, thinking to liberate the terminally stodgy development a bit -- in February I opened up my land to all comers for five months.
Like the Vistan firstcomers who'd built homes amidst a de facto recreational development seemingly unmindful of what troubles their move might create for the over a thousand other lot holders, I was equally determined to let the chips fall where they may. I'd host a motley group of merry refugees from drab, conventional lifestyles, people who were the very antithesis of the strict law-and-order code so many of my 'neighbors' embraced almost like a religion.
I solemnly tendered my invite by letter to the rainbow steering committee then holding its monthly steering committee sessions in the City Hall chamber (of all places) of far away Chico. Word spread fast, and though it would never be recognized or supported as an 'official' rainbow camp for being held on private land, for months hundreds of early-comer wired spirits -- often in colorful, glad-rag garb and driving outlandish rigs -- would traipse in and out of the buttoned-down-and-proud Vista hinterlands like so many party-hearty space travelers vacationing from another planet. In a way the scene came to feel a little like the animated feature Yellow Submarine, in which the Beatles's triumphant music turned the dreary frozen black-and-white world into brilliant technicolor.
Rainbow elders Whitney Loman and Eagle Feather oversaw the setting up of their three 28-foot yurts -- formerly belonging to the Seattle area's controversial Love Family spiritual sect -- on the parcel's lower back acre. "There's your UFO, Stuart!," someone told me as the central yurt went up. Earlier, I'd mentioned how I once liked to imagine a scout ship landing on the parcel. I'd even named my place Earth Base, a whimsical variation homage to a former Seattle Capitol Hill fire station that was repurposed as a community center and renamed Earth Station. My place was known as Earth Base for years after.
Of course, it wasn't all peace and love. Not by any means. Off-putting power plays, ego trips and less than altruistic attitudes erupted now and then, people being people and the eighties being trying times. And rainbow folks were unable to enjoy getting totally into their radical-freedom element on private land rather than in a public forest. Even so, incredibly juiced transcendent energies often prevailed. I had to work triple time to get into the flow of things after having lived alone so long. Plus detach from my ownership of the place as best I could in order to feel more one-among rather than an improbable landlord.
Predictably, when my convention-minded neighbors heard about what Ward was up to now, they had a royal conniption fit. Though a few more liberal-minded retirees seemed tickled by it all, possibly rebels at heart and not seeing anything too threatening about the surreal scene, others were having kittens. No free-spirited long-hairs, with their flagrant pot smoking (then very much illegal) and shameless nudity and unsettling tribal drum jams pounding long into the night, would be tolerated...not in their one-time Shangri-la now going to rack and ruin, dammit. One family per parcel; that was the Vista rule, etched in stone. (Claims of “We are one family" wouldn't cut much ice.)
Frothing at the mouth, they reported me to every enforcement agency they could think of: county sheriff; health, planning and building departments; fire marshal; dog catcher... But, saving grace, earlier on I’d coordinated a meeting between then-county sheriff Charlie Byrd and the rainbow elders, which was actually held on my land in the prayer and meditation yurt. Law enforcement had been keen to learn what they might expect with some 33,000 rainbow celebrants soon to invade their turf (as it would turn out; I had to laugh out loud when one irate neighbor asked if the national event was going to be held at my place). The sheriff, at least tenuously reassured our ragtag group appeared to be a basically harmless if freaky bunch (apart from the pot smoking and a sometimes proclivity towards nudity), a group likely to only cause a temporary glitch in the conventional order of things, must've told my apoplectic neighbors to chill out a while and grit their teeth, it'd soon be over.
Jaws surely dropped; the dang-blasted system was failing them yet again.
Rebellious offspring of the various outraged residents who visited the scene loved it; it would become part of Vista lore (what little there was of such). The writer liked to think the mostly free-spirited scene helped break the ice of the Vista's long-oppressive regime, even if perhaps at the risk of encouraging an anarchistic spirit to maybe gain too strong a foothold in the once overwhelmingly strait-laced community.
It seemed that over the decades the place swung from one extreme to the other: from the firstcomers' honeymoon period, happy campers giddy over the endless possibilities of the pristine lands; to a ruthless law-and-order minded "No this, no that, don't even think about it" regime; then back to "Whoopee, anything goes!"
