Hey, Where'd Everyone Go?

I'll revisit the community of people I live with this week. It's been nearly a month since I first wrote about my seasonal housing mates and I'm happy to remote that as we got to know each better, initial judgments and prejudices were forgotten. Now I just have to learn not to judge people immediately, and potentially not to judge people until I've talked with them multiple times, I'd expect the same of other people trying to get to know me. The more I talked to people here the more interesting they became. I found out a couple of my 10 person social circle went used one of their days off every week to go to Van Horn and take an EMT class. Others have worked at GUMO for years and have a lot of interesting stories, like the Law Enforcement officer who once caught a Brown Pelican in the park. It had been blown here from California by especially strong winds. I also found out a couple of them lived in Carlsbad most of the time, further shrinking my park housing social network.

Unfortunately, as soon as I got to know everyone better, a wave of people left. And by wave of people I mean 3. But 3 is a lot when you're starting with 10. The most recent 2 to leave were a couple who headed to Montana a couple week ago. The guy was my housemate, so they were always in our house cooking or hanging out. With them gone I pretty much have the place to myself. My other housemate hangs out with a good friend of his the whole time. Their departure felt like more than 2 people though. They had been at GUMO a while, so knew everyone well, and were well liked. People would come over and hang out with them, and social gatherings of 4-6 people were pretty common. With them gone those people don't come over anymore. My group of friends that I could potentially hang out with on a given night is now down to 2, and while its nice to have so much space in my house to myself, it feels lonely sometimes. Also not helping is that when my housemate departed, he took with him his collection of DVDs. Evening entertainment has since been limited to reading, and possibly studying for Yellowstone or writing the journal article on my Dartmouth senior thesis. The satellite TV is still around of course, so maybe I'll become interested in the NBA playoffs at some point soon.

On the other hand, I'm getting to know those 2 remaining people very well, and talk to them most nights for at least an hour or so, which is fun. More people should be arriving this month, but then I'll be leaving soon after that. Things are settling into a routine a little bit, but that's not a bad thing, especially when that routine involves hiking in a national park most days and playing basketball every day after work while the sun sets over the mountains.