You Gotta Love It Did I ever mention that I love living in Crestline? I do. Has anything changed about that lately? Nope, and I’m not alone—a lot of people tell me that. Our editor, Davey Porter, calls me a Crestline booster. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe I should start a booster club here. That might be a conflict of interest, though, just in case I wanted to start writing a series of negative articles about this place for some reason. I don’t have to, though. That’s being taken care of for me. I was down in the San Diego area during part of the evacuation and was reading an article about our fires. The Copley News reporters were explaining the area in a San Diego Union-Tribune article. They began by talking about the affluence and mansions of Lake Arrowhead. Then they explained Crestline: “Farther to the west lies blue-collar Crestline, known locally as the place where people who work in Lake Arrowhead live.” Have you ever heard that? Is that how we’re known locally? Nobody from Lake Arrowhead has ever said that in my presence. Of course, I’m a pretty big guy. Not one of my friends or acquaintances here in Crestline works in Lake Arrowhead. You’d think from this article that we’re all standing outside the Goodwin’s parking lot in the morning cold every day, stomping around with steam coming out of our mouths, waiting for some Lake Arrowhead person to pull up so we can jump in the back of his pickup truck for an honest day of minimum-wage yard work. Can you imagine Dr. Laura driving up in her Chevy Tahoe and saying: “Jump in, guys. Let’s go do the right thing. We got some beetles to kill. Here’s 40 bucks—now go take on the day.” It makes us sound like poor slobs and the Lake Arrowhead people sound like rich snobs—neither of which is true. I’ve worked for a guy in Lake Arrowhead before, but I did it in the comfort of my home office and got 35 bucks an hour for doing it. I guess that’s what they mean. Isn’t it interesting that you have to go “down” to get to most other places from Crestline. The people in other places that are talking us down are all beneath us. Just something to think about. Another article, in the Los Angeles Times, stated that our town contains some stately stone chateaus (I only know of two). The rest of the sentence says that other than that, Crestline is a collection of cottages and cabins, “some of which might be best described as glorified shacks.” So I guess cottages are the high end and shacks are the low end here. Those print reporters must be making some good money if they consider the 7,000-square-foot, multilevel, modern house on 10 acres of pine and oak that I recently visited a “cottage.” What am I? A Gregory Hillbilly? That means my 2,200-square-foot house on one-half acre must be pretty close to the “shack” category. I’ll tell you this—if they had a helicopter big enough to put my house in a sling and plop it down on a half-acre in Beverly Hills, it would go from the low $160s to the low $1 millions just like that. All I’d need to build is my own “ceement pond” out back and I’d have it made. But who wants to live down there? When I worked as marketing director of an ad agency in Riverside, I first mentioned that I was planning to move to Crestline from Temecula to a group of employees in the lunchroom. One of the owner’s sons pulled me off to the side and almost whispered, “Man, don’t you know that it SNOWS up there?” Like that’s a bad thing. It sure beats sitting inside an air-conditioned development home in Temecula wondering when the summer is going to end so you can stick your toe outside. The people who used to live across the street from me here did the opposite—they just moved from here to Temecula. Shortly after they moved here four years ago I remember the very pregnant young wife walking down the stairs of her house through a foot of snow in early April almost in tears. “Does it always snow this much here?” she cried. “They told us it only snows a little, and then when it does, it doesn’t stick on the ground.” I can’t imagine a real estate agent up here telling that story, but I can imagine that a husband who really likes the mountains might just fudge a little on quoting to her what the real estate agent said... The husband loved the mountains. His wife hated them. Wife1, Husband 0. Welcome to Temecula. Speaking of boosters, Crestline could use a booster shot about now. You really know you have a close-knit community when everyone starts sneezing and coughing and sniffling at the same time. About 350 of us got together in a tight ball on Saturday night and sang Christmas carols in one another’s faces for an hour while we watched the tree at the lake being lit. Just spreadin’ that old holiday cheer around. |
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