The place appeared something of a chameleon, changing to whatever the majority of the current crop of residents wanted it to be.
(end of personal account)
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Being gone eleven months of the year
created lots of problems
The firstcomers' over-wound, control-freak stance, replete with barking signs everywhere, had been in part born of feeling an urgent need to try protecting the place and vacationers' left belongings while living up to 700 miles away eleven months of the year. Mischief-minded offspring of embittered locals who'd resented the sudden takeover of their former longtime stomping grounds had a hell-for-leather field day during parcel owners' long absences...which, of course, got the latter livid on their return, their hoped-for carefree vacations, anticipated all year, met with a rude reality check, their beloved new hideaway and their possessions violated.
For, as often stressed, the locals, some maybe fourth or fifth generation descendants of the region's pioneers and long set in rural ways, were worlds away from ever welcoming to the big-city based, parcel-buying newcomers into their once-sleepy bucolic realm. They'd mount what amounted to be a pitched, "You may think it's your land, but it's still ours, we'll never recognize your damn place" campaign, one that lasted decades. The endless miles of non-gated, groomed back roads were irresistibly inviting for the region's mischievous kids' dirt bikes to gouge deep donuts in their freshly poured, at times deep, cinder topping, while your delinquent-minded youth engaged in more serious, spirited hell-raising by stealing and vandalizing at will.
So it was that unruly youth -- absorbing the perturbed sentiments of their elders and carrying on the family tradition -- geared up a protracted war with the foreign la-la-landers who'd dared to commandeer their favorite hunting, grazing and kegger-partying land. Law enforcement could only do so much in working with the absent owners, there being maybe at most a single overseer or two watching over seven square miles of ungated entrances and unfenced lots during the long off-season. Over the decades, residents often never fenced off even developed properties, since the place had felt so peaceful and somehow protected that the need wasn't felt. The problem: the actual land owner himself was needed to make a report of any incident to get an investigation, and some belongings no doubt went missing over a half year before the owners even knew it.
Fast forward, and by the time civic-minded lot owners started living on their parcels and joining the larger community, attending church services and, in later decades, the number of younger-resident families increased and enrolled their kids in the local schools and joined PTAs, it felt too late -- barring a dose of amazing grace -- to reverse the long-standing vicious circle of contentious energy. Dislike and suspicion of the Vista and its invasive lot owners seemed to be permanently ingrained in the DNA of locals, their kids, their grandkids...
“Permit? We ain’t got no permit...
I don’t need no stinkin’ permit!”
Through the 1980's and 1990's, the county's health and building ordinances were still being fitfully enforced. Unless one didn’t mind being deemed an outlaw and never earning recognition and acceptance as an “official” resident -- which, in time, more and more indeed wouldn't -- landowners wanting to live on their parcels complied as a matter of course. Or at least provided the illusion of trying to comply: "See here? I've started my well; I'm fifty feet down and waiting on my next paycheck to drill deeper; cut me some slack here, will ya?" (Hope he's buying this.)
After the Great Recession of 2008-2009 hit, devastating the global economy, county supervisors were forced to make tough calls. Among other actions, they axed the position of residential-code enforcer, which seemed to be having so little effect anyhow -- leastwise, in the Vista, a lost cause if ever there was one.
Over the next half decade, residential-code enforcement would essentially disappear from the Vista...like it never existed.
With no official telling you anything different, it was easier than ever for a newcomer to foster the notion that one could do whatever they wanted on their remote parcels. The old threatening signs were by then seriously biodegrading, their dire warnings fading into illegibility. They lent the place the air of being something akin to a forlorn, all-but-abandoned, rural ghost town, living out some peculiar zombie half-life in happy obscurity.
No legal power to fine; Liberty vs. license
Other subdivisions forming in the region about the same time had wanted to assure they'd establish a respectable residency. Accordingly, they gave the property-owner boards legal power to levy fines for infractions of agreed-on rules. If not paid, they could slap legal liens on a culprit's property, which then had to be cleared up before the land could legally change hands. In Lake Shastina, visible clotheslines, solid fencing and dirt bikes were all verboten. In Shasta Forest, one could get fined fifty dollars for changing oil on their own property even if capturing every drop for recycling.
