Conclusion of informal history

of the first fifty years of Mount Shasta Vista

 

"We can chart our future clearly and wisely only

when we know the path which has led to the present."

 -- Adlai E. Stevenson

 

Lost cause revisited, one more time

It came as no surprise that the Vista entrance sign's snarly energy was reflected in its monthly board meetings. Open to all parcel owners and family members, the proceedings, dull as dishwater sometimes, were a caution others. Gnarly shouting matches were not uncommon. At least once a fistfight broke out on the floor.

 

It was as if the place had grown some deadly cancer that, left unchecked, was fatally metastasizing. The tsunami waves of bickering among the malcontent dwellers was so overwhelming it might've made rich fodder for the likes of gonzo journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson: “Fear and Loathing in the Vista.”

 

The first residents must've felt something like earliest prospectors during the California Gold Rush. While briefly having the diggings to themselves, intoxicated with their good fortune, things suddenly turned to pandemonium once the flood of fellow seekers of the prized yellow stone began descending en masse. Similarly, earliest Vistans briefly luxuriated in having the domain all to themselves. They established their own lifestyle and had blind faith in the system, such as it was, to keep a semblance of fair-minded law and order in their de facto rural retirement village.  But, like the first miners, they soon got run over. 

 

Eventually they'd  become like so many mad King Lears, imperiously shouting commands into the winds.

 

As more newcomers moved in, some opting to ignore code requirements, firstcomers still tenuously had the ball in their court through their established relations with county code enforcers and a lock on board membership. They ran with the ball, clinging to it for dear life. They'd dismiss as idiots anyone at meetings who took exception to their hardball tactics; 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 do their damnedest to keep county health and building codes enforced and so prevent the fabric of their fledgling community from hopelessly unraveling.

 

Desolated and shocked beyond endurance once depended on enforcement efforts grew threadbare, overwrought board members and cohorts stayed clad in armor, mace and sword at the ready, prepared to engage in growingly common, full-on, take-no-prisoners battles and either win or go down trying. For a while at meetings, they tried to dodge public discussion on a potentially inflammatory matter by steamrolling the agenda through, mumbling “public comments?” out of the side of their mouths before taking a fast vote: "Motion?...second?...all in favor...motion carried." They banked on newbies’ unfamiliarity with formal meeting procedure. Shouts of protest once concerned newbies got hip to their trick were countered by simpering yells from board supporters: “Robert's Rules! Robert's Rules!”

 

Despite their dedicated efforts, the well-heeled firstcomers’ dream of building a conventional backwoods retirement Shangri-la had inexorably turned into a nightmare. The Vista had come apart at the seams before disbelieving eyes.

 

As yet more settled in the junipers and sagebrush lands -- many of such modest means and with such free-spirited mindsets that the notion of building to code wasn't even considered -- the limited-resource country's code-enforcement officers' responsiveness had at last reached a tipping point. Beyond it they were unable and/or unwilling to enforce the codes and ordinances (the very ones that people living in town, nowhere to hide, perforce toed the line on). This, despite (or, perhaps, because of ) being duly appraised and constantly updated of the dire situation by the seething legal residency, haranguing them with each new-found infraction demanding swift response. The notion of taking an early retirement must've started looking good to some.

 

So it happened that eventually authorities had all but abandoned code enforcement efforts inside the misbegotten realm. One got the impression they liked to pretend it didn't exist. (Not unlike the place's scofflaw dwellers towards their residential ordinances). That is, not beyond the county's property tax collectors' and property assessors' unfailing attention to every single parcel and what improvements, if any, were made so they could squeeze out more shekels through their annual property tax assessment.

 

Before the 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, those who knew the law and had perhaps threatened legal action if they didn't respond. They'd become such pains it was finally easier to reluctantly 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 then clear out, fantasies of easy, cheap country living busted. Others, more hardened, kept right on living the way they were. They felt that inertia and property rights, plus the county's enforcement resources being overwhelmed, would ultimately win the war. More and more often, they proved themselves right.

