All Things Stewart Springs
Independent tribute, watchdog & blog site since 2011
An inside look at Mount Shasta Vista's first 50 years: 1965 - 2015+
Informal history of the one-time de facto collective camp resort
and its futile efforts to grow into a standard community
(or even the faintest 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 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 versions of parts 1, 2 and 3 were first published
in the now-zombied Mt. Shasta Herald September 22 and 29, 2021
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The once-sleepy 50 year-old backwoods subdivision underwent radical sea change in 2015. The place had already jumped down the rabbit hole ages earlier, but "the Vista" was then to discover even greater depths, as a haven for rogue scaled pot grows. The following crazy-quilt retrospective by a longtime resident deep-dives into where the place was coming from leading up to that momentous year, which (coincidentally?) also marked its fiftieth anniversary. While also sharing incidents and personal experiences and briefly touching on post-2015 times, it focuses on the many reasons the remote development, well, went to pot...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
[Part 1]
Wilderness condo, anyone?
The rustic wooden archway spanning the entrance bore the words “Mt. Shasta Vista” in hand-scrolled, wooden letters. It beckoned, making your more whimsical first-time visitors driving under it imagine they were perhaps entering some enchanted woodland realm or quaint scouting retreat rather than a private, mostly undeveloped, rural subdivision. One sensed the hopes and dreams that went into it, how the place's earliest property owners -- initially only visiting summers from distant cities for extended campouts and rendezvouses -- held a deep affection for the fledgling development, so neatly tucked in the high desert wooded foothills below Mount Shasta's northwestern slopes.
The sign, set back a ways from the blacktop highway and surrounded by trees on each side, is now long gone (along with the trees). Together, they'd imparted a certain grace to the entrance of the backwoods development, begun in the mid 1960s and located some fifteen miles out from both Weed and Grenada off county road A-12 on Mount Shasta's sleepy side. The region reportedly long ago held one of the largest stands of juniper trees on earth and had been named, appropriately enough, Juniper Flats.
Happy campers turned modern-day pioneers
So smitten by its charms were some among the flock of mostly older repeat vacationers -- many from the L.A. area -- that they decided to actually retire here. Collectively, they segued their individual lots from simple first-generation recreational use into part of a thinly spread proto community of full-on retirement dwellings.
This wasn't as outlandish a move as it might've seemed, as the lots at the place's birth had been re-zoned by the county for single-family residency after developer petition. No doubt the efforts launched by the few dozen landowners were in hopes that like-minded others would soon follow suit, initially each covering their own water, electrical and sewage needs like them, until eventually they could build up some manner of systematic centralized infrastructure and thus grow the place into a standard rural community of financially secure nature lovers (preferably fellow retirees, no doubt).
That was the starry-eyed vision. Alas, their initial, gung-ho efforts to manifest shared infrastructure beyond a few isolated power and phone lines and an informal community well was not fated to succeed.
Central among the reasons: contention surrounding the very land sale; a grand falling early on over a campaign to electrify the place; the high cost of drilling often very deep wells; and, later, the coup de grace, the arrival of those who refused to conform to Siskiyou County's health and building codes.
Long story short, forces would conspire to torpedo the fondest hopes and dreams of what instead proved to be a short-lived code-compliant enclave of transplanted city folks. No more than some ten to fifteen percent of the parcels would ever get connected to the grid, and the cost of drilling individual wells often proved so prohibitive and iffy that, in time, open non-compliance by typically less-solvent, bohemian-leaning newcomers to the costly county residential codes became commonplace.
The possibilities!
Not long after the brief honeymoon of the fledgling community, the place shifted gears -- stripped gears is more like it -- to become a permanent bizarre limbo land constantly at war with itself, an incongruous oil-and-water mix of code-compliant residences and decidedly code-challenged ones. Result: the Vista was almost always in hot water with Siskiyou County's code-enforcement authorities.
It seems the developer had decided to play it by ear, initially not having any well-defined long-range plans or visions for the place (made transparent, anyhow) beyond serving as a simple -- i.e. primitive -- collectively owned and maintained, de facto recreational resort. 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. Suddenly, new rural residential subdivisions were starting up all over the place in the upstate California region.
It appeared the developer, along with a select group of owners who had been enjoying their extended annual camping visits here and seriously falling under the mountain's spell, decided to get ambitious. They must've appreciated that it would take a critical mass of parcel owners -- many of whom it seems bought the lots only for being cheap and perfect for simple private retreats, or as long-term investments or short-term speculative gambles -- willing to commit the necessary time, money and effort to build up the infrastructure needed to bring such a massive transformation to fruition.
They no doubt crossed their fingers, took a deep breath, and hoped for the best.
It had at first appeared to be little more than a Good Sam’s Club, of sorts, tucked out in the boonies. An unassuming rural development, offering weary city dwellers a mess of secluded, affordable, 2-1/2 acre-on-average parcels, where every now and then they could enjoy secluded camping, unwind from city cares, and breathe fresh mountain air while drinking in the mountain's regal presence.
The developer's apparent initial lack of a more ambitious financial commitment or planning vision was reflected in Vista's boilerplate ruling documents, or CC&Rs -- and the association status. It was a POA, or Property Owners Association, not an HOA, or Homeowners Association.
No nothing
At its launch there was no water, no electricity, no sewer system, no gas lines. Forget any paved roads or community center, public parks or playgrounds. It was nothing but a lot of lots, 1,641 (count 'em). Plus a labyrinthine 66-mile network of modest red cinder roads and signage and a dauntingly tiny map to access them.
Called ranch roads by George Collins, the L.A.-region developer, they were fragile affairs built up of a loose rock base over often deep, sandy soil, with volcanic red cinder topping from a nearby cinder hill. As they were never designed to withstand constant heavy loads or frequent or fast traffic, a 15 miles-per-hour speed limit was set to both help preserve them plus keep the backwoods' relaxed, tranquil atmosphere intact and dust down. Ongoing maintenance was covered by the then-modest annual mandatory-membership property assessment, informally called road dues.
A sea of turn-key, primitive wilderness camping condos, if you will, with at first only wispy dreams of maybe someday growing into something more, maybe not. A number of lot owners -- the relative few who actually made use of their newly acquired properties, or those waiting until others developed the place some before jumping in -- imagined the possibilities the secluded, affordable lots with their sweeping mountain views inspired.
To more fully fathom Shasta Vista's history, it helps to bear in mind there were two powerful factors at work. One, the late sixties through the early seventies period was a time of rarefied, historic and staggering social and political upheaval, awakening spiritual awareness and expanding consciousness. And two, the land possessed an extraordinarily pronounced, dreamy quality; one that unrealistically sparked imagining the sky as the limit when it came to ambitions to grow the development into a thriving woodland community. Combine the two, along with the random luck of the draw and the super-affordable lot pricing encouraging impulse purchases lacking intention, and you had perhaps more than a passing potential for an unrealistic lotus land to emerge, its denizens in pursuit of idyllic carefree living in the bosom of nature.
Country comfort
Situated a few miles uphill and east of the soon exurb of Lake Shastina, many of the realm's parcels offered one a profound sense of solitude (or mind-numbingly stark isolation, depending on the mindset). Situated as most of the lots were between one to five miles distant from the nearest of its five blacktop entrances, with their subtle, tranquility-eroding traffic wash, one could feel fifty miles from town due to the land's profound sense of stillness.
The high-desert lots were spread over seven square miles of the juniper trees and sagebrush and thin scatterings of tall pine. The development spanned nearly six miles between furthest points: Pilar Road at Perla Drive in its northeastern-most point to Trails End Road at Rising Hill Road in its southwestern-most point. National Forest and Bureau of Land Management lands flanked several borders. Square-mile sections were platted into two giant clumps, separated by a square mile of BLM land and the county highway A-12 running between the second, smaller clump of sections 23 and 13, near Pluto Caves and Sheep Rock respectively.
As often happened in such rural subdivisions, the developers conjured up whimsical road names to try tickling the fancy of their target market: private vacation land seekers and impulsive casual investors. Evocative names like Lost Mine Road, Zane Gray Drive and Happy Lane. Rich sounding names like Silver Lode Road, Golden, and Bonanza. One was perhaps meant to evoke a 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 perhaps an improbable air of being some sort of Catholic summer retreat. Collins Drive and McLarty Road were named after the developer and his main man, respectively; a third, Ragan Drive, was apparently 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 or 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*. The brainstorm of developer George Collins's southern-California-based outfit, Pacific Shores Realty, it was land he 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 grazed livestock on the land for generations, seasonally making cattle drives right on nearby sections of the then-sleepy two lane highway; ancient cow patties still littered the writer's new parcel over a decade after the Vista's founding. Also, the region had been deemed among the best hunting ground in the entire county for over a century. Before white settlers came, indigenous peoples seasonally hunted through the mostly waterless area; the writer found a complete obsidian arrowhead on his parcel the very first week. The region had been picked clean of much of its tall pine by lumberman Abner Weed around the turn of the last century; your writer found a few large stumps on his lot still busy biodegrading after eighty years.
The story goes that when Jess Martin sold the sprawling acreage to developer Collins, he hadn't bothered to first get permission from other family members. Big mistake. Apparently too late to stop the sale, they were reportedly furious over the commercial nonsense soon set in motion on their now-lost ancestral holding. The region's other longtime residents shared their outrage at the disruption to a long-established bucolic way of life and no doubt took their concerns to the halls of local government. This contention erupted years before the handful of lot owners would grow the primitive realm into a de facto rural retirement village and soon find themselves engaged in a take-no-prisoners war with code-ignoring land buyers who dared to horn in on the cheap into what by then the former considered their domain.
The controversial land sale had set the stage for the disaster soon to unfold. It laid a faulty foundation for the world of animosity, bitterness and confusion that came to tarnish the domain's reputation and crimp its livability.
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* According to the date formal paperwork was filed and time-stamped in Siskiyou county courthouse. This date was used rather than the 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 had been abruptly closed off just so a bunch of rich big-city folk could lollygag in their shiny Airstreams a few weeks a year.
The county's then-four board of supervisor members had no doubt sympathized with the aggrieved Martin family members and incensed locals; maybe they were initially skeptical of ever approving it. But due to Collins's persistence and earnest assurances, plus his track record of having successfully launched subdivisions elsewhere -- and the board being budget-minded and living in California's third-poorest county -- they must've been ultimately won over. They were no doubt mindful of the fresh revenue stream that 1,641 individually owned and taxed lots would supply (if, also, worlds more paperwork).
Concerns were raised over an apparent lack of water and the lots often being rocky, volcanic land that couldn't support conventional septic systems should owners ever want to build, and indeed the board insisted his team first dig several wells to show that the land in fact did have sufficient water. They must've finally decided it at 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 good wells (and electricity) might be prohibitive and iffy -- and hoped common sense would prevail.
Although 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 unconvinced. The well Collins drilled at the highest elevation to demonstrate there was water throughout (if you went deep enough) had only drawn five gallons a minute (minimal amount to be deemed an acceptable well); he'd maybe thought that wasn't enough to assure the place could always provide adequate and affordable water for vacationers opting to sink a well on their parcel to avoid having to haul water in. Or for possible home builders for which having a dependable water supply would of course be essential.
His skepticism would prove justified. He must've had to refrain from saying "I told you so" to fellow board members (assuming his lone dissenting vote wasn't just a sop to appease infuriated locals). While many future residents would hit decent water at 200 to 300 feet in the lower sections, the depth required in the higher ones could run 700 feet or more. And even then, some wells 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, the Kehners, living a mile from the writer, had drilled a super-deep well with water having arsenic levels within the then-acceptable health department limit when properly treated with rock salt filtration. Years later, they both died and not far apart. While writer never learned if arsenic poisoning was determined a contributing 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 humanity 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. Then, as things started really getting out of hand, it turned to open hostility. Finally, as the county realized it had a perpetual problem child on its hands, it settled back into a stony, hell-what-can-you-do-about-it? dismissiveness and sometimes even a flinty, hard-bitten contempt.
Although it was later events that would really aggravate county authorities, the downward spiral in sentiment, beyond that caused by grumbling locals, had no doubt first been triggered by the indeed sometimes serious lack of easily tappable water. It would lead, directly or indirectly, to most future problems. It was so serious it would cause countless future settlers of more limited means, especially those in the higher elevations, to blatantly ignore the health and building codes. This in time would amp the local government's scorn, derision and exasperation over the misbegotten place through the roof. Its disregard for the place's eventual, seemingly hopeless, dysfunctionality and perpetually infighting residents would spread to every county department down to dogcatcher (with, of course, the notable exception of tax collector).
An electrifying turn of events
Between the original owners' and regional residents' sour feelings over their lost stomping grounds and the scarce water, scarcer electricity, and often rocky ground making code compliance especially challenging, an already well-fraught situation was on the verge of snowballing totally out of control.
That handful of ambitious and adventurous lot owners -- after brainstorming the idea of settling and retiring as a congenial group of shared-vacation buddies to their respective properties -- were a scrupulously law-abiding group. Each first drilled an approved well, paid into a power fund to get electrical lines extended, and installed a regulation septic system, thereby individually supplying their own infrastructure, all before they could get a home-building permit. That was issued only after submitting detailed construction plans, paying a fee, and agreeing to build to code "in a timely manner." Their generation, having weathered World War II, with all the monumental civilian cooperation required to support high-stakes effort to preserve democracy, was used to toeing the line without question when it came to established authorities.
Though maybe a few were hands-on owner-builders who lived on the site during construction, most hired contractors and lived elsewhere until their house was completed and signed off by the building department.
At first glance it looked like the place was maybe on its way to becoming a respectable -- if ultra-sparsely settled -- rural community. Telephone lines were extended for free; utility poles sometimes carried both power and phone lines. But significantly, the change would come at the price of ending popular first-generation use as the secluded retreats many had bought them to be. Such owners had zero intention of ever building on the lots; the place was just too isolated and too water-challenged and non-electrified to even consider. No, they'd hoped things would stay primitive for camping...and affordable: no mandatory assessments to try "improving" things.
In their book the land already had all it needed: simple road access. Though the lots were technically zoned for single-family residential occupancy, the place had been so perfect as is for enjoying rustic getaways and retreats that it was hard to imagine it ever being anything else. You didn't mess with things, trying to turn it into something it wasn't suited for -- especially if not enough fellow lot owners were willing to get on board with the huge effort and expense needed to make a successful transition from primitive collective campground to standard community. One with all the bells and whistles city dwellers took for granted and were shamelessly hooked on: central water, electricity, and waste disposal, not to mention paved roads.
Not another Lake Shastina
Hundreds of lot owners would effectively protest what they viewed as the capriciously changing of horses in the middle of the creek. The sad prospect of losing the pristine charm of their camping sweet spot was staring them in the face. Naturally they refused to chip into the voluntary assessment power and light fund spearheaded by Collins; 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 would thus fail, the thousand-plus contributions that were made enabled bringing in power to the couple dozen or so retirement-couple members.
Flush with cash from selling their pricey city homes and champing at the bit to move onto the land they'd fallen in love with, they were psyched to simplify their lives and create their own little exclusive Shangri-la. They anticipated luxuriating happily ever after amid the splendor of woodland solitude year round in prominently, breezily urbane, transplanted So-Cal bonhomie.
Due to the prohibitively costly process of extending power lines to the remote lots, the earlycomers had rapidly exhausted the fund which so many had chipped in on, expecting it to be there for them when they were ready to build...or for those they might want to sell their lots to in order to assure a better price and quicker sale. It's unclear whether or not it had been planned as only the first round of contributions, as far greater cash infusions would be needed to electrify the whole 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 to build out the place. It would have been a sure indicator there was a significant number of new, energy-thirsty customers itching to settle, as was currently happening in almost-next-door Lake Shastina (formerly known by the less euphonious name of Dwinnell Reservoir after its dam was built in 1927, along with a long, cross-country canal, to aid regional farmers).
Trying to goose lot values
Crucially, beyond the handful of early house builders and mobile home installers -- and those thinking to maybe build sometime in the future (plus the lot holders who'd hoped to keep the place primitive for simple camp use) -- were others, possibly the vast majority. They appeared keen on the idea of seguing the giant checkerboard of infrastructure-bereft lots into an actual, by-golly community...but not for themselves (Are you kidding? Perish the thought). Nope, they were simply detached investors hoping to goose parcel values; with electricity available at every lot, lot prices and sellability would be more apt to take off.
Regardless of what some owners thought about the abrupt shift in land use and the embryonic rural community suddenly emerging, that tiny handful of certain age -- having the mindset, bucks and resolve to move fast and build their own de facto, thinly spread rural retirement village -- had gone for it lock, stock and barrel.
Inevitably, tempers flared after they'd so rapidly depleted the power fund -- and the power company soon withdrew its commitment. The company had come to realize that there wasn't any huge drove of new power customers eager to settle the remote lands and get hooked up with their mainline supply of go juice.
Power grab
A giant chasm thus emerged among fellow lot owners, along with loss of confidence in the developer who'd zealously pushed for the fund, confident he could get everyone on board and maybe get the power company to subsidize or absorb further line extension costs. Or had thought that -- in a dime, in a dollar -- people would agree to more voluntary (eventually maybe even mandatory) assessments to replenish the fund and thus enable further building out the development.
The writer's not sure, but possibly electrical providers in general became wary of investing so much money in such new rural developments with their relatively small (and delayed) profit return to accommodate the sudden flood of back-to-the-landers wanting power brought to remote locations -- especially on realizing, in Vista's case, the rocky ground often made for difficult pole setting by its electrical provider, Pacific Power...and so they maybe jacked up the extension per-foot costs to protect their short-term bottom line from hemorrhaging.
A friend who'd lived in the New York backwoods around the same time told the writer how, right after he got his lines put in, his local power supplier raised line extension costs from fifty cents to five dollars a foot, a prohibitive ten-fold increase. If this was a national trend and the case here as well, it would've created a double whammy: the fund was exhausted and the power company demanded new, sky-high extension fees that shocked senseless any would-be home and cabin builder, mobile home installer, or remaining die-hard camp-trailer vacationer depending on an affordable extension rate.
In any event, it turned out that over a thousand property owners had effectively subsidized the electrical hookup costs of a few dozen. Tempers surely must've erupted to match that of the long ago spewing lava of the place's namesake volcano. Some might've jumped to the cynical conclusion that the developer intentionally misrepresented the financial realities involved in electrifying the entire place just to aid the homesteading ambitions of a few he'd become cozy with, or had otherwise fudged the facts and promised something he couldn't deliver. Or, worse, 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 and handicapping the lots' potential market values then entered a wildly different breed of owner, one destined to put the cherry on top: Instant homesteaders. Serious back-to-the-landers bearing rebellious spirits and little cash. With full-court-press determination, they were destined to forever blur there being any clear, dedicated purpose for the place over time. Was it a primitive co-op camp resort or a fledgling living community? It couldn't be both. Not without creating a world of confusion and discord.
The tumultuous mid to late 1960s through early 1970s period was, among other things, witnessing a phenomenal back-to-the-land movement. First sparked by the rapidly emerging counterculture fleeing Babylon (as some liked to put it), the diaspora soon cut across class lines; the first excited residents, likewise burned out on city living, got 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? In the Vista's case it was a luxurious notion perhaps only the comfortably situated could afford to pursue...if conforming to the steep and costly and then-enforced county health and building code regulations -- made far costlier for the lack of any easier water, electricity or sewage systems -- for establishing what the powers that be deemed an acceptable residence.
As anyone who lived through the historic period thoroughly appreciated, it was a time of astoundingly polarized social and cultural upheaval as well as dramatic spiritual awakenings. A growing stream of often financially insecure, freedom-minded, non-conformist people were making a grand exodus from the city to embrace country living. It was inevitable that they would also find themselves gravitating to the same generous-sized, secluded lots with their inspiring namesake views and jaw-droppingly low prices.
Game changer
Some, and eventually most, of these newcomers appeared intent on ignoring any and all of the silly and unreasonable codes, regulations and restrictions dedicated law makers and bureaucratic forces had devised. Ones that tried insisting that one first drill what might prove to be a 700-foot well and then pay an extortionate price to extend power lines before technically being allowed to stay on their own parcel for more than thirty days a year -- or build anything more than a fence without first applying for a permit.
Screw that. They figured 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 mind too much meeting the exhaustive, super-exacting building standards required to become official residents -- it was simply the way things were -- the local bureaucracy must have gotten used to people willing to comply with the full letter of the law and strove to keep a strong handle on enforcement. Maybe, too, they were coming under pressure from the state with new, far stricter standards for approving subdivision developments. Possibly some lot buyers had already been trying to drop anchor and casually live in trailers and motor-homes; the county felt a need to get tough with a public that now seemed bent on disregarding their departments' chiseled-in-stone regulations and specifications regarding what constituted an acceptable abode.
Oh, the camper and the resident should be friends...
A story went around of how a lot-owning couple early on had tried following the rules but was denied a permit. They just wanted to pour a cement slab for their brief annual RV vacation visits. They were told no way; they'd first have to put in a well and septic system and hook up to power before they could pour the slab. Sorry, it didn't matter if you only visited one month a year; the code's the code.
One suspected that the newly established dwellers, having gone through the mill, were well aware that among the over thousand individual lot owners were bound to be some who would try to end-run the system; they'd refuse to play by the rules and render unto Caesar. Maybe the former had put pressure on the health and building department by reporting even the tiniest infraction to discourage even 'respectable' vacationers who were also now effectively intruding on the newly emerging residential scene, by erring on the side of caution. Legal residents no doubt expected, even demanded, that they enforce the exact letter of the law with which they'd complied, at great expense and bother, dammit. Fair's fair, after all.
However it all came down exactly, such draconian enforcement of rules and procedures on how to live on -- apparently, even just visit -- your own property out in the middle of nowhere had a predictable way of inspiring people to view them as unreasonable, eminently deserving of being ignored. As the poet Gibran noted in The Prophet, "You delight in laying down laws, yet you delight more in breaking them."
Enter stage left a flock of happy-go-lucky, freedom-minded back-to-the-landers, some of decidedly modest means, intent on planting themselves on their new-owned lots before the ink on the sales paperwork could dry.
That's when all hell really broke loose in Mt. Shasta Vista.
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The Vista Thru Time
1965-2015
[Part 2]
Ephemeral dream community goes berserk
The place's already gnarly vibe -- first from contention by locals and family owners over the sale, then the electrification brouhaha, and now from an eruption within over the suddenly emerging plague of non-compliant residents -- went into overdrive. Compliant residents unhinged. A snowball of infuriated contentious forces grew to such monstrous proportions, it seemed as though some demon had taken hold of the place and kept it in a stranglehold.
This massive force-field of polarized negativity was destined to bedevil the would-be peaceful realm for ages.
In a nutshell: Between (1) an embittered farming/ranching community coming to view The Vista's inhabitants through distorted fun-house mirrors as a 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 eroding the place's livability and property values; (3) disillusioned absentee parcel holders, most indifferent to the day-to-day realities of its few residents, soon stuck with lots they could often neither enjoy recreationally nor sell without taking a bath; (4) non-conforming residents taking heat from the aforementioned frothing-at-the-mouth residents and kicking back hard, defying a system they viewed as oppressive; and (5) the put-upon county authorities over time essentially giving up even trying to enforce health and building codes in a place many locals resented being formed all along...add these together and the place never had (you knew it was coming) a snowball's chance in hell.
A querulous spirit had come to infect the backwoods. A contentious force field hovered over the otherwise serene high desert woodlands like so many storm clouds forever threatening to rain on the parade of all: detached speculators, absentee property holders, code-legal residents and "outlaw" dwellers alike.
No matter how many future residents might dedicate themselves to try turning things around and salvage the development's seeming initial promise, the place would never amount to more than a stalled-out, de facto primitive recreational resort and soured investor boondoggle that failed to grow into a recognized community, its evolution arrested within a few short years of its jinxed start.
In realtors' stark insider parlance, the place was roadkill.
Down the rabbit hole
The more free-wheeling, non-compliant dwellers invading the briefly respectable preserve had jumped down the rabbit hole into their own private worlds that the realm's rarefied energies could so easily inspire. Soon enjoying wild Mad Hatter tea parties all but oblivious to the outside world and its bothersome regulations which they ignored with pirates' glee, they dismissed as largely impotent the ravings the rants of the Queen of Hearts, in the guise of a largely-powerless property owners' board and its minions, screaming, "They'll build to code or it's off with their heads!"
Expanding on the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland analogy a bit more: Standing in for the mischievous Cheshire cat was the spirit of rebellion that mocked the dully accepted ways of a sometimes over-strict law-and-order mindset. And the hookah-smoking caterpillar? The stony, spiraling vortex energies of massive Mount Shasta; the backwoods development clung to its very foothills, a half hour away from any town's modifying influence. It was fully under its surreality-inducing sway, as if, like the stoned caterpillar asking everyone who ventured into its dreamy, topsy-turvy domain, "Who are you?"
According to one definition of vortex energy, given by Ashalyn, founder of a local outfit, Shasta Vortex Adventures, which encourages 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 thinkers went so far as to claim Mount Shasta was no less than the root chakra of the entire planet, most everyone at least agreed that it emanated some subtle yet palpable, mysterious and powerful force. One that affected everyone within its field -- and not always in a good way. That's why American Indians never lived closer to it; its energies were felt too strong for comfort and that living too near would show disrespect to Great Spirit.
