Been Here a While
Scott Davis
The trouble with living in Nevada County for forty years is that you eventually begin to think you belong here. This is a mistake.
He arrived in 1986, a young man of thirty with a wife, a collection of household furniture, and the apparently reasonable belief that forty years ought to be sufficient time to establish residency just about anywhere. He was wrong.
Nevada County has a system for deciding who counts as a local, and nobody has ever written down the rules. As near as he can tell, they involve ancestry, the ability to identify buildings that have been demolished, and whether you remember when you could drive through Grass Valley without stopping at a traffic light.
Been Here a While is a collection of stories from the Sierra foothills: coffee-shop parliaments, generator Olympics, directions given by dead landmarks, and a retirement that didn't take. They move between Grass Valley, Nevada City, Penn Valley, Rough and Ready, and the smaller places in between, told by a man who has lived here long enough to love it and not nearly long enough to understand it.