 

White bread outpost?

Though some might've experienced mixed feelings towards the firstcomers' intolerance over substandard construction and sanitation and their aggressive response, one couldn't help but sympathize with their plight. What a heartbreaking situation it must've been, seeing the place they'd heavily invested in and nurtured high hopes for to enjoy their golden years in irretrievably slip away. (Perhaps 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, law-abiding backwoods community...

 

...if still only a white bread one.

 

For while in later years, at least absentee ownership appeared to become racially diverse judging by the file list of owner names, actual residents in 2014 -- numbering yet only perhaps 300 or 350 -- were overwhelmingly white. Though there were a few Hispanics, there were few to no Black, Asian, or Native Americans. Growing up in the polyglot melting pot of San Francisco, the writer didn’t find anything too 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 -- in a place, given an even playing field, no one bearing expedient intents.

 

The scene perhaps reflected rural Siskiyou county as a whole, so predominantly white it might've appeared to be -- not without some truth --  a narrow minded, passively racist backwater to any people of color arriving from large melting-pot cities with their relatively mutual racial tolerance, inclusivity and everyday intercultural mingling. A more diverse Vista residency from the start might've made the would-be community a more culturally rich and thriving development, such as it was. But it was all a moot point, for Wonnderbread it was a full half century.*

___________________

 

* One might say it wasn't prejudice, or flagrant law ignoring, alone that would later make the Vista's overwhelmingly white population generally unwelcoming to new, minority members. There's a natural inclination of any like-minded ethnic group to stick together in easy familiarity over time, and so be slow to adapt to any sudden change in the ethnic make-up. There would be a steep learning curve at play -- one fraught wit the potential for mutual suspicion and misunderstanding -- even in the best of circumstances. Certainly a willingness to be law abiding could go a long ways in helping the ethnic harmonizing process along.

_____________________

 

Fine line

Anyone generally respecting the rule of law held that a development needed its residents to work together on some level and follow certain established rules in order to keep things safe and pleasant -- the acid test being one’s children -- for all committing to hanging their hats there. Otherwise, weeds of civic indifference and scofflaw attitudes could spring up, filling a social vacuum and choking a place's livability.

 

But it made simple country living all but impossible if ordinances were TOO strict, too expensive, too onerous for the majority of would-be legal residents to ever conform to. As the poet Kahlil Gibran wrote, noting this eternal dance in The Prophet: “You delight in laying down laws / Yet you delight more in breaking them.”

 

There was a fine line between having enough rules and regulations to keep at least a semblance of fair-minded order and having too many and courting rebellion. In any event, as mentioned, developer Collins would never have gotten the Vista development greenlit if he hadn't agreed to set up the CC&Rs to require every buyer to conform to all county, state and federal rules, laws and ordinances on signing the legal title paperwork.

 

The rush of having one’s own land in such a relatively remote region, though, could easily obscure the reality of there being any such county or state regulations TO conform to. There wasn't anyone around to say 'boo' -- especially after the county abandoned its residential code-enforcement in its drastic budget-slashing measure for several critical years during the first half of the 2010's.

______________________

 

“I say we got Trouble...with a capital ‘T’...”

Writer's own tale

 

(Note: Feel free to skip this section, which offers the writer's personal experiences, if of little interest)

​

In October 1978 I snapped up a nice, gently sloping lot with inspiring mountain view for $1,750, at $250 down and $25 a month easy installments for the balance. I'd get by for eleven years with kerosene lamps and candles before going solar in 1989, when solar panels still cost ten times more than now, even adjusting for inflation. (A one-by-four foot, 50 watt panel ran over $400.)