In any event, being under the mountain's sway could induce some pretty wild fantasies, if not outright hallucinations. Add this to the Vista being such untamed land and it could easily erase from mind any pesky notions of following a dominant social order's wearisome, constrictive, sometimes seemingly arbitrary edicts.
To say code-compliant residents were upset when the bohemian scene took off in almost spontaneous combustion by people definitely not their kind doesn't even begin to describe their outrage. Their fledgling upscale-rustic community, one they'd banked such high hopes on and had poured tons of energy and committed time and money into establishing once burning the bridge to their former worlds, was now facing gravest peril.
Endangered wonderland
If they didn't scramble and stem the tide by demanding the county enforce its own dratted codes with which they'd so diligently complied, all would be lost...their nascent sweet-spot retirement village, 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 prove their efforts a losing battle; residential code enforcement would be all but abandoned by county authorities after repeated efforts didn't take hold in the long run. (Plus, in much later years, a hemorrhaging county budget would result in eliminating the enforcement post altogether for a critical half decade.) Code-compliant residents, stunned by the regional government's seeming inability and or unwillingness to enforce its own damn statutes -- ones they'd honored and obeyed and deemed set in concrete -- were left spitting-nails mad, bent into pretzels, fit to be tied, twisted into knots, pick your metaphor.
In short, they wuz pissed.
Despite what had appeared an auspicious start, first as a de facto popular shared vacation resort land, then as a nascent rural retirement community, the latter would be only briefly enjoyed by the few dozen of the some 1,500 lot owners (allowing for multiple-lot holders) before it began its inexorable descent into chaos. It was destined 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 the vast sea of now-compromised recreational parcels. A distinct air of untenability reigned. The occasional visit to still-uninhabited regions by those die-hards hoping to avoid heated politics and continue enjoying camping on their parcels no doubt had mixed results.
The place was hopelessly snared between worlds. Skitzy in purpose, its very reason for being now fuzzy - was it a campground or a residential development? -- all along it had seemed an unwanted child (beyond the developer's fondest hopes), bestowed with precious little support from either county or surrounding community. Its residents and visiting parcel owners, scrambling for scarce potable water while unavoidably getting caught up in the polarization taking root between defiant newcomers and the strict law-and-order firstcomers, were left to fume and squabble and bicker and demonize each other til the cows came home.
Thus, the Vista, frozen in time and nursing one serious identity crisis, was deprived of ever finding some rightful place in the sun.
Emboldened by realm's remoteness
Despite such a crushing load of handicaps, over time there continued to be a steady trickle of unconventional buyers keen on moving onto the super-secluded, view-inspiring, irresistibly cheap parcels. Beyond long-term investors feeling stuck with holdings in the now-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 all these was the 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. People attracted to the affordable lots like moths to flame. One month's city rent covered the down on a generous-sized piece of largely undisturbed land they could then live on and tenuously call their own after scoring some old trailer or mobile or simply camp out on. Screw urban living and its soulless, overpriced ticky-tacks and greedy landlords.
They crossed their fingers and hoped to be left alone to live between the cracks of society and its costly living standards that so often made making ends meet next to impossible in city living. While some on tight budgets, including the writer, would grudgingly build to code, others, blissfully ignorant of -- or studiously ignoring -- the mundane city-centric regulations trying to be enforced so deep in the boonies, held more of a dismissive Building code? What building code? You're kidding, right? attitude. One couldn't blame them. People, unless masochists -- even those preoccupied with abodes being first and foremost investments, and so willing to meet accepted standards -- naturally preferred that their living scenes to be as simple, affordable and carefree as possible.
The succeeding waves of non-compliant dwellers were emboldened by several things: (1) it was historic times, with a tectonic shift in human consciousness and lifestyles; growing 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 far removed from mundane downer regulations; (3) the all but abandoned -- but lingering in spirit -- first-generation camp-use-only vibe, once the proto community of approved homes emerged, created enough chaotic uncertainty to take full 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 waves of non-complying builders -- variously labeled code violators, illegal residents and, perhaps the unkindest cut, squatters (on their own land; maybe a crude reference to not having toilets?) -- 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 but also of the increasingly spotty enforcement, other newbies made bold to go on the offensive. They pulled in their sundry derelict travel trailers and mobile homes, or built ramshackle shelters on the fly, and could bear openly defiant and mocking attitudes 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 damn well please 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 good rain. While some homemade homes were artful, others were void of charm except perhaps to their inhabitants. It was almost as though 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 become a latter-day frontier, far removed from modern times and all its spirit-stifling rules and regulations over how one was supposed to live on the planet.
Though many such dwellings weren't ever officially "red-tagged" by the county (designated unlawful to inhabit), they still had a pronounced stigma attached. The disapproving and hostile reactions by code-compliant others over the fact they even existed could make enjoying staying in them with anything approaching peace of mind a bit iffy for all but the thickest skinned.
In time, certain dwellers -- feeling light years away from dependable responsive law enforcement save for more serious matters (and even then, a forty-five minute wait time wasn't uncommon) -- would essentially deem themselves a law unto themselves. Feeling the need to act as citizen deputies, as it were, to keep the realm peaceable and law abiding according to their lights, the old guard residents zealously patrolled the sprawling backwoods realm with an eagle eye out for any reportable health or building code infractions going on . More than a few found at once off-putting, ridiculous, and more than a little scary.
Turning this abiding vigilante tendency upside down, one non-compliant resident, decades later in the late eighties, had taken serious heat over being suspected of growing pot (he wasn't), a deed then very much illegal and vigorously prosecuted. A Sheriff's helicopter had hovered dangerously (and illegally) close over the big truck tarp he'd stretched from the trees over an old school bus for shade, suspecting he was trying to hide a verboten grow. Outraged at the invasion of space and how air turbulence was tearing the tarp loose, and by no means shy, he had openly flipped them off. Naturally they couldn't let this affront to their authority pass. Other members were soon walking onto his land without a warrant, loaded for bear, pointing weapons at him as if just itching for an excuse to open fire. On the wings of this incident he decided to displace some of the resulting angst experienced 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.
Buy in Haste...
No doubt many impulsive among the land's first 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 would turn off your more circumspect land shopper exercising due diligence. They were giddy over being able to grab such a nice-sized piece of unspoiled land in such 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 that any normally felt need of making a judicious assessment flew out the window, aided and abetted by the mountain's powerful spell; parcels were snapped up like so many 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, blissfully far beyond modern times' slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Add to these legal residents the more thoughtful and involved investors who, despite the discouraging unfolding realities, still clung to the idea that the parcels might still make good retreats worthy of maybe someday building homes or cabins on. And the many parcel flippers who'd grab the lots imagining how easily 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 forever deadlocked in conflicting lot-ownership intentions and operating at cross purposes. The result? The Vista existed in a state of perpetual chaotic uncertainty and disunity.
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The first-generation settlers had themselves at first been adventurous vacationing campers, wanting to enjoy pristine nature for a spell. But even as they no doubt preferred, or were willing to make generous allowances for, the pronounced absence of infrastructure, they no doubt also sussed the place's possibilities for settling.
While this lack had presented little or no problem during the first years of exclusive camping and simple retreat use -- trailers being self-contained and one otherwise resigned to making like a bear in the woods -- it would be flirting with sure disaster once, years after they'd established their approved residences, various and sundry resource-shy, would-be residents rolled the dice and started dropping anchor, never seeking anyone's approval but their own. In proceeding to establish primitive long-term camps and year-round ramshackle dwellings, the pedigree of Vista residency thus began its long irreversible decline. At least, to the way of thinking of any lot owner who prized order, conformity, and following society's rules and regulations (whether reasonable or not, it wasn't for them to question).
Over the decades, as the Vista had morphed from primitive camp lots to fledgling standard community to a mongrel, anything-goes outback, it became the wayward realm the county would throw up its hands at in exasperation. It appeared as though they'd allowed some dread Frankenland to be created. It was a menace to the villagers -- and an ongoing embarrassment to the established order.
Officials despaired over how to stem the growing anarchy and lawlessness emerging amid the thin scattering of approved homes. Some no doubt took refuge in magical thinking, imagining the whole place simply vanishing.
An onerous building code & the owner-builder
Unsanctioned home structures only increased in the Vista in the 1980s and 1990s. More and more, buyers eager to settle appeared to lack both the funds and 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, usually, power line extension. As said, freer spirits considered such codes over-complicated and needlessly intrusive -- not to mention exorbitantly costly -- for any rural owner builder to want to comply with. As if maybe they only reflected the cushy living standard of the more affluent strata of society that insisted everyone dance to their tune or else.
Hoping to avoid such stringent codes -- and the inflated lifestyles of would-be upward mobiles, many forever tempted to live beyond their means and soon drowning in debt -- was the very reason so many moved into the Vista in the first place: to get back to basics, to live more simply in closer harmony with nature and within one's means. Of course some were doubtlessly thinking short-term, intending to stay only as long as they could before gaining too much unpleasant attention over their non-copacetic shelters from neighboring busybodies.
The train of thought of more reasonable souls went something along the line that it was one thing to maybe have a few commonsense guidelines in place to avoid getting unsightly, flimsy owner-built structures that might blow over in the first strong wind and to ensure critical hygienic standards. But it was another altogether to demand that one living on their own private land out in the middle of nowhere be made to construct a continuous foundation, build to a certain minimum size, overbuild by a safety factor of five, install double-glazed windows, super-insulate the roof, install a fire sprinkler system...
Somewhere there appeared an extraordinary disconnect from reasonableness.
In the 1970s, a grassroots effort came about, led by a group of outraged Mendocino county, California rural owner-builders, to encourage the state legislature to establish less onerous building requirements for those 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.
Only three did and Vista's Siskiyou county wasn't one of them. Its building department, at home dealing with contractors who knew the drill in their sleep, seemed to be owner-builder hostile. They didn't want to waste their time guiding amateur builders through the myriad steps involved in conforming to the quagmire of regulations and specifications they were paid to rigorously enforce. "If you can't understand it, hire a contractor" was their dismissive attitude. They assumed -- not without good reason, given the code's incredibly far-reaching, pricey requirements -- that many owner-builders would only reluctantly conform, trying to 'cheat' the code at any given opportunity. Over a decade after getting my own tiny house green-tagged, despite having indeed 'cheated' on a few minor details (exceeding code on others) I ran into the by-then retired head building inspector at the post office; he'd come out once, at the very start of construction. Perhaps intuiting I hadn't fully toed the line and still wanting to take me to task, he asked warily, "Did we ever get you signed off?"
While such draconian requirements no doubt discouraged many earlier, would-be non-compliant builders, in later times, with the once iron grip of regulatory bureaucracy's enforcement slipping, a rebellious spirit was gaining some serious ground. People aspired to build rural shelter on their own land however they fancied, thank you very much, never thinking to get any Mother-may-I? permission from any blasted bureaucratic authorities and, adding insult to injury, have to pay for the privilege. Though on a much smaller scale, in some circles playing "beat the building code" was as popular a cat-and-mouse game as "what pot laws?" of current times. Bound and determined to live on their bought-and-paid-for property and figuring possession was nine-tenths of the law, such Vistans' attitude was, "This is my property and I'll do whatever I want 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 -- most especially among those who'd hoped to settle on their lots long-term and at last enjoy some long-sought rural 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 with any teeth, more than a few buyers dismissed the posted signs as mostly ineffectual, blustering Barney Fife bluff. But then, any buyer who leaned towards wanting to be law abiding realized with sinking heart that the signs sometimes really meant business. If wanting to make use of the place beyond just camping up to thirty days a year and not risk the rug suddenly being pulled out from under one, the lots' woeful lack of infrastructure would require shelling out a small fortune to square things away.
It was like ten-cent parcels had a hidden million-dollar spoiler attached.
For the same or related reasons, parcels seemed destined to become an albatross around the necks of countless 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 cluttered the former semi-pristine domain, they were usually left unable to sell them at a profit as either vacation lots or building sites to anyone knowing the score. This 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 by the aggrieved party who, warming to their task, raked the place over the coals with almost demonic intensity.
It was a buyer-remorse pattern fated to be most owners' relationship with the unlucky 1,641-parcel development.
But the seductive lure of affordable backwoods parcels under the protective presence of a magical mountain, worlds away from noisy, over-wound city living, kept grabbing new flocks of both would-be residents and impulsive investors alike. While the latter of course only thought to flip obviously undervalued parcels, increasing numbers of the former came to ignore mundane concerns like conforming to the by then only sporadically enforced codes -- until out of the blue it bit them on the backside and they joined the full-throated chorus of the disenchanted.
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Lots sold themselves
Again, though the lots were technically zoned to permit building single-family residences, they had been first marketed primarily as primitive vacation lands, simple recreational getaways. Maybe over time owners would get together to create something more ambitious, maybe not.
It was all upfront and legal under then-existing California laws covering such rural subdivisions.
Essentially the lots were offered as simple places of retreat for weary city dwellers wanting to rough it a while, enjoy having a refuge with their own nice sized piece of relatively unspoiled, secluded nature. Tomorrow, who knows? The sky was the limit if you had the bucks to conform to code and liked the idea of living in nature far off the beaten path.
Developer Collins had maybe sensed he needn't invest any more time, money or effort in the project to move the lots than he did. If owners wanted to settle the place, they could take on what was needed to be done; it was too dicey for him to risk pouring any greater capital into it in hopes things would take off. If so, he was right. It appeared that enthusiasm over the chance to wing it and spend a little pleasant time amid the solitude of one's own bit of woodlands, majestic Mt. Shasta watching over, big as life, had proved contagious during the times of the back-to-the-land movement ramping into high gear. With a bit of sizzling ad copy, the lots practically sold themselves.
After springing for drilling test wells and buying an existing well with a super replenishment rate just off Vista land to satisfy the county that there was indeed water there, he was likely hopeful that every part of the elevation-varied realm might provide enough water should people ever want to actually settle on their parcels (or even just visit and wanted to have their own well rather than have to haul in every drop). That said, he'd possibly downplayed the sometimes extreme depth of the water table for bringing in individual wells with a healthy draw rate at higher elevation areas like Section 23, off Pluto Caves. Instead he'd maybe talked up a happy picture of the unofficial de facto community well every lot owner was of course more than welcome to use.
Bottom line: he had created, at the very least, a simple, collectively owned wilderness retreat realm in a growingly popular vacation region with hazy potential to become something more. Each of its lots, having well-maintained road access, were platted to a fare-thee-well, corner boundaries marked by pounded-in, short red steel pipes and ribboned lathe sticks with exact scrawled bearings. Some ninety percent offered impressive Mount Shasta views. Who needed anything more?
But the spiel and cheap prices would also attract many who had zero camping or building interest in mind....again, probably the overwhelming majority. They'd snap up the parcels as long-term investments or short-term speculations, excited to have gotten in on the ground floor. They assumed others -- not them, thank you, are you kidding? -- would soon be clamoring to either enjoy camping on the secluded scenic properties or build homes and code-approved vacation cabins, both scenarios working to drive up Vistan lot values nicely.
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. Some of these the land might've then grabbed and they decided to hold on to them long-term. They flirted with the idea of building dwellings if and when things progressed enough to enjoy visiting, maybe living in them a while or renting them out before finally selling at a tidy profit once the novelty of living in the boonies wore off. (So many Americans, restless, rootless and frequently on the move, appeared to always view shelters as investments, 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 -- was seldom considered.)
Giant monkey wrench
The writer guesstimates that no more than maybe ten percent of the lots' owners kept entertaining any thought of building for any reason once the campaign to electrify the place had failed so miserably and sparked a major falling out among lot owners. That debacle threw a giant monkey wrench in the works. Some cohesive group vision had been crucial if the place was ever to serve long-term the mutual benefit of a wildly divergent association of parcel holders; it now appeared there was little to none.
Everything had seemed so hunky dory in the beginning. One was in blissful ignorance of the festering, behind-the-scenes storm clouds brewing over the place's very existence: of the former landholders' deep contention over the sale; of longtime locals' resentment over a bunch of high-and-mighty city folks crowding in and taking over their backwoods, crimping a long accustomed way of life.* Excited new lot owners couldn't have known how the county, after lot owners started building in the often rocky volcanic foothills and struggling with water, would come to regret ever having green-lit the place...how they'd begun to view the forlorn development like a lemon vehicle they'd bought against better judgement and were now hopelessly stuck with.
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*As mentioned elsewhere, even into the early eighties local ranchers seasonally led sporadic cattle drives right down stretches of the Vista's A-12 highway frontage between range grazing areas. They almost seemed to enjoy pretending the vehicle traffic, impatient to get through, wasn't even there, like they were still living back in the pre-auto 1800s' Western frontier era. Git along, little doggies.
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No such distressing undercurrents were anywhere apparent at first glance. Early nature-hungry city vacationers enjoyed their idyllic backwoods enclave with the often-prevailing, lighthearted -- even giddy and euphoric -- spirit of the times. One had the convenience and luxury of camping on their very own piece of secluded land for up to thirty days a year rather than pay daily to chance camping at some place with others maybe setting up twenty feet away with a passel of squalling kids. A mini-trend within the grand back-to-the-land movement was afoot.
The majority of initial lot buyers were coming from the wider Los Angeles region, where the developer was based and had launched his marketing campaign from; others hailed from the Bay Area and Central Valley -- purchasers merrily pitching tents and rolling in their travel trailers and RVs and savoring the fresh air and quiet and mountain serenity.
The terrain was known as high desert woodlands: high, dry and wooded. Though powerful seasonal windstorms could prove treacherous and unnerving -- sometimes roaring through like a runaway freight, due to the massive mountain displacing and condensing storm air currents in Venturi effect -- the place, like nearby Lake Shastina and Juniper Valley, otherwise often enjoyed an enviable banana-belt climate. While most summers were hot and bone dry, there were plenty of junipers trees, and on a select few parcels scattered tall pine, for inviting shade. Some years saw a summer thunderstorm or two to cool things down. Visitors to the west end of the Vista were a short hike away from Lake Shastina's secluded cross-country irrigation canal to cool off in. And the mountain’s spectacular northwestern glacier-clad side did wonders in keeping one feeling cooler just by gazing on its chilled splendor.
"Bye 'n' bye" came fast
Significantly, developer Collins had casually hinted how the place might make a dandy place to retire to "bye 'n' bye." He was either responding to a growing enthusiasm among fellow repeat campers to the idea or maybe had it in mind all along (having gotten the lots rezoned for residences at the start) and was deftly orchestrating the enthusiasm like a maestro. He'd intimated the idea early on in the official newsletter periodically sent to property owners and avidly read by the small segment of co-owners who vacationed at their new-fledged wilderness outpost. Located at the central top of the Golden State with Mount Shasta its regal crown, it was hard for certain nature lovers not to fall in love with the realm -- enough for some to want to settle on the tucked away parcels after 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: building structures not as second homes but, as Collins suggested, full-on, primary-residence homes for new retirees.
Like Lake Shastina, the Vista usually got far less snow than nearby Weed or the City of Mt. Shasta due to the region's phenomenal crazy-quilt of micro-climates, again largely 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 needing to put on chains to get out of never-plowed roads. (Long ago, the place tried plowing roads after one of its rare heavy snowfalls; the equipment blade tore up the cinder roadbeds so badly, requiring expensive and laborious repair work, that it proved impractical; thereafter, for several decades until the heavy February 2025 snowstorm, everyone was on their own.)
Con su permiso:
dealing with an exacting building code
Of course it was understood that it was up to each would-be resident to spring for the cost of drilling an approved well, installing a regulation septic system, and getting power lines extended if need be -- all before the county would deign to issue a building permit upon submission and approval of exact plans meeting exhaustive code requirements and paying for it based on the square footage specified. Only then did one have the legal right to live on the land for more than thirty days a year. Super-strict, no? But then, maybe as if to balance things, once the permit was issued you could live in any sort of structure that served as a temporary on-site shelter during construction: trailer, shack or hole in the ground.
While building was expected to progress "in a timely manner," many, far from being in a hurry, made a leisurely effort of it. The writer himself stretched out his own home-building project period to forty-two months while living in a tiny earth-sheltered hobbit home -- which was, most decidedly, non-code. It tickled me how the inspector always cast a wary eye at it each time he strode by it to check on the building site just beyond; he no doubt had to suppress an instinctive urge to red-tag it on the spot.
On completion, the post office assigned a new dwelling a legal street address (or technically, released the already existing number, long ago assigned by county planning to every recorded parcel in the county), thereby enabling one to receive mail at the blacktop entrance boxes. Such an address was also ostensibly needed to obtain 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: permanent, contiguous 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; minimum structure size; thorough electrification; insulation; 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 that the submitted plan would prove structurally sound and had to otherwise meet all general specs. As said, most early Vista owner-builders had hired contractors to do most or all the construction and didn't move onto their properties until a building was completed and given the official county blessing by being signed off after a final inspection and thus 'green-tagged' for legal occupancy.
Building code focused on cities
Although the Uniform Building Code had been around in the U.S. since 1915, enforcement was undoubtedly relaxed to nonexistent for ages in more rural areas. Primary focus was naturally concentrated on crowded cities with their close-packed structures, built by detached contractors who'd never live in their creations and could be tempted to take shortcuts on building integrity that resulted in shoddy construction and sometimes tragedy for eventual inhabitants. Overseeing rural owner building wasn't a concern, as the founder of the UBC, Rudolf Miller, himself stated early on, never envisioning 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." His commonsense view was obviously abandoned as living densities increased and government’s bureaucratic, power-hungry, freedom-crimping regulatory powers grew exponentially.
For a long while, country property owners could no doubt more or less build cabins and cottages to suit themselves, at their leisure, maybe even play it by ear, overall design emerging only half-way through if even then. It was their land, and they could build whatever they dang-well pleased on it. But with bureaucratic regulations' tendency to be adopted by ever greater numbers over time (some would say spreading like a cancer), until at last universalized, government authorities would begin insisting that the same exhaustive guidelines adhered to in teeming cities by indifferent contractors churning out cookie-cutter abodes for profit be followed by owner-builders deep in the furthest reaches of remote areas, on their own land, for what would be their own home.
It was having such 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 eventually caused a serious erosion of respect for certain areas of the rule of law by more than a few of its more nonconformist -- or sometimes simply desperate and cash-strapped -- inhabitants.
Priced to move
At its launch, parcels in the Vista were indeed priced to move. The writer remembers reading in the old Vistascope newsletter archives how they first went for between $750. and $975.* The price varied according to parcel size, location, terrain features and views (a few dozen parcels had no view or only a partial view of Mt. Shasta). The developer enjoyed relatively low overhead and obviously wasn't out to get rich off the project; he was already successful from past urban development ventures and could afford to be generous. (Or, perhaps not so much playing Santa Claus, he had set a low price point out of uncertainty they might not move otherwise.) In any event, he appeared to hold a genuine affection for the land, as mentioned actually joining others in camping on the parcels the first few summers. He seemed to want the lot sales to feel like feel-good bargains they were (such as they were).
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*In 1969 dollars. Adjusting for inflation, that'd be nearly ten times more in 2024 dollars, still relatively cheap. The price undeveloped lots fell to in 2022, when the market dropped out, $10,000, was about the same, adjusting for inflation, as when the place first launched, 57 years earlier.
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There had been no steep infrastructure costs beyond putting in and maintaining the red-cinder roads, many main arteries no doubt traced over preexisting logging, livestock-tending and hunting 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 the fast-growing sagebrush.
All sorts of first-generation buyers would purchase the lots for all sorts of reasons. Again, countless had 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 small minority were psyched at the prospect of enjoying having their own private campgrounds and thought of maybe someday building a home or vacation cabin on the lots, 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 like a giant KOA-style camp village, loaded with amenities and services, attracting a flood of campers tickled at the prospect of having their own recreational properties so nicely nestled amid the vacation destination region of Mount Shasta, maybe even launching time-shares on the more improved secluded lots.
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, had every future would-be resident taken the responsibility of meeting individual infrastructure needs before building to code, as had almost everyone among the first wave of transplants (and as is no doubt 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 people reaching retirement age, flush with cash from selling big-city homes and bewitched by the enchanted wooded high-desert land they'd discovered and wanted to make their new home and shared Shangri-la. Or those with the willingness (and then far-stricter eligibility) to take on major debt and, unless a contractor or hiring one, having the disposition and fortitude needed to learn about and deal with the time-consuming, niggling, hoop-jumping, exasperating process of conforming to all the code requirements demanded to be followed by the owner-builder.
Understandably, their vision didn't elicit any ringing endorsements from the later, worlds less solvent, parcel buyers -- many of whom moved 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 ramshackle trailer or throw up a makeshift shelter on the fly from scrap materials or make a small lumber yard splurge and called it okey dokey.
Place's primitive camping-use origins linger to this day
It seemed cheap land and cheap shelters could go together; it surely proved true in Vista's case. Since the lots were originally marketed and enjoyed as de facto simple camp lands -- and then not infrequently were later handicapped by difficult water and rocky terrain, discouraging standard development -- time would prove it impossible to ever erase the place's primitive recreational use beginnings.
Earliest investors and speculators likely never anticipated the possibility of this major wrinkle cropping up. How an epidemic of non-compliant structures sprouting -- plus sometimes questionable land use -- would drastically erode their holdings' sellability and desirability as a place to either camp at or build on (again, for anyone the least bit convention-minded). Between hearing about the few dozen full-on code-legal homes springing up and developer Collins talking up such a rosy picture over the place's bright future, they naturally assumed everyone would build to code.
