Jennifer Sherman - Dividing Paradise: Rural Inequality and the Diminishing American Dream

I first visited Paradise Valley in the summer of 2009, with my climbing partner Will. I had moved to Eastern Washington the previous summer to begin a tenure-track job at Washington State University. Will, a Washington native, was a knowledgeable guide to the many beautiful outdoor recreation areas of the Pacific Northwest, some well-known, some obscure. He had not told me much about Paradise Valley ahead of time, except that we had to drive through it to access nearby alpine rock-climbing. Youll love it, he told me, and I trusted him.

As we turned into the valley and crossed over the Paradise River for the first time, I was awestruck. The free-flowing rivera rarity in Washington State, where most rivers are dammed and harnessed for electricitysparkled like strings of jewels in the late afternoon sunlight. Everything was bathed in the golden light that shone off the water, and it felt ethereal. Tree-covered mountains rose from its sides as we wound upward along the curving road into the valley. The mountains grew larger and the landscape more impressive the further we went. It was higher up, when the valley floor opened up into wide, lush meadows flanked by steep snow-covered peaks, that I first began to sense the significance that this place would have for me.

Five years earlier, I had wrapped up a year spent in another mountain valley: Golden Valley, Californiaa remote, beautiful, and harsh place. Golden Valley became the subject of my 2009 book, Those Who Work, Those Who Dont: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America. The landscape of Paradise Valley evoked the landscape of Golden Valley for me, a similar combination of verdant green valley floor with alpine peaks rising above. Yet as we drove through the main towns of Paradise Valley, I was struck by how different this place felt. While Golden Valley had been a community on the decline, with few services and little public life visible to the outsider, Paradise Valley was a tourist mecca, offering a steady stream of options for lodging, food, and retail. There were art galleries, coffee shops, ice cream parlors, and pizza places as well as restaurants that ranged from brewpubs, to upscale dining, to casual restaurants catering to large families with children. There were stores selling trinkets, high-end clothes, health food, and sports equipment. There were multiple businesses that rented skis in the winter and bicycles in the summer. Everything that tourists might want, regardless of their cultural backgrounds and social class, was available somewhere in the valley. In this way it was nothing at all like Golden Valley and its barren lack of services.

As a sociologist, questions immediately filled my head. What made these two mountain valleysboth in the Pacific Northwest, both quite remote, both once dependent on logging and ranchingso very, very different from one another? The role of amenity tourism was the obvious answer, which seemed to reinforce everything that I knew from the rural sociological literature about the positive impacts of this form of economic development.economy, and how do they feel about people like Will and me, driving up on a long weekend in cars stuffed to the windows with expensive outdoor gear, to camp, climb, eat a burger, and drink a beer before heading out again without ever getting to know them?

As we headed further up into the Cascade Mountains to find camping for the night, I told Will that I was going to come back and study this place someday. He laughed at me, somewhat baffled as to what I found so interesting. For him, Paradise Valley was an annoyance you had to drive through in order to get higher into the mountains, a place of traffic jams and tourists best avoided unless you needed to stop for supplies. It was merely the gateway to our wilderness weekend, not a goal in and of itself. I returned to Paradise Valley many times in the ensuing five years, to climb, to camp, to ski, and occasionally to just relax in the mountains. I stayed in Forest Service campgrounds, vacation cabins, and hotels depending on the time of year and the purpose of the trip as well as whom I was with and their preferences. I continued to be fascinated by the place and the questions that nagged in the back of my mind on each trip, making me feel slightly uncomfortable with my social location as an amenity tourist in a rural community.

I finally got my chance to study Paradise Valley in 2014, ten years after Id left that other mountain valley. I was no longer a young, nave graduate student living hand-to-mouth and wondering if I could pull off a research project of this scale. I was now a tenured professor on sabbatical, driving a Prius instead of a beat-up Subaru, with a salary that was higher than that of most of my interview participants. I had years of experience in qualitative and ethnographic research, had interviewed hundreds of people over the previous decade, and understood the things I would need to do to comprehend the social dynamics of this place. Within ten months in Paradise Valley I was able to do significantly more data collection than I achieved in my twelve months in Golden Valleyfortunately so, because I found Paradise Valley to be much more socially diverse and complicated than Golden Valley was in the early 2000s.

The resulting book is not a sequel to my 2009 one; rather, it has been written in a sort of conversation with it, continuing my in-depth investigation of the dynamics of rural America in the twenty-first century, including the struggles, the rewards, and the cultural discourses that permit its residents to make sense of their lives. In this endeavor it is my intention to shine a light on American culture more generally, including helping to understand the ways in which we as a nation have come to accept and believe in the intense inequality that we are experiencing in the early decades of this century.