TAGS
My family moved to Colorado Springs from Northern California in 1998. We came here for many reasons: clean air, minimal pollution, very little traffic, low crime rates, low taxes, and (most importantly), we had family here.
A few weeks in, I noticed that there are some strange quirks about living in Colorado (and Colorado Springs, specifically) that I hadn’t expected. So for anyone interested, here is my list of the funny quirks of “The Springs,” my home sweet home.
We have five (count ’em: 5!) major military installations here: NORAD, Air Force Academy, Ft. Carson, Peterson AFB and Schriever AFB. I’ve heard estimates that military spending accounts for 70-80% of our local economy, and those figures don’t surprise me. Most local shops in town offer “military discounts” for active-duty military, and you’ll frequently see soldiers dressed in combat fatigues when you’re shopping or out for dinner. An enormous percentage of our population is active or retired military. What a lot of people do is work for the Air Force or Army for twenty years and retire to Colorado Springs, working for a private contractor doing the same job as before (Space Systems Engineering, for example) for three times the pay, while drawing military retirement benefits. It’s one of the most lucrative deals I’ve ever heard of.
I like and support our military (my Great Grandfather served in the Army, my Grandpa served in the Air Force and my Uncle served in the Marines), but, alas, I personally haven’t been in the military myself. Which means I’m in the minority, and I’m constantly telling people behind cash registers “No, I don’t have a military I.D.” when they offer me a military discount.
In California, we recycled because it’s required by law. It was just part of our routine—we’d set out our color-coded recycling bins (green/yellow/blue) at the curb next to the garbage can on trash day. So naturally, after moving here, I figured that recycling would be even more important because we were living in the mountains. Boy was I wrong. Instead, I was shocked to see that most people in Colorado Springs don’t recycle anything. A few years ago, I tried to find a place where I could recycle our glass bottles because I felt bad always throwing them in the trash. I started calling around. Only one recycling center told me they could take my glass bottles if I wanted, but I wouldn’t get paid anything, and I would have to drop them off since they wouldn’t pick them up. So if you’re at a BBQ at a friend’s house, don’t bother looking for a recycling bin for your soda or beer can. Just throw it in the trash.
[Update, 2015: As of last year, my local trash service has started offering single-stream recycling, and I signed up as soon as I found out about it. For only $3/month, we now get a blue rolling recycling container that we can put paper, glass, and more in. Finally. What changed that allowed them to offer this? I don’t know, but it sure helps us out. And it only took them a decade and a half to catch up!]
What on earth is lacrosse? It’s a game of supposedly American Indian origin, where high school kids run around on grass fields wearing enormous safety goggles and waving white nets. The first time I drove by a high school and saw a lacrosse game, I thought the girls soccer team was running around catching butterflies. It took me a while to figure out what was going on. What a strange sport—I had never heard of this before moving to Colorado. In the reverse, nobody here has ever heard of Water Polo, which is a huge sport where I grew up. How funny.
Cities are bad enough, but people also have trouble with road names. There are many roads in downtown Colorado Springs that give people a lot of trouble, two that seem nearly impossible: “Cache le Poudre” and “Vermijo.” Cache le Poudre is French for “hide the powder,” and has a fascinating back story of French trappers who hid gunpowder in a river bank a long time ago. However, nobody cares about that, or the fact that it should be pronounced like “cawsh-luh-poo-druh” so instead they’ll say “catch-la-pooter.” Some people haven given up entirely and just call it “Cash Street.” Quoi?! I’d hate to hear them pronounce “San Joaquin,” the county where I grew up.
Tons of locals haven’t been to the top of Pikes Peak, and they don’t care to. I have been to the top of Pikes Peak exactly twice: once 20 years ago when I was visiting my grandparents, and last year, to take my daughter there on a school field trip. Both times, we took the cog railway to get up there. My wife, who’s lived here for 21 years has never even tried to go to the top, or hike it at all. Oh, and for the record, it’s called “Pikes Peak,” not “Pike’s Peak.” Its official name does not include an apostrophe, at least since 1890. There’s a law somewhere that says mountain’s can’t have “possessive names,” so they just removed the apostrophe.
Because of the high altitude, everything that’s bottled is under pressure. For example, when you opening a can of yogurt, if you don’t point it away from yourself, the lid will “pop” and spit yogurt into your face. I’ve watched this firsthand several times, and it’s funny every time a tourist or newcomer gets an eyeful of yogurt. When you go grocery shopping, it’s funny to see all the potato chip bags just about ready to burst from all the air inside.