 

It was an early fall, and I set up a quick camp. While days were still pleasant, overnight temperatures plunged to a bone-chilling 13 degrees F.  During my first morning after overnighting, an older man driving by -- not part of the volunteer posse, but nonetheless wound up like most every compliant, year-round resident -- spotted me heating coffee water and defrosting myself over a tiny rock-lined campfire in a clearing some 30 feet from the road. He slammed on his brakes, climbed out, and stood there pointedly looking down at the fire.

 

“You got a permit for that?” he asked. Thus  were my first words of welcome from the would-be community before I could even get in a first sip of morning coffee. They weren't encouraging.

 

Fast forward six weeks and I apparently waited too long to apply for a building permit -- and, crucially, first join the POWW water-truck club, in lieu of drilling a well, to be able to qualify for a building permit. As a result I was destined to get the full "Unwelcome Wagon" treatment from sundry busybodies in a development that, I began to appreciate more fully, was more than just a little squirrelly around the edges.

 

While having intended to conform all along, if reluctantly, being a fairly timid, Walter Mitty type, law-abiding citizen (if obviously also having a contrary, intellectually-radical streak), I was gearing up slowly and carefully. Over winter I planned to research tiny-home design, study construction methods and building codes, then draw up tentative designs to submit in spring. I was staying in a half-mile distant, 12-by-16 foot cabin that kindhearted neighbors, leaving as the fair-weather season wound down and taking  pity on my situation, offered to let me, a total stranger, winter in.

 

This so I wouldn’t freeze to death camping out in my tent, as I'd first resolved, wanting to stay on my brand-new land and future homeland no matter what. Cold alone could be endured with my then spartan lifestyle, extreme-weather bedding and a jury-rigged wood stove in the tent (not recommended). But, unbeknownst to me, the region was notorious for windstorms of such magnitude they beggared description. Coming out of nowhere, they could roar across the land like a runaway freight. Seventy to eighty mph wind speeds were not uncommon; in the late 1980s we got hit with a storm with 100 mph gusts.

 

December weather assaults kept blowing my tent down, no matter how tightly 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 vacated cabin. Thereafter I made the quarter-mile hike each day to work on my place clearing brush, roughing in a roadway and building an earth-sheltered storage shed that would become a legal onsite construction shelter once securing a building permit.

 

Before I got it, though, I was to experience the full heat of unknown intolerant neighbors. It seemed that ever-vigilant Vista board members and their cohorts had established a pipeline with local realtors for every Vista parcel sale made. Distant neighbors had thus soon learned how some rambling upstart of obviously modest means was daring to sneak into their domain, presumably with no intention of ever paying the piper. My Strout realtor informed me later that while admitting he just sold a lot to a young long-hair, he'd refused to divulge where or to whom.

 

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 in search. Weeks later they finally tracked me down when I wasn’t home. They took one look at my thrown-together, mostly underground store shed and verboten outhouse and duly reported me to the county health department. They didn’t know -- or, I suspect, care--  that I had every intention of building to code.

 

Their scorched-earth policy allowed no such wiggle room. Equal opportunity hasslers, anyone and everyone the least bit non-compliant who they didn't cotton to as one of them was duly thrown under the bus.

 

Busted

Summoned on the carpet of then head county health department honcho, Dr. Bayuk,  I got the full bum's rush. I wan't even allowed to explain my intent to comply. Assuming the worst, he was loaded for bear and read me the riot act. He gave me 120 days to get compliant by installing a septic system -- even though I wouldn’t have a cabin to connect to it for years -- and build a temporary outhouse over it, or 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 while shaking his head. He no doubt felt I needed that extra dose of fear to get me properly motivated.

 

The only reason he'd worked with me at all was because at the last moment another kindhearted neighbor had come forward. She'd explained how they promised to let me join the by-then membership-capped water truck club when I was ready to build. So he'd grudgingly allowed me to become POWW's final and twenty-sixth member.