Significantly, many speculators, on hearing the ambitious plans of what turned out to be only a tiny number of lot holders, were almost certainly misled into thinking there were far more property holders gung-ho on building out a full-on standard rural community than ever existed. No doubt they'd started salivating like so many Pavlovian dogs, anticipating the place following Lake Shastina's lead and building out in a merry mad scramble and lots commanding ever-greater sale prices.
Congratulating themselves for having gotten in on the ground floor in what seemed to be an easy slam-dunk moneymaker, parcel investors idly sat back and waited for things to take their course. Some would eventually join in and likewise build on their lots, thinking to live in the new structures a while before selling and making a much bigger profit, or become likewise smitten by the land and, resonating with the retired dwellers' bonhomie, decide to stay. But most, having little to zero interest in the day-to-day realities of a few scattered residents -- or the serious commitment needed by a critical number of lot owners to reach a tipping point and evolve the place into a functional community -- couldn't be bothered to even see the dots, let alone connect them. They just twiddled their thumbs and waited for 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 belated, dizzying flight to the moon. Long depressed values of unimproved lots climbed from $5,000 to over $150,000 by 2021. This the result of a national red-hot realty market combined with the place's discovery by "outlaw" cannabis growers anticipating California legalizing recreational pot and what would -- perhaps predictably, given the new gold rush of anarchistic entrepreneurs flooding the state -- prove to be largely unenforceable regulations. It would decriminalize unsanctioned commercial grows to a civil misdemeanor (the only western state to do so), and leave it up to each county whether or not to allow regulated commercial grows in its unincorporated areas. Conservative Siskiyou County, a Reefer Madness mindset prevailing, would respectfully decline (while having to suffer incorporated towns like Weed and Mt. Shasta voting to allow pot dispensaries and possibly approve regulated commercial grows). Even so, it often made the eventual sporadic busts often (but not always) little more hassle than getting a speeding ticket.
Lots thus sold like crazy for reasons totally unrelated to infrastructure build-up, still almost nil; formal development plans, still nonexistent; or, for more than a few, being a place to want to settle long-term once visions of building a thriving, proscribed-grow based community met with the chilly winds of legal realities. This startling phenomenon only proved in keeping with the place's chronic boom-bust nature. One that -- due to factors beyond the scope of this writing -- would cause unimproved lot prices to plummet in 2022, when there might be few takers at even $10,000. ("Price reduced $80,000.")
The place's extreme boom-bust nature 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, anarchistic pot entrepreneurs, and/or cagey realty speculators periodically rained down on the region, driving up depressed prices of the problematic parcels -- or tried to -- through the roof. Then, as things didn't pan out, market values quickly fell back to their default bone-dry level, softer than sponge cake.
The more philosophical might conclude that it's a peculiar wild land that refused to be tamed.
_____________________
Land, ho!
According to an archived copy of the Vistascope newsletter regularly sent out soon after the place's late sixties' start, every last one of the lots was snapped up within eighteen months.
This fact belied a later common assumption that the developer had somehow gotten stuck with parcels nobody wanted. People wanted them all right -- or thought they did, at first. The lots sold like crazy during a time when back-to-the-land fever was sweeping the nation. It was only later that the hundreds of absentee owners and those they sold them to, realizing the hapless development had gone cattywampus, couldn't get rid of them fast enough. But of course, they didn't want to sell at a loss. So the odd lots, though at first charming to anyone who appreciated rustic seclusion, sweeping views and a cheap price, had serious deal breakers attached to them and thus became a drug on the market.
Despite being offered for a song compared to other similar regional properties, over the decades they often found few takers once their bizarre pedigree -- a jinxed development that had flown off the rails, rife with an angry-native social climate, daunting lack of infrastructure, and prohibitive cost to gain code compliance -- became common knowledge to anyone doing the tiniest bit of research.
But, again, at the Vista's inception no such stumbling blocks were apparent (beyond the obvious stark lack of infrastructure). With the back-to-nature movement in high gear, the tiny minority of older Vistan parcel buyers -- stoked at the prospect of moving onto their own bit of unspoiled nature in one of upstate California's more popular recreational regions -- had become its first residents. The relatively well-heeled group saw in the far flung primitive development the ideal makings of a low-key country retirement paradise.
They weren't alone in their feel-good enthusiasm and their 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 merrily 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 notably different from other rural subdivisions of the region that were forming about the same time.
For there were new rural subdivisions popping up all over the Mt. Shasta region then. They included nearby Lake Shastina, 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 Juniper Valley subdivision, some 240 lots of varied 10, 20 and 40 acres each (exact founding date unknown); Hornbrook region’s Klamath River Country Estates (KRCE), 2,050 lots of 1 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 first.
On forming in late 1965, a year or two ahead of all the rest, there was an as yet unproven market for rural developments of such sprawling scale. Developer Collins maybe sensed that the lots had to be priced cheap to attract buyers and get the ball rolling. Being the first such developer, he'd perhaps thought it too risky to invest in any infrastructure beyond basic road access. Maybe the place would be thought too far from town to attract people who'd want to actually live here and so might prove successful just as primitive vacation land; there was no telling. He played it safe, feeling no pull to hammer together any sort of master plan, content to start it up as a simple de facto recreational development.
But he also displayed a perhaps bit sly, tomorrow-never-knows air to its potential to maybe someday become something far more.
Even though he was no doubt well aware of the popular back to the land movement emerging then (coinciding with the-burgeoning counterculture which spearheaded it) -- perhaps keenly so, sensing an almost-certain new realty market emerging -- he'd decided to hedge his bets. Maybe he realized how deeply the farming//ranching locals were up in arms over its very formation, so much so that he opted to go slowly, giving people time to adjust, marketing the lots only for seasonal camping: just visiting, folks, no worries.
In any event, the wording of the Vista's ruling documents (CC&Rs, or Covenants, Conditions & Restrictions), were only your basic general boilerplate. Once the place's first few parcel holders would drop anchor and render the original legal framework inadequate, it could spell out almost certain disaster short of making extensive revisions. Such a re-imagined plan was crucial if the place ever hoped to provide some solid avenue for building out with any rhyme and reason...provide guardrails to steer the development in an agreed-on direction by its volunteer board members and other involved land owners that met established living standards.
It might've created, for instance, the legal power for the board to fine owners for infractions to agreed-on appearance parameters and home practices (changing oil, hanging laundry, fencing), as had some others, thus (ideally) working to maintain a certain caliber of lifestyle. This power enabled slapping a lien on one's ownership title for chronically blowing off payment of a ticketed infraction, and so established at least a grudging respect for the rule of law, serving to discourage both non-copacetic behavior by property owners and possible attraction by land hunters bent on inappropriate lot use.
Of course this was always a two-edged sword. As was recently 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 "...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."
In any event, without any overarching plan for residential growth and no vision beyond what little the general boilerplate gobbledygook provided, Mt. Shasta Vista was left to forever struggle swimming upstream against strong currents. It was always vulnerable to the vagaries of the place's latest resident owners' arbitrary druthers. As a result, any effort by the more civic-minded among the fitful, ever-changing flock of dwellers to transform the place from primitive beginnings to an actual, by-gosh community, one dwellers might actually take pride in rather than simply use and tolerate a while, would almost invariably prove an exercise in futility.
Interest flatlines
With so many parcel owners absentee and seldom, if ever, visiting, from the start it that seemed the overwhelming number of title holders were indeed just betting on the place and the expected actions of what turned out to be only a few: initially that minority of owners who'd enjoyed vacationing here, and later, the tinier number who actually dropped anchor, both of whom had naturally felt inclined to work to further the place along, improving its livability (and, thus, marketability). The former had twiddled their thumbs and let others do all the heavy lifting. They'd no doubt liked to imagine busy worker ants building up the place's value before they either began enjoying the place themselves or -- far more likely -- cashed in and made a respectable chunk of change for their trouble.
It would of course prove far more trouble than they could have ever imagined. Holders were destined to lose heart in droves not long after the development's early burst of improvement efforts came and went and various snafus began to crop up.
Water had naturally always been the most crucial concern. By the early 1970s, visiting repeat campers and residents-to-be had briefly rallied, pulling together to develop the informal community well with its 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 initially well-less home builders. (Collins, with his usual largess, 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 whose owners committed to building. A long mobile home was pulled in in which to hold the first few state-mandated monthly board meetings.
After this initial flurry of action, though, enthusiasm for common improvement efforts seemed to run out of steam. New residents switched gears, each scrambling to each carve out their own little backwoods mini-kingdoms. It was all they could do to build up the place enough to provide their own needs. Other parcel holders, if wanting to join them, would have to generate their own infrastructure, the same as them. It was simply the way things were.
As earlycomers built the first county-approved living structures, the place was momentously shifting from being a de facto shared camp land to the beginnings 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 drive through the labyrinth of back roads, nothing but trees and brush forever, then rounding a bend and suddenly a full-on estate jumped out at them.
Interest in enjoying one's parcel for camping vacations would naturally nosedive overnight; those who'd camped there were by then either themselves building homes, grumbling about those who were, or deciding to abandon ship and sell their parcels and hopefully not take a bath. To the recreationally minded newbies, the place had irreversibly lost its pristine charm: the one-time collective camping wilderness was now cluttered with the very trappings of civilization they'd wanted to get away from a while. It was an oil and water situation, refusing to mix together.
Almost overnight, the place had become neither fish nor fowl.
Fast forward, and once various unapproved shelters of code-nonconforming inhabitants began flooding the land, the realm's fledgling legitimate community -- one its residents had poured personal fortunes and much blood, sweat and tears into -- was suddenly in peril. Without updating the CC&Rs, or at least every future would-be resident agreeing to toe the line and meet the steep county health and building code requirements -- and enforcers promptly stopping them if they didn't -- the development's compliant residents were facing one gnarly, insurmountable impasse. They'd be stymied at every turn despite their most diligent -- and soon desperate -- effort to try preserving the place as a standard community.
At one point early on, the association's few residents got it together so far as to appoint informal block captains for each of the seven mile-square sections. They worked to keep appraised of all the goings on in their respective, now being sporadically settled domains, driving around and getting info on sundry matters over other residents and visiting owners, then relaying latest intel to board members to suss over at the monthly meetings and deal with if action seemed warranted. This phase of organized grass roots government showed that, despite a growing set of unfortunate circumstances, there was a strong sense of public-minded cohesion among most of the earliest residents. Even if the primary motivation was only to try nipping in the bud any incipient health and building code violations going on in their midst, it at least showed there was 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 ever evolved beyond punitive, reactive law-and-order policing and into a more positive, fair-minded, live-and-let-live mind frame.
That obviously wasn't going to happen.
This rudimentary organized grassroots effort switched to an informal phone-tree hotline setup once too many barbarians were storming the gates to keep an effective handle on things at monthly meetings alone. Some older residents had by then already moved on, devastated, their fondest dreams of enjoying retirement years in the sweet spot of peace and quiet dashed to hell and gone. They hadn't the heart to take arms against a sea of troubles to deal with the ongoing battles with unruly interlopers who were now defiling the once-charmed realm with what appeared a desperate Hail Mary effort to restore the place's quality of life through regulatory channels.
As more and more lot buyers made bold to occupy parcels they'd snapped up, though, defying anyone to do anything about it, the eventually overwhelmed county enforcement officials appeared unable to stem the tide despite their most diligent efforts. At some point they simply give up on the place as a lost cause.
Result: the soon-minority, flying-by-the-seat-of-their-pants, shocked senseless respectable legal residency that had elected to stay, standing firm and braced for battle with the unruly rabble, constantly 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 but stalled trying to be something more by accepted standards, parcel values were lucky to even keep up with inflation.
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 California developers 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 out and roads made in the barren, treeless Mojave Desert. (Interestingly, it was launched within a month of the Vista; perhaps current subtle influences had 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 forgot...or tried to.
Eventually this suited its few actual residents just fine -- those who had stayed despite all, or bought homes from those who'd bailed...or who had grabbed parcels and heedlessly thrown together humble abodes on the fly. Various dwellers, doing their best to tune out the long-simmering, disturbing politics, grew accustomed to the rich solitude. They relished the park-like setting which inspired its first incarnation as a happy-go-lucky, secluded co-op campground. So few residents amid so much nature proved delightful -- but was terrible for investors and speculators. They found it difficult to sell holdings no longer having anything going for them to entice would-be buyers besides being cheap and secluded with nice views. Such parcels, no longer optimal for camping yet requiring huge outlays before one could live on them legally, found few interested 'respectable' parties.
And again, it didn't help sales efforts any that the place had from its very start gotten such a bad rap, resented by locals for unsettling their one-time sprawling backwoods domain with la-de-dah, invasive urban ways and being seen as perennially problematic by county government. Many of the latter no doubt became soothsayers: "It'll be a disaster, mark my words; wait and see. Wanna bet? I'll even give you three-to-one odds."
They would roundly reject the misbegotten child left squalling on their doorstep; the resulting tarnished image of the place no doubt sensed by your more aware land shopper, alert to any errant negative currents surrounding the place.
"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 an ever-increasing annual road assessment through gritted teeth, determined not to take a bath on what they had first thought likely a sure bet. In denial, they needed to believe their investment would pay off some day, or that it would at least eventually prove a nice place to build a vacation cabin at and perhaps enjoy the camaraderie of fellow part-time and full-time backwoods dwellers once residents finally got it together.
After ages, convinced the out-of-kilter place appeared to have zero chance of ever right-siding itself, many finally bit the bullet. As fed- up owners unloaded their clunkers en masse resigned to taking a loss, cheap parcels flooded the market.
There were often few takers, even so. This despite in the late 1970s a modest $1,200 to $1,750 asking price and often easy terms. 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 eventually come along. Or yet other uninformed casual investors, infected with the latest round of speculation fever: "It was so cheap, I couldn't resist." Or, again, die-hard optimists, thinking they'd maybe enjoy the parcels themselves once the place finally got itself together. At the least, they'd have something interesting and tangible to leave their families (and then let them figure out what to do with the buggers if things never panned out).
But beyond such calculated dice rolling, impulsive moves and hopeful "some day" thinking, there was, again, that growing number of land buyers psyched at the prospect of -- novel idea -- actually moving onto the parcels. To them the lots were pure catnip. Some wanted to make like Thoreau, living simply on the land and letting the rest of the world go by. Maybe in time they'd establish a home business (as the writer did), or commute to work as the place became a de facto bedroom community of sorts. A very few were still willing to build to code and thus fulfill the age-old dream of chucking urban life and becoming respectable country squires.
Others -- entirely too many to the thinking of the ax-grinding remnant of code-legal residents -- seemed to be only looking for a cheap place in the boonies for immediate residency to avoid city rent with its steep first and last plus security; or hide out, some probably dodging child support, maybe even have an outstanding arrest warrant or two. No matter if it meant drastically downscaling one's standard of living and 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 for waste and have to haul in every drop of water -- and needing to fire up a generator or go without go-juice. For even if a power line teasingly skirted their properties, it couldn't be hooked up to a structure without first satisfying the blizzard of code requirements.
It made for primitive living on primitive land, but the heady sense of freedom it allowed 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. With the eighties' still-prevailing heavy-handed mindset and strict code enforcement yet holding sway, there was fat chance of that happening.
Round and round...
And so over time the mirage of a Mt. Shasta Shangri-la, dreamy backwoods realm undervalued and under-exploited, proved 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 to the parcels emerged.
Sporadic cycles of short-lived buying mania with maybe a brief curious camp visit or two was followed by a long-term absence of any interest whatsoever, ephemeral fantasies the dreamy land lavishly fostered being played out: this often appeared to be 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 little brush cleared, maybe an outhouse built or a soon forgotten trailer -- still clinging to their relatively pristine states. And so they kept luring new impulsive buyers, wowed by the land's trifecta of lure: unspoiled land, sweeping mountain view and dirt-cheap price.
Similarly, the long succession of casual small investors and speculators routinely soon lost interest in the first-beguiling lots and any belief in their potential profitability or livability. Some parcels doubtless changed hands over a half dozen times over the years always attracting a new flock of buyers powerless to resist grabbing such bargain properties in such a picturesque setting...a place that to all appearances appeared somehow magically hidden away from all the troublesome ways of so-called civilization.
For the massive mountain presence in the place's very backyard kept emanating its powerful, almost palpable yet undefinable force. Those leaning towards new-age thinking felt it worked to over-stimulate a person's upper chakras if not better grounded on arrival. The thinking went that such people 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 off-the-beaten track properties they were lucky enough to have snagged for a song.
In a way it was California dreamin' full tilt.
And so the luckless development kept spinning round and round. Being 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 by moving such low-end "road kill" properties kept supplying the calliope's shrill but hypnotic melody.
Stymied by disinterested speculators
and investors feeling nickeled and dimed
It probably can't be emphasized enough: competing with the place's host of other drawbacks -- water scarcity, lack of power, absence of development plans, often rocky soil and steep-sloping lots, locals putting a whammy on the place, and the prohibitive cost of meeting code -- was in a way perhaps the biggest drawback of them all: the adverse effect that a teaming sea of detached absentee lot owners had on it. They'd invested in or speculated on the place and over time became disheartened, some eveb bitter and hostile towards the now-obvious misfire of a subdivision. Many would never tune in to the nitty-gritty realities and essential needs if it was to ever grow into a recognized community or even the faintest facsimile thereof. They were chagrined to realize they'd gotten stuck with such a soft-market lemon that required annually shelling out through the owner association assessment. It left them feeling nickel and dimed to death. They were essentially enabling a few lot owners to live here, paying for road upkeep they never drove on. Such a feeling of acute buyer remorse surely worked on the subtle plane -- no less certainly than the lack of easy water -- to undermine even the most determined efforts of errant civic-minded residents to try salvaging the place's early promise and somehow move it onto more solid footing.
For, all other problems aside, how could the Vista ever evolve with so many of the ninety percent absentee ownership harboring such pronounced indifference, apathetic to the notion of ever doing anything to try to redeem the perpetually floundering would-be development? Not if it meant sinking a single penny more into it, through proposed special assessments, to fund community project proposals. Not even if such a project, like creating a community center, would work to increase parcel values over time, making the place more livable and the parcels easier to move and at an actual profit. That's how jaundiced and cynical many had gotten towards the luckless rudderless ship of a subdivision.
Countless lot owners had lost whatever faith they might've held for the place and its potential to be anything more then a chaotic, sub-standard, infrastructure-shy disaster area -- which, again, perversely, many of its few residents seemed to like it being. It made for leaving an embarrassment of undeveloped, park-like land all around them, thoughtful stuck investors having in effect generously provided the luxuriant buffer with their unsellable lots.
Not another red cent...
Those who would opt 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, felt burdened with dud properties in a dead-in-the-water development. As it was, the annual assessment bite was often only paid amid much grumbling and whines of "I don't even live there; why the hell should I pay for 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 all other regional rural subdivisions, except maybe that of next door's Juniper Valley. When the writer arrived in the late 1970s it was only about $20. a year, whether a lot was improved or not. (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 had become some $2,200.) No matter. They still felt bled, shook down for the latest assessment every fall, many no doubt feeling akin to trailer park mobile home owners, the structure theirs but having to fork over rent each month on the space it perched on lest it get grabbed 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.
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 development -- or left for dead in more of the realty world's sometimes 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 protesting needing to pony up each year, the wording on the annual billing statement grew a mite testy. Key words in large boldface letters defied ignoring the association's demand for prompt payment: "PAY WITHIN 30 DAYS TO AVOID SEVERE PENALTY OR FORECLOSURE", it yelled. Things obviously were a far cry from earlier times' lighthearted communication tone, with its merry spiels of carefree vacationing and maybe retiring to the enchanted land bye 'n' bye; the situation had taken on a hard, no-nonsense edge. Reason: Board members were now grappling with keeping enough revenue coming in to cover the constant maintenance needs of 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, damned if they did and damned if they didn't, stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
Such chilly exhortations seemed only to encourage some to finally blow off paying altogether. "They're daring me not to pay, huh? Well hell, maybe I'll just take them up on that; they can have their 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 more appropriate 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 often became unable to service them all in any timely fashion. And perhaps none anywhere up the immaculate zen standards of earlier, simpler times of far fewer residents, when the country back roads were pleasant to drive on at a mosey while drinking in the unspoiled tranquil scenery. (So irresistible to mischievous kids to gouge deep donuts in 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 carefully groomed the day before.
Again, this caused more owners 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, far and away, the most problematic one: the long steep uphill stretch of Perla Road at the front of Section 13, by Sheep Rock. It could routinely gobble thousands of dollars a year to maintain. Most sparsely settled and non-settled regions might not see the road truck for an entire 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 at last bestir the harried board members to pay address the neglected road stretches in the more remote hinterlands -- and raise the annual assessment fee to cover the increased work load and 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'd so thoroughly relished visiting their lands that many would move onto them in infectiously high spirits during that extraordinary "God is alive, magic is afoot" times of the late 1960s through early 1970s. A time when waves of feel-good euphoria might wash over you out of the blue even if your drug of choice was only Valium or a 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 lumberman Abner Weed’s having harvested the area’s tall timber early in the twentieth century. And bulldozing needed to make the new networks of roads marred the front of some lands. (The KRCE development, northeast of Yreka, was born similarly, re-purposing tree-harvested lands into rec lots for nature-hungry city folk.) But a substantial number of parcels, largely left undisturbed for ages, were part of a rich, fragile high-desert woodlands ecosystem. They could feel enchanted to anyone appreciating their subtle, almost primeval, charms, those who didn't need towering trees and crystal streams before embracing the wilds. The land held inviting groves of old junipers, some with almost DayGlo-green moss growing on their north sides; furry lichen growing on deep-shaded rocks; riots of tiny colorful wildflowers in spring and early summer; occasional stands of stately pine; and dramatic rock outcroppings, sometimes perched on by a mountain lion, on the lookout for deer that occasionally meandered through.
All had lent many areas something of a rarefied atmosphere that invited one to wax poetic over. It struck some as a rare place, a realm where time seemed to almost 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 had combined to inspire excited repeat vacation visits from homes often 600 miles away. Enough so to move the select handful to chuck city living and retire here to enjoy the tranquility and seclusion of country living year-round. And so it was that the place ephemerally became a respectable residential Shangri-la to every nature-loving retiree making the bold exodus...and having the bucks to build according to their accustomed lifestyle, which happily dovetailed with the county's then rigorously enforced health and building codes.
That said, rumor had it that the very earliest comers in the mid to late sixties -- among them one structure on White Drive by two old brothers from San Francisco, and another, far more ambitious, the Spencer place on Heinzelman Drive -- didn't even need building permits to construct the simple cabin or full-on, multi-story home, respectively. Code enforcement had then apparently yet to establish a solid foothold in the more remote hinterlands of such sparsely settled regions. If true, this possibly set a precedent for subsequent owner-builders to feel they needed no more than their own permission to build on their lots. And the building department was left forever stuck playing catch-up, saying in effect, "Hey, you really do need a permit now...no, we mean it. Seriously..." (And maybe in an aside: "Mind you, I don't necessarily agree with the policy, but hey, it's my job.)"
No more sketchy subdivisions
In the early seventies, California passed a flurry of landmark regulations covering any future subdivision starts.
“...[A] new attitude of comprehensive planning and environmental protection emerged,” wrote realty attorney James Longtin. The Vista barely got in under the wire before vast regulatory changes made it impossible to any longer spin out such bare-bones, quick-buck, often-problematic rural developments like the Vista.
After the state's 1974's Subdivision Map Act, developers were henceforward required to first get local approval and make legally binding commitments to provide all basic infrastructure for any new residential subdivision proposed. Plus, over time they or owner association directors were legally committed to spring for public improvements like parks, playgrounds and community centers. It seemed that our place, though grandfathered in under the earlier, far more lax requirements for forming, 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 on their one-time campground parcel in the primitive development so unabashedly bereft of infrastructure.
Would-be Vistan homesteaders had to jump through all kinds of complicated, time-consuming, expensive hoops to earn the right to legally live 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 installing a septic system and often having to shell out another big chunk of change to get electrical lines strung to one's property.
Who’d want to live in the middle of nowhere anyhow?
To build or not build community
Maybe county officials crossed their fingers, hoping there'd never be any who for some strange reason would actually want 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 numerous completion stages. They had better things to do.
Jumping ahead decades, residents had better things to do than foster a dubious notion of an organized community. Polarized energies bearing uber-cynical, short-fuse attitudes came to discourage it at every turn. Bowling alone was in by then, anyhow. More people moved here expressly to do their own thing and be left alone: hermits united (or disunited). Often they'd at most only work together 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 fast cure for anyone nurturing some misbegotten notion to try helping the place along.
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 daunting lack 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. And some people, craving natural solitude, bought here expressly because it lacked such trappings. To their thinking, any buzz of structured rural community, its esidents working to get on the same page, too often resulted in everyone getting in everyone else's business, cannibalizing each other's energies, keeping the age-old quest for simple, stand-alone rustic living an elusive dream.
Not so for those affluent modern-day pioneers of yore. Bewitched by the realm’s unspoiled charms during simpler if more rigid times, enough to invest their sweat, fortunes and fondest hopes into it. Early Vistans were stoked at the prospect of working together to carve out a rustic retirement community -- both for themselves and for any others who liked what they were doing, enough so to muster into their emerging rural enclave of respectability. It thus briefly became an embryonic hideaway sanctuary of decent folk living far from the madding crowd. A haven where one could enjoy their retirement years in peace and quiet deep within the bosom of nature. As a song lyric of the time went, they had hoped they were “...going where the living is easy and the people are kind."
