When Retirement Quants Dream...

...when they dream then this, below, in the image (by way of my iPhone last week), is the type of sugar plum fairies that dance in their heads...

In this case we are looking at the Madison Valley in SW Montana. The Madison range (and Ennis, MT) is in front of you, the Tobacco Root range is behind you to the left, the Gravelly Range is behind you to the right. The point of this picture is that it is about :45 from Bozeman. Shit, in south FL it takes me about 45 minutes just to get to the grocery store, about 3 blocks away. An hour of driving and I'm still in Broward county and, if you've ever been to Broward county, you, therefore, know wherefore I dream.

When my involuntary (and, in case we need to know, bad-faith-initiated) incarceration in FL is over [1], and if I am not too old or poor to move, then move I will...and the move will likely be to SW Montana. Minnesota, by the way and for reference, was home. And by home I don't mean casual home, it was home in a very rooted sense. The geography of my first-50-years-of-life memory is 100% the rolling ag-hills of southern MN.  It was what we can call a visceral-home. But I will not return there for reasons that are all my own. Florida, by the way and for reference, is -- and let me be really really crystal clear on this point -- not home. My ex-wife used to tell me that home is wherever family happens to be, and certainly she is right at a superficial level, but me? I say never take advice from someone that relentlessly touts family; abandons husband and children for decades: rips them out of a rooted MN community in exchange for something not-family; separates and divorces stealthily; at some point pulls a step-dad into the scene; and then just this week continues this kind of chaotic insanity with a new chapter that is yet to be written...but will be. Hey, listen, my sense of home is family, too, of course, and at least I've been present for my kids over 22 years, but there has always been a "physicality" to home that I crave as well. There is a necessary place-ness to it that is hard to describe. So, if that "place-ness" thing is not MN and not FL, then where is it? Right now, I seem to be a no-one from no-where looking for a somewhere (any Walker Percy fans might recognize that reference) which is more or less an untenable situation for the still-living and self-aware.

And I have been looking. Over the last 50 or so years I have been between Minneapolis and the Pacific maybe 50 times: by plane, bus, car, train, and thumb. I might be missing another mode of transport in there somewhere. I have probably canvased at least 100k square miles of the American west for over five decades. And in that canvasing I have concluded that somewhere west of the 100th meridian (that was for Wallace Stegner fans...but I'm being accurate here as well) and east of CA, south of Canada and North of Mexico is where I will be if I live long enough to actually be there. Four years ago, I had a well-known and provisional flirtation with CO but now it is a dead-certain-infatuated-and-probably-monogamous commitment to MT. There it is. ...and current or future romantic relationships: be forewarned. Let's call it Home.

I thought the kind of sentiment that I was expressing in the last paragraph would somehow impress or energize the Montanans with whom I conversed on my recent trip. Uh, yeah, no. Didn’t happen. The most common response was something like: "sure, you and everyone else in the country." Which is evidently true if you happen to track Bozeman real estate prices. No one there wants me to come. It’s a "we’re here now and we both love and regret what we are losing as a way of life, so go away" kind of thing.  My profession of: but-this-is-my-spiritual-chosen-home! (and you've only been there for 150 years, by the way) comes across as somewhere between un-compelling and repellent. Oh, well. They don't have a choice. I have to end my time on earth somewhere. So I am acomin'.

And for those weaklings that say "it's too cold, ever been there in winter?" might I remind you that I spent 50 years in MN. And for those that are still too whiny: I also spent a winter in Winnipeg where one's eyes, in order to not freeze solid, tear, and then the tears freeze on your face...in a one block walk. I can handle MT.

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My recent trip to Bozeman was not my first. I have been through the area many times since around 1970 or 1976. And I was there last year on the second leg of a two year journey from MSP to SEA with my middle daughter. My reaction last year to Livingston/Bozeman -- after MSP (cold, friends and networks gone, taxes high, politics insane), Sioux Falls (I love it but a little off my affections for now), Boulder (real estate is insane and the hipsters way way too much for me), Golden (I like it, maybe a plan B), Vail (can't afford it, median home was 1.2M 2 years ago, too cold, and too many tourists...but I love the locals and I love the area), Glenwood Springs (I like it, too far from an airport, and, confusingly, disdained by a friend), Grand Junction (TBD but close to Durango, which I love), Moab (love it, a wee hot and dry for me, and a little remote from airports for my kids...), Ogden (I'm warm to it, real estate is a steal, close to airport, but locals waived me off on the crime and some other stuff), Jackson (real estate is awful, median price was ~1.5M and the locals said they hated it and couldn't afford to live within 30 miles and that it lost it's community soul 20 years ago), Coeur d'Alene (very pretty but crowded and I was put off by the Maserati dealership by the coffee shop where I sat down for coffee one morning), and Seattle (crowded, way way way too hip, expensive, social and political problems, etc) -- was, after a relaxing-shoulder-drop kind of thing: "ahhh, home." Hey, at least I warned them I'm coming.

Here, fwiw, is RiversHedge and crew near Bozeman, MT:

This is on Kirk hill. This was a really mild hike with a great view of the south/west Gallatin Valley. This, by the way, was a day after I nearly killed my new girlfriend on a slightly more "aggressive" hike.  From left to right:

- Rivershedge: for some reason a (for now) retired guy with an un-known desire to work on quantitative retirement math.  I mean, really, why?

- Daughter 1: graduated Stanford in June with BA in econ with honors and the John G. Sobieski award for creative thinking in economics. Going back in the fall to get MS in something quantitative. I think "management science and engineering" or something like that.

- Daughter 2: senior with last quarter's track record of all A+s and one A (my god, she's a slacker!), a perfect ACT, all 5s on APs, and double lang in French and Latin. And I thought she was going to go goth....

- Daughter 3: not pictured, but she's there in my heart. Similar accomplishments but still quite young.



Notes ------------------------------------------------------

[1] If I ever have the courage, and if the living participants do not have the capacity to crucify me for doing so, I will tell this story some day. And I will have the courage. I have it now. But some of the indirect participants are not of age yet, so....