The other day, I was walking down Main Street to pick up a spool of twine at the hardware store. I noticed that the new mixed-use development on the corner has installed a subterranean, temperature-controlled bicycle storage facility. It features individual biometric lockers and a professional-grade bike wash station with reclaimed-glacier-water filtration.
I stood there for a long time watching a man in an expensive down vest struggle to find the right thumbprint setting to retrieve his carbon-fiber road bike. He looked very focused, as if he were landing a small aircraft. I remember when the only way to store your bike downtown was to lean it against a hitching post or a brick wall and hope the chain stayed on when you returned.
It seems we are building a city designed for people who do not actually live in it. The developers call these “lifestyle amenities,” but I have yet to find a lifestyle that requires a heated room for a bicycle while the street outside is lined with four-story buildings that seem to have forgotten how to make windows that open.
“It’s about density,” a young man told me while he adjusted his cycling goggles near the entrance. He moved here from a coastal city last autumn and works entirely through a laptop screen. He explained that by packing us all into these vertical boxes, we are saving the ranchland. I nodded, because it is difficult to argue with someone who owns so many moisture-wicking layers.
We are very good at creating the idea of a rugged mountain town. We have the brick, the reclaimed wood, and the expensive gear. Yet, the more we add these high-tech storage solutions, the less the downtown feels like a place where someone might actually buy a spool of twine or a bag of nails. It feels like a showroom for a life that is perpetually about to begin, just as soon as the weather improves or the trail conditions dry out.
Perhaps we should stop building facilities for the equipment we use to explore the valley and start building spaces for the people who still remember the names of the mountains. I am not against progress, but I do miss the days when a bike was just a way to get from the house to the post office.
These days, you need a password to park a bicycle, but I still can’t find a place to buy a decent hammer on a Sunday. Progress is a quiet thing, usually arriving in the form of a bill for something you never realized you needed.
Phyllis Grainbelt has lived in the Gallatin Valley her entire life and remembers when the Co-op was just a co-op. She does not elaborate on what this means.