Kind of something, as it soon enough turned out.
______________________________________________
The Vista Thru Time
1965-2015
[Part 4]
"Welcome all!"
vs. "Up the drawbridge!"
Some among the mostly second wave of new residents felt blessed. Swept up in the grand pioneering adventure of it all -- living on newly opened land with so few others around -- they were eager to share their good fortune with whoever else might arrive. They'd offer cheerful assistance, eager to see the fledgling backwoods community grow and flourish. To them, each new denizen of the sparse backwoods settlement was a welcome addition in those heady late-frontier days of the early 1970s to help further settle the realm, such as it was.
Others, mostly among the first wave, weren't quite so welcoming. Since there were no real guardrails in place through a fine-tuned master plan or CC&Rs to guide it along, each new arrival would be summarily vetted by them. Bearing an "our-way-or-the-highway" mindset, a newcomer was quickly judged as either one that would fit in with their regimen,fostering he upscale-rustic nascent community along, or stick out like a sore thumb and serve to undermine efforts. The latter, they felt, needed to be dealt with a post-haste, gloves-off manner that brooked no nonsense.
Oftentimes the more altruistic neighbors were residents of homes whose original inhabitants had fled once the charm of Vista living had begun to lose its luster and what they'd once deemed an rare gem was morphing into paste jewelry. The second-generation newcomers hadn't experienced the latter's ordeals of complying with strict codes, only to have others blatantly ignore them, or the earlier vandalism and theft by irate and malicious-minded locals during the first, camping-only years. They were more in the moment, live-and-let-live, happy-go-lucky. Some would invite newcomers to share an afternoon 'drinky-poo' on their porch or offer to freeze water in repurposed milk jugs to help them weather a hundred degree heatwave -- even offer to let an unprepared newcomer winter in their vacation cabin, as happened with the writer.
Whereas others had done all the heavy lifting and paid heavy dues, newcomers were free to relax and enjoy the fruits of their labor, savoring the moment and appreciating the rich seclusion -- and those around them, irrespective of any newcomer's circumstances or intention. There was still a sense of euphoric pioneering spirit filling the air that the more open-spirited tuned into -- a wonderment and sense of gratitude for having found such a tucked-away and affordable rustic domain located not too far from town for anyone truly valuing tranquil living amid nature.
Instant homestead
Not so others. They remained seething mad, bent into pretzels by the endless trials being faced just when they thought they could finally relax after a lifetime of work and enjoy their golden years in tranquility. Unlike former neighbors who'd bailed on the unraveling scene, they'd dug in hard; they were here for the duration, come hell or high water. Strict law and order folk, they scrambled to pull up the drawbridge and throw away the welcome mat (even as existing entrance signs weirdly continued to welcome one). Huge, foreboding signs snarled everywhere. They were bound and determined reverse the situation and salvage the scene by kicking out the riff-raff and keeping them out.
But again, having no legal enforcement powers through fining for infractions, they were forced to rely on Siskiyou county's residential code officials to protect their rural outpost from being overrun by misguided souls. Those with the audacity to try invading 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 and that peculiar new hybrid, the pot-smoking, beer-guzzling redneck-hippie, all of which they thought they'd finally mercifully left behind.
They knew such lot buyers and hopeful instant settlers were worlds away from ever respecting and emulating their conventional middle-class ways, and so prove disastrous to the established order of things if they didn't scramble to get them evicted. Girding their loins, they took on a sea of trouble with full-court determination: damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. In no uncertain terms 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. If you couldn't afford it or didn't want to go down that path, well, the place obviously wasn't for you...so don't even think about it, bub.
But word of the cheap secluded parcels was out; the floodgates of land hunters opened wide once realtors advertised the embarrassment of lots for sale cheap on their coast-to-coast multi-listings. Despite their best efforts to deter further would-be, threadbare newbies and insist that all existing miscreants be kicked off by county authorities, it became a losing battle. No matter. The home guard had sailed around the bend, permanently unhinged. Their anger was limitless and enduring; like so many crazed Don Quixotes, they kept tilting at windmills full throttle.
Some among the pretenders to the realm no doubt had had the bucks to build a respectable little shelter for hopefully low-key stays of varying lengths and did so without bothering to seek the tax-happy county bureaucrats' blessing; why sink a fortune into cheap land? It didn't compute. Others, of more modest means, simply erected long-term tents or pulled in a humble trailer or mobile home, or built a tumbledown structure from scrap material maybe scrounged at the dump and hung up their hats and figured they were home.
They were all deemed a viral infection threatening the health and happiness of the realm's respectable residents.
Brazen newcomers
The brazen newcomers in turn appeared either oblivious or indifferent to them. Why should they care what a few scattered retiree residents might or might not think of them and their sudden presence amid the giant checkerboard of mostly empty lots? It was either, "Hey, what's the big deal?" or "Mind your own damn business." Many clearly didn't appear concerned over the county ordinances they were willfully ignoring, tuning out the barking signs as little more than toothless desperation. It seemed being out in the middle of nowhere on such remote lands could dull any perceived need to conform to bureaucratic nonsense born of over-complicated city-living mindsets and realities.
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, all ostensibly subject to a sea of regulations -- was just too seductive not to succumb to. It might even be said that one's sense of well-being fairly depended on it.
So it went that the growling No This, No That, and No the Other Thing signs thrown up were dismissed as mostly unenforceable bluff by a few well-healed, uptight residents trying to bogart the place for themselves by demanding everyone conform to their living standards. More and more newcomers went their merry way, "doing their own thing", that vital watch phrase from the rebellious sixties' being taken to heart by greater numbers of people with each passing year, as people left behind the former times' fading stiff, authoritarian-leaning mindset of blind conformity, lingering military vestige of the devastating World War II era that had so seriously bent the planet out of shape.
When such errant newcomers were rudely awakened after an unpleasant confrontation or two with the compliant residents gone nuclear, or 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 La-la-land-ish, country club enclave from rack and ruin had adopted such a furious zero tolerance stance against any and all newcomers daring to ignore the codes they deemed etched in stone that the more free-minded land buyer, scoping their over-wound headspace, thought, Screw 'em; I'll take my chances.
Fraught, distraught, and overwrought
While the modern-day pioneers had conformed to all legal residency requirements and fully expected every future would-be resident to do the same, soon enough it seemed such rules didn't even exist. It was unfortunate, but that was the way it was. The place became so dysfunctional by its escalating battle over lifestyles, it beggared belief.
Practically overnight, their fledgling safe-haven backwoods retirement community had turned into its own madding crowd.
Not all newcomers were brazen anarchists, of course; maybe actually very few at first. Some of lesser means were by and large law abiding and only nurtured similar hopes of living out their own simpler visions of tranquil country living but didn't have the bucks (or, often, inclination) to conform to code. They couldn't believe that the sign's warnings of strict code regulation could actually be enforced in such a wild backwoods locale. Or that some, most living miles away, would get so up in arms about how others chose to live on their own property. While they had no real intent to buck the system per se (at least its reasonable rules), their fondest dreams could get dashed to smithereens once receiving an antagonistic 'unwelcome wagon' visit from their hitherto unknown neighbors from hell, an overbearing delegation of high-and-mighty hard-asses, swooping down on them out of nowhere and reading them the riot act.
Others were thicker skinned. More rebellious and less concerned with rendering unto Caesar, they dug in hard and kicked back, giving as good as they got. In the early 1990s, an unsanctioned neighbor with such pronounced confrontational tendencies had just been given his walking papers. One day he spotted the current board president driving about and aggressively tailgated him for miles along otherwise empty back roads, sticking like glue. While the man no doubt became alarmed on looking in his rear-view and realizing he'd somehow gained the ire of some apparent crazed madman, one might've concluded he was only reaping what he and earlier board members had sown. for holding such a cold, intolerant stance in a realm where a peaceful calm wanted to prevail.
Home in the country
Back to the early to mid 1970s... After the first wave or two of settlers had settled, following a few late sixties' early birds, a sprinkling of maybe thirty or so year-round, mostly compliant, residences dotted the landscape. While the code defiant trend had yet to gain any real foothold, a certain momentum was growing. The genie was out of the bottle: there was cheap Mt. Shasta region land just waiting to get snapped up and settled on. Various and sundry would soon be leaping at the chance to make the Vista’s sprawling juniper boonies their home, too. As said, in the bigger picture the notion of one not just visiting but actually living in nature was taking off in the public's mind. “Head for the hills, brothers!” was the clarion call as more and more city-weary, nature-hungry souls of all sorts joined the back-to-the-land movement then ratcheting into high gear. For some, it would prove only a few years' respite from urban living; for others, it became a committed long-term lifestyle.
As people's interest soared in making the great escape from urban living, the Vista gained something of the air of being a time-release Oklahoma Land Rush. In leaps and bounds, excited new arrivals were discovering the tranquil, affordable backwoods and settling in...or trying to. With the place having no master plan and the once iron handle on code enforcement beginning to slip, each newcomer went for it and winged it, flying blind, on their own private bit of terra firma. The land experienced fitful, frenzied bursts of shelter construction, some still to code, more not. The sounds of hammering and whining circular saws and chugging power generators filled the air. Writer guesstimates that by the mid to late seventies maybe sixty to eighty residences, now of markedly varied degrees of ambition and compliance, dotted the some seven square miles of remote high-desert woodlands -- a woodlands that at times seemed to exist in its own special world.
Those opting to ignore code requirements and play it by ear in the mad scramble 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, posted their own signs ("Private Property -- No Trespassing" being popular), and moved in lock, stock and barrel.
It was the territorial imperative writ large.
With so many hypnotized by the land in a way often eclipsing practical concerns, a strange wonderland at increasing variance with mundane realities was emerging, despite the most dedicated and frenzied efforts of outraged residents to arrest such an insufferable 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 this might've enabled a more orderly growth into a standard community, one in which things were better spelled out so each would-be resident knew the score in no uncertain terms beforehand. Before doing anything more than visit, one would appreciate that they had to first bring in an approved well (or share one with up to three adjacent lot owners), usually pay to have power lines extended, and install an approved septic system -- all before then becoming eligible to apply for a building permit and conform to the exhaustive health and building codes. This -- for better or worse -- was the accepted reality of places like nearby Lake Shastina (and, of course, most any American city and suburb).
Not in the Vista. Though first settled by solid law-abiding citizens, it was the rebellious sixties and early-seventies; it was predictable that the era's intense spirit of Anything Goes would burst their often staid, convention-locked, happy bubble. Perhaps things were aided and abetted by the early vacationers themselves for having built up such an exuberant (if fully law abiding) spirit on the land. Even so, one wonders if even such a CC&R revision might've assured the place would gain a solid footing and grow into a 'respectable', recognized community...one that in time gained an at least 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 already nursing serious buyer remorse, the heavily invested residents would've realized they'd never get the two-thirds vote needed to tackle such costly and time consuming legal re-structuring. Besides, they were retirees; their days of heavy lifting were over once building their new homes was a done deal.
Or so they'd hoped.
Bogarting Shangri-la?
A more cynical view might've held that the first year-round residents realized that constructing full-on homes amid a sea of raw parcels that had, in its first years, been such a wildly popular camping retreat was bound to create certain thorny problems but they didn't care. They had theirs, for whatever remained of their time on earth; let the chips fall where they may. Their viewpoint must've been that since the lots were zoned for single-family residency what was the problem? Camping had only been an ephemeral, first-generation use of the parcels. They surely hoped others would get enthused about the evolution of land use they were spearheading and would merrily follow suit. No matter. Some, perhaps less public spirited, must've realized that if more people didn't join their number and some ninety-five percent of the raw parcels stayed undeveloped (as in fact happened) and lots compromised for camp use stagnated as a result andsoftened their market value to cotton candy, well, hell; It was always buyer beware.
In any event, the way they saw it they'd earned the right to claim the place as their own after having complied with every last nit-picky, pricey, time-consuming legal residency requirement the bureaucracy threw at them. And besides, it was the developer himself who'd suggested retiring here "bye 'n' bye". Blame him if your parcels no longer serve as the backwoods retreats you bought them to be.
And blame him they would -- but the first residents, too...some for their having effectively bogarted and repurposed their one-time camping paradise, others for having gobbled up the electrification fund.
Not unreasonably, the new tax-paying homeowners now lording the land expected dutiful enforcement response by county ordinances to keep things copacetic. Later, while still loaded for bear even after the system began failing them miserably, their resolve had, again, switched gears into, "And if we can't get you out, then, by God, we'll to do our damnedest to make your lives here a living hell."
For better or worse, the shape-shifting, neither-this-nor-that place had been all along essentially left a blank canvas. One to be painted on and painted over and painted over yet again by whatever the latest in an ever-changing succession of residents (and still-visiting campers) aspired the Vista to be, if anything. Each among the more dominant and involved inhabitants during a given period advanced their own notion of how things should be. They tried convincing others that it was the best way or the only way to go. The situation was maybe something akin to excited kids building sandcastles on the seashore, until the high tide rushed in and in a twinkling their most ambitious efforts were erased. Later, new castles were built by others, likewise unmindful of the inevitable next high tide. Or like creating an image on the then-popular Etch-a-Sketch toy, then, with a shake of the hands, even the most elaborate designs vanished, returning the screen to a blank slate.
Dime a dozen
While legal requirements for homebuilding ostensibly fell within the bounds of county, state and federal authorities -- which ordinances and codes the development's future parcel owners were, as said, technically obligated to conform to as a condition for the place getting greenlit -- these were never easy to enforce by the sparsely populated county's undermanned staff tasked with such things. 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 even existing short of pouring over satellite photos (which in time became standard procedure by the county to tax lot improvements). So livid code-compliant residents burned up the phone lines, screaming bloody murder over the latest noncompliance outrage they uncovered and demanded swift response to. Like the fate of the world depended on it (as indeed the fate of their world did).
But it was a tall order. In the fast-changing times with the heady sense of freedom living in the secluded back-country enclave gave 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 effectively enforce its own codes should people opt to simply ignore them -- something of a pronounced libertarian, even anarchistic, spirit took solid root. Especially among the minimalist-lifestyle baby boomers. Fast on the wings of earlier waves, they'd felt irresistibly pulled to the mountain, like a tractor beam in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Parcels were soon going for a dime a dozen. Excited buyers wouldn't stop to wonder much why they were going so cheap. It maybe struck them as maybe one of the last few bargain land deals around and they'd been lucky enough to discover the gems before someone else grabbed them. While it might've seemed an extraordinary bargain too good to be true, land-hungry buyers possibly 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 had run its course and the varied crowd of instant homesteaders pouring in were psyched to do their thing and be left the hell alone. Not for an instant had any bought into the ephemeral retirement community's lah-de-dah, urbane notions of the way things should be.
During the radical late '60s to early '70s -- as different ages, headspaces, lifestyles, incomes, awareness levels, land-use intents and varied respect for the rule of law got thrown together in the giant cookie-cutter of a primitive wilderness subdivision -- it seemed that the only common ground ever cultivated was everyone agreeing to disagree with everyone else.
It's safe to say that it was the unwillingness of so many to build to code, aggravated by the high cost of supplying one's own water, power and sewage system, that vied for being the ultimate deal breaker holding the place back from continuing to evolve as a full fledged community. The ensuing rebellion from the perceived-as-oppressive building codes would tear 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'd stayed, braced for battle, and the merrily (and not so merrily) rebellious who came and dug in practically overnight. The former viewed the latter as invasive illegal residents deserving the bum's rush; the latter viewed the former as uptight control freaks with too much money and a serious need to chill.
That said, there were the sundry other factors that combined to make for a place festering with irreconcilable differences that effectively sabotaged itself. A place built on such a shaky footing, lacking water, electricity and supporting CC&Rs, 'What code?' attitudes; and an overwhelmed county's inability and/or unwillingness to better enforce them; a place rife with contentious energies aimed at it by disgruntled locals bearing a flinty resentment it even existed...all were baked into the place. Such a laundry list of hindrances guaranteed that whatever elusive hopes more civic-minded residents and concerned property holders might've ever nurtured to turn the place around were doomed six ways to Sunday.
Property owners board: hardball with a vengeance
Reflecting and amplifying the place's many woes was the property owner association's member-elected board of directors.
Formed to fulfill the ongoing obligations of a nonprofit public-benefit corporation that the Vista was, the board, composed of six volunteer land owners each serving staggered two-year terms, was required to meet monthly. At first 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 and at times ailing circle, shrinking as some gave up the ghost . Since all members had to live in approved structures and be in good standing (i.e., pay the annual dues), or at least be a member in good standing if living elsewhere, to be eligible, the board of course led the charge in declaring war on the festering scourge of noncompliance afoot.
Significantly, universal health and building code conformity in the Vista was critical if a legal resident decided to move on and hoped to sell at a decent price. Once realizing the good ship Vista was sinking fast by the bow, their outrage was magnified for the bleak situation hitting the money nerve. They knew they'd lose out getting any kind of decent return after all their hard work and expense creating legal residences as the place was quickly losing its brief pedigree of being an enviable upscale rustic place in which respectable people lived. Indeed, maybe it was this, as much as (or even more than) being such insufferably blind law-and-order zealots per se, that triggered their boiling-over rage.
In any event, infuriated board members in doggedly reporting of every last violation spotted by dedicated policing efforts created a stony policy of scorched-earth overreach and ruthless hardball action that became the downer gravity center of the realm.
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 made similar commitments to comply. Sometimes they upset even those who had bought approved homes and were soon nursing serious misgivings for having moved into such an uber-contentious scene. One in which it almost seemed normal for everyone not busy getting drunk to be gnashing their teeth over some grievance or other. They lamented, What on earth were we thinking, moving here? For decades, the place experienced what was in effect a mini reign of terror as various board members and their minions went about with an oftentimes balls-out ruthlessness, trying their damnedest to stamp out the affliction plaguing their once-was-and-by-damn-and-by-Jesus-will-be-or-should-be-again, serene backwoods enclave of upright law-abiding citizens...and everyone else could just go to the hell. Ah, the serenity of country living.
No great surprise that such furious intolerance made the place more than a tad less desirable to want to live in for many. It doubtless scared off some of your like-minded, would-be code-compliant owner-builders from ever opting to settle on their lots -- or buy them for such. The latter would hear war stories from sullen or spitting-mad residents they approached to ask how they liked living here or had gotten 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 indeed, a Whack-a-mole effort that did little to stem the tide of unsanctioned building in the long run, it 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 would sweep up everyone into the fray or try 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 depended on was failing them spectacularly: It had allowed barbarians to storm the gates...and stay. Shocked over their dreams of tranquil retirement and living among kindred souls in the bosom of nature evaporating like a mirage, some indeed seemed to take a grim, warped-out satisfaction in exacting a pound of flesh from every transgressor they encountered, threatening dire consequences if they didn't toe the line. Even when they knew such threats had largely become empty bluster, they must've felt that venting their spleens with such open hostility would make at least some feel so unwelcome they'd start packing just to get away from such intolerant-and-proud, whack-job "neighbors".
Indeed, some of your more unwitting transgressors, having no stomach for such testy confrontations, gave up and move on, shell-shocked and devastated. (The writer was almost one.) And a few, who knew they were probably courting trouble but weren't attached to lots so cheaply gotten, would leave, muttering, "Oh well, worth a try." But others, having thicker skins and more combative natures, dug in hard and escalated right along with the would-be enforcers, as if daring them to do their damnedest. They'd fence off their places and post their own gnarly signs. One of the more chilling: underneath a crosshairs symbol 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 enforcement crowd; it was a peculiar cat-and-mouse pastime that informed their stay and kept their adrenaline up.
There was yet another reason the code compliant manned 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 by the state to make a good-faith effort to have association members abide by all county, state, and federal laws and ordinances, technically they could be held legally liable if neglecting enforcement efforts; board members could be sued.
As if to show there could be no doubt whatsoever they weren't shirking their duties, they reported every last infraction their incessant searches revealed.
Short of extra-legal vigilante efforts, the place was fully at the mercy of the county powers-that-be to keep things on track. Once Vista's situation started seriously derailing, it was still on them to try to make things right. As taxpayers and association members with no legal fining powers, the old guard insisted that the stretched-thin county enforcement agencies were duty-bound to address the insufferable situation and return the realm to 100% code compliance...no matter how much effort it took or how long it took.
What earthly good were such ordinances if not actually enforced? Failing that increasingly impossible dream as the overwhelmed, underfunded, increasingly under-motivated enforcement system broke down, at least it'd be on them. (Then maybe they'd get sued.)
Instantly radicalized
While each land buyer signed an agreement to also abide by all aforesaid applicable laws, regulations and ordinances on purchasing their parcel, it was of course buried in the 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 tranquil country living remained blissfully ignorant of the fact they'd ever agreed to any such thing. They were therefore a bit shocked when told -- often with fire-breathing intensity -- how you couldn't do this or that and don't even think about the other thing. People came to feel foolish and misguided for having responded to the siren call of such cheap land in what at first blush had seemed such a low-key, charming, affordable place (apart from all those weird barking signs), but for some unfathomable reason appeared hellbent on giving new meaning to the phrase 'going off the deep end.'
Such hardball tactics radicalized one against the local powers in a heartbeat.
The more cash-strapped, instant-sanctuary sort of newcomers hoping to buck the system only knew they'd snagged a miraculously affordable piece of rural California and were psyched to do their own thing and be left alone. Maybe over time they'd try for a well; maybe not. They'd connect with kindred souls who'd advise them, "Just 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 them and the horses they rode in on."
The very nature of any good-sized rural subdivision, a crazy-quilt gridwork of myriad lots tucked out in the boonies, could make them problematic even with supporting infrastructure and CC&Rs. While it enabled any 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 on one's lonesome -- the hidden costs of cheap rural subdivision lots could be steep indeed. One 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 made the same plethora of rules and regulations feel normal...and so insufferable out in the sticks.
It was that crowded, super-regulated urban reality so many had wanted to get away from that led them out 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 -- could often make it difficult due to the contentious forces afoot to ever warm up to the reality of others sharing the land with them, 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 for better or worse was, on the mundane level, inextricably bound together by an overarching legal structure and all its endless edicts: It was the bureaucratic city mindset surreally superimposed on the untamed countryside. As a result, thinking the place would offer independent country living often proved little more than an illusion.
Steve Dockter, a late neighbor of the writer's whose laconic manner of speech and wit bore a striking resemblance to that of actor Sam Elliot, once noted drolly that "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 feeling by 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 ruined it for everyone.
The Vista's laundry list of neighborhood grievances at times did appear endless.
Between barking dogs, roving packs of the same, discharging firearms, blasting stereos, gunning vehicle engines, driving too fast and recklessly, vandalizing and stealing road signs, burning toxic materials in one's backyard 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 and despoiling the landscape... Between these, there was usually always something or other to raise one's dander (whatever dander is).
In sheer exasperation, residents kept complaining 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 and reflected an older populace's set rural ways -- and often feeling hostility or indifference to the development which their predecessors had shown such poor judgement to ever approve -- that they might also feel powerless and/or disinclined to work to try resolving its longstanding problems. Among the more benumbed and burned out on elected public service were those practiced in the political fine 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 circling endlessly: "Well, unfortunately there's not a whole lot we can do"; "Sorry, but it's not our problem"; "Ya see, it's complicated"; "You might give Neighborhood Watch another go"; "You could try suing"...
Beyond the element in local government indifferent to the Vista's ongoing trials and tribulations, for others it wasn't so much not caring as it was that the county's rural population -- embracing a relaxed stand-alone country lifestyle and the Code of the West championing rugged independence -- hadn't any inclination to play cop over fellow residents; they thought people should work out any problems among themselves. Many in government beyond actual law enforcement seemed to lack the disposition cultivated living in your denser, often 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 were eroding the dream of easy country living.
Authorities depended on the vast majority being dutifully law-abiding. The largely rural county didn't have a big enough treasury to enforce its own ordinances should enough for whatever reason simply choose to ignore them.
If that happened, it could be in deep doo-doo.
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The Vista Through Time
1965 - 2015
[Part 5]
Subdivisions weren't organic settlements
For anyone whose imagination could take a surreal bent, 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: try to determine how many strangers could live together in the middle of nowhere for how long and deal with a given load of rigid 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 the hell alone. They didn't want to deal with any blasted bureaucratic mandates. Naturally they did their best to ignore them in the Vista -- even if thereby possibly allowing for unintended consequences: permitting an infusion of perhaps less law-abiding lot owners attracted to the wayward place as a promising hideout. Some might say the very word 'subdivision' handicapped such developments from ever becoming more thriving communities 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 measure of empowerment within a slow-growing community in which each resident played a role.
The Vista, in stark contrast, was founded by a realtor who lived six hundred miles away; he had every last bit of land cookie-cutter-platted into 1,641 lots before the first parcel buyer ever set foot on the place. It was his creation, such as it was, initially aspiring to perhaps be no more than simple shared recreational land, a place where one could enjoy roughing it in nature a few weeks a year. When a few owners got ambitious and tried evolving into an actual by gosh community, with the developer's active support, the lack of any systematic residential growth plan would handicap it from the get-go. It lacked -- forget infrastructure -- crucial cohesive guidelines, plus any collective determination and abiding pride for being part of a budding, 'home-grown' community. Instead, its approach seemed to be to it by ear: "Hey, let's see what we might develop if we get on the same page."
