By JAMES RICKMAN
Los Alamos

Choices have consequences.

That’s what my parents used to say, starting back as far as I can remember. As a tiny kid I didn’t have the bandwidth or life experience to grasp the larger context of those three words beyond recognition that bad behavior led to delivery of a few quick, violent smacks to my backside from The Belt or a Rubbermaid dustpan.

Years later, during a few fall weekends each year, we were dragged up to the ski hill for work parties. As a husky kid, the lot I usually drew was hauling freshly chainsawed aspen stumps to the bed of a truck so they could be hauled away to the base of the mountain or wherever it was they went. Some weekends I worked so hard that I was fast asleep in the car before we even hit Never Shine corner a few hundred yards down the road.

But I remember how happy I was each year at the annual Ski Swap, watching my newly minted annual ski pass with a brand-new photo being run through the laminator by an adult volunteer. I would quickly thread the thin beaded chain through the still-warm ID and proudly hang it around my neck, knowing endless hours of weekend skiing lay ahead thanks to my own efforts toiling alongside others getting the mountain ready for another season. That was the first time I realized my parents’ words didn’t simply refer to spankings or other negative reinforcements.

One year, shortly after school had started once again, our Cub Scout leader announced that we’d be going on an overnight camping trip up near Truchas in the spring. I relayed the exciting announcement to my parents, only to be deflated with the stinging news that tents and sleeping bags cost money that they didn’t have, so if I wanted to go, I’d better start working harder.

My extensive morning paper route already was netting me “good money,” making me the envy of most of my friends and classmates, who relied on their parents for generous weekly allowances. But simple math revealed that there was no way I could save what I needed in time. Desperate, I invented another side hustle at the suggestion of my big brother: Selling Wallace & Brown greeting cards door-to-door.

It was humiliating work in a town where heads of households relished the opportunity to admonish an eleven-year-old kid that the community’s Green River Ordinance prohibited door-to-door peddling and that the cops were going to come for me if I wasn’t off their porch in five seconds. I could hear them counting down as I skittered off into the darkness beyond the glow of the porch light toward the next house, clutching my tattered briefcase full of sappy cards with line drawings of puppies or kittens with bows or bonnets on the front and hackneyed phrases celebrating milestones or good fortune in bright red cursive inside.

By the time spring arrived, I had gone through four re-orders from Wallace & Brown, the last of which also contained a certificate acknowledging me as their top salesman for the region. As far as I knew, I was the only salesman in the region.

At the local sporting goods store, I bought the finest down sleeping bag the North Face made and a high-quality, off-brand tent that the owner recommended. At the register I was $12 short. My father bailed me out, smiling and muttering under his breath that that’s probably how much they would have spent anyway. Walking out of that store with my new things was one of the proudest moments of my life, so after the camping trip I snatched up the vacated paper route in the adjacent neighborhood and doubled my earnings.

In ninth grade our coach added morning workouts to our swim team regimen, so I was up at 4 a.m. three days a week in order to finish my augmented route before practice. I got my first full time job during junior year and earned work-study credits. The 7 a.m. shift on Saturdays and Sundays kept my partying in check.

Los Alamos has always had its caste system. In those days the delineations were the kids whose parents worked at the lab and whose parents didn’t. A subset of us poor kids were the ones who lived in the “trailer park” out on East Jemez Road. In the upper echelons, rank was further refined by whether parents were laboratory honchos, hobnobbers with honchos, or everyone else.

I often heard the offspring of these self-selected pinks bemoaning the boredom of living in our small town. Our ski hill was okay, they’d say, but it was nothing compared to Vail, which was where they spent Christmas; none of the local restaurants could deliver the fare they’d enjoyed during their last Spring Break family Odyssey to a place with white sand beaches and palm trees; our local stores didn’t yet carry the latest shoes or fashions they’d seen during their jaunts to the East or West coasts while checking out colleges.

With my work, play and social schedules, boredom was a foreign concept, an invention of the privileged. I had saved enough to buy my first car by senior year. That acquisition took me down many strange roads, not all of them good.

One year my misadventures motivated my father, who was working at the state penitentiary, to get together with his workmates to design a specially catered “Scared Straight” program just for me. A week “on the inside” closely shadowing my father, who acted like I was next week’s incoming fresh meat for the other prisoners, quickly disabused me of any aberrant ideas brewing inside my head. I upped my college savings strategy. Ten years later I graduated, personally owning that accomplishment in addition to everything else I had worked so hard for over the years.

Choices have consequences.

Like every kid in this community, I couldn’t wait to leave Los Alamos. Later, like some, I couldn’t wait to return. I am simultaneously amazed and delighted that our population is roughly the same as it was nearly 50 years ago when I was in high school. While some puzzle over our county’s lack of brick-and-mortar businesses despite having one of the wealthiest populations per-capita in the nation, we all inherently understand that our circumstances result from the choices we make.

The instant gratification and lower prices afforded by online shopping help explain the empty storefronts in our downtown, whether we choose to admit it or not. And while all of us would love to see an abundance of affordable housing that we could snatch up with our spare cash as investment properties, we acknowledge with winks and nods that when we say “affordable housing,” we mean for us and not the lower castes who would occupy it and bring to the community the ills associated with poverty and ignorance. Were this not the case, our population would have at least doubled during the past five decades.

Gone are the days when sweat equity by an army of volunteers conquered a mountain of work required to operate amenities such as our ski hill. We’ve opted to privatize in order to maximize the precious-little leisure time that remains in our overprogrammed lives. We quake in personal Fear of Missing Out at the expense of Community. With no personal stake beyond membership dues, our obsession with instant gratification fixates on price alone—not the actual costs that our choices accrue upon everything else in our interconnected world.

Uncomfortable truths such as these ignite furious and righteous indignation on social media platforms among members of the most recent generations—whose parents hovered to ensure that none of their darlings would suffer a skinned knee, a bruised ego, rejection by a plum university, or being deprived of a participation medal for even the most dismal of performances.

The heartbeat of our warming planet quickens. Eventually, the consequences will be laid bare. And still there will be those who insist that the world, or even our own little community, owes them something, and not the other way around.

I know what my own parents would have to say about this.