No such legal powers ever existed in the Vista.
This was always the place's two-edged sword. While its relative lack of sometimes nit-picky, overreaching rules and regulations had empowered residents to feel more like lords and ladies of the manor, as it were, such freedom could, naturally, also attract those with seriously scofflaw inclinations; those who wanted to exploit seemingly unregulated land unmindful of disturbing the realm's relative peace and quiet and pristine nature with dubious goings on. Example: the place long ago had a monumental junkyard eyesore surreally surrounded by undisturbed wooded lots; it took the board ages to get the county to condemn it and the place be cleaned up.
In a democracy it always came down to giving people the freedom to do whatever they wanted, so long as their actions didn’t interfere with the rights of others to do what they wanted; liberty vs. license. The flip side of liberty was, of course, the obligation to support the rules of law set up in order to safeguard those freedom rights of the majority. The greatest good for the greatest number. That the rules sometimes seemed to favor the interests of the sometimes corrupt, wealthier class, at the expense of others getting the short end of the stick, was no doubt what so often made people want to rebel against the system in the first place.
Can a place be centered without a center?
Few Vistan parcel holders -- especially absentee ones, but even many residents -- ever felt the need to build a community center. So they never did. Even though its population had easily grown enough to merit one, there was never enough interest in establishing a place where residents and visiting lot owners could meet and get to know each other in a neutral, relaxed setting, and form informal volunteer action groups like community gardens, swap meets, litter patrol -- and have the monthly board meetings in the actual Vista rather than next door in a tiny fire station backroom.
But indeed they were long held in that cramped, cold-fluorescent-lit backroom space just off Vista property. And the annual property owner meetings? For many years held ten miles away in Lake Shastina; one had to walk through the golf club's bar lounge often littered with schnockered tee enthusiasts to reach the conference room. In earliest years, they were held hundreds of miles away, at places like many members’ favorite at the time, the Madonna Inn, in San Luis Obispo, 500 miles away; the board wanted to make it easier for the southern California ownership to attend. This fact offers a powerful clue how dominant south-state influence was in the place's formative years.
At the risk of stating the obvious, it was hard for a quasi community to gain any sense of centeredness without a center. Needing to leave the place to have monthly meetings and drive ten miles away to attend the annual meeting? It didn't compute. While it struck more than a few as too weird for words, it of course only reflected the place's remarkable level of discombobulation.
“Wouldn’t give you a dime...” vs. “Only $29,999!”
Due to the place’s sundry shortcomings, sale values of parcels stalled for decades, barely keeping up with inflation; interest in the parcels took the meaning of 'soft market' to new levels. Until 2015, unimproved two-to-three acre lots went begging at $5,000. Lacking any easier water, sewage systems, electricity or a more can-do, fair-minded, empowered board or appropriate CC&Rs, the place all but screamed, "Beware! Failed subdivision!"
It was so sketchy around the edges, it struck few as a promising place to ever want to drop anchor at. There appeared to be certain subsets of humanity that the place attracted. Those with a spartan streak, who might actually enjoy roughing it a while; those determined to live on the cheap, who wouldn't lose any sleep being non-compliant, "Screw the system" their motto. Also those renting houses and mobiles from code-compliant owners who'd moved away, for affordability more than anything else, and then tried their best to tune out the place's daunting shortcomings; those few who, while aware of the place's lacks, hazarded to build a code-legal home anyhow, feeling the pluses outweighed the minuses. These in addition to various long-timers who'd known the place during kinder times and had sunk such deep roots they were braced to weather changes that made others flee in a heartbeat -- especially offered a ton of money to ease the pain of uprooting.
Long ago I met a former realtor who said of the properties with a heated disdain apparently then common in certain local property-peddling circles, “I wouldn’t give you a dime for any of them!” He said this with such a fire-breathing intensity, you'd think the realm was sitting on top of a radioactive-waste dump or something. It made one wonder if he and his colleagues had perhaps in times past skirted ugly lawsuits for misrepresenting the properties, or endured some other such unpleasantness that made it not worth the paltry commission fees the low-end properties generated.
