Home, Home on the Web

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I'm not really writing this story from Westcliffe, Colorado. I'm only there digitally, through the magic of Google Maps Street View. Westcliffe is a small town in the Wet Mountain Valley, beneath the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. There's a main street with a few blocks of businesses, oddly named Silver Cliff Ave., after the neighboring town. The 463 residents of Westcliffe, some of them ranchers, are literally home on the range. It's about 7,000 feet (2,133 meters) above sea level, with rodeos and pickup trucks and big homesteads. As you can imagine, part of me wishes I were there. I made several summer trips to the area in the 1990s, when my parents had a cabin outside town. Yes, there are retirees and summer residents with vacation homes around Westcliffe, drawn by the jaw-dropping natural beauty of the area. Westcliffe isn't an untouched idyll by any means. It even has some broadband service. But when I found out that Street View had dramatically increased its coverage of America's byways, I immediately looked for Westcliffe and then was instantly dismayed when I found it. It feels wrong, somehow, that this isolated little town is in the ever-growing grasp of Google -- documented, catalogued, and searchable....