Welcome, Now Leave: How a would-be Shangri went hopelessly cattywampus - Tapa blanda

Sinopsis

This is the quirky, outlandish true story of a would-be Shangri-la turned ghost development

It's the engaging tale of Mount Shasta Vista, a sprawling, remote subdivision of 1,641 generous-sized parcels, carved into the remote juniper flats of far Northern California in the Sixties and the diverse, often-at-odds buyers attracted to them.

Written by a resident of nearly five decades, the book is part local history, part memoir, and part penetrating social study. It’s told wryly, with the patient eye of a bemused anthropologist who has watched the place unfold over time in all its improbable dysfunctionality. But it never treats Mount Shasta Vista as a punchline. Instead it offers an intimate, sober, yet often-comical look at the startling cultural conflicts that shaped it and the root causes of its almost absurdist discombobulation.

For decades after an initial group of well-heeled L.A. retirees flocked to the place in the rarefied late Sixties, land-hungry city dwellers with big dreams and small budgets snapped up the parcels to escape "Babylon” and live on the land. But all reckoned with the pronounced lack of infrastructure: no water, few power lines, 66 miles of cinder roads – and a tangle of building codes that made the simplest cabin-building effort feel like a labor of Hercules.

Then, starting in 2015, a radically new chapter began. Rogue cannabis growers poured en masse into the 80%-empty, 'road kill' subdivision. Arriving as California's cannabis laws were about to be rewritten, the ensuing tension and chaos, the place briefly became the new ground-zero of outlaw grows, a phenomenal mini Emerald Triangle that gained statewide attention.

The strangely charmed land has been forever caught between the dream of tranquil country living and an endless series of rude awakenings. Welcome, Now Leave captures that tension with real emotional weight and a skewed humor.

In this book you discover:

• The politics of building your own house
• Why power line extension rates skyrocketed, and what that meant for lot holders hoping to build
• The arrival of rebellious back-to-the-landers in the late ‘60s through the ‘70s
• The phenomenal 2015 turning point, when an invasion by unlicensed cannabis growers, mostly Asian American Hmong, turned the place upside down
• The systemic prejudice faced by these new residents, aggravated by the bold grow operations
• Mount Shasta's reputation as a mystical, healing mountain forever drawing people
• The radical body freedom embraced by certain longtime residents
• The shifting maze of new, untested cannabis regulations and how people dealt with - or ignored – them

Part local history, part social satire, part memoir, and part elegy for a peculiar lotus land that forever seeks a place in the sun, Welcome, Now Leave asks two simple questions. Why did this place go so wrong? And how much will people risk, sacrifice, and compromise in the elusive search for the hoped-for peace and quiet of country living?

The answers might surprise you, even as you learn of the intimate interplay of politics, basic freedom rights, realty hustling, idle speculation, and unstoppable social and economic forces all converging on the still-untamed land.

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