Eventually, two out-of-region realtor groups thought differently. Specializing in scouting rural developments deemed undervalued, in the late 2000's they snapped up hundreds of the bedeviled hinterland parcels for cheap, properties that had long laid fallow (at last relieving many long-stuck and more recently-stuck absentee parcel owners). They mounted slick sales campaigns to try remedying the obviously under-exploited situation, intent on making a mint in fast turnover and high markup.
The first outfit, National Recreational Properties, Inc., had hired former "CHiPs" TV star Erik Estrada to serve as their uber-aggressive pitchman. Out of Irvine (possibly the same town as Vista founder Collins), it apparently had a penchant for going after failed, “left-for-dead” subdivisions, sharp talons squeezing out what easy quick profit there was to be had before swooping off to the next rural roadkill. In their ad promos "the Ponch" enthused how the place was so great, he owned a parcel. (He was, of course, given it as part of the deal, just so he could say that.) see related article
The outfit reportedly offered to fly prospective buyers in to enjoy a champagne brunch along with the big pitch and grand tour of the prime, affordable properties that offered such enviable solitude, fresh air and dazzling mountain views. When they held a grand open house, balloons festooning highway entrances, rumor had it that no one even showed. (They were more successful with their Alturas, California area development, California Pines, which boasted over 15,000 one-acre parcels, though each for some strange reason it demanded the installation of a super pricey, individually engineer-designed septic system that hindered its development.)
A few years later, around 2012 another group, Billyland.com, likewise grabbed a mess of the raw Vista parcels, possibly taking some off the former's hands. They in turn appeared to aim at the easily snookered or desperate and land-hungry Internet surfers. They hawked the parcels online, eBay auction style, the 'winner' being the one who'd made the highest down-payment bid when the timer ran out. Buying land sight unseen with a few simple clicks and no credit checks -- such an idea's time had apparently come. “Only $29,999!” they gushed. Of course, with low monthly payments and a high interest rate, the ultimate cost would run over $50,000. Predictably, their campaign attracted many living on a shoestring; some were soon growing a few cannabis plants, no doubt in part to try keeping up the land payments and so avoid losing what some legal residents, perhaps uncharitably, had deemed as no more than private campgrounds for the homeless.
Eighty legal residences amid 1,641 lots
At the start of 2015, according to county records, the Vista had a grand total of eighty approved residences. Out of 1,641 parcels, that was roughly one in twenty, or five percent of the lots, sporting site-built homes or brought-in mobile homes up to code. The rest -- some 1,556 lots, or ninety-five percent -- either had non-permitted dwellings, were once informally lived on and since vacated, or, most commonly, were still as relatively pristine as the day the place was launched a half century earlier -- minus the scars of tree poachers, thoughtless off-roaders, abandoned trailers, and errant windblown detritus so generously donated by residents of nearby lots.
But hope sprang eternal for some speculative landholders still intent on making a bundle. They set a super inflated price in listing their lot with a realtor, thinking to snag an eager, uninformed buyer with more dollars than sense, oblivious to the depressed market and the development's age-old litany of festering problems. "Secluded"; "The perfect spot to build that dream home", "a slice of heaven", wrote the realtors in shameless abandon.
In the early teens, the sale of a lot in section 13 to a woman was about to close. She was taking one last look at the parcel before signing when a nearby scofflaw resident, determined to keep out his own 'wrong kind of people', strode out in full view of her buck naked and pranced about, expressly for her benefit. The ruse worked; the deal fell through.
“Maybe if we ignore them, they’ll go away.”
It was no great secret that the county supervisors rued the day they ever greenlit what had become such a spectacularly woebegone development. Former Vista board president stalwart Jeannette Hook, who worked with county officials in the course of her career, said that they viewed the Vista as "the red-headed stepchild no one ever knew what to do with."
