This is so beautiful! The thing I love most about Old San Juan is that all the locals know each other (and each other's dogs). It's such a community. Bisbee sounds so amazing, and like places in the Hudson Valley. I think I might spend my life alternating between the city and the town. And I hope you get more of what you need, wherever it is!
Im really thinking you’re onto something—I don’t want to pick city or town but love the contrast between the two! Another reason I think I loved Bisbee was that it felt decidedly un-“modern US”. The houses were all built on top of each other, winding roads between them. Some friends said it reminded them of Europe.
Bisbee is indeed amazing - we visited there a few years ago, driving over from where we were staying with friends near Phoenix, but were only able to spend one day - your pictures were wonderful, just so cool to look at
and I think you captured the small town v city worlds quite nicely
we live half of our time in a remote canyon (Burns Canyon) that is pretty far off the grid, but still ~45 min drive away from small(er) towns like the charming Joshua Tree, or even Yucca Valley, which is rather charmless but does have a cool cafe and also a fantastic sourdough bakery, so there is that…
anyway, ‘living in a small place where you were bound to become known by and know everyone else’, this does has its virtues. but in our canyon there are maybe just forty people and yet because the homesteads are mostly fairly far apart, no one is going to drop in, there are zero public places (like cafes or stores) — unless you want to drive the 8 miles into Pioneertown, a western movie set turned very tiny down that does have a saloon and the famous Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Place roadhouse…
really, you do not run into people except driving on the one dirt road that runs through the whole canyon, and you wave to each other… and that is about it, so if you like the idea of knowing everyone and everyone knowing you yet you do not have to actually much meet or see them, Burns Canyon is for you
I should clarify… when I say ‘where everyone knows you’, the knowledge may not be from actually meeting you, talking to you, or even seeing you - it is often ‘gossip knowledge’, what folks have heard about you from others (who also may never have meet or even seen you, face to face). This is because of the remoteness and separation of homesteads, combined with the ‘small town culture’ where gossip and stories are traded all the time (just like in the movies!)
A story to illustrate just what I mean: It was our second year in Burns Canyon, we were just getting to know the place ourselves and had met hardly anyone who lived up here — yet many of the canyon dwellers had heard about us. We had built our house pretty much from scratch, on the site of a crazy survivalist’s cabin where we kept only the concrete slab, and that was itself unusual (building a home rather than moving in to one of the old A-frames or cabins already in the canyon), so there apparently was a good of shared interest and discussion concerning just who we were.
But we only learned about this when one day, when pulling a small trailer loaded with bricks, our little Rav 4 could not make it up one of the steeper hills on that single dirt road. We had to stop or get dragged back down the hill. And as this was only a one lane road, this meant no one could get through, up or down. A small line of four or five vehicles eventually were stopped behind us, all long-time canyon residents.
And of course folks got out of their jeeps and pickups to see what was the matter, who was causing this traffic jam. And that led to them meeting us — a crowd formed, with us at the center. And our Rav 4 was not only pulling the trailer, we had our two macaws and Newfie in it — naturally, the noisy parrots and very big black dog attracted attention too. People started talking.
The main topic: Just who were we? But before we could answer, could introduce ourselves, someone in the crowd shared their knowledge: ‘I heard you were gynecologists’ he said. My wife, Marilyn, started to explain, no, we were not… when someone else piped up, with a correction: ‘No, I heard they were clinical psychologists’. (The idea that we were some kind of ‘doctors’ or academics seems to have been widely shared.) Again, Marilyn tried to explain that, no, that was not it, when she was interrupted: ‘Well, what are you then?’ So she answered: ‘We’re sociologists.’ Puzzled looks. The big guy who thought we were gynecologists spoke up: ‘What the hell is that?’
Marilyn did her best to explain, thinking she should describe the kind of work we do rather than try to define sociology lol. ‘We watch people working’. This was in fact the truth. We are both ethnographers, and our research at that time was all about studying workplaces and different kinds of work, in service of designing spaces and systems that would help workers share their own practical knowledge and collaborate, to work together better.
Marilyn figured that going through all that was not going to help, though. So ‘watching people at work’ seemed to be a good shorthand (and honest!) description of workplace ethnography. Her explanation generated a big guffaw, from the big fellow: ‘Sweetie, you ain’t going to see nothing up here, because we don’t do any work!’ Smiles and much laughter all around. The world of Burns Canyon, in a nutshell. The ice was broken. Lots of fun talking together followed.
Finally, the wife of the contractor who had built our home came driving down the mountain in their big pickup, and with the help of our new friends, we attached our trailer to her pickup and she then led us up to our place. But that introduction — from gynecologists to clinical psychologists to sociologists (what?!?) — was how we met several of our neighbors, and has remained the foundation of our loose friendship to this day, 13 years later.
