This was interesting. I asked Carlos and Julio if they wanted lunch or three hundred each to work the rest of the day. They were suspicious. I explained the situation, and they opted for the three hundred. So out of the two thousand, I’d pocket fourteen hundred after paying the boys while using the Joyce truck and the Joyce fuel. That’s not bad by any standard, but there were uncertainties. The shipper was bound to be somewhat disconcerted, and, this being Colorado, we might be greeted at gunpoint, or by a posse of close friends in an ugly mood. Regardless, we were ready. I fired up the tractor, hooked up an equipment-loaded trailer, and headed out to Evergreen.
The exurbs west of Denver are mottled with winding roads sporting thousands of homes built into the mountainsides. Towns like Conifer, Genesee, and Aspen Park sprout up practically overnight, and developers grab any piece of ground that can hold a foundation to build somebody’s dream house in the hills. It’s a zoning nightmare and typical of Colorado. When easterners think of Colorado, they think of pristine mountain vistas and John Denver. Colorado, in fact, has more in common with southeast Florida, Phoenix, and Los Angeles when it comes to land use. The primary goal is to get the politicians to provide as much publicly subsidized infrastructure as possible so the real estate honchos can build more houses, condos, strip malls, and blacktop. The secondary goal is to have the existing taxpayers pay for the new schools, sewer plants, roads, and police departments that these same taxpayers didn’t ask for. People always seem to be puzzled when their bucolic communites get overrun by sprawl. Well, guess what? It didn’t just happen. It was planned, years before, by the developers and the elected officials in the town hall. Even more likely is that the developers were the elected officials in the town hall. Most people are too busy changing diapers and getting the kids to dance recitals to notice what is really going on out there. You can trace the entire arc of American history back to real estate scams starting with the Colonial Ordinance of 1648 in Massachusetts, which is still in effect. It’s actually even earlier if you want to dig a little. The pilgrims in Plymouth and the second and third sons of English gentry in Jamestown may have been starving to death, but that didn’t stop them from platting all the ground. Our elementary school history books say that George Washington started out as a land surveyor. Well, he was sort of a surveyor. What he really was was a real estate speculator on a grand scale, as were most of our founding fathers.
Here’s an interesting historical question: Why did so many American Civil War battles take place near courthouses? We’ve got Spotsylvania, Amelia, Jacinto, Stafford, Dinwiddie, and Appomattox, to name just six. Why were there so many courthouses in the rural USA in the nineteenth century? Was there so much theft? No. Robbery? No. Crimes of violence? No. The reason was that everybody was suing everyone else over land possession, ownership, titles, and development rights. Well, the real estate interests settled it all down over the ensuing century by operating quietly and effectively so that the path of unbridled development looked like progress and the ensuing sprawl looked random. It may have been progress, depending upon your definition, but it certainly wasn’t random. As a result we have all these swaths of low-density sprawl all over the country.
Evergreen is one of these. Miles and miles of roads and scattered houses where school bus rides are mini road trips and you have to drive half an hour to get a pint of milk. I was climbing uphill in the truck around the hairpin turns when I saw what looked to be a large yard sale. This had to be it. I parked on the main road before negotiating the driveway. This was potential hostile territory. If I was the shipper I’d be supremely pissed off and panting to take it out on somebody. Julio was in the lead with his 240 pounds and six feet three inches; Carlos was next, his taut frame expressing menace. I was last in line, looking for a rifle barrel sticking out a window. There wasn’t a sound. It was a little past 1 p.m. as we passed through the mess in the driveway, veered around the piano lying on the pavement, and rang the front doorbell. I heard a baby crying, then footsteps, then the door opened, and there was our shipper, Mr. McNally, a pleasant-looking young man, holding an infant. Mrs. McNally was behind him with a toddler on her hip. I bravely stepped in front of my phalanx.
“Mr. McNally? I’m Finn Murphy from Joyce Van Lines. I’m here to make things right.”
“Thank God,” said Mrs. McNally.
“I’ve no idea what happened here and don’t need to know, but a short summary might be useful. Can you tell me anything?”
“Sure,” said Mr. McNally, “The driver showed up this morning and started to unload with his crew. We were in here with the kids. All of a sudden the truck left with everything still in the driveway. I called the office in New Jersey, and they said they’d figure it out. That’s all I know.”
“You didn’t have any words or anything with the driver or the crew?”
“Nothing. They came in, said hello, everything seemed fine, and then they were gone.”
“Well, I’m very sorry about all this. We’re a local crew. This is Julio and Carlos. We’ll get this all sorted out for you.”
“That sounds great.”
“There will be no more problems. Let’s do a walk-through and see where everything’s going.”
The residence was what they call an upside-down house, which meant the kitchen and living room were on the second level and the bedrooms on the ground level. They’re built that way so the mountain vista, really just a view of other houses and power lines, is enjoyed from the living level. On the ground floor there was a small interior stairway with a sharp turn leading up, and an outside stairway leading to a deck and the entrance to the kitchen. The house was built in the 1970s and was a total piece of shit.