Yet, as often stressed, the place was fully at the mercy of county officials and enforcers to keep intact whatever shreds of respect for the rule of law might yet remain. But the huge, mostly rural, county, on an overstretched budget and often understaffed, had long ago given up even trying to deal with it. Responsible enforcement and policy-making parties had grown so numb to the perpetual thorn in their side that they blew off the inconvenient truth that its legal residency was, as tax payers, paying their salaries and expected them to earn their keep, dammit.
Despite -- or because of -- the number of non-compliant dwellers proliferating, it seemed that in time authorities wouldn't respond to requests for help with a visit short of an actual emergency. One would think they must've appreciated the ripe possibility that the place might prove a greater disaster waiting to happen. But what could they do? So officials kept kicking the can down the road, on automatic pilot, determined to avoid dealing with the woebegone backwaters whenever humanly possible...
...until the great day of reckoning came at last.
Tidal wave of fortune seekers
I was taking a leisurely stroll along my road one day in the winter of 2014-2015, when I noticed some long-slumbering, unfenced lots had just received fresh attention. New surveying posts were planted with scrawled bearings and Day-Glo ribbons fluttering off their tops...just like at the start of the subdivision a half century earlier, no doubt.
There they go again, I thought dismissively, futilely trying to sell unsellable parcels; will they never give up? Then, over the next few days on driving out I noticed similar survey flags and boundary sticks along the road. I started to worry a bit at that point. Something was going on. But what? Was some new wave of homesteading fever preparing to take off? Was a developer secretly building a major attraction nearby that would make people suddenly clamor to live here? Had gold been discovered on the parcels? (The obvious often escaped me.)
I tried putting it out of mind as likely only the latest half-baked realtor campaign to entice a new bunch of ill-informed land shoppers.
Then, several weeks later, I was awakened by the persistent sound of metal striking metal.
I stepped outside, curious. Actually, the noise seemed to be coming from several directions at once. Like some surreal flock of persistent metal woodpeckers had descended on the region, rat-a-tatting up a slow-motion storm. Walking to the front of my driveway, I spotted a slender Asian man forty yards away pounding with dedicated focus a metal stake to string barbed wire along. It was such a surreal sight in a place that had rarely had any fences around actual residences, let alone barbed-wire ones about vacant ones, that I didn't exactly feel pulled to walk over and introduce myself and try to find out what the heck was going on.
A few days later, a small party of white people was talking among themselves on the lot directly across from me. Not used to hearing voices so close by in my remote neck of the woods, I walked over to introduce myself, thinking maybe they were new homesteaders planning to build, as they were studiously pacing off an area. They seemed evasive, and I couldn't understand why. We chatted a bit, but they seemed wary of me. Then, out of the blue, one said, "We're not bad people", further mystifying me.
In time, I noticed barbed wire fences seemed to be going up everywhere -- along with "No Trespassing", "Posted: Private Property" signs on lots that had been vacant for decades.
It finally dawned on me that -- duh -- people were snapping up the parcels to grow pot on...lots of pot. Word was out how the remote Vista lots were going dirt-cheap in a poor rural county lagging behind neighboring countries of Trinity and Shasta in enacting more restrictive cannabis ordinances to get a handle on the illicit growing ramping up and spreading like wildfire. People were in a delirium to grab Vista's long long-unsellable lots while the getting was good. Before everyone and their uncle started descending on the instant grower haven and realtors, knowing the score and having early on bought up a slew of parcels, jacked up the asking prices to the moon to reflect the sudden phenomenal seller's market -- one that would actually have bidding wars break out. One neighbor, cashing out on land he'd bought five years earlier for $6,000, had hopefully asked $85,000 for his remote lot at the end of a remote cul-de-sac; it had a tiny non-code living structure and water tank and irrigation system set up. A bidding war ensued and he got $105,000. While hard to believe, unimproved lots unclaimed in 2014 at a $5,000 asking price were grabbed for $150,000 or more by 2022 (before, soon after, the market plunged as fast as it soared).
