I Prefer to Leave
Jan. 12th, 2025 07:15 pmI won't be able to leave the United States before Donald Trump is sworn in (groan, again) as president. But I am taking concrete steps toward moving to some friendlier nation.
I have identified a top candidate destination, but I am not going to tell the world what it is, yet. Better to wait until I know that I'll actually be able to go there.
It's a maddeningly slow process, the more so because I am also mildly under the weather. I remain reasonably confident that I will be able to make it out before it's too late.
Summer. Yuck.
Jun. 26th, 2023 03:45 pmI really, really don't like summer. Not in any of the places that I've lived since I left graduate school in 1972, at any rate. All of those places have been in the Eastern time zone of the USA, and you will note that I now have completed fifty-one years of not liking summer.
What don't I like about it? The weather, obviously. The heat, and the humidity. That's what you get in the eastern US. Okay, bits of New England are partial exceptions, but still.
Would I be happier in a place like New Mexico, where it gets pretty hot but is always much less humid? A few years back, I thought so. I spent a non-trivial amount of time there, most recently in August of 2019, for the purpose of testing that hypothesis. And what was my conclusion?
Strictly speaking, I suppose I would be happier there, weather-wise. But not enough so. I could conceivably still decide to move there, but, since that last trip, any real enthusiasm for the idea has pretty much evaporated. Like summertime rain there: at times, you can see rain in the sky above you, but it doesn't reach the ground.
For that matter, my history of trying to escape from typical Eastern summers goes further back than that. It was a big part of the motivation for the last move I actually did make: from the Raleigh area (in the region of North Carolina known as the Piedmont) to the Ashville area (in the western mountains of the same state). It's the same story: I do like the summer weather here better than I did there, but not nearly enough so to make me glad when the summer begins.
In short, I really don't like summer.
It has come to my attention, however, that not everyone feels the same way. There are even some, bless their strange little hearts, who enjoy what it's like in summer even in a place like Raleigh.
I invite you to tell us how you feel about summer weather. About summers where you live, or if so moved about those in some other place you've been.
Westward. Ho?
Dec. 1st, 2019 05:20 pmI'm getting ready to move. That's going to take a while; It's not at all certain that I'll even be ready by spring. There's a serious need to lighten my load: you know, get rid of stuff.
Move where? My most recent truly personal journal entry, posted on September 11, was shortly after my return from a trip to New Mexico, which trip was undertaken because I was thinking of moving there. In that entry, I expressed some uncertainty as to whether I was going to go through with that plan.
Now? I'm leaning towards it. Does that mean that all of my doubts and concerns have been completely overcome? No. But I've come around, pretty much, to the view that the only way to be certain that it's the right place for me is to try it and see.
About the "pretty much" part: my view of the decision-making process is that you can't claim to have finished it to have truly decided until you've taken some action that commits you to the plan. And, for better and for worse, there's really no occasion for that now: the process of getting ready is not yet at the stage where anything I need to do depends on the destination.
That earlier journal entry didn't give a clear and complete picture of what the "doubts and concerns" the uncertainties about New Mexico as my new home actually were. And I still can't do that. But if I say a few words about one of them, that may give you more of the flavor of what the overall decision process is like.
So, let's talk about the weather.
A big part of my motivation for wanting to move, somewhere, is that I really don't like the hot and humid summer weather in North Carolina. I knew, before the trip, that in New Mexico, you almost never get the "humid" part and that, as a result, it tends to cool down more, and faster, in the evenings. But it still can get hot in the daytime.
I deliberately made the trip around the hottest time of year, in order to see whether I could be comfortable with that weather pattern. And that, indeed, was my first, and biggest, source of doubt, when the trip was over. No question that I prefer the weather in New Mexico to that in North Carolina. But I asked myself: if I'm going to go to the trouble of moving, should I perhaps refuse to compromise, and instead pick a destination which fits my weather preferences more exactly?
Maybe I should. But, as I indicated earlier, I now lean in the other direction: toward acting on the assumption that I can't really know the answer to that question unless I actually do go and live there for a year or so.
Why?
If I answered that question thoroughly, it would take so long that you'd fall asleep before you finished reading this (if you haven't already). One obvious piece of the answer, and a clue as to why it would take so long to be thorough, is that weather isn't everything.
But even confining ourselves to the subject of weather, I just don't think that I have enough data to make a final decision. Another factor quite relevant to how I'll feel about it after a whole year: how long is the period when it's too hot for me? If it's not too long, then maybe I'll be happy with just making behavioral adjustments during that period: slow down some, overall. Take a siesta: already a somehat attractive idea, and the more so the older I get (right now, I'm seventy-three). And, during the hottest few weeks, don't spend too much time outdoors in the middle of the day.
That last bit can get tricky. It will help a lot provided that you can spend those hours in the right kind of indoor space, in which the heat doesn't affect you too much. (And, to make it more difficult, I strongly prefer that this be accomplished by means other than air conditioning.)
In other words, a lot depends on the sort of building in which you live.
You want to close the windows in the heat of day, and open them in the evening and overnight. And for this to be effective, you need "through ventilation": openable windows on (at least) two opposite sides of the building. Electric fans are important, too, during both parts of the daily cycle.
