We'll always have the weather
“It’s windy out there,” says the lone man in the main street bakery. He offers up the observation even though I’ve given no indication that I’m listening. A tall, take-away coffee cup sits on the table and he wraps his hands around it as he looks out the window.
Weather is always a surefire conversation starter.
There were flash flood warnings, I say. He laughs, noting the blue skies, then pulls out his phone and begins searching for doppler radar updates. “All purple everywhere,” he says turning his phone screen toward me so I can see the predicted storm fronts. “A little in Arizona and upstate, a lot in Mexico, Flagstaff.”
It’s monsoon season in Arizona, but the rains have all passed by Havasu. On a few nights the wind will sweep through with gusto, knocking over patio tables and uprooting umbrellas. The flags here all look like they’ve been through a battle so tattered are their ends.
The man says he’s lived here for 46 years, so he should know when a monsoon is coming. “They had a big one in Phoenix, and hail about that big out east,” he says, putting his thumb and index finger together to form a circle the size of a golf ball.
We’re the only two people in the bakery aside from a young girl manning the counter. Outside the streets are dead quiet, as is much of Havasu this time of year. The weather gets so hot the snowbirds retreat. Families with school kids take advantage of summer holidays, and locals who have nowhere else to go are left tending empty restaurants or going for a drink at bars with only a handful of people.
He introduces himself as Dave and says he does dishes at a sandwich shop down the street from the bakery. The management cut his normal four-day shift to three, he says, meaning his wages have also been docked. Dave says his brother is helping him out with his phone bill and other expenses.
He is a big man with days-old stubble and wire rimmed glasses. His t-shirt, black with the sandwich shop logo on the left breast, is faded around the neck and shoulders and hugs his generous belly. He asks where I’m from and when I say out of town he dives into a story about how he once tagged along on a trip across the country with a friend who was driving a Mayflower truck. They made it to 19 states in total — including Maryland, Mississippi and Texas. He’d like to go to Sacramento where his brother works in roofing. And Montana.
Dave seems to take the hard knocks as they come, lodging no complaint about his shift cut. His family has all moved away, but he likes it here in Havasu, a place everyone comes back to eventually, he says.
The city has changed a lot in the decades since an eccentric entrepreneur from California built a chainsaw factory here and launched an ambitious project to carve a city out of raw desert. It went through a building boom that helped inflate the population from just a few hundred people after its founding to more than 50,000 as of the latest census. Then the housing bubble burst and home values plummeted. It you were looking for a house around 2008, you could have found one for $7,000, Dave says.
Housing prices have since rebounded and a lack of supply has driven home values up as much as 7% in the past year. But it's still affordable by California standards and remains high on the list of good retirement destinations.
That's little comfort to Dave, who is struggling to pay his phone bill. And it carries little bearing for the town's future. People may come back here eventually, but I get little sense that they're coming in to jump start the economy through new industry or innovation. Instead it feels more like a town emptying out like the malls with their near-vacant parking lots.
Dave says its time to go and I tell him I hope work gets better. He just smiles and says "bye dear" to me and the girl behind the counter. Outside the sky looks just as blue as ever.