Among the Hmong
Although a handful of lot buyers were white, the overwhelming majority were Asian-American Hmong, a distinct-culture minority tribe in China, some of whom migrated to bordering Asian countries after feeling oppressed by the nation's ruling authorities. They'd become sitting targets in the aftermath of the Viet Nam War in which they joined fighting on the side of American efforts once U.S. forces pulled out April 30, 1975; those suspected of having sided with Americans were not infrequently killed on sight. (Two of the writer's neighbors recounted witnessing seeing their own family members get killed.) They were soon -- but not immediately, for concerns of their ability to adapt to an industrialized U.S. society -- given refugee status.
Remarkably clannish, they dreamed of establishing their own tight-knit communities.
Though agriculture was in their bones, in early years they'd lose out to Mexican migrants in Southern California's vast growing fields due to lack of English speaking skills and no more quickly adapting to their new homeland's ways. Now, swept up in Mt. Shasta's vision-a-minute factory and California's historic impending recreational cannabis legalization, they held high hopes that they'd maybe at last found a place where they could establish their own rural community and support it by cultivating and marketing unsanctioned commercial-level cannabis grows through the burgeoning national underground market (which, of course, people of all colors and nationalities were getting involved in).
Everyone anticipated what would prove to be a tidal wave of super-scaled pot growing in California as state voters were primed to finally legalize recreational cannabis by passing Proposition 64. But there would be restrictions that some either didn't realize existed or simply chose to ignore. Siskiyou County would opt to forbid any commercial pot growing outside of city limits, their right under the new state law's provisions. One couldn't get approval to grow in the Vista (not zoned for commercial agricultural use, anyhow), even if willing to play by the rules, as the rules specifically prohibited it. You could legally grow up to six plants on your own residential property, for your own use. But that was it. Any more and one was potentially inviting trouble.
Among other things, the new rules reduced unlicensed commercial grows of any size to a simple civil misdemeanor, crop chopped, and a $500 fine (plus, rarely enforced if ever for want of space, a half year in jail).
Spring came and the Vista was suddenly abuzz with more traffic than the place had ever seen; it was a genuine modern-day land rush. An indication of how many people were flooding at astonishing speed: One day on driving out on Placone Drive I spotted some road litter and stopped to get out and pick it up, as was my habit. It had been a sleepy back road that for ages probably saw fewer than a dozen cars a week drive along it. In the few seconds I stopped, two vehicles came roaring out of nowhere, like bats out of hell, and drove halfway off the road to get by me in a cloud of dust; no doubt their occupants were rushing to a realtor's office to stake their claim.
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta
Unlicensed growers and, sometimes, instant homesteaders as well thus began a frenzied snapping up of the long under-appreciated parcels. The lots were seen as a steal -- as had always been the case throughout the place's checkered history. Starting early 2015, they sold like crazy to any and all willing to take a chance and bypass what would prove to be the county's largely ineffective, unenforceable grow-permitting regulations. Regulations that would have one, among other things, deal with state and county agencies, tons of paperwork, regular inspections, strict bookkeeping, fees, taxes... Who needed any of that? When one could grow seas of green with so little chance of getting caught, who wouldn't opt for the latter?
The situation sometimes made for the sporadic crop busts little more hassle than getting a speeding ticket. But not always. Some raids were led by barnstorming authorities bearing pointed assault rifles, so terrifying some, unaware of the hardball tactics sometimes meted out to any so cavalier as to ignore laws like they didn't exist, that it no doubt triggered the PTSD of older cultivators from the frightful killing fields they'd escaped from in war-torn Asia. (Being an oppressed minority in an overwhelmingly white, quasi good old boy local culture didn't help matters either.)
It was all perhaps a bit like an incredibly lucky streak playing roulette: Every now and then it might be interrupted by the ball landing on 0 or 00, with no ability to cover the positions. The odds were eighteen in nineteen to remain a winner, odds too great for any who loved to bet and work with the earth -- and had a tolerance for dealing with potential adversity -- to resist.
A selective sort of anarchy would suddenly become irresistible to droves of basically otherwise law-abiding citizens. It was a situation similar to one ages earlier (if on a fair smaller scale) when people dropped anchor on Vista's lots and ignored the building codes like they didn't exist. Financially insecure people wanting to live freely always tend to ignore laws and ordinances that appear unenforceable, especially if they're viewed as unfair, arbitrary, and or unrealistic and holding one back from ever getting ahead in life.