A further note on through ventilation: this is so important that it (or, rather, the lack of it) almost single-handedly ruins the chances of making an informed decision on the basis of a trip like the one I made last summer: a two-week visit to the state in which one is staying at hotels. Because, you see, "through ventilation" is something that American hotel rooms hardly ever have. (This may have some relation to the fact that they almost always do have air conditioning.)
One additional important architectural feature: thick walls, made of a material with a considerable capacity to store heat. When combined with the sizeable difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures, these give you the ability to fine-tune the indoor temperature, by learning when to open and close the windows.
There's more than one way to design a building with those properties. One of the most effective ways, though, "just happens" to be the building method that's also the most long-established in New Mexico. It's called adobe.
It has to be real adobe, though. Santa Fe, specifically, has a building code which requires that practically all buildings look like they're made of adobe. But the great majority of the resulting buildings are what is known as "fauxdobe" and that isn't worth squat when it comes to keeping the indoors cool without AC.
And that surprise! is a good place for me to switch topics, at least partially. The new focus: assuming that I do move to New Mexico, then where, more specifically? To what local area within the state?
The previous post listed the three towns that I spent time in, during last summer's trip: Santa Fe, Las Vegas, and Taos. Each of those is roughly in the northeast quarter of the state. And I am still operating on the assumption that I will choose one of those three.
(A reminder: if you've only heard of one place called Las Vegas, it's probably the one in Nevada. That's not the one I'm referring to here.)
And now I'm in a position to tell you that Santa Fe, probably the best known (and largest) of the three, has fallen to the bottom of my list.
One major reason for this is that Santa Fe and, specifically, housing in Santa Fe is a lot more expensive. But there's more to it than that.
The new leading candidate is Las Vegas, which is probably the least expensive of the three. But more importantly, I think: it seems more like a community.
(Taos, definitely still a possibility, is somewhere in the middle, in several respects.)
Why does Las Vegas feel more like a community? I can't say for sure; I just felt that way, hanging out there. Here are a couple of things that may have something to do with it.
The distribution of the population by age seems to be wider, and more balanced. I saw proportionately more teenagers and young adults. Santa Fe skews older: a lot of people have gone there to retire. (Yes, I would count as one of those. But still.)
Santa Fe also skews richer, and that, too, feels like a point in Las Vegas' favor. I'm pretty sure I could afford to live in Santa Fe; I just no longer feel so much as if I would want to. It's as if people in Santa Fe are into striving to be special, while people in Las Vegas are just folks.
And now I can circle back to the matter of weather, and the housing best adapted to it. Of the places under consideration, Las Vegas (or so I perceive) is the one where it would be easiest to find and rent a dwelling made of real adobe. (Partly because I wouldn't have to sift through all those fake ones.)
In fact, the distinction between real and fake adobe could stand as a symbol for the broader cultural differences between Las Vegas and Santa Fe. If I wanted to be snarky, I could say: If you live in Las Vegas, you live in New Mexico. If you live in Santa Fe, you live in a theme park about New Mexico.
And there's more! According to one of my Las Vegas informants, most of the city's real adobe houses are in that part of town which has the largest proportion of Spanish-surnamed residents. (Not surprising: those folks would be more aware of the advantages, since their people have lived in New Mexico much longer than the Anglos have.)
So, as a bonus, I might pick up a little more of the language. If one wants to become a New Mexican, that has to count for something, verdad?
I'm back from New Mexico
Sep. 11th, 2019 01:27 pmActually, I've been back a while -- almost as long as I was away, but not quite. (The time that I was away from home was a little over three weeks.)
I spent time in three towns in New Mexico: Santa Fe, Las Vegas, and Taos. (Yes, there's a Las Vegas in New Mexico, not to be confused with the one in Nevada. New Mexico's is smaller, but considerably older.) My number-one purpose for making this trip was to help me decide whether I want to live in one of those places.
So what's the verdict? Well, in brief, there isn't one yet. I still like the idea of living in the "Land of Enchantment," as New Mexico calls itself, but there are other alternatives which won't let themselves be ruled out yet. There are a lot of factors to be considered. Weather is one, but also cultural and even political factors.
Under "culture," you could include my sense of whether I would be able to make friends in a particular place. But once I start thinking about that, then I also have to consider that it would be better if there were some people there -- or not too far away -- whom I already knew. Friends or relatives, either or both.
Now as for politics ... well. I have the impression that the political landscape in New Mexico is rather distinctive. I don't mean more to the left, or more to the right, than the rest of the country; it's more a matter of the fault lines being different. People's politics depend to a considerable degree on what group they identify themselves with.
Lately, it's become fashionable to use the word "tribe" instead of "group" in discussions of American politics. That already points to one of the ways that New Mexico is atypical; "tribe" probably suggests something different in a New Mexican context, because of the relatively large Native American population of the state. The 2010 census reported that 9.4% of New Mexicans were Native American, more than any other state except Alaska.
(To translate the previous paragraph into Canadian, substitute "First Nations" for "Native American[s]".)
That's only one small example of how the social landscape, and therefore the political landscape, of New Mexico is distinctive. For now, I shall let it stand for the whole.
And for the moment, the distinctiveness of New Mexican society will, in turn, stand in for a larger whole: the mass of issues that so far have prevented me from making a real decision about where I want to live.