Things which have changed (1)

Size.



I should mention some of the ways in which the city, Albuquerque, has changed in the time since I've been gone…that is, the last 30 years or so.



The first and probably the most obvious is sheer size. I've not done serious research, but I did check the web, and according to Wikipedia the current population is 552,804 (or, at least, that's what it was in 2011).  If you include the surrounding areas, what specialists call "the Metropolitan Statistical Area" (MSA), then things get even more interesting. The total population then is in excess of 887,000 souls.



Now, when I left here, in 1979, the population of the whole area…not just Albuquerque but the MSA, which is to say almost the whole center of the state…was just about 480,600 (at least according to the web sites I've checked). In other words, the size of the city and its environs has not quite doubled since I was an undergraduate in my twenties.



And the increase becomes even more dramatic when you go further back. When I was thirteen in 1970, the population of the MSA was somewhere between 350,000 and 370,000 people, depending (I gather) on who you count and how you count them. (I'm using censusscope.org as my source, and it gives a number of about 373,000. However, The Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University provides the smaller number.)



In 1960, when I was all of three years old, the city's population was 315,485 (again, according to censussope). Thus, just in my lifetime, Albuquerque has gone from being a pretty small town, really, to a reasonably serious player among America's middle ranked cities.



This is not necessarily a good thing. There have always been serious traffic problems here—everyone has a car, public transportation exists but it is under-funded, streets are broad and straight, and speed limits are high and often not particularly well-observed.. (There's one avenue not far from where I sit now which has a limit of 55 miles an hour. This is not a highway, understand. It is a city street. It cuts between residential areas and is lined on either side by shopping malls. Thus pedestrians, if there are any, must play a kind of tag or leapfrog with thundering cars and SUVs, all moving at speeds that would be considered intimidating on some Eastern freeways).



Now, though, those problems are increased by an order of magnitude. Traffic can be simply overwhelming. At rush hour (and it seems that, in these days of 24/7 work weeks, every hour is rush hour), you will find yourself at some stoplight on an average city road that has up to eight lanes, not counting the two additional left turn lanes, and a right turn lane as well. Yet, in spite of that vast capacity, you will be trapped, stopped, stuck in motionless traffic, with too many cars (each containing too few people), waiting long hours for something, anything, to move.



I remember when we first started visiting here, my wife and I. My father told Martha, "This town is getting just too big. The traffic is terrible."



Martha, city-girl from the densely populated east, laughed when she told me this. Albuquerque? Wonderful little Albuquerque? Albuquerque the anti-Boston? Albuquerque with too much traffic? How was that possible?



Then, she started driving here on a regular basis.



A few years, even before we moved, she told me, "You know what? Your father was too right."



And at that moment, in her face, I saw the sadness that comes with the death of a hopeful illusion—that is, the idea that somewhere, somehow, there is a kind of Shangri-La, a Mayberry, a Rivendale, where the good things of cities are not balanced by the bad.



I recognized the look quite easily. It's been on my face often enough. In Boston, New York, New Orleans, Las Angeles, Montreal, London, Paris…others.



Think of it as the curse of the small town boy. The boy who goes in search of something, some excitement, some escape…but who discovers the reality that place is largely irrelevant. If the heart is itself not at peace, then there is no safe harbor. Serenity does not come from position.



So he returns to the community that sent him forth. Only, alas, he discovers too the sad wisdom of Mr. Wolfe.



He will have no welcome.