And Siskiyou County, its old-guard, largely rural, pillar citizens, more than a scosche conservative, would adamantly refuse to allow one iota of commercial pot growing in the county within its entire unincorporated area (that is, anywhere outside incorporated towns). This struck your more liberal minded citizen as being doggedly repressive and behind the curve of fast-changing times.
The Vista being located a half hour from the town of Weed wouldn't help matters any, either; with such a stony moniker (of course long the butt of jokes and cause for snickers), it came as no surprise that its region became the initial epicenter of unregulated grows.
"There's gold in California...again!"
The consequences were enormous as California became the only western state to reduce the criminal penalty for unsanctioned commercial cultivating -- on any scale -- down to a civic misdemeanor (barring related offenses, like polluting the water table with toxic, banned insecticides, or setting out poisons to kill wildlife maybe hoping to snack on the product). It essentially paved the way for the rallying cry of "There's gold in California!" to sound again, 167 years after history's original epic event. Word once again spread like wildfire as grow-happy entrepreneurs felt irresistibly pulled from across the nation and overseas. The state once again became a billion-ton magnet to pursue the new once-in-a-century opportunity to get rich quick.*
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*Asian attraction to California as a steppingstone to fast riches wasn't anything new. Beginning in 1849, Chinese immigrants, like other nationalities around the world, flocked to the state they called Gum San, or "Gold Mountain", escaping poverty at home. So many came that it led to wide-spread social unrest -- ostensibly over how Chinese were taking away jobs from whites for being willing to work more cheaply but, alas, actually more about maintaining white purity. Their presence fueled racial violence that included mass lynchings. In 1882, President Arthur signed federal legislation known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which forbade Chinese immigration into the United States for 61 years. It grew to further restrictions of other Asian groups, including Japanese, Korean and Filipinos, by setting near-zero immigration quotas. The act was finally repealed in 1943. see PBS video
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County supervisors might just as well have gone fishing for all the compliance their new restrictive ordinances inspired -- ordinances they no doubt liked to think of as etched in stone. The hundreds of new Vista lot holders intuited that the ever-changing cannabis laws and ordinances were new and untried and so prime candidates for being openly ignored, that they would be all but unenforceable, especially in a sprawling, spread thin, relatively poor rural county like Siskiyou. And if busted, it might only be a relative slap on the wrist and minor setback (if also often an unpleasant loss of face and human dignity for being treated like a criminal). Almost overnight, seas of green flourished, first exceeding the state's allowed personal-use six-plant limit some sixteen-fold, then, within a few years, over three-hundred fold.
Was the sixties' back-to-the-land euphoria
reactivated in 2015, the Vista's unheralded golden jubilee?
The latter-day, super-nova explosion of frenzied land settling was something out of another era.
The massive land grab and systematic cannabis cultivation appeared to catch everyone in the county flat-footed, asleep at the switch, out to lunch, pick your metaphor. "No one could've predicted such a thing would ever happen," opined one public official to the media, head stuck firmly in the sand. The Los Angeles Times soon featured stories over the unfolding drama, and the New York Times did its own piece on the town of Weed and the region's phenomenal pot-growing mania. The long-obscure, failed rural subdivision had suddenly gained national attention, albeit in a glaringly bad light. For better or worse, it was having its moment.
But the Vista's long-festering plight -- born of a county too provincial-minded and or lackadaisical to keep up with fast-changing times or able to enforce its own ordinances and regulations. should enough people opt to ignore them -- had been careening towards a collision course with reality for ages...
...until having avoided dealing with it for so long at last proved to be something of an unwarranted luxury.
People had predicted at its very start that Mt. Shasta Vista would be a disaster. It came as no surprise, then, when a half century later, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, they proved themselves absolutely right.
Anyone appreciating the forces at work on the subtle plane might ponder on the following: Is it possible that year of 2015, which significantly marked the (unobserved) fiftieth anniversary of the Vista's founding, somehow served to reactivate and further amp up the euphoric enthusiasm of people to settle the land that was first experienced by the Vista's first settlers, then for being such a sweet spot for nature lovers to retire at, now to pursue get-rich-quick endeavors while at the same time building an instant, rough-and-ready community?