 

Being thin-skinned, the experience, happening within months of my arrival loaded with keen expectations, fully traumatized me. Before the last minute reprieve, I'd pretty much given up on the place. Devastated and demoralized, at age 29 I appeared to be gearing up to fade away into yet another homeless sunset. Instead, though fondest hopes and dreams by then felt hopelessly mangled, I dredged up some reserve willpower, paid the $125 water-truck membership fee, and was determined to invest the required time, money and effort to get legal and squared away over time. I'd then at least be able to live on the land with a modicum of dignity and salvage some peace of mind.

 

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 buried, first inspected, tank and leach field. In part for the benefit of any busybody driving by to check out the scene of the obvious scofflaw's almost-bust, maybe hoping to find some new reportable offense, I painted on the side facing the road, in big, bold, blue letters, “Welcome Halley's Comet in 1984.” That should baffle 'em, I thought. I then built another outhouse more to my liking, a low-slung squatter affair cleverly disguised as a doghouse, water bowl and leash in front. No one ever discovered the ruse.

 

Over a leisurely three and a half years I then built a code-approved, 1½ story, solar-tempered little-big cabin. I used only hand tools, wanting the building experience to feel intimate, leisurely and old-fashioned, and having lots of energy to burn at age 29. I hired help for the open-beam roofing and electrical and scrounged recycled lumber whenever possible. It appeared I was on the verge of becoming a tenuously respectable resident. Not that I was any longer interested in being accepted as such. It was like the classic Groucho Marx quip made over a restrictive country club's finally 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 warm to the board and learn to appreciate its potential to do some actual good for the chronically floundering, perpetually at odds with itself, would-be community.

 

Working under the gun of county code enforcers -- who I sensed were trading notes with ever-wary Vista board members and their minions -- was so depressing it drove me to drink. I'd learn firsthand how board members and their ilk had a gift for radicalizing the place's denizens in their hell-bent campaign to return the place to some semblance of its former glory of absolute conformity, or, in frustration, at least demand a pound of flesh by giving hell to anyone not compliant.  It felt as if the place was caught up in some negative reactionary spiral, trapped in some contention-drenched, never-ending time loop of permanent discord.

 

On the wings of getting my new shelter signed off in early 1983, I was still a timid if rebellious 33 year-old. One by now thoroughly disenchanted with the Vista's imperious, would-be overlords, who obviously didn't like the cut of my jib.

 

Rainbow fever

I soon got into far 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 event was going to be held in California for the first time ever since its start some 12 years earlier. It would be somewhere in an area a two hour drive away 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 returning for the first time in decades to their coming-of-age, countercultural roots, would begin pouring in from everywhere, including overseas. Many had nowhere to go until the public-forest site was determined, many months away yet.

 

Wanting to reconnect with my roots while evening the ledger for all the countless people who'd helped me over my long years on the road  -- plus thinking to maybe liberate the  stodgy development a tad -- I opened up my land and resources to all comers for what turned out to be the next five months. Like those Vistan firstcomers who built homes amidst an ostensible rec-land development, seemingly indifferent to what troubles it might create, I was equally determined to let the chips fall where they may in hosting a motley group that was the very antithesis of the Vista powers that be.

 

I solemnly tendered my invite by letter to the rainbow steering committee, then holding its monthly steering committee meetings in a City Hall room (of all places) in far away Chico. Word spread fast, and though never 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 sometimes outlandish rigs, traipsed in and out of the buttoned-down-and-proud Vista hinterlands. Rainbow elders set up three 28-foot yurts  -- formerly part of the Seattle area's controversial Love Family spiritual sect -- on the parcel's lower back acre. "There's your UFO, Stuart," one told me as the central yurt went up; earlier I'd mentioned how I'd always liked to fantasize a scout ship landing on the parcel.  I'd named the land Earth Base, after a Seattle Capitol Hill fire station that had transformed into a community center and renamed Earth Station. Earth Base it was for years thereafter. In a way, the scene felt a little like the animated feature Yellow Submarine, when the Beatles' triumphant music turned the dreary frozen black-and-white world into brilliant technicolor.

