Fort Lewis wants more students, although when I left the college as a full professor in 1974, it was generally thought that 2,000 students would be enough. Purgatory desires more skiers/snowboarders, although there was a time when 1,200 daily skiers was considered to be a good goal. A real estate agent tells me we need more population growth in La Plata County. And, of course, we must have a larger airport, if we have such growth.

There is a moment in Shakespeare’s “King Lear” when the king asks for more guards. At this point, he has surrendered his entire kingdom to his daughters and laments the loss of camaraderie he shared with his palace guards. One daughter admonishes him, saying “You don’t need more guards.” Lear’s famous response: “Reason not the need.”

We need to reason more about our community’s growth needs. We should ask ourselves about what Walter Lippmann termed the “acids of modernity.” And if we do, we should be prepared to answer the U.S. senator’s query, “How much is enough?”

Maybe less growth and not more growth may very well be the answer to many of our community’s concerns. Perhaps we should be reading Henry David Thoreau, Roderick Nash and John Muir in lieu of real-estate notices.

After retiring from Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1996, my wife and I returned to Vallecito and the home we occupied when I taught at Fort Lewis. For us, Durango offered not only what we needed, but also what we wanted as well.

The Durango I knew, when there were no stop lights, was the Durango I loved the most. Of course, I have an “axiology to grind.” But so do many others with differing value systems.

Simply put, strange though it may sound, it was the Durango of the 1960s that I loved the most. For me and my family, it was more than enough.

Frank Tikalsy

Bayfield