This is so beautiful! The thing I love most about Old San Juan is that all the locals know each other (and each other's dogs). It's such a community. Bisbee sounds so amazing, and like places in the Hudson Valley. I think I might spend my life alternating between the city and the town. And I hope you get more of what you need, wherever it is!
Im really thinking you’re onto something—I don’t want to pick city or town but love the contrast between the two! Another reason I think I loved Bisbee was that it felt decidedly un-“modern US”. The houses were all built on top of each other, winding roads between them. Some friends said it reminded them of Europe.
Bisbee is indeed amazing - we visited there a few years ago, driving over from where we were staying with friends near Phoenix, but were only able to spend one day - your pictures were wonderful, just so cool to look at
and I think you captured the small town v city worlds quite nicely
we live half of our time in a remote canyon (Burns Canyon) that is pretty far off the grid, but still ~45 min drive away from small(er) towns like the charming Joshua Tree, or even Yucca Valley, which is rather charmless but does have a cool cafe and also a fantastic sourdough bakery, so there is that…
anyway, ‘living in a small place where you were bound to become known by and know everyone else’, this does has its virtues. but in our canyon there are maybe just forty people and yet because the homesteads are mostly fairly far apart, no one is going to drop in, there are zero public places (like cafes or stores) — unless you want to drive the 8 miles into Pioneertown, a western movie set turned very tiny down that does have a saloon and the famous Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Place roadhouse…
really, you do not run into people except driving on the one dirt road that runs through the whole canyon, and you wave to each other… and that is about it, so if you like the idea of knowing everyone and everyone knowing you yet you do not have to actually much meet or see them, Burns Canyon is for you
I should clarify… when I say ‘where everyone knows you’, the knowledge may not be from actually meeting you, talking to you, or even seeing you - it is often ‘gossip knowledge’, what folks have heard about you from others (who also may never have meet or even seen you, face to face). This is because of the remoteness and separation of homesteads, combined with the ‘small town culture’ where gossip and stories are traded all the time (just like in the movies!)
A story to illustrate just what I mean: It was our second year in Burns Canyon, we were just getting to know the place ourselves and had met hardly anyone who lived up here — yet many of the canyon dwellers had heard about us. We had built our house pretty much from scratch, on the site of a crazy survivalist’s cabin where we kept only the concrete slab, and that was itself unusual (building a home rather than moving in to one of the old A-frames or cabins already in the canyon), so there apparently was a good of shared interest and discussion concerning just who we were.
But we only learned about this when one day, when pulling a small trailer loaded with bricks, our little Rav 4 could not make it up one of the steeper hills on that single dirt road. We had to stop or get dragged back down the hill. And as this was only a one lane road, this meant no one could get through, up or down. A small line of four or five vehicles eventually were stopped behind us, all long-time canyon residents.
And of course folks got out of their jeeps and pickups to see what was the matter, who was causing this traffic jam. And that led to them meeting us — a crowd formed, with us at the center. And our Rav 4 was not only pulling the trailer, we had our two macaws and Newfie in it — naturally, the noisy parrots and very big black dog attracted attention too. People started talking.
The main topic: Just who were we? But before we could answer, could introduce ourselves, someone in the crowd shared their knowledge: ‘I heard you were gynecologists’ he said. My wife, Marilyn, started to explain, no, we were not… when someone else piped up, with a correction: ‘No, I heard they were clinical psychologists’. (The idea that we were some kind of ‘doctors’ or academics seems to have been widely shared.) Again, Marilyn tried to explain that, no, that was not it, when she was interrupted: ‘Well, what are you then?’ So she answered: ‘We’re sociologists.’ Puzzled looks. The big guy who thought we were gynecologists spoke up: ‘What the hell is that?’
Marilyn did her best to explain, thinking she should describe the kind of work we do rather than try to define sociology lol. ‘We watch people working’. This was in fact the truth. We are both ethnographers, and our research at that time was all about studying workplaces and different kinds of work, in service of designing spaces and systems that would help workers share their own practical knowledge and collaborate, to work together better.
Marilyn figured that going through all that was not going to help, though. So ‘watching people at work’ seemed to be a good shorthand (and honest!) description of workplace ethnography. Her explanation generated a big guffaw, from the big fellow: ‘Sweetie, you ain’t going to see nothing up here, because we don’t do any work!’ Smiles and much laughter all around. The world of Burns Canyon, in a nutshell. The ice was broken. Lots of fun talking together followed.
Finally, the wife of the contractor who had built our home came driving down the mountain in their big pickup, and with the help of our new friends, we attached our trailer to her pickup and she then led us up to our place. But that introduction — from gynecologists to clinical psychologists to sociologists (what?!?) — was how we met several of our neighbors, and has remained the foundation of our loose friendship to this day, 13 years later.