 

Predictably, my terminally convention-minded neighbors, most living miles away, had a veritable conniption fit. While a few more liberal-minded retirees seemed tickled by it all, possibly rebels at heart who didn't see anything too threatening about the surreal scene, others wanted none of it. No free-spirited long-hairs with all their flagrant pot-smoking (then still very much illegal), shameless nudity, and unsettling tribal drumming far into the night...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 “Hey, we ARE one family” didn't cut much ice.

​

Frothing at the mouth, they reported me to every enforcement agency they could think of: county sheriff; health, planning and building departments; fire marshal; probably the dog catcher... But, saving grace, earlier I’d coordinated a meeting between then county sheriff Charlie Byrd and rainbow elders, to be held on my land. Law enforcement was keen to learn what they might be in for with 33,000 rainbow celebrants (as it turned out), starting to flood their turf. The sheriff, reassured our ragtag group seemed a basically harmless if freaky bunch (apart from gleefully ignoring pot laws), causing only a temporary glitch in the terminally dull, conventional order of things, must've told apoplectic neighbors to basically just chill a while, grit their teeth, and it'd soon be over. Jaws surely dropped.

 

The system was abysmally failing them yet again.

 

The writer liked to think the ensuing free-spirited scene helped break the ice of the Vista's long-oppressive atmosphere, even if at the risk of possibly encouraging anarchy to gain a permanent foothold. Rebellious offspring of various outraged residents had visited the scene and loved it; I was an unlikely hero as the scene became part of Vista lore. 

 

It seemed that over time the place would swing from one extreme to the other: From firstcomers' honeymoon period, happy campers giddy over the endless possibilities of their pristine lands to ruthless, law-and-order minded "No this, no that, don't even think about it" intolerance", then back to "Whoopee, anything goes!" albeit a more bold, scofflaw variety. 

 

_________________________

 

 

Gone eleven months of the year

The firstcomers' control-freak stance was, as noted, in part born of feeling a strong need to post serious signs everywhere to try protecting the place and left belongings while living up to 700 miles away some 11 months of the year. Mischief-minded locals, resenting the sudden takeover of their former longtime stomping grounds, had a hell-for-leather field day during their extended absences...which of course got visiting owners apoplectic on their return, hoped for, carefree vacations anticipated all year met with ugly reality check.

 

Clearly the natives, some third or fourth generation descendants of the region's pioneers and very set in their ways, were far from ever welcoming the newcomers into their fold. They'd mounted a rebellious, "You may think it's your land, but it's still ours; we'll never recognize your damn place" campaign. The endless miles of ungated, groomed backroads were ideal for dirt bikers to gouge deep donuts in, and more delinquent-minded youth couldn't resist engaging in more spirited hell raising, stealing and vandalizing at will.  Unruly youth -- absorbing angry sentiments of their families and carrying on a proud tradition of protesting the big city vacationeers's presence -- geared up their protracted war with the foreign la-la-landers who'd dared to try appropriating their wilderness playground and grazing land. Law enforcement could only do so much trying to work with the mostly absent owners, there being maybe at most a single overseer or two watching over seven square miles of property off season, and the actual land owner himself needing to report an incident to get any investigation.

 

By the time civic-minded lot owners started actually living on their parcels and joining the larger community, attending church services, and in later decades, as younger resident families increased, enrolling children in the local schools and joining PTAs, it might've almost seemed too late to try reversing the long-established vicious circle. Dislike and suspicion of the Vista and its invasive lot owners could seem 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!”

As related, through the 1980s and 1990s the county's health and building ordinances were by and large strictly enforced. Unless one didn’t mind being deemed an outlaw and never earning recognition or acceptance as an “official” resident -- as, in time, it seemed more and more wouldn't -- landowners hoping to become respectable residents tried to comply. Or provide the illusion of complying: "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 economy, county supervisors had to make some real tough budget cuts. Among other actions they'd axed the position of residential-code enforcer that seemed to be having little effect anyhow -- leastwise in the Vista. The place was so far gone by then, calling it a lost cause seemed an understatement.

