The Beauty of Impracticality

The 2005 hurricane season has thankfully ended and William Gray, the Nostradamus of hurricane forecasting, is calling for another active season of storms next year, leaving many realtors and property owners wondering what effects the big swirlies will have on the local real estate markets (I think that Swirlie sounds cuter and a lot less frightening than hurricane, so I?m encourage its use in future marketing materials.)

I?m betting that in the long term, hurricanes or swirlies, whatever you prefer to call them, will have less of an effect on local markets than many predict for the simple reason that people who love beautiful places can?t love practicality.

If you take a well agreed upon list of all the places people seem to want to be, the one characteristic they all seem to have in common is their immense impracticality, which is why the time-share market in my hometown of Andalusia, Alabama hasn?t quite taken off.

Hawaii would probably be on the list, but it?s also on the list of places for highest probability that your garden gnomes will be burned to the ground by slow moving lava flows.

California?s weather is so perfect you can grow cabernet in your own back yard. You?re house with views of the majestic pacific coast is also likely to be covered in mud, burned to the ground by forest fires or simply shaken apart by the earth?s tectonic plates.

The rugged coast of Nantucket is beautiful and their clam chowder doesn?t come in a can. There?s also drizzling rain, the threat of drunk driving Kennedy?s on wet, foggy roads and those pesky ghosts of shipwrecked sailors that make a mess of your garbage like hungry raccoons.

The Rockies have snowstorms, avalanches, and now that Denver has voted to legalize pot, a large stoned grizzly population with a very dangerous case of the munchies.

The south of Frances has, well, southern French.

Like all the other beautiful places that people want to be, life along the Emerald Coast is impractical.

Sand is impossible to get out of carpets and floor mats; salt air corrodes anything not made of stainless steel; food is expensive; and swirlies occasionally come in from the Gulf to eat our beaches and threaten our homes. But to those of us who live here, a drive on a clear day over the Destin Bridge when the incoming tide has turned the water Caribbean green makes none of it seem to matter.

Like horses, sports cars, bungee jumping, hang gliding and children, the things we treasure most can be a whole lot of trouble and expensive to maintain. For hundreds of years, storms have battered the earth?s coasts and for hundreds of years, in increasingly greater numbers, we idiots have continued to be drawn to them.

The landlubbers of the world find our storm-related memory loss inexplicable. Like the ants of a scattered hill, we continue to build back what may only be knocked down again.

There have always been, and will always be people who need to be close to Mother Nature. These people have always been - and will always be - willing to live within the impractical reach of her arms.