Of course, nowhere near enough ever did get on the same page. It soon became clear that the incredibly diverse ownership was not only sometimes reading different chapters, but entirely different books.
Vista's already trey iffy situation was made yet iffier after various one-time residents started leasing their homes once the blush of living here had worn 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 in time one might've felt a strong vested interest and wanted to get involved to help the place along. That is, beyond joining the volunteer fire department or doing fundraisers for it, or spouting one's two cents' worth at a monthly meeting (if even allowed to, not being property owners).
The place's myriad problems, once again, were exacerbated by that legion of disinterested absentee parcel owners that so long constituted over ninety percent of the association's membership. They dwarfed the minuscule number of actual residents, yet held equal voting power on any proposal. To many of the purely speculative, the place was nothing but a gone-sour investment they'd sell the second they got any halfway decent offer. In the meantime they'd scream and holler over every cent of annual due increase, right along with the few scattered residents, many of whom had themselves become indifferent to the outlandish notion of actually trying to help a one-time wilderness condo that had obviously long ago lost any chance to ever redeem itself.
Why even bother?
The professional association management in time hired by the volunteer board was relied on to take care of mundane everyday matters, especially 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 other than nurse along the wobbly operation the way it was and hope for the best. The cynics included long-established residents who had their own social scene wired, thank you very much, and were all too aware how steeply the cards were stacked against the place ever turning around. They'd reject as naive if well-meant the pipe dreams of those who wanted to try making the place more livable.
Frustration and cynicism ran so deep, hope was just another four-letter word.
A prime example of 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 resenting their being piled on their boxes. They stayed there on the ground for weeks. 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 never thought to be that someone. Disheartened and disgusted that the place was so untogether, they no doubt got a perverse rush every time they drove past, mentally raking the board over the coals for being so discombobulated it couldn't even deal with such a simple matter. The place really was like a rural condo, its one-person road management expected to keep all the common ground tidy -- not us; earn your damn keep, slacker.
A more far-reaching example: In 1981, a majority of association members overwhelmingly defeated a proposal made by then-board president Eric Prescott. He'd envisioned the Vista building a modest multi-use community center on one of the hundreds of empty lots for the mutual benefit of every resident and owner-visitor at a time when the place, still predominantly code-abiding, was growing fast with new residences popping up. Even though it would’ve only involved a modest extra assessment for two years to fund, its cost being spread out among so many owners, and undoubtedly would've benefited myriad parcel holders over time, fostering a better sense of community and likely increasing lot values, the sea of disinterested, disillusioned absentee parcel holders kept their blinders firmly in place and chorused their favorite refrain: Not One Cent More!
Many embraced the notion that once they'd bought the land, except for annual property taxes -- some newbie landowners no doubt weren't even aware of that recurring expense -- they were home free. So, as noted, absentee lot holders took strong exception to having to feed the parking meter every year for road maintenance on roads they never even drove on, lest their property get towed away by the Association through legal repossession...for resale to the next, possibly equally clueless buyer. The situation fostered a keen resentment by such owners towards residents who were routinely driving on roads they had to pay upkeep on. It seemed grossly unfair somehow.
Sweet someday...
Not that there weren't also a few absentee owners who, despite all, treasured the land. Some felt nothing but kind regard for its residents who'd made the grand leap to secluded country living. They held wistful hopes that its promising beginnings might someday be rekindled. Some no doubt entertained notions of maybe moving here once it finally, at long last, pulled itself together. Or even as-is and hoping for the best. And a few others still enjoyed periodic camping retreats on lots located far from sometimes busy arteries and established homes often found clustered along the the few power lines and within a mile or two of the blacktop.
But such sentiments faced the constant headwinds of all-is-futility vibe from the long entrenched detachment, indifference -- even hard-bitten disgust -- of lot holders who felt stuck with what had proven to be a sucker investment in their eyes. And it seemed most owners -- jaded residents and disillusioned absentee owners alike -- were cynical towards the deemed fanciful notion of the place ever actually pulling itself together. Especially if it meant one more penny pried from wallet or purse. Obviously there was zero hope for such an outlandish basket case of a failed subdivision.
Many thought that surely some portion of their annual assessment fee could be used to go towards funding whatever civic improvements the community-minded thought might help the place along. But the budget was almost always stretched to the breaking point over the high cost of maintaining the sixty-six miles of fragile roads. Plus, the board was repossessing parcels of defaulting owners which couldn't be resold readily, and so their annual county property taxes were absorbed by the association until finding a buyer, further eating into available funds. Then there were vandalized 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 presidents with conflicts of interest
In the 1980s, as mentioned, the association started shelling out for the annual salary of the professional association manager. Things had gotten too complicated and time-consuming for volunteer board members to deal with alone. Most were not enough well versed in legal matters to grasp the intricate procedures required for running the development according to Hoyle, especially after the state legislature in 1985 enacted the flurry of new regulations for California subdivisions 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 -- actually brokered lot sales by working as a realty agent on the side. In itself, perhaps no big deal. But in 2015, he joined the flurry of realtors hustling to sell lots to the flood of parties caught up in the mad scramble to cash in on California's new gold rush of legalized recreational pot and the all but unenforceable regulations for growing it on a commercial scale; he seemed indifferent to the chaos and severe disruption to a peaceful rural lifestyle it would surely create.
And while some, maybe even most, volunteer board presidents, themselves residents, tried to keep the well-being of the residency in mind -- balanced with valid concerns of the vast majority of absentee parcel holders -- one, who shall remain nameless, was later part of the most ambitious realty effort to push parcels on commission. Her outfit sent out letters to every parcel owner, inviting them to sell, knowing that many who'd felt stuck with unsellable lots for ages would jump at the chance to unload them and actually make some money. She had held that it was the right of each property owner to do with their lot whatever they wanted. ("One has the right to cut down every last tree on their parcel if they want to", she once said while presiding over a board meeting.) In her book, an unbridled doing whatever one wanted trumped any consideration for the well-being and quality of life of the overall community. With such a mindset -- willing to expedite pulling the rug out from under the place's long-established way of living just to make a fast buck -- established residents would be left feeling like expendable pawns on a realty market's chessboard.
Though the development was, again, 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 for-profit concern look like a piker.
No there there
Many residents had low to no expectations going in and so accepted that there wasn't more there there. Nothing beyond the junipers and sagebrush and simple roads amid the scattering of dwellings of starkly contrasting stripe. Maybe even relieved, as it suited some just fine. Various parties used the place as a temporary perch, a transition spot, ready to move on if and when something better came along.
Many people the realm attracted indeed seemed far from your conventional sort (if there even was such a thing). They'd moved here to get as far away from over-complicated, peace-eroding bureaucratic urban forces as possible yet be not too far from town. As one late section 13 Pilar Road resident, then president of the Siskiyou Arts Council, said gleefully of the place during a public radio interview, "We live out in the middle of nowhere and we love it!"
Those who'd conformed to code requirements, or bought places that had, ostensibly had the peace of mind with which to enjoy them for being law-abiding residents. But even those who hadn't and were hunkered 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 ignoring any and all laws and ordinances they maybe didn't approve of.
Handy place to perch
The Vista, as an arrested de facto recreational subdivision that had failed to segue into a recognized community past its fleeting early incarnation, for long decades remained an embarrassment of mostly empty lots. This situation naturally struck all kinds of refugees from urban living as making for a dandy place to land: cheap and remote, but not too remote. The code-compliant among them could enjoy simple stand-alone country living, while the non-compliant could more than likely get away with not conforming to code, or suffer singed feathers at worst. Both paid the mandatory annual dues (usually) and as a popular idle pastime demonized the property owners board as the source of all evil. With a shortsightedness living in the place seemed to cultivate, it was the fly in the ointment interfering with any more carefree country living.
The more cynical felt 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?", ad infinitum. Idle, 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 respites, pleasant lulls when the dread fire-breathing beast of contention appeared to slumber. During such times -- especially during gentle springs and balmy summers -- a peaceful, laid-back spirit prevailed over a land that, despite all, felt blessed with a rich and rare tranquility. Grateful denizens relished the solitude for living amid such a sunshiny, largely unspoiled habitat, polarized energies checkmated, a tenuous live-and-let-live attitude prevailing.
Such idyllic periods, alas, seldom seemed to last very long.
Perennial joker in the deck:
the Intolerable Years of the 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 bit of wild land, their own little backwoods hideaway, bought for a song, one had to keep tuning out the perennial joker in the deck: the never-ending battle over code compliance. It could make the less affluent, would-be royalty feel instead like serfs living under the oppressive yoke of overlords who'd met the county's legal residency requirements and were heavy-handedly vested in upholding their own pricey living standards for the place -- sometimes succeeding, other times coming off like Barney Fife.
This joker, like some rude Jack-in-the-box, kept popping up to crimp the lives of non-complying dwellers during the Intolerable Years that roughly spanned between the mid 1970s and 1990s. As said, domains furthest away from the blacktop often had so few others living near that inhabitants might've imagined their digs more as pioneer homesteads of yore rather than dratted modern-day subdivision parcels subject to a slew of nit-picky, spirit-stifling rules and regulations. But even there, the latter reality would sooner or later assert itself to put a damper on one's day.
Some (certainly not all) board members and their cohorts of the time -- their fondest hopes for the place fading to oblivion and, consequently, their minds lost, were desperate and drunk on the seeming powers being a board member conferred. They could run amok like so many little T-Rexes. With barred teeth and razor claws, the uber law-and-order champions tried wielding ruthless authority over the domain in the forlorn hope of resurrecting their lost Shangri-la, in the process making life hell for everyone.
Fast forward and board members, though still grumbling over the rampant non-compliance going on, ruining property values and quality of life, seemed to gradually become more or less resigned to a seemingly unsolvable situation. Board meeting members and attendees, many still mindful of the brief idyllic scene of yore, at some point started to sink into a why-even-try? depressed mindset. But, oddly enough, even as the once-iron authority started seriously rusting away, residents often still somehow felt one couldn't do diddly-squat without first getting the 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 place along.
Beleaguered crew on the foundering HMS Vista
One day at a meeting held in then-president Bonnie Jolly's living room, the writer volunteered to become the unpaid custodian of the subdivision; I wanted to deal with the epidemic of road litter and windblown detritus that often despoiled the roadsides. Though they seemed to think it a laudable idea and promptly voted me into the new position, it was an unreal experience: It was almost like they approved the post in their sleep. They hadn't bothered to address any details the position would require, like supplying trash bags or possible reimbursements for dump fees or maybe a token gas allowance stipend; nothing. (I hadn't thought to bring it up myself.) So I quit my official post before I started, knowing I needn't bother saying anything to anyone. Their hearts simply weren't in it. Burned out volunteering and used to receiving mostly only grief for their efforts and getting depressed over the sorry state of affairs in general, they could only muster enough energy to cover routine matters like road maintenance while coasting along on automatic pilot. (I'd continue gathering road litter informally, as did a few others likewise concerned.)
The way board members so often seemed to be so woodenly just going through the motions and calling it in, other residents, knowing the beast had lost its teeth, would tackle things as they saw fit on their own, not asking for the board's permission. Like setting aright a road sign that had been struck and was precariously listing or fallen, or repairing a stretch of road in front of one's place themselves rather than go through stupefyingly sluggish channels.
Apathy and a sense of hopelessness in the place was so chronic and well-entrenched, it could feel like we were some beleaguered crew aboard a foundering ship with barely the will left to do anything more than bail just enough water to keep from going clean under.
What rules?
Jumping back again now to the earlier, super-intolerant years (sorry, but forty-six years of memories and experiences makes it next to impossible for this impressionable writer to be any more tidy in chronology)... Despite a seemingly bonkers board throwing its weight around on near-constant red alert, the 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 land. No uptight board -- lacking credibility and legal fining power and over time getting less and less enforcement support from the county -- 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 world's standard rules and regulations -- and especially any busybody elected board of directors. It just didn't register as something needed in their realm: it was too invasive, too arbitrary, too self-defeating to the very reason one moved here.
At the risk of overstating the point, the illusion of anything goes manifested in profound measure, if subtly, for the vast majority of raw-parcel owners being mere investors, living far away and rarely if ever visiting. To actual dwellers, they seldom held more than an easily tuned out phantom presence. Inhabitants came to view the thousand-plus vacant, undeveloped, seemingly unsellable parcels almost as a de facto permanent park commons. Dwellers were sovereign not only over their own inviolate mini fiefdom of two to three acres but an oftentimes luxuriant buffer zone of dozens of empty parcels absentee owners were nice enough to provide as well. It could make one feel land-rich indeed. The writer, living in one of the then more remote areas, for decades savored being surrounded by literally hundreds of undeveloped, unfenced acres; one could indulge in madcap strolls about the region starkers if you wanted with no one to know or care.
Some residents -- beyond board members in contact with absentee owners -- might've vaguely sensed the latter's displeasure over how the place was doing. It was a disheartening situation, one that often allowed firewood-selling tree poachers to raid absentees' unfenced lots at will, sometimes parcels harboring actual squatters, and let off-roaders indifferently tear through absentee owners' often not-even-posted parcels with zero respect for it being someone's private property. Though perhaps having no one to blame but themselves for being fool enough to buy into what proved to be such a developmental misfire, it was easier to blame the residency and mostly powerless board, who together gave the impression they didn't care diddly-squat about what was happening (and some residents, only trying to make the best of a bad situation until moving on, indeed didn't).
Whether or not one sensed this pernicious force at play, the absentees' combined ire over the sorry state of affairs was definitely part of the overload of corrosive forces at work. It could vaguely gnaw at a resident's peace of mind -- if only on an unconscious level -- right along with the in-your-face, code compliant dwellers waging war on the non-compliant and the scarce-water situation. The huge absentee ownership -- which as a whole could never muster enough public-minded energy to want to help the place out of its dire straits by voting for things like a community center, not if it meant forking over one more cent -- was definitely a contender for being the straw that broke the camel's back.
Vigilante episodes
inside an intractable tract
One day in the early 2000s, one of the very few residents then furtively growing illicit cannabis for the underground market -- long before changing California pot laws effectively decriminalized such doings -- found himself with new neighbors. They appeared intent on doing the exact same thing. Wanting to avoid increasing the likelihood 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 plants by then, some mostly for their own enjoyment, others to generate a bit of extra income as well. 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 low-key.*
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* The Vista's early pot grows, limited as they were, would of course help set the stage for the later scaled growing mania, showing yet again how the remote place was an irresistible draw for all sorts, for all sorts of reasons.
California had, of course, legalized medical marijuana in 1996, the first in the nation to do so. In the years preceding recreational pot being legalized by voters in late 2016, changing the rules yet again, a few enterprising Vistan residents pooled together scrip from the sea of registered, mostly-sham medical-marijuana 'patients' ("I can't sleep, Doc"..."Hey now, just slip me a Franklin and your troubles are over"), entitling them to grow six plants a year for each. In effect it legally allowed them to grow 99 plants, thereby ostensibly supplying sixteen 'patients' while still technically keeping in compliance with state law and not triggering possible unwelcome government interest by growing one plant more.
After 2016, the 99-plant figure reportedly apparently became the tacitly agreed-on limit, barring any filed complaints, to overwhelmed 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 legal residences, applying to all except licensed commercial farms, would soon be openly ignored by the inundation of enterprising underground growers pouring into the Vista and adjacent areas, starting in 2015 -- along with eventually abandoning the 99-plant limit.
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Between a critical handful of your more defiant kinds, ignoring any and all rules and regulations interfering with doing what they wanted; a county seemingly throwing up its hands and abandoning the place as a terminally 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 pretty 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 vacant lots to sell as firewood, cutting down scores of standing snags, sometimes even living trees, including some of the few tall pines that had long graced the region. They left unsightly stumps and slash piles on once relatively pristine parcels. (A forestry department rep once showed the writer a regional map with a rash of probably 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 the endless barking of dozens of unhappily caged residents, often left baking in the sun, for over a year until the operation finally got shut down.
And bolder souls took the law into their own hands. When a resident towards the top of White Drive discovered the surveyor had made an error decades earlier on his lot boundaries, he actually tried to close off the major through road running by his place by building a posted gate across it -- despite it being ages too late to legally remedy the error. A devil-may-care neighbor who regularly used the road didn't think twice when encountering the sudden barrier: he just 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 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 shot at them, missed, and was arrested. On another occasion, a resident on Cardinal Road saw red on learning how his scuzzy neighbor had tried hitting on his young teen daughter. Along with the wrecking crew 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 the absentee owner, the latter held a shotgun on him until the sheriff deputy arrived a full half hour later.
Multiply the writer's knowledge of the goings in mostly just his one section times six sections of similar edgy episodes, 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 sharing a euphoric bonhomie in first camping on, then settling the land -- was ancient history, shot to smithereens ages ago, the quaint way of life of some misty bygone era.
Blame it on the mountain
One could maybe in part blame the energy of the massive mountain for Vista residents not working any better together. As mentioned, its natural force field (or whatever energy one sensed it emanated) was thought to stimulate one's upper-body chakras. While initially revving the imagination, in time it could also tend to pull one meditatively inward. Bolstered by the development's founder, who, as an enthusiastic fellow camper in the early years, championed the freedom to do whatever one wanted on one's private parcel (within the bounds of the law, of course), the mountain's influence could work to make one feel their lot was something akin to Superman's impregnable Fortress of Solitude.
Long after the honeymoon camping period and early homesteading years had faded away and non-code-approved living took off in earnest, people for a while actually competed to get voted onto the board. Some no doubt were hoping to mellow the place, willing to turn a blind eye to unenforceable county ordinances so long as residents were otherwise peaceable, wanting to try to make the best of a bad situation. Meanwhile, others with less live-and-let-live bents 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 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. The ungovernable atmosphere, perhaps aggravated by and reflecting the 1990's high national crime rate, was punctuated by the helpless wails of long-suffering 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
Speaking of water... In supreme irony, residents on water-parched lands periodically had to scramble to keep water out. Snow melt poured in from next door's seasonally running Whitney Creek that every now and then went on a rampage, flooding areas of the adjacent section 28's lowlands at either Buck Horn Road or Rising Hill Road depending on the seasonal creek's changing course. After many years of often silt-laden or muddy floods washing away vulnerable roads and eroding various parcels, the Association in the eighties sued the Forest Service. It had allowed the course of the creek -- actually just a seasonal snow-melt wash -- to have been 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 hadn't wanted to either.)
Our development won the suit and the quarter-million dollar settlement went to funding the massive earthen berms that to this day are kept up along Buck Horn and what's left of Rising Hill to protect the place from future flooding. 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 been mostly 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 finally burst, flooding land with water and mud flow on both sides of the berm and prompting a Code Red evacuation alert.
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Bored writer joins the board
In the early 2010s, after over thirty years of, like many, feeling little fondness for the board -- and at times being demonized by some members in return, short fuses being common all around -- the writer actually 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 legal minimum needed to conduct official and essential business like approving road maintenance outlays.
They 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 have gone into dread state receivership as a failed subdivision and faced monumentally unpleasant and costly consequences. As I was one of only a few who even sporadically attended monthly meetings, one evening in 2012 I found myself roped into serving on it as secretary by then-president Pam Simpson before I knew what was happening.
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 from time to time. It felt like no one gave three hoots in a holler what happened to the woebegone place. Certainly few appreciated or respected how various residents were volunteering time and effort serving on the board to meet the state's mandate to do what was needed to be done to keep alive some minimum level of functionality. For all their troubles, volunteers were, as said, often vilified as power-crazed busybodies interfering with residents' would-be tranquility. (Various non-compliant neighbor acquaintances suddenly became more guarded around me, as if I'd 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 the more determined and thick-skinned members serving on it soon burned out, becoming overwhelmed, jaded and/or embittered and disillusioned in record time. Those who hung in could appear like charred remnants of their former selves. At the monthly meetings they were like dogs with a bone, determined not to let go of the reins for fear no one could or would do a credible job.
Indeed, from time to time the board did attract certain volunteers with private agendas up their sleeves. They hoped to leverage the post to selfish advantage, maybe wanting to sabotage operations to protect nefarious goings-on, or at the least idly sought the dubious prestige and sense of empowerment being a member might confer without intending to do diddlysquat.
As the writer soon learned first-hand, the board's pressure-cooker meetings could seriously undermine one's peace of mind. One had to be in full psychic armor and ready for battle, as it were, if, say, some outraged resident or visiting owner attended and started venting their spleen. Or, more often, one had to endure soul-crushing boredom. And be made to do dirty work if told by the manager to, say, help 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 appeared to be in clinical group depression. As if everyone felt the thankless, grand futility of it all, but plugged away anyhow out of some misguided sense of civic duty. With my filled-in time slot on the board expiring with the next election after having served eighteen months, my name was put on the ballet without anyone ever asking me if I even wanted to run. (Predictably burned out by then, I declined to serve further, even though elected.)
Over time, the development would now and then appear to be getting back on track (as much as any track even existed) under the guidance of your more capable, on-the-ball, altruistic-minded board members. They scrambled to get the place up to speed by tackling remedial catch-up chores. Then it'd derail all over again. This, due to the endless shuffle of new, sometimes less motivated and/or knowledgeable resident volunteers. There was always a lot of slow on-the-job orientation involved. By the time new volunteers got a tenuous handle on operations, they were usually burned out. And so the learning process began once again with other newbies from the ever-shrinking pool of willing volunteers in good standing.
All is futile...
Born under a dark star?
No doubt like many well-meaning board members before and after me, I'd hoped to somehow help turn the place around. The situation had just seemed so ridiculously depressing, so needlessly downbeat, so absurdly all-is-futility-so-why-even-bother? that surely it wouldn'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 were appreciated, it was too little too late to make a bit of difference. 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 a miracle it was only wishful thinking to imagine concerned board members could ever pull the place out of the quagmire it was so firmly stuck in.
We were dinosaurs floundering in a tar pit, lamenting the Vista's 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, and not without reason, came to dismiss the troubled realm out of hand: “No water, no trees, nothing but desert and rattlesnakes; it's a friggin' wasteland.” 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 spot.
The way so many routinely slammed the place, you might've concluded it was born under a dark star, some wicked witch’s cauldron boiling over with gnarly contentious forces, any effort to resist its tragic destiny 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. The calendar date was the birth date of TV's Rosanne Barr, along with 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 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. 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 in meaning). Its 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: a dreamland, its denizens often unable to manifest their happy dreams in waking reality.
Perfect storm
Somewhere along the way the once openly shared, carefree vacation land reached a critical tipping point. Having flown past the point of no return, its anarchistic-leaning residents were determined to do their own thing while hundreds of absentee landholders filled with buyer remorse had little or no interest in the place whatsoever except to cash out the clunker investment the first chance they got. Most would-be residents had long ago lost any inclination to build to code. One contractor who in later times actually did appear to build a two-story house to code on Catherine, minus well and 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-built place wouldn't fetch enough return if deciding to sell for being in such a squirrelly mishmash of a place.
Countless daunting factors holding the place back had been piling up over decades, combining with changing external realities, which, taken together, appeared destined one day to have created a perfect storm.
The situation was already letting any so inclined have a field day pursuing whatever dubious land uses they might conjure up -- junkyards, dog kennels, meth labs -- for being on such remote, private dirt roads, tucked far away from all but the prying eyes of a few nosy neighbors who often seemed powerless to do anything about it anyway. No matter if such dubious land uses upset the peace and quiet which the code-compliant had dropped anchor here for and invested decades of hard work in establishing homesteads, or had bought places from others who had and paid for them accordingly. The place, long having been up as a lost cause by the county, became the poster child for a failed rural development.
More and more, denizens of the wayward realm belted out the unbound sentiment of the old Cole Porter's tune "Anything Goes".
Without any 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 had gained an outsize influence. It seemed the majority of less invested residency were so used to the place being terminally dysfunctional -- a quirky, cheap, low-key hideaway with a powerless board and often unresponsive county authorities -- that they couldn't be bothered to read the writing on the wall. Or read it and felt nothing could be done. As a result, the place left the door wide open for possibly even wilder misadventures.
One didn't need the omniscience of 20-20 hindsight to realize that by the early teens two things had become glaringly obvious: The Vista was a rudderless ship, vulnerable to drifting into perilous straits; and that its residents either didn't care or felt helpless to do anything to try preserving the (despite all) often relatively tranquil rural lifestyle by then 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 would go. Was the place's metaphorical foundation (as it were) coming 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 a blog covering his exhaustive search to find an 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, by the early 2000s a few solution-minded residents applied 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 arid high desert land, usually baking hot and bone dry in summer, and further aggrivated for being on hydrologist-baffling volcanic terrain that often made hitting water through lava strata touch and go and, even if successful, sometimes resulting in water undrinkable without expensive 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 to naturally air-condition their eventual home. (More on wells and water in part 7)
Back to the ‘80s
By the mid 1980s, Vista had grown to maybe 150 or 200 residences, its dwellers of widely varying ambition and code compliance levels. Scattered over the nearly seven square miles, it was still a mere sprinkling; the development was worlds away from even beginning to get built out. Many if not most inhabitants felt like land barons -- especially those on lands furthest from the blacktop.
It seemed many owners were allergic to unpaved roads; they never learned to accept the place's cinder surface thoroughfares. Adverse to their nice clean vehicle getting all dusty and ruining the latest car wash, they rejected the notion of having to drive up to five miles over sometimes narrow, winding cinder roadways to reach a property. A half mile of unpaved road was more than enough to have to endure.
