These observations are of a dynamic setting. They focus on how migration is
related to life in a small town in a beautiful setting. Migration is an eternal human
process which is particularly definitive of the American psyche. Migration is
neither an independent variable nor dependent. It is caused by social events while
causing still more. It is part of the experience of a never ending transformation of
people and the places where they reside. The diverse considerations that people
make before, during and after they decide to move are described. Their
considerations are affected by their particular and idiosyncratic qualities. Their
decisions are made with imperfect and often inaccurate knowledge. Their decisions
evoke continual and long-term consequences on the local community, since there
is a never ending stream of newcomers and out-migrants.

No general or systematic theoretical observation is presented here. Unless it
be this: Humans are simultaneously rational and irrational, some seemingly more
one than the other. There is a certain fuzzy logic in what they say and do.
Contemporary theory about migration contributes enormously to understanding and
explaining how people move, but no single theory systematically explains most of
what they say and how they behave. More broadly, social theory has much to offer
to this understanding. Perhaps what is most valuable, social theory expresses
eternal paradoxes about behavior. Is it rational or irrational? Is there reality to life
or is life, that is, social behavior in its environment, a matter of construction and
interpretation? Can a community be planned effectively or does planning create
more problems than solutions? Should sociologists give advice about applying
ideas to society or should they remain locked away, academic monks in cells lined
with books?

The answers to these and other fundamental questions have no singularly
correct answers. They place an intellectual framework around these observations
regarding how people in a small town in the Rocky Mountains act and think about
their lives. Migration is an inflow and outflow process that links social values
expressed through individual decision making to physically relocate. Migration
creates effects by the arrival and departure of these people, taken as individuals and
as a collective, a cohort coming and going. It is one tiny flow in the river of life that
shares many common qualities with the ebbs and flows of the broader stream.

The fuzzy and poetic foundations of social life acknowledged, this also is a
study of very practical and tangible elements of personal and town life in a modern
industrial urban nation. Subdivisions with toxic weeds and stray dogs are real and
annoying impacts on the physical environment from population growth and
expansion. Increased and aggressive traffic, and the loss of semipublic lands, affect
the constructed environment. Higher prices and an expanding concentration of
cosmopolitan elite are other residues of change in the social system.

My observations are heavily influenced by my training and experiences as a
sociologist. I often think of the impacts of social development more than merely the
process of change. My personal values and beliefs also have influenced what is
written here. I have been passionate about understanding the reasons why people
move from city to country, and then back again. Communities, meaning deeply
entrenched small populations with common values sustaining themselves in the

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