Desert Oasis

It seemed like such a great idea at the time.

A friendly park that people would love to visit. A place where you could fulfill the needs of your visitors. You imagined families and retired couples with travel trailers and motor homes en route to the state park or people visiting your city from another state. You thought about how happy they would be with all the services you would provide. You bought land just off the new freeway. You planted trees and installed electricity and water; bought picnic tables, built a pool and a neat concrete office and tidy restrooms with toilets and sinks and showers.

You smiled at the oasis you built there in the middle of the desert. Where there was once just sand and rocks, you made a place for people to call home. And then you waited.

And you waited.

People came now and then. But it was nothing like you imagined. The happy families didn’t come. The desert was deserted.

Then someone asked if he could rent by the week. The weeks turned into months and the months turned into years and suddenly you found yourself babysitting a community of decrepit Winnebagos and moulding trailers that had’t seen a road in decades. Under the trees you planted, now grown tall and luxuriant with foliage, you overlook the flat tires and tinfoiled windows and patch jobs of plywood and duct tape that are the possessions of your tenants- the elderly, the unemployed, the single parents, the people working minimum wage just to scrape together the meagre rent they pay you without fail every month. People who stop by your office every day to chat. People who help show the newcomers the ropes. You fill in the pool and start locking the bathrooms and make sure the pit bulls are chained up. You call the sheriff when you have to, which is becoming more and more frequent these days. Every now and then a hapless tourist shows up and you do your best to accommodate them. But your heart's not in it any more.

And you wonder... how did you get to this?