It seemed that for many the desire for seclusion was weighed against the desire for easy in and easy out, as if only flirting with country living. And so they struck a compromise by settling on lots a relatively short distance from the highway. A segment of dwellers seemed to dislike the roads so much that, for a while, they bandied about the half-baked idea of paving them and covering the prohibitive cost by special assessments that the sea of absentee lot owners would have to disproportionately shoulder (no doubt causing a riotous reaction). Perhaps they thought cinder roads were the main thing holding the place back from ever getting itself together. Their heads were so stuck in city-centric ways that they didn't realize the place's lack of paved roads was perhaps the least of the place's problems.
In any event, with so many of the deemed less-desirable parcels scattered deep in the hinterlands, there was a grand buffer of some thousand empty parcels overall that lent more remote regions a profoundly tranquil, park-like ambiance for those willing to go the distance and embrace country living, gamely adapting to the uber-rustic circumstances.
But it often seemed that no matter how much pristine land one might be (tenuously) enjoying, a foreboding undercurrent lurked 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 never really accepting the place and the dead-set resolve of code-compliant residents to battle code ignorers and their insufferable lifestyles, dragging down the development's livability, desirability and market values, it seemed one was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Even if a resident was compliant, an almost palpable tension filled the air, one felt by one and all. On the subtle, it was like living in a crowded tenement, angry landlord pounding on the door.
It was one of the grand ironies of living in the Vista. Either you detached and became philosophical about it all or you soon found yourself over-identifying with artist Munch’s screamer.
It would drive more than a few to drink.
Missing word sank efforts
About 2012, a long overdue effort was launched by a handful of more civic-minded residents: a committee had been formed to try revising the outdated CC&Rs. Not overhaul them outright, mind you, but at least tinker around the edges, trying to make them more relevant to current realities. After much slow sledding, a glitch in the progress report 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”, but the all-critical first word Proposed was somehow left out, making the changes sound like a done deal.
This 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; they thought the board was maybe trying to stage a coup.
The long and winding roads;
Whitney Creek revisited
While you had your own private parcel, the modest annual ‘road dues’ assessments were often 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 not in 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, now and then got rambunctious as summer temperatures soared above 100 degree F. The product of the mountain's 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 up to 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 seemed to have a 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 the board finally abandoned them and bought the parcels of those who could no longer reach their parcels short of driving in with a Hummer; they figured it was cheaper than having to keep rebuilding periodically endangered but little used road stretches.
Three-fourths of Rising Hill Road, the southernmost road in the Vista, no longer existed -- and the area was still vulnerable to flood. For ages delivery people and first-timers, using an outdated map or relying on sometimes inaccurate Google Maps, got confused, if not hopelessly stuck, looking for nonexistent roads. Finally, the Association -- decades after there was an obvious need for them -- installed Dead End signs at the front of all the once-through roads branching off Starling Rd.
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 with so many having ornery, "leave me alone and we'll get along fine" attitudes. This socially-challenged situation was (yet again) seriously compounded by the sea of absentee owners who'd detachedly bought parcels as speculative investments and came to regard unsellable holdings as an albatross about their necks. The widespread disenchantment of lot owners, both present and absent, was guaranteed to arrest any errant inclination one might've felt to try rescuing the wayward realm from the discombobulated straits it had long ago drifted into.
At some point, having no solid foundation on which to sustain and build any recognized community, it was overwhelmed by the torrent of adverse circumstances and had simply shorted out, becoming the arrested development that first-time visitors would drop their jaws over. Such a "left for dead", train wreck of a place, set amid otherwise seemingly peaceful and charming backwoods, struck many as surreal. Like it was perhaps 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 trying to rise above its lowly station and was paying the price for its rank impertinence.
The earliest settlers who had built full-on, code-approved homes knew it would take everyone following the county's health and building regulations if the development was ever to emerge as a recognized community. But of course people had swooped 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, hee-hee?" attitude; or even "My land; bugger off" stances. The firstcomers keenly realized the survival of their one-time idyllic law-abiding retirement hideaway was facing imminent mortal danger. Their only recourse lay in demanding county authorities step in with rigorous, no-nonsense code enforcement.
Anything short of that, the place was toast.
Still a nice place to live, kinda sorta
Over time, the realm -- having become such a broad, haphazard, unlikely mix of full-on 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 stopped rising in the oven, was removed and partially collapsed, then over time dried out and solidified. Though left precariously existing between worlds in essence, the Vista was de facto recycled: its residents made like hermit crabs, moving in among abandoned rec land lot shells and houses sold by the disillusioned lot holders. Many and sundry would come to consider the development a nice place to live despite its litany of shortcomings and checkered pedigree. Sure, it was a failed subdivision, but, hey, it was our failed subdivision.
Living in the Vista often felt something akin to 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 then constituted the absentee membership scattered throughout the nation. They were definitely not enjoying the land. Some, possibly hoping for a miraculous turnaround, had clung to their 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 indeed were over the years. The sentiment of such owners of repo-ed lots was essentially, "When I invested in the place, I didn't realize I'd have to keep investing in it."
Others finally dumped their lots in bitter dismay, taking a loss, many feeling nothing but unkind thoughts towards a once promising place that had proven to be a cruel mirage. This churn rate of lot ownership changing hands, lending a pronounced sense of impermanence to the development, worked to create extra billing time for the salaried manager processing the reams of legal paperwork, driving up association dues. And it generated quick commissions for the profit-motivated realtors who kept offering the embarrassment of beleaguered low-end lots as sleeper land steals to the gullible, desperate, and expedient- or flip-minded. It seemed they often didn't have to say a word; the oddly charmed, dirt-cheap lots with their sweeping mountain views and deep seclusion sold themselves.
Meanwhile, absentee parcel holders -- like the hapless characters in the play Waiting for Godot -- patiently stood by, waiting 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 even building an approved shelter of some sort as a part-time retreat. Or, if they could afford it, build a full-on home and leisurely sample Vista living a while before then selling at a nice profit once the inevitable disenchantment set in. "You'll love it here"..."Why are you leaving, then?"..."Er, well..."
Beginnings re-visited:
ten-cent parcels with million-dollar views
The earliest campers in the newly formed shared wonderland savored it like fine wine. In spring the realm would delight 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 drenching rainfalls, the pungent earthy scent of damp juniper and sagebrush was 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 had 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 became keen on the vision of building up an idyllic rural community, one so refreshingly off the beaten track.
Seldom heard: a discouraging word
The earliest 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, likely inspiring spontaneous choruses of “Home on the Range” or "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 daytime potlucks and barbecues under the unfailing majesty of Mt. Shasta’s northern slopes. (The locale offered such staggering mountain views that the then well-known City of Mt. Shasta photographer, Keven Lahey, in later times would race over to snap the spectacular, almost surreal, lenticular clouds sometimes flying off it, or an impossibly giant one hovering over it like some visiting mothership from Venus.)
Judging by the writings in the association's twice-annual Vistascope newsletters, visitors were sharing in the euphoric waves of feelgoodness that was sweeping much of the planet during those rarefied purple-haze days of the late 1960s to early 1970s (along with the gnarly uprisings, wars and protests, of course).
...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 and its tired-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 the group buzz might’ve been further heightened by something quite extraordinary: unknowingly copping a contact high from parties aboard the UFOs then frequently spotted darting about the mountain and 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 enjoying the mountain's sleepy side.
Dreamland
To any susceptible to the subtle charms of such high desert woodlands -- magnified for being under the mountain’s spell -- it was a nature lovers’ paradise. One that new parcel holders contentedly worked on to improve. The light-duty cinder roads were kept immaculately groomed by the membership’s workhorse road truck. Flowers were planted at select highway entrances. The welcoming archway sign was lifted into place.
It’s said in metaphysical thinking that the imprint of earliest inhabitants of a land establishes a subtle vibration that it then forever after resonates with, no matter what might happen over time. If accepting this as maybe true... Prehistoric indigenous people had seasonally hunted game here but didn’t settle, probably over lack of water and not daring live so close to a powerful and sacred mountain. 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 imprint on the land was made by none other than modern day, pioneering Vistans.
If so, their earliest years of extended camping and settling in bestowed on the land an euphoric, industrious, decidedly conservative and somewhat topsy-turvy energy, a DNA signature the land still resonates with, though often getting buried below the surface.
Apart from such possible influences on the subtle plane, whenever mindful visitors unwound and tuned into the land, one sensed its pronounced, soft, almost-otherworldly and dreamy quality. In spots beyond earshot of highway wash and with no jets droning overhead or freight trains rumbling in the distance, the land held such a profound quiet, one could almost sense the earth breathing. Repeat visitors and residents alike, on adjusting to the enveloping silence, could come 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 singular stillness.)
However, this dreamy atmosphere came with a 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 get things squared away with the powers that be, and so allow their brainstorms to actually manifest. Instead they often remained just so many pipe dreams the region's rarefied energies so readily fostered.
Over time countless one-time owners came and went, happy bubbles burst after a few months or years of either ignoring or being ignorant of the sundry mundane regulatory realities that were still at least fitfully enforced by county and state governments. Ordinances legally obligating any would-be resident to first establish a well, septic, and power and then build an abode to accepted standards. Until out of the blue, a reality check shocked them awake like a bucket of ice water dumped over the head.
It was a phenomenal pattern. Serene enchanted land for sale cheap kept grabbing newbies psyched over the secluded parcels' possibilities. Then -- like a 'Star Trek' TV episode in which intrepid space explorers land on a strange new planet that at first appears a mysterious paradise -- its fatal flaw is discovered and they're lucky to get out alive.
A fine place, by George: further speculations
on why things went so far south
L.A. developer George Collins had appeared no less smitten by the land's charms than the earlycomers he sold the lots to, joining in with vacationing new-parcel owners during the place's initial, visiting-only years. He became the super glue that held the place together by serving as father, midwife, cheerleader, first board president, fellow vacationer and daddy moneybags all rolled into 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 professed in an early newsletter, 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, perhaps due to no more ambitious initial planning and risk taking, soon enough became a developmental misfire, a stalled-out, bare-bones recreational subdivision lacking the organized vision and critical infrastructure to facilitate growing into anything more. It made the land super-affordable but ultimately caused endless headache and heartbreak for the latter-day, would-be and actual residents and campers alike. But he was obviously far from your stereotypical slick, disinterested land developer who just took the money and ran. He'd nurtured the place along, wanting to see it grow and flourish, at the least as a collectively owned, primitive rural resort.
Let George do it
He was so central in the place's beginnings on so many levels that other property owners doubtless grew accustomed to it being in his capable hands. Perhaps on one level they became something like land tenants, passively relying on their kind overlord to do whatever needed to be done. In other words, "Let George do it."
In essence he had become the place's benevolent master, doing all the heavy lifting and sparing everyone else the bother, in turn being acknowledged as the main man by willing and grateful subjects. As long as he stayed in the picture few would feel motivated or empowered to take on major group responsibilities to grow the place according to their own lights. Up until the time people actually started building and moving in, it was his baby.
When at some point he bowed out for exact reasons uncertain, the vacationers and new residents, their 'father' having abandoned them, were forced to scramble. Left to their own devices, they had a steep learning curve in assuming responsibilities and grappling with ongoing issues; some they probably never knew existed now stared them in the face. One might've concluded that it was at this point the good ship Vista first began to seriously founder. It had had its problems before, sure, leaks that bailing efforts had enabled keeping on top of things and the ship still more or less seaworthy. But Collins -- up until the electrification brouhaha began unraveling whatever group ownership fabric existed -- as a seasoned subdivision developer seemed to know how to deal with everything. 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 having to bail like crazy just to stay afloat.
Alas, no critical mass
Enough had been jazzed at the idea of building up a recognized community that Collins's hopes rose after apparently having first cautiously played it by ear. "If enough want to build a recognized community here, I'm their man to get it done", was maybe his attitude. But after the few dozen firstcomers had settled, the compliant population base would never grow enough to become the critical mass of committed property owners needed to really flourish. Water was often too deep, power was pricey -- and too many were simply speculators unwilling to sink anything more into the place, especially after it became clear only a tiny number had ever been keen on moving onto the land. Their faith lost, it must've appeared they'd be throwing good money after bad at a boondoggle that would never amount to more than a sparsely settled, infrastructure- and organization-challenged would-be community amid a sea of now-compromised retreat lots. One located too far out in the sticks to attract any but the attention of well-set retired people and their antithesis, poor, land-hungry, would-be homesteaders living on a shoestring, maybe a few rural-friendly working folks who wouldn't mind the commute.
Beyond the power fiasco, Collins no doubt further lost heart as the building owners became frustrated and testy over the lack of easily tapped water, knowing how people fifteen miles away could hit good water at seventy-five feet or so. Vistans would have to routinely drill down at least five times that, spending a fortune, and then maybe have to deal with suspended volcanic minerals like arsenic and iron.
It's been said that it's easy to come and go but hard to stay. Lot owners wanting to move onto the land knew they'd have to push ahead under their own steam -- each supplying their own water, power and septic, all at great expense. Collins's role and influence shrank as people per force had to act on their own and thus empowered themselves. It's probable he'd by then become something of a tiresome cheerleader. Owners facing sudden, complex and costly challenges had 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 now seeing bitter divisions splitting the ranks and an eroded regard for him as he lost his grip on things (maybe blatant code violators had already started trickling in), he possibly at last said the hell with it...and his former blessing turned to something of a curse. Or, at the very least, he developed a bittersweet "well, good luck" attitude and washed his hands of all further involvement with the place he'd birthed with such high hopes but limited investing commitment.
And so his and others' fading, happy vision for the Vista began its long, inexorable fade to oblivion.
Something happened between Collins and his one-time fellow vacationing lot owners then emerging as independent, modern-day homesteaders that turned the wine into vinegar. Something, or a series of somethings, changed the ephemeral Shangri-la from idyllic rural retirement haven to incipient nightmare.
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A hundred times cheaper
Vista’s raw parcels on a per-acre basis were both some ten times cheaper and ten times bigger than those of the next door's exurb of Lake Shastina, started a couple years later. That meant that for any land shopper not unduly concerned about the lack of infrastructure or the relative remoteness, or the quirky, haywire nature of the place, the Vista offered a deal a hundred times better. To others, though, it had limited value beyond serving as group-owned recreational land. While the Vista first attracted an equally financially secure crowd as the second-home buyer group Lake Shastina's developers initially wooed with full-on infrastructure, a recreational artificial lake, golf course, and relative closeness to town amenities, the population base would shift radically as building code scoffers became more and more common.
Eventually, comparing the two was like apples and oranges. One was a full-fledged standard community, the other only aspired to be one or embraced its unconventionality.
Lookin' for a sign amid a maze of roads
The one thing the Vista got on top of was road signs, even if the initial, tiny ones proved wanting.
Road signs were crucial inside its endless sixty-six-mile maze. Even longtime residents like the writer could get lost if hazarding off the accustomed, habitual route. One moonless night, I was driving about and suddenly realized I had no idea where I was. Disoriented, I finally reached to an intersection and spotted the modest stenciled 4X4 inch wooden road sign post. I climbed out and 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; I was still lost in a place I'd called home for decades.
Second generation signs were equally small, four-foot tall vertical metal affairs that soon rusted out. Delinquents would steal them -- as well as the current third generation, tall, rust-proof, reflective-green metal signs. Perhaps they especially felt the latter's slick, citified appearance clashed with the place's rustic ambiance. Or they just wanted to make it harder for anyone to find them if they didn't want to be found, leaving those unfamiliar with the roads soon hopelessly disoriented, wanting to give up to try finding their way out of the maze.
Place 'haunted' by sheer number
of phantom parcel owners
As stressed, many original lot holders had snapped up the parcels in pure speculation -- plus maybe for some to gain bragging rights for actually owning a piece of the golden state -- hoping eventual improvements like a centralized water supply and extended power lines would skyrocket parcel values. At the least, they'd have something interesting of tangible value to leave the family. Being the first kid on the block in the wider region's advent of rural subdivisions, the Vista had served what some might call a test run; while others took note and proceed to fine-tune their developments with infrastructure and vision plans, the Vista stayed unfocused beyond its primitive camping use, its lots held by those often never quite sure what the place was all about or might become -- but couldn't resist the price.
Over time the properties traded hands like so many baseball cards at recess. If each parcel on average changed ownership three times over the 50 years (probably an underestimate), the place up to 2015 experienced a rotating ownership of some 5,000 individuals, spread throughout the nation. If you included two more family members per parcel getting involved, the number increased to 15,000 people who held varied levels of interest in the place.
Fifteen thousand people, the overwhelming number absentee owners...that was guaranteed to keep the place, already remote, feel super remote...and more than a little sketchy around the edges.
It might've seemed to some that the place was always more of an abstract commercial aggregate of raw land commodities rather than any organic development whose lot owners (beyond a tiny number) ever aspired to grow it into an actual functional community.
After the original retiree clique had faded away and a wildly diverse population came to dominate, civic interest all but disappeared. Latter-day newcomers who plugged in and involved themselves quickly became aware of the realm's powerful undertow and Mt. Everest of inertia. Such forces -- magnified by the board, the only organized group the place had other than the volunteer fire department and its auxiliary fund raiser -- shattered one's dreams and fostered a sense of abject futility over trying to 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 realized.
Initially involved newcomers either gave up in keen disillusionment or soon dialed back any errant involvement urges. The few undeterred, more thick-skinned and unwavering, could appear like so many Don Quixotes tilting at windmills.
Up until 2015's phenomenal sea change, absentee owners still outnumbered actual residents about seven to one. Tellingly, the Vista’s fiftieth anniversary, occurring that November as the place was in the throes of getting re-purposed yet again, was an event observed by few, if any beyond the writer, much less celebrated.
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Reprise on Setting the standard:
"You gotta permit for that?"
The first wave of firstcomers had been recent retirees. They were flush with cash from selling big city homes and psyched at the prospect of becoming modern day pioneers and establishing a close-knit, tamed-wilderness community. They'd nurtured hopes of the place blossoming as other retirees and maybe respectable working folks joined their number. It would be one in which they, as founding members, had established a comfortable living standard that others, similarly financially secure, would conform to without question as simply the way things were.
It might be hard for some readers to appreciate in these rarefied, anything-goes times, that health and building codes were ever rigorously enforced out in such remote lands. But they were, with an iron fist. And the first wave of owner builders, staunch, law abiding citizens that they were, jumped through every last hoop (albeit some no doubt grumbling) as a simple matter of course.
The way they'd go bonkers when parcel "squatters" became an invasive force to be reckoned with, the philosophical might've thought the whole situation ironic: A place that started out championing primitive rec properties came to view anyone camping on them with alarm and suspicion. It was an incongruous turn of events, fraught with paradox: the place turned 180 degrees, residents becoming so wary of most campers that if they lingered they were viewed almost as wanted criminals. They'd track the permissible days left before they could throw them under the bus in righteous wrath.
The place had started out as a collection of de facto, do-your-own-thing recreational lots, then tried to segue into a living community, then its reason for being got so muddled it would end up supporting 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 retirement homes needed electricity, power lines then being nowhere near. Others wanted electricity made available for camp visits in their appliance-loaded trailers and RVs. Yet others simply wanted to goose lot values and sellability by adding infrastructure.
They'd either talked the developer and fellow lot holders into the idea of making a volunteer assessment to help spread the otherwise prohibitive costs of extending power to the remote parcels, or Collins had it in mind all along and maybe made it appear it was their idea. The big question was: were there enough owners interested in investing enough in the place to grow it into an actual community? Or were most content to let it remain a de facto seasonal primitive camp resort? 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 would sound the death knell of the place.
Mount Shasta's dream factory was definitely at work, in any event. Ambition was about to try making a quantum leap as property owners led by Collins envisioned extending electrical lines to every single lot. Why not? The power company -- again, no doubt on the strength of developer Collins’s (possibly glib) assurances he'd work to get everyone on board -- reportedly made a tentative commitment to extend power lines throughout. As speculated on earlier, possibly getting everyone committed and willing to fork over further money as needed to keep the fund solvent was a condition for the power company to agree to absorb or subsidize further line-extending costs beyond what the fund initially generated.
The Vista was reaching a critical turning point: If everyone went along, it might be on its way to growing into an actual bonefide community. Or at least had 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 by individual owners, until the place, hopefully, grew enough to develop more systematic and centralized infrastructure.
The backwoods realm seemed to be on the verge of transforming itself...if perhaps in a seemingly haphazard, scrambling to catch up, slapdash sort of way.
But nothing comes easy. While three in four -- some 1,200 parcel holders -- ponied up, fired up over the prospect of building there, camping with electrical amenities, or thinking adding power would increase parcel values, a quarter of the membership flat-out rebelled. Some four hundred lot owners refused to chip in. This, despite a membership newsletter's pleaful pitch from Collins 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, but...", then going on to try convincing them to reconsider.
To no avail.
Many who actually visited their parcels indeed seemed hunky dory with enjoying the primitive parcels just the way they were; they relished the prospect roughing it on their own bit of wilderness. They felt adding unsightly power and phone lines and their dead-tree, creosote-soaked poles would ruin things, destroy the place's magical, relatively pristine charm. They'd each bought a primitive parcel cheap for simple camp vacation use, never intending to do anything with it in the foreseeable future beyond at most roughing-in a driveway and building a stone campfire ring, maybe fashioning an outhouse if really ambitious.
The whole idea of the place, as they had come to see it, was to get away from the complexities of modern civilization -- including electrical dependency and telephones (this was, of course, decades before cell phones came along) -- and get back to basics, not drag them in...push the reset button and recharge amid the primitive realm's restorative seclusion. Bringing in electricity and extending phone lines would obviously defeat the purpose. Probably those leaning this way had deemed the place so remote that any further development appeared unlikely, and they'd come to think of their parcels as permanent private-camp refuges.
Even though the lots had been zoned for single residency occupancy by the county, providing potential avenue to build up a community, it appeared to many of those declining to chip in that speculation fever was out of control -- that it was only a tiny minority lot holders who seemed dead set on building up some weird rustic fringe community for themselves, bolstered a long by the many hoping to goose lot values for profit.
Sea of disinterested speculators
Possibly some of those refusing to chip in were themselves among the countless disinterested investors and speculators. They'd already soured on the place that they'd somehow managed to get tangled up in against their better judgement; property values failed to increase as hoped for. It was a super-soft market, and the anticipated making of easy money was a mirage. Now they were asked to sink more money into the boondoggle? No way.
It was easy for the cynically minded to jump to the conclusion that it was a select few parcel owners, keen on making the leap and building on their parcels, who had selfishly tried to get everyone else to go along with the fund just to minimize otherwise astronomical electrical hookup costs. This tiny minority was now trying to turn the place into a whole new critter that would, over time, doubtless require yet more -- and probably bigger, maybe even mandatory -- special assessments -- regardless of whether or not the critical level of support needed to successfully build up such a standard community could ever be reached.
They were, understandably, loathe to sink another cent in it. Some might've reasoned that getting power to every lot in itself wouldn't appreciably increase the parcels' market values due to the remaining iffy water situation and at times problematic waste disposal issue. Their possible 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, wanted to leave the whole world behind...and now they had the unmitigated gall to try to get the rest of the parcel owners to subsidize their costs!
And, again, since the place was no longer dedicated to recreational use, yet was likely to fail to ever get enough interest in build an actual standard community, it became desirable to neither interest and was left twisting in the wind. An insurmountable obstacle to ever moving now purpose-vague parcels at a profit had been created.
Sorry, out of luck, schmuck
The power and light fund had 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 -- psyched at the idea of living in such splendid seclusion (or, again, for some, building structures for others to get enthused about after briefly enjoying them before selling at a tidy profit) -- had gone for it. The power company, anticipating a flood of new power-guzzling customers moving onto their parcels and rapidly building out the place -- or at least a sea of vacationers wanting go-juice for trailer and RV hookups -- soon backed out of its tenuous commitment. They'd been discouraged anyhow, by the frequent drill bit-shattering lava rock strata they 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 had already planted and wired tall street lamps at every one of the five highway entrances (proving its initial good-faith commitment). It's possible they'd yet be shining at night today but for the beacons -- which gave off an eerie, cold, bluish glow -- repeatedly getting shot out by rowdy locals. No doubt their tribe was still fulminating over the subdivision even existing and having taken over their long-accustomed backwoods wilderness. They must've taken especially keen delight in being able to sabotage it without even leaving the pavement. After a few rounds of such target practice and the power company's repairs, they finally gave up and removed all the light poles.
The five highway entrances were once again swallowed in darkness after nightfall.
As mentioned, only about ten to fifteen percent of the 1,641 parcels ever got connected to power. Some who'd contributed to the fund had doubtlessly made tenuous plans of building sometime down the road. They were so distraught by the fund getting gobbled up by the earliest builders that they sold their lots in dismay, if not outright disgust. Some of the less informed who'd chipped in had probably kept their lots thinking to build sometime, then lost it when they realized they'd been left out in the cold. When ready to build they were told by the association that the fund had gone dry and the power company possibly then quoted them some shocking five-figure sum to extend the line.
