I grew up on a quiet street in a small town. The part of town where my family lived consisted of mostly alfalfa and dairy farms at the base of the Rocky Mountains. My street looked out place because it blazed a lone trail into the green alfalfa field that formed our entire block. The story behind the decision to build half a street of suburban America into one of the local fields comes from a divided house, with one sister deciding to develop her interest in the real estate, while her brother kept the fields in tact. The street was developed with an eye to the future, and the street just terminated, stopped dead in the middle of the field. It was not a cul-du-sac, it was like they ran out of pavement and the street ended in a straight line at the irrigation ditch that watered the rest of the land.
My house was the penultimate house, and it could not be more unrelated stylistically to the other three houses at the end our street. The house was long and skinny, made of dark brown bricks with white wood trim. Dad found the plans in a local newspaper and wrote in to the editor to receive the grand spread of plans that would soon become our home. Across the street, our neighbor's house was light colored ranch style home with yellow siding and white bricks. The house is surrounded by maple trees and hedges and features a prominent bay window. Kitty-corner from my house is a grand southern-style mansion with white pillars and a large circular driveway that curves around a rose garden and a flag pole. To the South of our house is the Dead Cat Ranch, where the house if built on top of the horse corrals. The Dead Cat property winds around from the South to the West behind our land, and includes several Western-style features such as the Dead Cat Saloon and the Dead Cat Coi Pond. The ranch was named after the cat the owner ran over on his first day on the land. The owner makes hand-tooled horse saddles and owns a tequila farm in Mexico.
Where the street ended, there was a line of trees, behind which ran an irrigation ditch full of snakes and a field full of grasshoppers. The end of the road was always a big draw to the neighborhood kids who used to build forts among the trees and catch the water snakes to add to their collections. Running through the alfalfa turned our pants green and destroyed many pairs of white tennis shoes.
I was raised to read and appreciate the stories of Louis La'Mour and his cowboy heroes. My father had collected over 70 of his novels, and as I worked my way through the collection I would reenact scenes with my friends at the frontier space we'd built as the end of the street. We imagined log cabins and Indian attacks, saloons and gun battles, cattle drives and horse corrals. Because the space was a nowhere it became an anywhere for anyone with a little imagination.
Looking out from the street we would imagine the future neighborhood that would tame our local wild. We imagined new families with kids who loved baseball, and would let us jump on their trampolines. In the future we wouldn't have to walk through an alfalfa field to reach our school, and we wouldn't have to drive up and around our block every time we wanted to go the store or to a movie.
After I moved out of my parents house, the road was lengthened and attached to the other end of the block. Houses rose out of the fields and new families moved in. The alfalfa was harvested and the fields were plowed in preparation for new homes with sprinkler systems and sidewalks. After 30 years of being the lone street of houses in a field of green, our street was now equally out of place as a thirty-year-old neighborhood surrounded by brand new houses that dwarfed the Dead Cat Ranch, the southern mansion, and the long, skinny house with dark bricks and white trim.
A few years after leaving the fields to go to college I started my first day of City Planning school. Sometimes I remember the kid who grew up in an alfalfa field who will someday plan cities and develop real estate. The time spent turning the local nowhere into an anywhere using that child-like imagination may soon turn into a satisfying and fulfilling career. Looking at a blank and undeveloped property I may never be able to see everything imagined there by previous generations, but I can make that space meaningful for future generations.
In some ways I am still the imaginary cowboy with alfalfa-stained pants and shoes, imagining a space that has yet to be.