And, further, the Vista's golden jubilee, though unheralded, came about during the throes of a major social meltdown in anticipation of the long awaited liberalization of cannabis laws in California, triggering the latest phenomenal gold rush. Had the time stream's exact moment on some subtle level helped trigger yet another -- and far more dizzying -- incarnation of the Vista as a dreamland? One as blissfully unmindful -- and as stubbornly disregarding -- of mundane realities as ever?
Whether one discounts this converging events as mere coincidence or the grand synchronicity of a universe at work, no one will deny that Mt. Shasta Vista went to pot in breathtaking fashion.
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Afterword
The fifth century B.C. Chinese philosophy Lao Tse said that the cause of anything is everything and the cause of everything is anything. It would be unfair and over-simplistic to try to pin the blame for what happened to the woebegone development on any one cause or party. One might say that everyone was guilty and everyone was innocent.
There was an extraordinary confluence of factors at play over time, countless ingredients in what became the place's recipe for disaster -- for non-grower residents, anyhow. Obviously, it was a deliciously fortuitous situation for adventurous pot entrepreneurs willing to live and work together to remake the place to suit themselves while making a mint through unsanctioned commercial grows.
- - - - - - - -
A brief recap of the ingredients in the Vista's recipe for grand misadventure:
The party selling the land to developer Martin reportedly didn't get permission from the rest of the land-owning Martin family. They were furious. The result: A contentious vibe infected the place from its very moment of conception
Dutiful efforts to follow legal protocol by the first residents -- each providing their own well, electrical hookup, etc. before building, to code, and only then moving in -- were not followed by sundry future dwellers, despite such conformity being crucial to getting recognized as a standard community, isolated conditions making it easier to get away with it
The plan to extend power to every lot, initially funded by voluntary assessment, failed after one in four parcel owners refused to chip in, among other factors leading the power company to back out of its tenuous commitment. Owners were left to gripe how the funds of over a thousand contributors had been gobbled up just to connect the homes of a couple dozen, leading to a growing indifference and/or contempt towards both the developer and the residents by the Vista's myriad absentee owners, by then feeling stuck with lemons
Pacific Power possibly jacked up extension costs through the roof after the initial homebuilding, causing a meltdown of lot-owner fury if actually the case
Add:
A sea of indifferent absentee owners, often mere speculators, many soon nursing serious buyer remorse and -- unable to unload the clunkers without taking a bath, as land use got blurred between first-generation recreational use and arrested growth as an standard community -- refusing to sink another cent in the boondoggle through special assessments to try to improve the place
Firebrand property-owners board members, along with other heavily invested first-comer residents, reacting to the growing rash of residents refusing to conform to health and building code by declaring war, creating an uber-contentious social climate that dragged on for decades
Detached, profit-minded realtors, not caring diddly-squat what one did with their lot
Limited-involvement association managers and, sometimes, actual board presidents, indifferent to or ineffective in helping the efforts of more civic-minded residents to nurture a more viable sense of community, some even heavily participating in the eventual red-hot realty boom sparked by liberalization of pot laws in California
Stir in:
County officials in time all but abandoning enforcement of health and building regulations for the half decade starting with the Great Recession of 2008-2009
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Mix together and bake 50 years. Result? One giant question mark of a place the public still shakes its head over, dismissing it as a tangled mess that defies even wanting to try wrapping one's mind around.
Was it any wonder the Vista became such a basket case? Almost all along it had seemed it had been vying for the 'Most Dysfunctional Rural Development' award in some bizarro alternate universe.
Countless influences led the Vista to be the way it is today: first a shared recreational land, then an ephemeral standard rural community, always left wanting to be more despite the cards being stacked against it from the very start...
...and, people being people and the Vista being the Vista, is still trying to any way it can.
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Stuart Ward, a Vista resident since 1978, served as secretary in the early 2010's on its property owners board and, along with former board president Bob Moore, produced the ephemeral official Vista website
online from 2012 to 2014. He still brakes for road litter.
An Independent Stewart Springs watchdog, tribute & blog site since 2011