Some might've been inclined to feel that a handful of fellow lot owners had essentially robbed them blind (and or the power company had reneged on its commitment with bait and switch tactics). The firstcomers knew the fund would only cover the line-extension costs of a few would-be lot improvers (in 2024, over $53,000 a mile, or $10. a foot) if a possible deal with the power company to absorb or subsidize further costs had been in the offing, provided everyone got on board, fell through. Being new retirees who had the means and desire to settle almost immediately, they'd moved fast (perhaps getting some inside skinny on extension rates soon to skyrocket) and tapped the funds dry in a twinkling. In any event, the limited-fund situation had favored the bold and cash-rich.
So it was that lot owners failed to get on the same page at a critical moment. Instead, they had a grand falling out, which, preceding the later 'outlaw' builder situation by several years, set the stage for that even gnarlier contention, soon to follow.
It was funny in a way, viewed from the perspective of the ongoing human tragi-comedy. Earliest campers and residents were seen as the bad guys by locals who resented their land takeover; then those who'd hogged the power fund and left the others in the cold were the bad guys to the rest of the lot owners; then those who ignored the building codes became the bad guys to those who'd hogged the fund from those who'd taken over the local's grounds...the contentious spirit kept going round and round. (And of course that doesn't even include the pioneer white settlers who crowded the land away from the seasonally nomadic natives.)
Place wouldn't catch the solar-electric wave
Much later, the place missed a sure bet not embracing solar electricity. What with the place's enviable banana-belt micro-climate and advancing solar technology, in time reducing panel costs over eightfold, it seemed the perfect way to create go juice. It could be so sunshiny on some March days, one might be enjoying soaking up the rays while in Weed, a mere fifteen miles away, hunched-over snow shovelers were still left dreaming of spring.
The first solar electric system was installed by a 1970s' resident, Brian Green, late co-founding photographer of 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 before big industry ever 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 more environmentally friendly -- solution to supplying power needs for their similarly remote, full-on homes.
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*While the later owner of Brian Green's home would lose the place to the Lava Fire of 2021, one thing miraculously survived, unscathed: the latest bank of solar panels. It was safely perched on its metal stand in a clearing amid otherwise total devastation, looking for all the world like nothing was amiss.
The writer in 1989 became one of two Vista residents to embrace solar. In my case it was sunshine or bust -- no backup generator -- which even now powers this online article's periodic reworking. For anyone curious, a 1992 HomePower story on my modest system was featured in issue #30 (starting page 6), as an example of a small set-up, showing that one didn't have to spend a fortune to create an off-grid system if content to have a few basic electrical amenities like lighting, home entertainment, and computer, and then go with alternate power sources for other needs such as wood heat and propane for cooking and refrigeration. (Homepower ceased publication November 2018, but its entire archives are available to download for free with simple sign-up.)
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Well, well
As related, developer Collins and the early group of owner volunteers had gotten together and established an informal, de facto community well. They constructed the huge holding tank with its enormous overhead valve, which all Vista lot owners settling were welcome to use by filling up the community water truck until their own wells were in. A spigot was provided to fill containers for camping visits. When the truck was later switched to fire use only, those with prohibitively deep water tables -- most 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.
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, well, technically illegal as hell. Plus, the water truck wasn't certified to deliver potable water. The then-department head Dr. Bayuk promptly capped the 26-resident club membership. 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 hauling water to their homes.
This consideration was given only in light of so many respectable members having sold former homes and built here on the strength of realtors’ assurance 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 (and maybe wanted to avoid a lawsuit against the county if he tried to shut off long-established well use for everyone). The building department went along with the variance, issuing building permits to any well-less parcel holders who were POWW members so long as they conformed to all other related regulations.
He insisted that all other lot holders henceforth had to drill an approved well before they could get a septic and building permit and so in time gain the right to live on their properties. That is, for more than thirty days a year without being made to feel like outlaws for overstaying their welcome by ever-vigilant neighbors forever trying to keep the rabble out. He envisioned the POWW memberships, relegated nontransferable to any subsequent home buyer, fading away over time as people got wells in or their properties sold to new owners, who'd then be expected to drill an approved well before being allowed to move in.
However...we were apparently on the honor system to comply. Inertia -- ridiculously strong in Vista's dreamy manana land -- reigned supreme. Besides, a way of living had been established. Some who were otherwise compliant, rather than spring for a well, resigned themselves to hauling water as the price one paid for living here affordably. And the fully non-compliant, hunkering down hopefully below the radar of snoopy neighbors and the powers that be, kept on filling up at the well, like always. Residents wanted to avoid spending a fortune (assuming they could afford it) on drilling efforts that might not even hit water, or good water, or enough water, plus the often prohibitive expense of getting electric lines extended to power the well 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 that was ignored like it didn't even 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 any need to mess with homes once they'd passed final inspection; the code enforcers' job was done as far as they were concerned. Never told anything differently, new homeowners naturally 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 being eligible for a building permit. It seemed that you could build first, then sometime down the road try for a well, at your own convenience. This misunderstanding was destined to further baffle many future would-be residents: "Hey, lots of homes don't have a well but they got building permits; why can't I?"
While Dr. Bayuk cautioned Vista board members to forbid anyone from using the well beyond POWW’s now-closed membership, efforts to control 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 a civic duty to want to mess with.
As time went by, the 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 represented the one thing property owners had successfully worked on together towards forging an actual, by-gosh community. Amid all the sorrowful confusion and contention, the well served an enduring and substantial reminder of the place's once-promising past.
Hey, it comes with the property
Fast-forward decades and things were still out of control with the well. Residents living on the cheap, never intending to drill, kept using it. Again, they'd 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 a teeming menagerie of thirsty livestock in his 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 with then-infrequent traffic going by sixty feet from the well while in full view was no doubt felt worth it for the chance to luxuriate in a fast cool down and rehydration on an exotically hot day. As freer-minded dwellers during warmer weather might routinely go about with few or no clothes on the privacy of their secluded properties anyhow, this wasn't as shocking as it might've appeared. In fact, it was the kind of rarefied place that, in another time and circumstance, might've made a perfect primitive nudist resort.
Finally, Vista board members, led by then-president George Gosting, got fed up and were fearful of getting fined by the state -- or sued by the membership. Well-owning residents were outraged over their annual dues going to replace the pump and cover monthly power bills; they felt they were effectively enabling and subsidizing code noncompliance. The board came up with a solution: just get rid of the bugger. They sold it outright with no discussion with or prior notice given 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. They 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 far-fetched racketeering charges. They likely leaned on the erroneous assumption their home indeed came with water-hauling rights to the well. Alas, they promptly lost the case and the lawyer got a practically 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 arbitrarily clamped on the place. Of course, it was all standard procedure to gain legal residency anywhere in California. But our place always felt exceptional...perhaps for both having difficult water and being in such remote hinterlands -- and being under Mt. Shasta's enchanted spell, with its unusual, at times almost otherworldly, subtle energies. The Vista could indeed seem like a dreamland, pure and simple. Somehow it just felt beyond the pale of the mundane world and all its sundry nit-picky rules and regulations. It was a realm unto itself, operating on its own frequency, penciling in rules as residents saw fit -- and even then, they were only suggestions.
As a result, various land-hungry buyers on a shoestring, lured by the bargain lands and not exercising any better due diligence, felt majorly scammed when at some point they got roused by irate residents and the county and told they couldn’t stay on their properties for more than thirty days a year without first doing this, that, and the other thing. They’d accuse the Association board, management and realtors of being in cahoots, each passing the buck, no one willing to offer the straight of things. To a suspicious mind not able or willing to deal with the often unreasonable and outrageous ways of the world, it might've indeed appeared as though they were somehow all slyly working in concert to churn problematic, marginal properties for quick gain while keeping rigid control over things. The forces seemed to be preying on people's desire to own their own land for selfish gain, all too aware how many eager buyers could never even begin to afford to meet legal residency requirements short of winning the 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 hassled by upset neighbors, the board, and county authorities, quit paying their annual POA assessment in protest; then the lot was foreclosed on and the Association, repossessing it, re-listed it and realtors waited for next suc -- er, buyer -- to come along.
In later times, many buyers obviously did know the score but just didn’t care. In a new era with a radically different social climate and far sketchier building code enforcement, they were game to join Vista’s growing non-compliant-and-proud denizens. Again, they were especially emboldened after the county had axed its residential-code enforcer position during the critical five year period starting with the Great Recession of 2008-09 and seemed to lack the teeth and political will to again enforce residency requirements by the time the position was brought back. Clearly the county 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 re-funded, in the mid-teens. I was struck how remotely detached they seemed from the significance of the regulatory role tax-paying residents had relied on to assure a certain standard of living was maintained in their neighborhoods.
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Such a situation easily lent the impression that anything goes 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 the maybe $30,000 or more to put in a well and perhaps half again as much to get power extended, also had enough to buy land -- and more than any piddly 2½ acres -- with easier water access and unencumbered by the ceaseless, virulent squabbling among disaffected neighbors. Why would anyone spend so much to buy into such a discombobulated sub-standard place anyway?
Cheap land with million-dollar views could only go so far.
Plenty of room left in Hotel California:
Early trouble in River City revisited
Most if not all of Shasta Vista’s founding families had seemed to either known each other from down south or met during their annual summer camp vacation rendezvouses. Mostly retirement-age couples, flush with cash, they could easily afford to build full-on legal residences and become lords and ladies of the realm. The territorial imperative being strong, they aimed to grow the one-time camp lands into their own conventional, de facto rural retirement community, let the chips fall where they may. Too bad if it disappointed or angered those who'd bought their parcels as camp retreats. Or had wanted to build but waited until after the power and light fund had run dry; you snooze, you lose.
Theirs was a distinct culture. The alphas of the group had a pronounced buttoned down, breezily urbane SoCal sensibility and full-bore Law-and-Order mindset that some might've viewed as a tad out of place in the top of more-freewheeling northern California, even allowing for it being in a conservative rural part of it. It struck the more impressionable that a L.A. social culture had somehow been weirdly transplanted, fully intact, onto the top of the state's wild, woolly hinterlands.
In ways that counted, the Vista became their place. Their tight-wound influence would linger for decades, even after the one-time exclusive Shangri-la had been largely co-opted and ruined by the rabble. It would continue shaping the development's social climate and collective mindset through their efforts to salvage what they could of their lost paradise...or at least arrest any further degradation.
The modern-day pioneers experienced such angst seeing their place lose its fledgling legitimate-community status once the flood of non-compliant invaded that, gone bonkers, the board scrambled and its self-appointed duties instantly expanded to include blowing the whistle to the county over every unapproved construction or over-long camp visit brought to their notice by their bloodhound cohorts cruising the endless backroads.
Desperate to try preserving their clearly endangered retirement haven, they rang the phones off the hook reporting every single infraction their search posse's dogged searches might uncover. Board members demanded the county authorities hold the scofflaw's feet to the fire for having so blatantly tried to invade their 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 amount to selective enforcement, possible grounds for a lawsuit against the county. And so for many years the stretched-thin code enforcers dutifully obliged, trying their damnedest to stamp out the growing plague of noncompliance.
At some point, though, they gave up. They'd ground their teeth in having to constantly deal with the major problem child with its relatively slim tax-generating base. One whose situation, no matter how much they tried getting a handle on things, appeared a 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 was deemed unacceptable to the heavily invested firstcomers. Gone around the bend, they clung to the belief that enforcing law and order was the one and only means of salvaging the respectable community available, short of raising a vigilante committee. In seeming denial of the insurmountable challenges, their volunteer search parties kept blitzing the land, patrolling the giant maze of roads, determined to run to earth anyone daring to try calling the Vista home while openly ignoring the residential codes and county statutes they'd deemed chiseled in stone.
With their Whack-a-Mole efforts in overdrive, posse members soon stopped even trying to talk to the culprits and pointing out the error of their ways. They'd maybe tried earlier, some no doubt in a soon-enough high-handed, imperious manner, then got huffy when told what they could do with their regulations. So, realizing they were dealing with blatant, possibly even violent, scofflaws, they furtively drove by, stopping just long enough to scope the scene from the road and ascertain the lot's location, then later get the parcel assessment numbers from the master map index and call in a formal complaint -- for every last minutiae of noncompliance the latest effort brought to light.
Sub-zero tolerance
It was for such scorched-earth campaigning that the unkind moniker of "the gestapo" got bestowed on the board of directors by the Vista's more live-and-let-live residents. Some of them had also gone through the compliance ordeal or bought from those who did; they knew how unreasonably steep and expensive code demands were for any wanting to live in the country and simplify their lives on a modest income. They were stunned and dismayed such a ugly, zero-tolerance attitude had erupted; playing ruthless hardball somehow just didn't seem to go with living in the would-be tranquil realm. Even though the place had spectacularly derailed, people must've thought there had to be a better way to resolve matters. Maybe not though, short of changing legal-residency regulations or suing the county for selective non-enforcement.
In time, the situation had gotten so far gone you'd've thought the only thing left for the twisted-into-knots compliant residents was to accept that their one-time rural paradise was toast. Shockingly, the system they'd depended on and supported all their lives had utterly failed them. Like Egyptian fish, they lived in denial. As miserable consolation, they took grim satisfaction in making things as thoroughly unpleasant as possible for anyone daring to have crashed their carefully planned, long anticipated party.
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 their remote parcel. 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 was grazing contentedly on nearby brush. I returned with a sense of foreboding a month or two later and, sure enough, they were long gone, their shelter bulldozed to the ground, looking as though it'd been hit by a tornado.
This was far from an isolated incident.
One might've said it was one's own dumb fault for not doing research on the way things were. Or that they'd known the score but rolled the dice anyhow, thinking it was such cheap land it was worth a shot trying to end-run the system.
Bottom line: many of the would-be country dwellers’ fondest dreams of cultivating some manner of simple affordable backwoods living had been obliterated to hell and gone during the Vista’s Intolerable Years. Here and there half-completed structures of varying ambition and construction levels stood as witnesses to disaster, abandoned and forlorn, radioactive from code-violation busts or builders running out of cash or willingness to comply. In time many would be picked off by furtive lumber 'recyclers'. ("Hey, it's just going to waste; I'm doing a service, doncha know.")
Vista’s seemingly affordable, easy-come, easy-go lands instead often proved to be more easy-come, hard-go.
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Welcome to Mt. Shasta Vista, now leave:
writer's first impression
The 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 that practically shouted:
HEALTH AND BUILDING CODES STRICTLY ENFORCED
Woe betide any poor soul failing to heed such no-nonsense warning.
So along comes your land-hungry writer, a rambling, residence-shy 29 year-old would-be nature boy of decidedly threadbare means, burned out living on the road, with merry visions of building a bower in the wilderness dancing in his head. Having champagne taste but living on a beer budget, I soon warmed to the notion of building in the bone-dry yet largely wild and super-affordable juniper lands, instead of the redwood creekside of my dreams...to blasted code if that’s what it took and meager resources and a steep learning curve might allow. Though it would prove by far the biggest project of my life up to then, at least lumber was fairly cheap and the building code was a smidgen less onerous -- if then rigorously enforced -- and costly to comply with. I planned to join the POWW's water-hauling group and so avoid having to drill a well I couldn't have even begun to afford.
To my impressionable mind, the growling entrance signs were of more than a passing concern. Even if lots were cheap -- most then listed for between $1,500 and $1,750, with easy terms of $250 down and $25 a month and 7-1/2% interest -- the place appeared just a smidge unfriendly. 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 town greeting sign scrawled in the Clint Eastwood 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 be arrested any second for having so foolishly driven in. Like I’d stumbled onto some 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 before and after me, cheap lot prices easily won out over common sense, eclipsing first impressions that screamed red alert.
Such sign wording, of course, 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 being so foolish as to try settling within their respectable scene. But it was also meant to dissuade would-be wood poachers, outlaw game hunters, trash dumpers, vehicle abandoners -- or, in earliest, vacation-only years, miscreants harboring designs of plundering goods trustingly left in trailers and mobile homes on absentee owners' briefly visited, unfenced parcels. (Even decades later, with hundreds of residents spread throughout the domain, one time 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 without any consequence.)
They'd probably needed that loud bark after all (for all the good it would do).
...with screenplay by Rod Serling
But the working principles of Chinese feng shui holds that the given energy at an entrance sets up a vibration that the entire 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 not wanting to tempt fate and risk their vehicle getting towed, parked it forward of the baleful sign and walked the entire way in, over a mile.
Indeed, entering the Vista for the first time could feel like walking into the middle of a movie and trying to figure out a 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 would be in due course treated to his own 'unwelcome wagon', he felt it might just as well have proclaimed:
Abandon All Hope
Ye Who Enter Here
_____________________________________________________________________
The Vista through Time: 1965-2015
[part 8: Conclusion]
Lost cause revisited, one last time
It perhaps came as no surprise to anyone that the Vista entrance sign's snarly energy was reflected 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 an absolute caution. Gnarly shouting matches were not uncommon and once a fistfight actually 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 phenomenal, it would've made perfect fodder for 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 earliest prospectors of California's fabled 1849 Gold Rush. While briefly having rich diggings all to themselves, intoxicated with their great good fortune, things turned to chaotic pandemonium the second the flood of fellow seekers of the prized yellow stone descended en masse. Similarly, earliest Vistans had briefly luxuriated in having the idyllic woodland domain all to themselves (beyond the occasional visiting camper), transplanting a solidly conventional lifestyle and having blind faith in local government to keep fair-minded law and order in their fledgling, respectable rural village.
But, like the first miners, they were run over without even getting the number of the truck. Eventually they became like so many mad King Lears, shouting imperious law-and-order commands to the winds.
When newcomers had first started moving in and making bold to ignore health and building code requirements, firstcomers still had the ball firmly in their court; they'd established relations with county code enforcers and had an absolute lock on board membership. They had ran with the ball, clinging onto it for dear life. They'd dismiss as idiots anyone at meetings who took exception to their hardball stance; 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 work to keep county health and building codes fully enforced and protect their incipient community from facing otherwise certain wrack and ruin.
To arms, to arms
Desolated and shocked beyond endurance after depended-on county enforcement started getting iffy, overwrought board members and their cohorts, never say die, kept clad in armor, mace and sword at the ready. They'd stayed loaded for bear, willing to engage in full-on, take-no-prisoners battles with any and every flagrant code ignorer, county support or no county support. 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 agenda through, mumbling “public comments?” out of the side of the mouth before taking a fast vote: "Motion?...second?...all in favor...motion carried." They'd 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 proponents: “Robert's Rules! Robert's Rules!”
Despite their most dedicated efforts, the well-heeled firstcomers’ dream of forging a idyllic backwoods retirement heaven was turning into a nightmare. The Vista as they knew and treasured it was coming apart at the seams before their eyes.
As more and more lot buyers settled amid the junipers and sagebrush -- many of such modest means and free-spirited mindsets that the notion of building to code was never considered -- the limited-resource country's code-enforcement officers' responsiveness had, again, soon reached a critical tipping point. Beyond it they were unable and/or unwilling to enforce the codes and ordinances effectively (the very ones people living in town, nowhere to hide, perforce toed the line on). This, despite -- or perhaps because of -- being duly appraised and constantly updated of the intolerable situation by the seething-mad legal residency, which harangued them constantly with each new-found infraction demanding a swift response. The thought of taking early retirement must've started looking good to affected county workers.
So it happened that in time authorities had all but abandoned code enforcement efforts in the misbegotten realm. One got the impression officials liked to pretend it didn't even exist (not unlike the place's scofflaw dwellers towards their building ordinances). That is, 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 so they could squeeze maximum shekels through annual property tax assessments.
Before that tipping point had been reached, it seemed the only responses made, other than for actual emergencies, were to the most persistent calls from fuming parties who knew the law and possibly threatened legal action if they didn't respond post-haste 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 the admonishment would stick. Some scofflaws would, indeed, at that point clear out, fantasies of cheap and easy country living clobbered by a rude reality check. Others, more hardened, kept right on living the way they were, devil take the hindmost. They felt that inertia and property rights, plus the county's enforcement resources being overwhelmed, would ultimately win the battle.
As time would prove, they were pretty much right.
White bread outpost
Though some might've experienced mixed feelings towards the firstcomers' intolerance of informal construction and ad-hoc sanitation methods and the guilty parties' aggressive response, one couldn't help but sympathize with the plight. What a heartbreaking situation, seeing the place they'd invested so heavily in, nurtured fond hopes of enjoying their golden years in, irretrievably slip away. It was maybe not too unlike a predestined romance, shorting out for one being asleep at the wheel at the critical moment. The Vista could’ve, should've, would've been such a nicely settled, enviable, backwoods community of forthright, law-abiding residents...
...if only a white bread one.
While in later years at least absentee ownership appeared to become a bit racially diverse judging by the file list of owner names, actual residents in 2014 -- then numbering perhaps 300 to 350 -- were still overwhelmingly White. Though among residents there were a few Hispanics and maybe an American Indian 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 amiss about this other than wincing whenever a neighbor dropped the ‘n’ word in casual conversation (and later, the 'c' word). I’d learned to pretty much adapt to any ethnic mix -- or lack thereof -- of a place, given an even playing field with no expedient intentions.
The scene perhaps reflected rural Siskiyou county as a whole, so predominantly White it might've appeared to be -- and not without some truth -- a narrow minded, passively (sometimes overtly) racist backwater to any people of color arriving from large melting-pot cities that leaned towards 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, such as it was, more culturally rich and thriving. But it was a moot point; Wonder Bread it was for a full half century. Starting in 2015, residents living in their all-white world would be shocked senseless for suddenly finding themselves surrounded by an Asian-American minority many had probably never mingled with as equals, who were now suddenly neighbors.
It goes without saying that mutual assimilation, always problematic, would've gone far easier without all the illicit commercial cannabis cultivation going on and overwhelmingly complicating matters.
Fine line
Anyone respecting reasonable rule of law held that a development needed its residents to work together on some level and follow established rules in order to keep things safe and pleasant -- the acid test being one’s own children -- for everyone committing to hanging their hats there. Otherwise weeds of civic indifference and unruly attitudes and goings-on could spring up, filling a social vacuum and choking the place's peaceable livability.
But, on the other hand, it could make simple country living all but impossible if rules were TOO strict, too expensive, too onerous for the majority of would-be legal residents to ever conform to.
There was a fine line between having enough rules and regulations to keep some semblance of fair-minded order and having too many and courting sure rebellion. In any event, as mentioned, developer Collins would never have gotten the Vista development greenlit if he hadn't set up the CC&Rs so that every buyer agreed by signing the legal title paperwork to conform to all county, state and federal rules, laws and ordinances. (A cynical Nam vet neighbor once told the writer, "The government makes liars, cheats and horse thieves of us all.")
However, the rush of having one’s own land in such a relatively remote region could obscure the reality of there being any such county, state or federal 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 measure for some five years during the first half of the 2010's.
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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 diversionary section;
it offers a further personal account of the writer's early experiences in the Vista.)
In October 1978, I 'd snapped up a nice gently sloping lot with an inspiring mountain view for $1,750, with $250 down and $25 a month easy installments for the balance. I'd get by for eleven years 0n 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 one might now grab almost as an impulse item at Harbor Freight.
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It was an early fall and I scrambled to set up a quick camp. While the days were still pleasant, overnight temperatures already plunged to a bone-chilling 13 degrees F (-10 C). During my first morning after a shivering night sleeping in a shallow trench, with plastic thrown over set sticks, I heard an approaching pick-up truck. The older man driving had spotted me heating coffee water and defrosting myself over a small, rock-lined campfire in a clearing, some thirty feet from the road. He slammed on the brakes.
Perhaps he wasn't part of the volunteer posse, but he was wound up nonetheless, the same as most every other compliant, year-round resident, feeling their place was getting overrun by shiftless yahoos and needed to be told what's what. He got out and asked point-blank, “You got a permit for that fire?” Thus spoken were my first words of welcome from the would-be community -- before I'd had my first sip of morning coffee. They 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'd tenuously hitched my wagon to.
was quickly learning to appreciate it was more than a tad squirrelly around the edges.
I'd intended to conform all along, if reluctantly, essentially being a timid soul and law-abiding citizen, if also having a contrary, intellectually radical streak (perhaps making me your typical walking human paradox). But I'd been gearing up slowly; it was such a momentous project, by far the most ambitious I'd ever undertaken up to then. Over winter I'd planned to leisurely research tiny home design, study construction methods, building codes, and fine-tune a design plan that I'd then submit come spring. I would stay in a third-mile distant, 12-by-16 foot cabin that a kindhearted neighboring couple, the Schumachers, out for a walk and getting ready to leave as the fair-weather season wound down and taking pity on my situation, out of the blue had generously offered to let me winter in at our first and only meeting.
This so I wouldn’t freeze to death camping out in my cabin tent, as I'd first resolved. 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 plus jury-rigged wood stove in the cabin tent (not recommended). But, unbeknownst to me, the region was notorious for occasional severe windstorms. They were of such magnitude they beggared belief. Coming out of nowhere, they'd roar through 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 extraordinary storm that actually punched hundred-mile gusts.
December weather 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. Thereafter I made a hike each day to work on my place clearing brush, roughing in a roadway, and building an earth-sheltered shed that would become my legal onsite construction shelter once securing the all-important building permit.
But before I ever got it, I seemed destined to experience the full wrath of unknown neighbors with zero tolerance for anyone not doing things one hundred percent 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 "neighbors", most living miles away, thus learned how another rambling upstart of seeming threadbare means had dared to invade their respectable domain, doubtless with no intention of ever paying the piper. My Strout realtor informed me later that while he'd admitted selling a lot to a young long-hair, he wouldn't divulge where.
I found that sporting, at least.