The first week after we moved here, I heard a family telling their friends about how they’d just purchased an “Air Conditioner” for their house. I couldn’t understand what all the excitement was about. …I later found out that in Colorado, having A/C in your home is a luxury, depending on when it was built. Most homes here, unless they were built in the past 10 years or so, don’t have them. Even if they do, you’re lucky if they actually work. Many people will even not have one installed when getting a new home built.
In California, it was simply a necessity. I remember one summer in the early 1990s in Stockton when our A/C was broken for a few days… let me tell you—spending a week in 110° heat was miserable. Yet, in Colorado Springs, many people will complain of the intolerable heart when our summer days hit 80°. Oh yeah, at least in California, we could go to the pool, but as I said, most people here don’t swim.
I remember taking walks to the neighborhood park in my first few months here, and the people I walked past as I crossed the street would look me in the eye, smile and nod, and say “Good morning!” I wondered if these were people I’d met before, because I wasn’t used to being spoken to in this manner by strangers. This politeness can also be a little bit weird sometimes: if you are approaching the front door of any building, whether it’s a store, church or gas station, someone is going to hold the door open for you… sometimes even when you’re twenty or thirty feet away from the door. They’ll just stand there, holding the door open, waiting for you. Polite, but very awkward.
This is my favorite thing about Colorado Springs, with one exception: our ants are big enough to make you wet your pants with fright when you see them… but other than that, there are also nearly no mosquitoes or cockroaches. All year long, we revel in the fresh, clean, bug-free air. The worst that happens here is we get moths in our garages every fall, and they die by the first freeze of the winter, so you’ll spend weeks sweeping up dead moths, but at least they’re just moths, and… they’re DEAD!
Colorado is so dry that you can leave a bag of potato chips sitting on the counter wide open for three days and the chips won’t go stale. It’s so dry here that you don’t even need a towel when you shower off. By the time you get out of the shower, you’re almost dry already. That’s the nice part about having such dry air. The part that sucks is that you can get nosebleeds very easily (sometimes, just sneezing is enough to give you a nosebleed). Also, it took my skin at least three years to adjust to it. Up until that point, I went through jars and jars of lotion and Vaseline trying to keep my hands from cracking and bleeding.
You can always tell who the tourists are, because they obsess over the deer that walk around in the streets. They’ll literally pull over their cars, roll down the windows, point, and then get out and take pictures. I hate to say it, but… we laugh at people like that. Locals here will slow down for deer, but that’s to avoid hitting them. Deer are pretty, but they’re annoying as well—they jump over fences, trash your garden and and eat the fruit off your trees. If you’re cruising down the highway and you hit a deer, you’ll probably total your car. I have several friends that have done this. Some people even die from hitting deer.
If you go to any coffee shop in Colorado Springs before 8:00am, you will see tables with men (and women, but less so) having bible studies. As a Christian myself, I think this is great, but I don’t remember ever seeing this in California. If you spend any length of time at coffee shops on the north side of town, you will hear the conversations peppered with prayer requests, talks about sermons, and people saying “Oh, you go to New Life? I do too!“
There are some people who focus on this far too much, I think. Some locals think Colorado Springs has a reputation as being too close-minded or too much of a “religious mecca.” My observation is that this isn’t even close to being true, and those people are listening too much to talk radio or party politics. For example: yes, the north side of Colorado Springs is filled with Christian nonprofits (Compassion International, Focus on the Family, etc), but according to data compiled by the Pikes Peak United Way’s “Quality of Life Indicators Report” in 2013, only 15.2% of people in the Colorado Springs area self-identify as “Evangelical Protestants,” while a whopping 66.7% self-identify as “Not Participating” with any religious affiliation at all. The report even says “Colorado Springs even has a “smaller percentage of its population reporting [a] congregational membership than either the USA or Colorado as a whole. …only Portland, Oregon has a lower participation rate.” In my experience,this data is far closer to accurate than what a few vocal opponents claim.
You think California’s drivers are bad? Come out here and you’ll change your mind. For some strange reason, when you’re on an on-ramp trying to merge with traffic on the highway, people will ignore your need to merge and instead speed up, as if to force you off the road. The same thing happens when you try to change lanes. People see your turn signal, and then accelerate it to try to prevent you from getting in front of them. Why? I don’t know. It’s very dangerous, and very strange. Also, each time it snows, you’ll see accidents all over the roads… sometimes even fatal multiple-car pileups, even if there’s only a half inch of snow. It’s as if people completely forget how to drive on snow, every single year.
Are there any “springs” in Colorado Springs? I’ve asked people this question for over 15 years, and the resounding answer from dozens (if not hundreds) of people has been something akin to “Hmmm… I don’t know. I never really thought about it.” I think this is the strangest case of complacency I’ve ever encountered—am I really the only one who thinks it’s weird that nobody except me asks this question?
