It's another new year, well it will be in a couple hours. I just realized I have lived here in Ashland Oregon since September, 1992. It is now 14 years and some change, the longest I have lived anywhere in one town in my life. Even though I was fortunate to grow up in two of the most beautiful and pleasant areas in the country (the San Jose/Santa Clara Valley before it was overdeveloped by the computer industry, and four years in Naples, Florida) and spent another roughly ten years in Contra Costa County, I think I would stay in Ashland even if I won the proverbial lottery and could live anywhere.
There's something nice about living in a place that has a first-class but small university near-by as well as a lot of theater courtesy of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Oregon Cabaret (pictured above, looking down on East Main Street where the Ashland Springs Hotel is the big building in the background) . It's not that I'm a great theater-goer. I might go to the Shakespeare Festival (which shows both the Bard and more contemporary fare from February to October) just twice a year and hit the cabaret or some other local productions once or twice. But having professional live theater creates an ambiance of visitors around the area that makes it a much more inviting place than if the town had, say, the HQ of the Hell Angels or the Yakov Smirnoff Theater al a the attractions of Branson, Missouri.
It's cold but not frigid in winter and hot but not humid in the Summer. The snow stays up in the hills above us for the most part and that makes the street driving safer.
There's Lithia Park (some pictures of which you can see on my slide show feature on the upper right sectionof this site) and several good used book stores.
The people are generally tolerant; Ashland is a liberal/progressive enclave in conservative Southern Oregon. Still there area lot of churches and American flags flying on holidays (or all year around) so one can feel at home no matter what your political mood at the moment.
It certainly isn't like some white-flight suburb in central California or the Deep South, but it doesn't have the practiced contrarian ethos of of Berkeley, California, with that polis' emphasis on being so counter-culture that Che Guevara could get a seat on the Ashland city council if he could only get past his usual "hey, give me a break, amigos, I'm dead" excuses.
Nor is it likely to become a pro-growth way station for rapacious developers. The only thing you can count on in this world is change, someone once said, but Ashland is going about its growth slowly and letting the outlying communities do most of the development. I like it that way.
Part of me will always miss the Bay Area and south Florida. But this is my home now and I am a lucky fellow to be living here. My New Years' Resolution is for my wife and I to travel to someplace we haven't been this year, but move--not if I can help it.
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