Ask Myles Rademan to speak about the future and he’ll start with the big bang. Yep, that one. You’ll get slides. You’ll get pithy one-liners. You’ll get frank truth that cuts all ways, sometimes a grenade. Myles doesn’t care. Well, he does care. Only not about your preconceptions, ideo logical notions, ridiculously gauzy nostalgia, prejudices, fuzzy thinking, and you are full of it. Me too. He tends to pierce all that, pin to hot air. This is what I really like about Myles. Enough to think of him as a sage, only in a coyote sort of way, sometimes sideways. He’s older now, gets cold enough in the winter to migrate for the season to Mexico. But he did historic stuff for Park City back in the last transitional era. Was one of the early visionaries for open space and trails, controversial then and beloved now as if always a hallmark. He was a big part of Main Street’s rise and place in the 2002 Olympics. He started and ran Leadership Park City for a generation, retiring as class 30 finished up in October 2024. He came to Park City in 1987 from Crested Butte, Colorado, as the city’s planning director in time to help lay out the successes we’re suffering from today. He’s consulted enough across all the ski towns over the decades to observe the challenges in common, which have little if anything to do with the Olympics, by the way. Colorado turned down the Games and the ski towns still blew up. So did Lake Tahoe, Jackson, Whistler and the rest from the ’90s on. This is more a story of relative wealth, obscene wealth and free time for an ever-more remote elite than anything else. This is me talking, not Myles, by the way and just for a moment. I don’t begrudge, though I do weary of declarations they fully earned their dumb luck in today’s America. Still, no one would want to come to Park City before the ski era. Spoiled rotten, we’re largely complaining about blessings we don’t recognize as such today. Those dwindling middle and working classes of which I am part benefit hugely, too. That’s just the truth. Myles recognizes what most peers stuck in once-was don’t. We’re not going back to our future. That past is gone. Myles likely will tell you it never really was, the way elder humans tend to edit their rosy memories. Here’s the start of his talk to the Rotary Club last week, and I will note that his audience boiled over beyond the available seats, including local politicians who don’t come much since they won office. “So OK, here it is,” he said, acknowledging his speaking time was short as he sped through slides. “The big bang, Earth cooled, Park City four and a half billion years (later). And where are we going? We’ve gone a long way from our beginnings 150 years ago. Where are we going? I really don’t know. I’m as confused about it as most of you and the City Council.” He ran through slides from the mining days. “We have a population here now that’s just about equal to what it was inside the city 100 years ago or more,” he said. “And of course, they didn’t have snow plows in those days. And people always ask about, you know, (being) authentic. We want to be authentic, but these were authentic false fronts.” He had on screen a photo looking down Main Street showing sheds behind wide veneers from when Poison Creek was not so much a name as the stench of a fact of human as well as industrial waste, and China Bridge was how the rich folk stepped clear of Chinatown. “Yeah, Park City was very affordable in 1970s,” he deadpanned with slides of buildings after mining had played out. “You could buy anything in town for back taxes. And I asked a lot of people, ‘Well, why didn’t you?’ One guy only told me the truth. Said it wasn’t worth it.” Back at my table, Park City Mayor Ryan Dickey noted how clear the political direction seemed then. The weather vane today is spinning by comparison with, I’ll say it, the town at the cusp of becoming a Sun City and I don’t mean the ski town with a similar name. But I’d argue the direction is clear enough if Park City hopes to be a regular-ish community and not pass fully into retirement enclave and short-term mecca for highest-end ski vacationers. “Now, of course, we’re in a new era, obviously. So we’ve changed a lot, and we’re still changing. And change is hard for most of us. I understand that.” Myles went on. “But here’s a statistic: Two-thirds of all the people in the entire history of the world that were over 65 are alive today.” According to the Pew Research Center, America has around 65 million baby boomers now, and 11,200 to 11,400 people are turning 65 daily. “So we have to confront some really hard truths,” he said. “You know, it’s time to to be realistic about what we’re doing, and we know all these things. Again, this isn’t Kansas. We’re in Utah now. This is a pro-growth state. This is a private property state. This is a capitalism-first state. So those things add up, and we can see it.” And naturally, people don’t come to Park City for that, he observed. Those who can afford it come to escape the cares of wherever they came from, for however brief or lengthy a time. “I tried to figure it out,” he said. “And then I realized that nobody moved here to confront reality. This is like Brigadoon.” If so, a divided one these days. How does misty Dreamland move ahead in challenging, transformative times? “There is an old Hopi saying: Apparently, the moon would never rise if it paid attention to all the dogs barking at it. So sometimes we have to act. I was talking to some of our council members and said, ‘Whatever you do, 50% of the people are going to hate you. If you do the other thing, 50% of the people are going to hate you. And that’s where we are.” It there anything everyone agrees on? Myles said he thinks so. “It’s a sense of hospitality. It’s a sense of belonging. It’s a sense of community,” he said. “Yes, the history is important. The environment is important. But Gary Snyder has a quote. He said, ‘Find your place on the planet. Dig in. Take responsibility from there.” Can that happen in Brigadoon? Myles has seen this magic before. It looks suspiciously like hard work. Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745. 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