 

Over the next half decade, residential-code enforcement essentially disappeared from the Vista. With no official telling you anything different, it was easier than ever for newcomers to foster the notion they could do whatever they wanted on parcels. The 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 some forlorn, all but abandoned, rural ghost settlement living out a zombie half-life in singular obscurity.

 

No legal power to fine;

Can a place center without a center?

Other subdivisions that formed in the region about the same time wanted to assure having the best chance of establishing 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 paid before 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 had always been the place's two-edged sword. While its relative lack of sometimes nit-picky, overreaching rules and regulations empowered residents to feel more like lords and ladies of the manor, as it were, such freedom could attract those with scofflaw intentions, wanting to exploit the seemingly unregulated land and disturb the place's treasured peace and quiet. Example: the place long ago had a monumental junkyard eyesore surreally surrounded by yet-pristine, wooded lots; it took the board ages to get the county to condemn it and the place 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 these freedom rights, thus serving the greater good. (That the rules sometimes seemed to favor the interests of the wealthier class at the expense of others always getting the short end of the stick was no doubt what made people want to rebel.)

 

Few Vistan parcel holders -- especially absentee, but even some residents -- ever felt the 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 central, neutral, relaxed setting, and form informal volunteer action groups like litter patrol, community gardens, swap meets -- and have the monthly board meetings actually in the Vista rather than next door in a tiny fire station backroom.

 

But it was long held in that cramped, cold-fluorescent-lit backroom space, off actual Vista property. And the annual property owner meetings were held some ten miles away, in Lake Shastina, one having to walk through the golf club's bar lounge, littered with buzzed tee enthusiasts, to reach the conference room. (In earliest years they were held hundreds of miles away, at places like the many members’ favorite at the time, the Madonna Inn, in San Luis Obispo, to make it easier for a dominant southern California ownership to attend.)

 

At the risk of stating the obvious, it seemed impossible for a quasi community to gain any sense of centeredness without  having a center. Needing to leave the place to attend the monthly meeting, and drive over ten miles to attend its annual meeting? While it struck more than a few as too weird for words, it only reflected the place's total discombobulation as much as anything.

 

“Wouldn’t give you a dime...” vs. “Only $29,999!”

Due to the place’s sundry shortcomings sale values of parcels had stalled for decades, barely keeping pace with inflation. Interest in the parcels took the meaning of 'soft market' conditions to a new low. Until 2015, unimproved two-to-three acre lots often went begging at $5,000. Lacking any easier water, septic systems or electricity, or any more can-do, fair-minded, empowered board and appropriate CC&Rs, the place fairly shouted, "Beware! Failed subdivision!"

 

It just didn’t strike many as an inviting place to drop anchor. Only those enjoying roughing it a while, maybe. Or those determined to live on the cheap and wouldn't lose sleep being non-compliant, "Screw the System" their motto. Or those renting houses and mobiles from code-compliant owners who'd moved away, for affordability more than anything, and tried their best to tune out any gnarly politics. Or long-timers who'd known the place in kinder times and had sunk such deep roots, they were braced to weather changes that would make others move away in a heartbeat.

 

Long ago I met a former realtor who said of the properties, with a heated disdain apparently then common in the local property peddling circles, “I wouldn’t give you a dime for any of them!” He said it with such vehemence, like the realm was maybe sitting on top of a radioactive waste dump, it made one wonder if maybe he and his colleagues had skirted ugly, protracted lawsuits for misrepresenting properties, or endured some other such unpleasantness that made it not worth the paltry commission fees closing such low-end realty generated.

 

Eventually though, two out-of-region realtor groups thought differently. Specializing in scouting rural developments deemed undervalued, in the late 2000s they snapped up hundreds of the bedeviled hinterland's parcels for cheap, properties that had long laid fallow (at least relieving many long-stuck or more recently-stuck parcel owners). Then they mounted slick sales campaigns to try remedying the obviously under-exploited situation, hoping to make a mint.