Now a determined posse was hot on the trail of the latest scofflaw, systematically combing the endless back roads to run me to earth. (My you-gotta-permit-for-that? neighbor, to his credit, never reported me and turned out to be a pretty decent guy.) Weeks later, they at last discovered my lair when I wasn’t home. They took one look at the thrown-together, mostly underground store shed and verboten outhouse and promptly reported me to the county health department. They didn’t know -- or, I suspect, 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 line.)
Their scorched-earth policy allowed for no such wiggle room. I suppose I'd already been on the land longer than the thirty days a year rules allowed. Equal opportunity hasslers, anyone and everyone non-compliant -- especially those they didn't cotton to as one of them and maybe deserving of some leeway -- was zealously thrown under the bus.
Busted
I was summoned onto the carpet of the then-head county health department honcho, Dr. Bayuk, who'd just capped POWW membership, determined to make every lot owner first put in a well before becoming eligible for a building permit. No doubt smarting from the wrathful earful he'd just endured over the latest upstart's scofflaw audacity, I was given the full bum's rush. Thinking the worst of me, he was loaded for bear and read me the riot act. But then, oddly, he 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'd see to it that I'd be thrown off my land. “And don’t think I won’t!”, he growled, jowls shaking like Nixon's as he spoke. He no doubt felt I needed an extra dose of fear to get me properly motivated.
It turns 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 to code. He thus had grudgingly allowed me to slip in and become the truck club's very last and twenty-sixth member.
Being thin-skinned, the experience, happening within months of my arrival overflowing with excitement to fulfill a decade-long ambition to settle my own land, traumatized me. Even with the last minute reprieve, I'd all but given up on the place. Devastated and demoralized, part of me felt like I'd be gearing up to fade away into yet another homeless sunset. Instead, though fondest hopes and dreams were now hopelessly mangled by hostile local forces, the wind gone from my sails, I dredged up reserve willpower from somewhere. I paid the $125 water-truck membership fee and rekindled my resolve to invest the required time, money and effort needed to get legally squared away. I'd then at least be able to live on the land with a modicum of dignity. Salvage some of my original anticipation of building my bower in the wilderness, while doing my best to tune out those who seemed to live to give others grief for their own fondest dreams having been so sadly mauled in the vicious circle of a realm.
I passed the perc 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 passed inspection and was back-filled. In part for the benefit of any busybodies chancing to drive 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'd painted on the side facing the road in big, bold, blue letters for their benefit, “Welcome Halley's Comet in 1984.” That should baffle 'em, I thought. Then I built another outhouse more to my liking to use 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'd build my code-approved, one-and-a-half story, solar-tempered little-big cabin (625 square feet), meanwhile living next door in my far tinier hobbit home (8 X 12 feet). On its plank door I posted a Shakespeare quote: "I could be bounded by a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space..."
Using hand tools only, wanting the building experience to be intimate and relaxed. I had energy to burn, being in my prime. I briefly hired help for the open-beam roof and electrical work and scrounged recycled lumber whenever possible. It appeared I was maybe on the verge of becoming an at least 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 offering him a membership despite 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 ever warm to the board and appreciate its potential at least to do good for the hopelessly floundering, perpetually at odds with itself, backwoods community I'd thrown in with.
Working under the gun of county code enforcers -- who I sensed 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 effort to try returning the place to its former glory -- or, in abject frustration, demand a pound of flesh by giving holy hell to anyone not compliant as some warped-out consolation. It felt as if the place was permanently caught up in a negative reactionary spiral, forever locked into some contention-drenched time loop of gnarly discord.
On the wings of getting my new shelter signed off in early 1983, I was still a timid if yet somewhat rebellious 33-year-old. One who was by now thoroughly resentful of the Vista's imperious, would-be overlords.
Rainbow fever hits the Vista
So naturally I soon got myself into even worse trouble. It seems I'd decided to celebrate the return of Halley’s Comet by hosting a months-long rainbow family camp on my land.
In 1984, the annual national alternative-culture rainbow family gathering, with its deep hippie-culture roots, was going to be held in California for the first time ever since its start some twelve years earlier. It would be somewhere in an area two hours distant, in the Warner Mountains wilderness, a ways from Alturas, in the remote northeast corner of the state. Come spring, a flood of psyched early-comers, some excitedly returning for the first time in decades to their countercultural roots, would be pouring in from everywhere, including overseas. Many would have nowhere to go until the exact public-forest site was determined, many months away yet as it turned out.
Wanting to reconnect with my countercultural roots while evening the ledger for the countless people who'd helped me along over the years when I was on Dharma bumming on the road, -- plus thinking to maybe liberate the incredibly stodgy development a bit -- in February I opened up my land and resources to all comers for the next five months.
Like the Vistan firstcomers who'd built homes amidst a de facto-established recreational development, unmindful of what troubles their move might create for over a thousand other lot holders, I was equally determined to let the chips fall where they may. I'd host a merrily motley group that was doubtlessly the very antithesis of the strict law-and-order mindset many of my 'neighbors' embraced like a religion.
I solemnly tendered my invite by letter to the rainbow steering committee, then holding its monthly steering committee meetings 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, traipsed in and out of the buttoned-down-and-proud Vista hinterlands like party-hearty space travelers vacationing from another planet.
Rainbow elders Whitney Loman and Eagle Feather oversaw setting up the 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 liked to imagine a scout ship would some day land on the parcel. I'd named my place Earth Base in whimsical variation homage to a former Seattle Capitol Hill fire station that had been repurposed as a community center and renamed Earth Station. My place would be widely known as Earth Base for years thereafter. In a way, the scene would come 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.
It wasn't all peace and love, though. Not by any means. Off-putting power plays, ego trips and less than altruistic attitudes sometimes tarnished any such ideal scene, people being being and the eighties being trying times and rainbow people unable to enjoy getting totally into their radical-freedom element on private land rather than public forest. Even so, incredibly juiced transcendent energies often prevailed. I had to work double time to get into the flow of it, having lived alone so long, and had to detach from my ownership of the place as best I could to feel more one-among rather than the landlord.
Predictably, when my convention-minded neighbors heard about what Ward was up to, 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. Absolutely no free-spirited long-hairs, with their flagrant pot smoking (then still very much illegal) and shameless nudity and unsettling tribal drum jams far 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 a Vista rule etched in stone. (Claims of “We are one family” wouldn't cut much ice.)
Fairly 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 that was held on my land. Law enforcement was keen on learning what they might expect with some 33,000 rainbow celebrants (as it would turn out), soon to invade their turf. The sheriff, at least tenuously reassured our ragtag group basically appeared a harmless if trey-freaky bunch (apart from pot smoking and enjoying losing clothes whenever weather and circumstance allowed), a group likely to only cause a temporary glitch in the conventional order of things, must've told my apoplectic neighbors to chill a while, grit their teeth, it'd soon be over.
Jaws surely dropped; the damn system was failing them yet again.
Rebellious offspring of the various outraged residents visiting the scene loved it; it became part of Vista lore (what little there was of it). The writer liked to think the ensuing largely 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 gain too strong a foothold in the once depressingly 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 often appeared to be a chameleon, changing into whatever the majority of the current crop of residents wanted to make it into.
(end of personal account)
_________________________
Gone eleven months of the year
The firstcomers' control-freak stance had been in part born of feeling the need to post serious signs everywhere to protect the place and vacationers' left belongings while living up to 700 miles away some eleven months of the year. Mischief-minded offspring of embittered locals resenting the sudden takeover of their former longtime stomping grounds had a hell-for-leather field day during the parcel owners' extended absences...which of course got them livid on their return, their hoped-for carefree vacations anticipated all year met with a rude reality check.
The locals, some maybe fourth or fifth generation descendants of the region's pioneers and incredibly set in their rural ways, had naturally been far from welcoming the big-city based, parcel-buying newcomers into their once-sleepy, bucolic realm. They'd mounted what amounted to a pitched, "You may think it's your land, but it's still ours; we'll never recognize your damn place" campaign. The endless miles of non-gated groomed back roads were ideal for kids' dirt bikers to gouge deep donuts in, and certain 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 a proud family tradition -- geared up a protracted war with the foreign la-la-landers who'd dared to take away their wilderness hunting and grazing 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 the vast seven square miles of ungated entrances and often unfenced lots off season. (Over the decades, residents often never fenced off even their developed properties, as the place felt so remote and peaceful -- on the surface, at least -- that a need to wasn't felt.) The actual land owner himself needed to report an incident to get any investigation, and some things no doubt had gone missing over a half year before they were known to have been stolen.
By the time civic-minded lot owners started living on their parcels and joining the larger community, attending church services and, in later decades, younger-resident families increased and enrolled their children in the local schools and joined PTAs, it almost seemed too late barring a good dose of amazing grace to reverse the long-established vicious circle. Dislike and suspicion of the Vista and its invasive lot owners often seemed 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 1980s and 1990s, the county's health and building ordinances was still being at least fitfully enforced. Unless one didn’t mind being deemed an outlaw and never earning recognition or acceptance as an “official” resident -- as in time more and more wouldn't -- landowners settling on their parcels complied as a matter of course. Or at least provided the illusion of trying to comply: "See here? I 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 and devastated the global economy, county supervisors were forced to make some tough calls. Among other actions they'd ax the position of residential-code enforcer, which seemed to be having little effect anyhow -- leastwise, not in the Vista. The place was so far gone by then, calling it a lost cause was an understatement.
Over the next half decade, residential-code enforcement essentially disappeared from the Vista -- like it never existed.
With no official telling you anything different, it was easier than ever for newcomers to foster the notion that they could do whatever they wanted on their remote parcels. The old threatening signs that had been erected everywhere were by now seriously biodegrading, 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 zombie half-life in happy obscurity.
No legal power to fine; Liberty vs. license;
Can a place find its center without a center?
As brought out earlier, other subdivisions forming in the region about the same time had wanted to assure they established 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. Examples: 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 also attract those with scofflaw intentions who wanted to exploit a seemingly unregulated land unmindful of disturbing the realm's relative peace and quiet and pristine nature. 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 -- just so long as their actions didn’t interfere with the rights of others to do what they wanted. The greatest good for the greatest number. Liberty vs. license. The flip side of liberty was, of course, the obligation to support the rules of law set up to safeguard the freedom rights of the majority, thus ostensibly serving the greater good. That the rules sometimes seemed to favor the interests of the 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.
Few Vistan parcel holders -- especially absentee ones, but even some residents -- ever felt a need to build a community center. So it never did. Though its population had grown enough to merit one, there was never enough interest to create such a practical facility, 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 and litter patrol -- and have the monthly board meetings in the actual Vista rather than next door in a tiny fire station backroom.
But indeed it was long held in that cramped, cold-fluorescent-lit backroom space off actual Vista property. And the annual property owner meetings? They were held some 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 distant; the board wanted to make it easier for the dominant southern California ownership to attend. That gives a clue how dominant the south state influence was over the place.)
At the risk of stating the obvious, it was hard for a quasi community to gain a sense of centeredness without actually having a center. Needing to leave the place to attend a monthly meeting and drive ten miles away to attend its annual meeting? While it struck more than a few as too weird for words, it only reflected the place's woebegone 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 brand new levels. Until 2015, unimproved two-to-three acre lots were often left begging at $5,000. Lacking any easier water, sewage systems, electricity, or any 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 that it didn’t strike many as a promising place to ever want to drop anchor at. It seemed it could only be appreciated by those enjoying roughing it a while. And those determined to live on the cheap and who wouldn't lose any sleep for being non-compliant, "Screw the system" being their motto. Or 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 stark shortcomings. Or a few who, while fully aware of the place's shortcomings, hazarded to build a code-legal home anyhow, feeling the pluses outweighed the minuses. Or long-timers who'd known the place in kinder times and had sunk such deep roots that they were braced to weather changes that would soon make others want to flee in a heartbeat.
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 spoke with such fire-breathing intensity, you'd think the realm was sitting on top of a radioactive-waste dump or something. It made one wonder if maybe he and his colleagues had in times past skirted ugly lawsuits for misrepresenting properties or endured some other such unpleasantness that made it not worth the paltry commission fees the low-end properties might generate.
Eventually, two out-of-region realtor groups thought differently. Specializing in scouting rural developments deemed undervalued, in the late 2000s they cheaply snapped up hundreds of the bedeviled hinterland's parcels, properties that had long laid fallow (at last relieving many long-stuck or more recently-stuck absentee parcel owners). Then they mounted slick sales campaigns to try remedying the obviously under-exploited situation, intent on making a mint in fast turnover and five-fold or more markup.
The first outfit, National Recreational Properties, Inc., would hire 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 they could before swooping off to the next rural roadkill. In ad promos "the Ponch" enthused how the place was so great, he even owned a parcel. (Of course he was 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 priceless solitude, fresh air and dazzling mountain view. 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, demanded the installation of a super pricey, individually engineer-designed septic system that would hinder its development.)
A few years later, around 2012, another group, Billyland.com, likewise grabbed a mess of raw Vista parcels, possibly taking some off the former's hands. They in turn appeared to aim at easily taken in or desperate land-hungry Internet surfers. They'd hawk the parcels online, eBay auction style, the 'winner' being the one making the highest down-payment bid when the timer ran out. Buying land sight unseen with a few simple clicks -- its time had apparently come. “Only $29,999!” they gushed. (With low monthly payments and a high interest rate, the final cost ran over $50,000.) Predictably, their campaign attracted many living on a shoestring, some 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 uncharitably viewed as little 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 legally permitted residences. Out of 1,641 parcels, that was about one in twenty, or five percent of the lots sporting homes or mobiles according to Hoyle. 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, long-abandoned trailers, and windblown detritus donated by residents of nearby lots.
Hope sprang eternal for some of the speculative landholders, still thinking to make a bundle. They set a super inflated price in listing with a realtor, thinking to snag some eager, uninformed buyer with more dollars than sense, unsavvy and oblivious to the depressed market and the development's chronic, festering problems: "Secluded"; "The perfect spot to build that dream home", "a slice of heaven", the realtors tired old pitches went.
In the early teens, a sale to a woman was about to close. She was taking one last look at the parcel before signing when a nearby scofflaw resident (the late Sean Miller), was determined to keep out his own 'wrong kind of people'. He strode out into open view buck naked and pranced about, entirely for her benefit. It worked; the deal immediately fell through. (The would-be seller told the writer of this episode during a sauna one day at nearby Stewart Springs.)
“Maybe if we ignore them they’ll go away.”
It was no great secret that county supervisors rued the day they ever greenlit the soon spectacularly problematic development. Former Vista board president stalwart Jeannette Hook, who worked with county officials in the course of her career, said they viewed the Vista as "the red-headed stepchild no one knew what to do with."
Although the place was at the mercy of county officials and enforcers to keep intact whatever shreds of respect for the rule of law might yet remain, the huge mostly rural county, on overstretched budget and often understaffed, had of course long ago given up trying to deal with the forsaken realm. Responsible enforcement and policy-making parties grew so numb to the perpetual thorn in their side that they disconnected from the inconvenient truth that its legal residency, as tax payers, was paying their salaries and, not unreasonably, expected them to earn their keep, dammit.
Despite -- or because of -- the number of non-compliant dwellers increasing, it seemed that in time authorities wouldn't respond with a visit short of an actual emergency. One would think they surely had to appreciate the possibility that the place might be a greater disaster just waiting to happen. Yet county officials kept kicking the can down the road on automatic pilot, determined to avoid dealing with the fool's errand of a place whenever possible...
...until the great day of reckoning came at last.
Tidal wave of fortune seekers
I was taking a leisurely stroll along my road in the winter of 2014-2015 when I noticed that some long-slumbering, unfenced, raw lots had just received fresh attention. New surveying posts were planted with scrawled bearings and Day-glo-bright ribbons fluttering off their tops...just like at the start of the subdivision, no doubt, a half century earlier.
There they go again, I thought dismissively, trying to sell the unsellable parcels again; will they never learn the lots are unsellable turkeys? Then, over the next few days on driving out, I noticed similar surveying flags and boundary sticks along the roads. I started to worry a little at that point. Something was going on, but what? (The obvious could often escape me.) 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 want to live here? Had gold been discovered on the land?
I tried putting it out of mind as likely only the latest half-baked realtor campaign to try snookering the latest unsuspecting land shoppers. Then, several weeks later, I was awakened by the sound of metal striking metal.
I stepped outside, curious. It came from several directions, like a surreal flock of persistent metal woodpeckers had descended on the region and was rat-a-tatting up a slow-motion storm. Walking to the front of my driveway, I spotted a little Asian man with dedicated intent forty yards away, pounding metal stakes to string barbed wire along them. It being such a weird sight in a place that had rarely had any fences, let alone barbed wire ones, that I didn't exactly feel pulled to walk over and introduce myself.
In time I noticed barbed wire fences seemed to be going up everywhere, along with "No Trespassing", "Posted: Private Property" signs on sleepy lots that had been vacant and unfenced for decades. Something was definitely going on. Some phenomenal land rush was erupting.
It finally dawned on me: people were snapping up the cheap remote parcels to grow pot on while setting up simple shelters to oversee the scaled crop production. Word had gotten out that the Vista lots were dirt-cheap, remote, and in the banana belt of a poor rural county that was lagging behind neighboring countries of Trinity and Shasta in enacting restrictive ordinances to get a handle on the explosion of illicit growing going on. People were in a delirium to grab Vista's long underappreciated lots while the getting was good...and before realtors, knowing the score and having early on bought a slew of parcels, would jack up asking prices to the moon in the sudden phenomenal seller's market. (Believe it or not, lots going begging in 2014 for $5,000 would be grabbed for $150,000 or more by 2022.)
Of course, it wasn't all that simple. The lot buyers were mostly Hmong American refugees and their descendants who'd long dreamed of establishing their own community somewhere, decades after becoming sitting targets in the Viet Nam War, in which they'd joined with American efforts, once it was lost. Agriculture in their genes, they'd often lost out to other recent migrants in the field due to a lack of English speaking skills and adapting to their new homeland's ways. Now, swept up in the mountain's vision-a-minute factory, they held high hopes they'd at last found a place where a tight rural Asian-American community could flourish -- supported by casually cultivating commercial-level cannabis grows in the exploding national market as various states' pot laws liberalized the once verboten weed. They were anticipating what would prove a tidal wave of commercial-scale pot growing in California as voters were primed to liberalize laws regarding cannabis cultivation and recreational use by Proposition 64. Among other things, it would reduce unlicensed commercial grows -- of any size -- to a simple civil misdemeanor and $500 fine.
Spring came and the place was suddenly abuzz with more traffic than the place had ever seen. An indication of how much more: One day on driving out, I spotted a bit of road litter and stopped to pick it up. It had been a sleepy back road that for ages probably saw fewer than a dozen cars a week traverse it. In the few seconds I stopped, two vehicles had come roaring out of nowhere like bats out of hell, driving halfway off the road to get around me, no doubt rushing to the realtor's office to stake their claims.
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta
Unlicensed growers and instant homesteaders thus began a frenzied snapping up of the long unappreciated, remote parcels. The two-to-three-acre lots were seen as a steal to the new buyers -- as had almost always been the case throughout the place's checkered history. In early 2015, the lots were selling like hotcakes to any and all willing to take a chance and bypass what would prove the largely unenforceable grow-permitting regulations and ordinances soon to be enacted. Regulations that involved dealing with both state and county agencies, tons of paperwork, regular inspections, strict bookkeeping, fees, taxes... who needed any of that bureaucratic headache and needless extra expense?
Anarchy and rebellion suddenly looked good to lots of otherwise law-abiding folks. It was a similar situation as ages earlier when people had dropped anchor on the lots and ignored the building codes like they didn't exist. Financially insecure people, wanting to live freely, always tended to ignore laws that appeared unenforceable (especially if viewed as both unfair and unrealistic).
What had helped prompt the explosion of illicit grows of would-be cultivators of the magic herb in Siskiyou county? People weren't even given the option of complying with commercial-growing regulations even if one was willing to go the aboveboard route. The state allowed each county to okay or ban commercial cannabis cultivation in its unincorporated rural regions. (Incorporated cities, in contrast, had the option of voting to permit commercial grows and dispensaries if enough residents okayed it.) Siskiyou, its old-guard, largely rural, pillar citizens more than a scosche conservative, forbade the Reefer Madness of commercial pot growing with a passion...for all the good it would do. (Being located a half hour from the town of Weed certainly wouldn't help matters any; it all but guaranteed the region would become the region's initial epicenter of unregulated grows.)
"There's gold in California!"...again
The consequences were huge for California, becoming the only western state to reduce the penalty for unsanctioned cultivating to a misdemeanor. It would essentially pave the way for the rallying cry of "There's gold in California!" to sound again 167 years after the epic Gold Rush. Word, again, spread like wildfire. Grow-happy entrepreneurs felt pulled from across the nation and overseas as the state once again became a billion-ton magnet to pursue the new historic opportunity to get rich quick through cannabis.
County supervisors might just as well have gone fishing for all the compliance their new restrictive ordinances -- which they no doubt liked to think of as chiseled in stone -- would inspire. The hundreds of the new Vista lot holders intuited that the ever-changing and seemingly arbitrary cannabis laws and ordinances would be all but unenforceable in the sprawling, spread thin, poor rural county if enough growers went for it -- and it was a relative slap on the wrist and loss of face if busted. Almost overnight, seas of green flourish, far exceeded the state's allowed personal-use six-plant plant limit, at first sixteen-fold, then, in time, over three-hundred fold.
Reactivating the sixties' back-to-the-land euphoria
on Vista's fiftieth anniversary
The phenomenal rush appeared to have caught everyone in the county flat-footed. Asleep at the switch. Out to lunch. Name 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 featured stories over the unfolding drama as the once-obscure rural subdivision was suddenly gaining national attention.
Their studious ignoring of the Vista's long-festering plight -- born of a county too poor, provincial-minded and or lackadaisical to keep up with the fast-changing times or able to enforce its own ordinances and regulations should enough people opt to simply ignore them -- had been careening towards a collision course with reality for ages...
...until avoiding dealing with it at last proved something of an unwarranted luxury.
People had predicted at its very start that Mt. Shasta Vista was certain to be a disaster. It came as no great surprise then when, a half century later in something of self-fulfilling prophecy, they proved themselves absolutely right.
But the more metaphysically leaning might wonder: had the year 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of Vista's founding, somehow reactivated -- and further amped up -- the euphoric enthusiasm to settle the land experienced by the well-healed modern-day pioneers in the late sixties, treasuring it for being such a sweet spot for any nature lover to retire in?
The latter-day, phenomenal burst of energized land settling seemed almost out of another era -- so much so, the mind reeled. Had the Vista's big Five-O, golden anniversary, coinciding as it did with the liberalization of pot laws, somehow caused the place to experience a dizzying new, ramped-up incarnation of a dreamland, as unmindful of mundane realities as ever?
One's left to wonder.
__________
Afterword
The fifth century B.C. Chinese philosophy Lao Tse once said that the cause of anything is everything and the cause of everything is anything. It'd be unfair and over-simplistic to pin the blame for what happened to the development on any one cause or party.
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, that is; obviously it was a deliciously fortuitous situation for adventurous pot entrepreneurs willing to live and work together to remake the place to suit themselves).
- - - - - - - -
A brief recap of the major ingredients in the Vista's recipe for disaster:
The party selling the land to developer Martin reportedly not first getting permission from the rest of the long-time land-owning Martin family; they were furious. They'd been content to have that part of their land holdings stay devoted to grazing and hunting. Result: A contentious vibe infected the place from the very start
Locals joining in with their resentment that the development plans ever got approved; one county supervisor had voted against its formation over the suspected lack of water
Ambitious efforts to follow protocol by the first residents -- each providing their own well, electrical hookup, etc. before then building to code, only then moving in -- weren't followed by sundry future dwellers despite such conformity being crucial to becoming recognized as a standard community
The plan to extend power to every lot, initially funded by voluntary assessment to a power and light fund, failing 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 over how the funds of over a thousand contributors were 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
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 -- were loathe to sink another cent in the boondoggle
Firebrand property-owners board members, along with other heavily invested first-comer residents -- reacting to the growing rash of lot buyers living on bought lots without conforming to health and building code by declaring open war on them and reporting them to authorities -- creating an uber-contentious social climate for decades
Detached, profit-minded realtors who didn't care diddly-squat what one intended to do with their lots
Limited-involvement association managers, sometimes board presidents, indifferent to or ineffective in helping efforts of more civic-minded residents to nurture a sense of community, some even heavily participating in the eventual red-hot realty boom in part sparked by liberalizing pot laws
Stir in:
County officials who in time all but abandoned enforcement of the building and health regulations for a full half decade, starting during the Great Recession of 2008-2009
- - - - - -
Mix together and bake 50 years. Result? One giant question mark of a place the public still shakes its head at, dismissing it as a tangled confused mess that defies even wanting to try wrapping one's head around.
Was it any wonder the Vista had become such a basket case? Practically all the while it seemed it was maybe vying for the 'Most Dysfunctional Rural Development' award in some bizarro alternate universe.
Countless influences -- some possibly not touched on here -- led the Vista to be the way it is now: a first shared recreational land and brief standard rural community forever left wanting to be something more, despite the cards being stacked against it from the start...
...and, people being people and the Vista being the Vista, is still trying to...any way it can.
______________________
Stuart Ward, Vista resident since 1978, served as secretary in the early teens on its volunteer 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