Where People Move To

I can remember reading in the paper several years ago about someone who built a house near a pig farm and almost immediately began filing complaints against the pig farmer about the smell.

 

This is exactly what was happening in Idaho when the Californians started moving up north to Idaho, and even Washington; because there are some nice rural areas in Washington State as well.
Montana probably got some of them, as @Cody Fousnaugh was mentioning; but Montana is known for their hellacious winters of -30below and 4-5 feet of drifting snow, and most of the people moving up from the south were not going to be prepared for that kind of winters. Even in north Idaho, we had people that came each spring, hoping for the minimalist lifestyle, and they soon learned where the weekly livestock auction was held, and stocked up on ducks and chickens, pigs and goats.
Then fall came along, and maybe they made it until the first snowfall; but by then, they were done with living "back to nature", and they hauled all the chickens and livestock back to the auction, and then moved back south somewhere, or rented a house in town.
But once these people moved into town, they wanted us to have all of the laws and regulations that they had hated where they lived before. They all wanted just the laws that suited their needs; but all of them had different needs, and the next thing we knew, Idaho had all kinds of new laws and regulations just like California did.
People who purchased land near car salvage junk yards and built their nice home, then wanted the junk yard to either move or build a 8 foot fence all around the property; just about like Ken's story about the pig farmer.

 

One that comes up here every year is a law requiring people to brush the snow off of their cars before driving them. So far, such a law has not passed through our legislature but each legislative session it is proposed.

Now, you might argue that it makes sense to brush the snow off of your car because the falling snow can be dangerous to anyone driving behind you, and I would agree -- but it doesn't have to be a law.

Most people do that anyhow. For the others, if your car is damaged by snow or ice coming off of a car in front of you, you can already make a claim against their insurance. Even without a law, if so much snow or ice has accumulated so as to pose a danger, there are existing laws that could be used to cite them.

I could drive two hundred miles in northern Maine and not see another car, and I rarely drive so slow that anyone is close behind me.

The problem with laws are that they are always enforced to their most ridiculous extreme, and such a law would encourage cops to ticket someone because an eighth of an inch of snow fell on their car while they were in the supermarket, or because someone couldn't reach the snow in the center of the car.

Maine has a law now that requires headlights to be on whenever the windshield wipers are in use, obviously to encourage people to turn their lights on during rainy conditions. Well, some cop ticketed someone who was running their windshield washer without having first turned his lights on. It wasn't raining, or dark. The judge threw it out of court, but he had to take the time to go to court over such a thing.

Stupid laws are almost always proposed by someone who came here from out of state.

When we moved to Maine, one of the things that were the most striking about the state was that you could drive almost anywhere, even on the Interstate, and not even see most of the towns that you passed by. You didn't see roads that paralleled the Interstate or the cars driving on them, even at night. In most places, you didn't even see the lights from traffic traveling the opposite direction. If you've ever read Stephen King's short story, The Mist, it would be clear that he was describing I-95 in northern Maine. It was beautiful, and one of the things that made Maine unique.

About ten years ago, a seventeen year-old was killed after hitting a moose in northern Maine. His mother, who had moved here from New Jersey or Massachusetts or somewhere, began a campaign to have the state clear the brush and trees away from the roads.

Certainly, I can appreciate the grief that comes with the loss of a child, but she made it her life's work and she finally won.

Now a wide swathe of trees are cut on both sides of all of Maine's roads, and they are mowed regularly. In most places, the median strip will have only a few trees, or narrow patches of trees, and you can see all of the traffic moving in the opposite direction. Everyone's fields, yards, homes, and the roads that pass near the Interstate are in view, and it's kind of like driving on any other road in America. No only the Interstate, but they have been cutting back the tree line along all of Maine's roads.

The last time I looked at the figures showing the number of deaths from collisions with moose, there hasn't been any noticeable decrease. At night, a moose could walk through a parking lot and you wouldn't see it because their eyes don't shine in the dark, and they don't make the jerky movements that alert drivers to the presence of a deer.

Maybe we could kill all the moose or equip them with collars that light up at night.

Like most seventeen year-old boys driving at night, her son was probably driving fast and it's likely that he wasn't paying any attention to his driving.