 

The first outfit was called National Recreational Properties, Inc.. It hired former "CHiPs" TV star Erik Estrada to serve as their uber-aggressive pitchman. Out of Irvine (possibly the same town as Vista founder Collins), it apparently had a penchant for going after failed, “left-for-dead” subdivisions, sharp talons squeezing out any easy quick profit before swooping off to the next rural roadkill. In ad promos "the Ponch" shamelessly enthused how the place was so great, he even had a parcel himself. (He was of course given it as part of the deal just so he could say that.)

 

The outfit reportedly offered to fly prospective buyers in to enjoy a champagne brunch along before the big pitch and  grand tour of the prime, affordable properties that offered such rich solitude, fresh air and dazzling mountain views. When they held a grand open house, balloons festooning highway entrances, rumor had it that no one even showed up. (They were more successful with their Alturas, California area development, California Pines, which boasted over 15,000 one-acre parcels, each demanding the installation of a pricey, engineer-designed septic system, which hindered its development.)

 

A few years later, around 2012, another group,  Billyland.com, likewise grabbed a mess of raw Vista parcels, possibly taking some lots off the former's hands. They in turn seemed to be aiming at land-hungry Internet surfers. They'd hawk parcels online, eBay auction style, the 'winner' being the one making the highest down-payment bid when the timer ran out. “Only $29,999!” they gushed. (With low monthly payments and a high interest rate, of course, final costs could run over $50,000.) Their campaign attracted many living on a shoestring, some soon to grow a few cannabis plants, no doubt in part to try keeping up the land payments and so avoid losing what various legal residents, perhaps uncharitably, viewed as essentially private campgrounds for the homeless. (As of late 2022, they were still trying to hawk a lot or two at $80,000, optimistic the right sucker was out there.)

 

By 2015, according to county records the Vista had a grand total of some 80 legally permitted residences. Out of 1,640 parcels, that was one in twenty, or five percent of the realm built up according to Hoyle.  The rest -- some 1,556 lots, or 95%, --  either held unpermitted dwellings, were once informally lived on and since vacated, or, most commonly, still as relatively pristine as the day the place launched a half century before, minus various scars of tree poachers and careless off-roaders.

 

Hope sprang eternal for some of the current speculative landholders, still thinking to maybe make a bundle. They set a ridiculously inflated price in listing with the realtor, thinking to snag an eager land-hungry buyer with more money than common sense, oblivious to the depressed market and the development's long festering problems: "Secluded", "Perfect spot to build that dream home!", etc.  Once during 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 resident, determined to keep out his own 'wrong kind of people', strode out within view of her buck naked and pranced about. It worked; the deal fell through.

 

“Maybe if we ignore them they’ll go away.”

It was no secret county supervisors rued the day they ever greenlit the woebegone development. One former Vista board president stalwart, Jeannette Hook, worked with county officials in her career. She said they viewed the Vista as "the red-headed stepchild no one knew what to do with."

 

Meanwhile, the place, having no fining power, was, short of extra-legal vigilante efforts, fully at the total mercy of county officials and enforcers to keep intact whatever shreds of respect for the rule of law yet remained.

 

But the huge, mostly rural county, on an overstretched budget and often understaffed, had of course all but 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'd try to forget its legal residency paid their salaries through annual county property taxes and, not unreasonably, expected them to earn their keep.

 

Despite -- or because of -- the number of non-compliant dwellers increasing, they still wouldn't respond short of an actual emergency. They must've realized it was a disaster 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 day of reckoning came at last. 