The good news is, finally, yes, we have indeed found “the Springs” in Colorado Springs! The bad news is, you can’t go there. You can’t see them, swim in them, or drink from them. All that remains of our magnificent Springs is a capped-off plumbing stub with no signage or fanfare in a downtown park where homeless people sleep. Fortunately, as of last year, there’s an effort by a few brilliant people to try to restore the Springs. For information on that, check out “.” And join me in my bewilderment that nobody seems to care about this bizarre situation and lost piece of history.
There are several SCUBA diving shops. Right here, next to Pikes Peak. Nobody thinks this is weird, for some reason, yet the closest open water is over 1,000 miles away. I love this, because it means that I can take my refresher dives at the two blocks from my house, when it’s 8 degrees outside, and snowing… and hop on a plane and do a two-tank boat dive in the Virgin Islands the very next day when it’s sunny and 90 degrees. But still… you gotta admit, this is really weird.
Oftentimes, when walking across a carpeted floor, when you go to turn off a light, the light switch will shock you. The same thing can happen when you go to shake hands with somebody. The only explanation I’ve heard for why this happens is that our air is extremely dry and that somehow causes static buildup. Sometimes, it’s not a big deal and you’ll just get a small zing. But every once in a while, when you’re not expecting it, you’ll flip off the light at night and get a zap so powerful that it hurts your whole arm and makes your funny bone tingle for several minutes. Don’t worry though, you’ll get used to it eventually. Try this sometime: when you’re done grocery shopping, set your grocery sacks down on the floor and walk in to the kitchen and kiss your spouse before touching any door knobs or light switches: you will get a “kiss shock.” This happens to my wife and I ALL the time.
We get snow all the time in the winter, but it will melt either the same day or the next day. On Monday, it might be 4 degrees and icy, and on Tuesday it might be 70 degrees with full sun and not a cloud in the sky. I’m not kidding—we do have swings that extreme. What this means is that nobody takes the snow that seriously… no matter how bad it gets, it’s pretty much guaranteed to melt tomorrow. So we all just drive around on melting snow all winter—our cars are always covered in road dirt and black slushy ice that’s half melted. We often forget having a snow scraper in the car too, which becomes a major hassle only once every two months or so.
Colorado Springs is the land of eternal construction. I’ve been here 17 years and the main thoroughfares of our city are ALWAYS under construction. Union, Powers, I-25, Academy…. all the main arteries of transportation are constantly being resurfaced, or widened. This wouldn’t be so annoying except for the fact that the city seems to want to do construction on all of them at the same time. I’ve gotten to the point where my route to and from work is a bizarre sort of zig-zag pattern where I dart in and out of residential side streets, all to try to avoid the obnoxious “work zone” speed limits and orange traffic cones. Even though I’m limited to 35 or 40 miles per hour, I can get there faster sometimes.
This one really, really drives me nuts. Nearly everything in town closes every night at 10:00 except the bars downtown where soldiers with PTSD get into bar brawls, and creepy old men bump and grind on unsuspecting young women. Where does everybody go at 10pm? I have no idea. Home, maybe? Walk around any part of town (except bar alley on Tejon Street) and you’ll hear nothing but crickets. The lights are out. The doors are closed. I’m exaggerating a little, but it’s really quite annoying. Example: my sister flew in from Florida a few months ago. It was a Tuesday night, and just barely 9:20pm. Every place we tried (over 10 different restaurants!) was either closed already, or closing in 10 minutes. I think I ended up pounding my first on the dashboard and cursing in frustration, then dejectedly pulling into the Village Inn parking lot. Yay. Come see how we roll here in Colorado Springs—land of Village Inn. So exciting.
Well, there you have it. That’s my list. Having said all that, Colorado Springs really is a very nice place to live. Every city has its quirks, to be sure. As I mentioned in the beginning, the crime is low, there’s no pollution, and the benefits far outweigh living here compared to Stockton (and many other towns in California). But these particular quirks are so strange to me, and sometimes so annoying that they’re worth mentioning.
Colorado Springs is really a very friendly city, and it’s a great place to raise children (hence, my raising my five kids here). So I generally do recommend that people come here to visit or live, especially if they’re seeking asylum from crime-ridden areas like I was.
What are your thoughts? Are you thinking of moving to Colorado Springs? Are you interested in relocating? Where are you living now? Have you heard anything else funny about Colorado Springs not listed here? Let me know in the comments! (You may note that so far, I’ve gotten lots of comments, and I try to answer every single one of them, so if you do have a question, just ask!)
.
