Eagle

It’s Saturday in Syracuse, and the bags are packed and ready to go. Mary and I arrived home safely from Nixa, Missouri, the first town in this adventure that we’re calling The Young and the Wireless. Tomorrow we leave for Eagle, Colorado, where we (and this blog) will be coming to you live and unplugged.

Under the Patchwork Nation model, Eagle is representing “Boom Town” demographics in our project. What exactly does this mean? Growth, relative affluence, 38.5 million Americans, to name a few. But as well-researched as this category is, a face-to-face meeting is in order. These neat little community categories beg us, as journalists, to find the correlations as well as the deviations.

My grandfather was a compulsive labeler. In his tool shed, each nail drawer, box, and peg board hole had a neatly-printed label to go with it. As we found in Nixa, labels can help you find what you’re looking for. But as with my grandfather’s system, what’s inside the drawer is often much less tidy.

I can’t wait to be surprised. Not just by the mountains (which I’ve been craving for the past 2 years out here in the East), but by the people who make up the place we’re calling America’s Boom Town.