 

In the spring of 2015, a sudden flood of entrepreneurs -- anticipating the eminent tidal wave of legalized recreational cannabis in California once voters by ballot measure indeed changed the law in late 2016, reducing illegal grows to misdemeanors -- poured in out of nowhere, snapping up the remote parcels that had forever gone begging. The lots were steals for any willing  to take a chance and bypass the strict permitting process that involved both state and county agencies. It would've been a wasted effort to apply anyhow, as the conservative county's board of supervisors would opt (as the state allowed) to ban commercial cannabis grows outside city limits.

 

California would become the only western state to reduce the penalty for simple, illicit commercial-scale pot growing from a felony to a misdemeanor. "There's gold in California!" was again the rallying cry, as people started pouring  in from everywhere.The supervisors might just as well have gone fishing for all the gleeful non-compliance their new ordinances, chiseled in stone, inspired. Hundreds of new instant Vista residents, sensing the ever changing cannabis laws and ordinances were all but unenforceable and a relative slap on the wrist if ever busted -- a $500 fine and crop confiscated -- with blinding speed rolled out unsanctioned grows exceeding the state's allowed personal six-plant plant limit sixteen-fold, in time some over three-hundred-fold.

 

The phenomenal rush appeared to have caught everyone flatfooted, asleep at the switch, out to lunch, name your metaphor. "No one could've predicted such a thing would ever happen,"  claimed one official to media, head firmly stuck in the sand. 

 

Studious ignoring of the development's long-term plight -- born of a rural county too poor, provincial-minded and/or lackadaisical to keep up with radically changing times or enforce its own ordinances and regulations, should people opt to ignore them -- had been careening on a collision course with reality for ages...

 

...until avoiding dealing with it proved something of an unwarranted luxury.

 

 

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Afterword

Fifth century B.C. Chinese philosophy Lao Tse said that the cause of anything is everything and the cause of everything is anything.  It'd be unfair and over-simplistic to try pinning the blame for what happened in the development on any one cause or party.

 

There was an extraordinarily daunting confluence of cascading factors at play over time, countless ingredients in the place's recipe for disaster.

 

A brief recap of the major contributing factors:

 

Seller to the land developer didn't first get permission from the rest of the long-time-owning Martin family, creating a contentious vibe on the realm from the very start

 

Surrounding locals resented the place being allowed to develop, possibly including some county supervisor members who voted against its formation (ostensibly for lack of water) 

 

Ambitious efforts of first settlers, each providing their own well, electrical hookup, etc. before building to code and only then moving in, weren't followed by most future dwellers despite this being crucial to ever becoming recognized as a legitimate standard community

 

Add:

A sea of indifferent absentee owners, often mere speculators, countless soon nursing serious buyer remorse and unable to unload the clunker parcels without taking a bath, in the meantime loathe to sink another cent in the place

 

The firebrand property owners board, along with other, heavily invested, first-comer residents, reacting to the rash of lot buyers determined to live on their newly purchased lots without conforming to county health and building code by declaring open war on them, zealously throwing them under the bus by reporting them to authorities, creating an uber-contentious social climate for decades

 

Expedient-minded realtors, not caring at all what one intended to do with their lot

 

Uninvolved association managers and sometimes board presidents, indifferent to or ineffective in helping efforts of more civic-minded residents make the place more livable, some actually themselves participating in the eventual mega realty boom sparked by California's liberalizing cannabis laws

 

Stir in:

County officials in time all but abandoning enforcement of the building code and state health regulations for a full half decade, starting during the Great Recession

 

More and more free-minded residents deeming home building-code standards ridiculously over-complicated and expensive for simple country living on one's own land and so worthy of being ignored

 

 

Mix together and bake 50 years. Result? One giant question mark of a place the public still shakes its head over and dismisses as a tangled mess, defying comprehension.

 

Was it any wonder the Vista became such a terminal basket case? All along it almost seemed it was vying for the 'Most Dysfunctional Rural Development' award in some bizarro alternate universe.

 

Countless influences -- some possibly not even touched on here -- led the Vista to become the way it is now: a former shared recreational land forever trying 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.

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