I was walking down Main Street the other day, clutching a cup of coffee that cost the same amount as my first mortgage payment—which, I should mention, I secured in 2006 for a perfectly normal, sensible amount of money—when I noticed something peculiar. The parking meters are still there. They stand like little iron sentinels, rusted and stubborn, reminding us of a time when you could drop a nickel in the slot and spend an hour looking at the mountains without feeling like you were participating in a high-stakes financial transaction.

Some folks tell me these meters are inefficient. They point to the fancy apps and the automated kiosks that take credit cards and track your license plate via satellite, as if they’re trying to launch a lunar lander instead of just letting you park your truck for twenty minutes to grab a bagel. But I think they’re missing the point. Those old meters are the last bit of “normal” we have left in a town where the price of a backyard shed has somehow eclipsed the GDP of a small island nation.

I remember when I bought my house. It was a very normal, standard transaction. I walked into a bank, shook a hand, and walked out with a house. It felt like buying a loaf of bread, if the loaf of bread happened to have three bedrooms and a nice porch. Today, I look at the new developments popping up on North 19th and I feel a profound sense of confusion. They build these four-story buildings with names like “The Aspens” or “The Summit,” but there isn’t an aspen or a summit in sight. They’re just boxes. Very expensive, very tidy boxes.

The developers tell us this is “density.” They say if we build enough of these, the housing math will finally start to math. But I’ve been doing the math since 2006, and the numbers keep getting wider apart. You’ve got the people who want to preserve the character of a town that stopped existing ten years ago, and then you’ve got the people who want to turn every square inch of the Gallatin Valley into a boutique hotel for people who own private jets. Meanwhile, the parking meter sits there, indifferent to the chaos.

I spoke with a local contractor, Gary, who has been pouring concrete in this valley since before the first Starbucks dared to show its face on Main Street. He’s currently working on a foundation for a building that will house six condos, each priced at what a mid-sized ranch used to cost in the nineties. “Howard,” he told me, wiping dust from his forehead, “people want the ski town dream, but they don’t want to deal with the reality of living in a place that has decided it’s suddenly the center of the universe.”

Gary is right, of course. We all want the dream. We want to be the person who skis eighty days a year but also owns a Land Cruiser and lives in a house that didn’t require an inheritance from a shipping magnate. But then we complain about the traffic on Huffine. We complain about the people moving in from elsewhere, even though most of us moved here for the exact same reason—to get away from where we were, so we could live somewhere “authentic.”

If we tear out the old meters, we lose that last tether to the era when things were priced like things, rather than like speculative investments. A parking meter doesn’t care if you’re a billionaire from the Yellowstone Club or a college student trying to make your tuition payment last until the end of the semester. It just wants its quarter. It treats everyone with the same cold, metallic equality.

I’m not saying we should stop progress. I understand that a city needs to grow, or at least that’s what the city commission tells us every Tuesday night while wearing very expensive wool sweaters. But I would like us to at least keep the meters. They are relics of a time when a person could walk into a hardware store, buy a box of nails, and not feel like they had to check the stock market first. They remind me of 2006, a year where life made sense and a house was just a place you slept in between trips to the Bridgers.

The meters are stubborn, much like the people who live here. They are failing, slightly tilted, and increasingly ignored by the new wave of app-based parkers who wouldn’t know a quarter if it fell out of their designer jeans. But they are still here. And as long as they’re here, I suppose there’s a chance that someone might stop, notice the rust, and realize that we don’t actually need to make everything so complicated.

Sometimes, a parking space is just a place to leave your car for a while.

Howard Benchpress owns a home he bought in 2006 for what he describes as ‘a normal amount of money.’ He brings this up frequently.