‘Lone Eagles,’ Retirees Change West

Philip Burgess, president of a Denver think tank, Center for the New West, remembers the discovery a few years ago.

He kept stumbling across people in rural areas doing their business by telephone, fax and air express for clients far away. When he ran across the New York stockbroker in rural Colorado, he decided he was on to something.

The broker explained that he moved out of New York after his boy’s bicycle was stolen for the third time and some miscreant snatched his wife’s purse. Life was a lot different in Colorado: a lot better. Work was the same, though. He just did it over the phone.

Burgess dubbed such folks “lone eagles.”

Dick Larsen is a lone eagle. Originally a corporate guy who worked at U.S. Steel and Ford Motor Co., he went to work as a finance consultant. He helps draw up business plans to present to lenders and financiers, and in sales and acquisitions of companies. He could have done this work from San Francisco, where he was living, but he decided he could also do it from Bend, Ore.

“It’s not a business you’re going to start from Bend,” says Larsen, 62. He couldn’t have built up the knowledge and contacts without years first in San Francisco and New York. But once he was set up, there was no need to live in a big city.

He moved to central Oregon 22 years ago. Real estate was cheap, the air clean, ski slopes and fishing streams uncrowded. He lives seven minutes from his office. He still spends a lot of time flying off to see clients, but he’d have to do that wherever he lived.

More and more Dick Larsens are living where they want. They are brokers, engineers, consultants, sales reps, writers, artists and even cottage manufacturers. And they are helping to transform the West.

“Rural areas in the West have gone from decline in the ‘80s to growing faster than the national average in the ‘90s,” says William Beyers, professor of geography at the University of Washington. Beyers reports mini-booms in places such as Griggs, Idaho, where Paul Allen has a ranch, and Montrose, Colo., just up the road from the “starter mansions” of Telluride.

On Beyers’ map, the boom counties extend in a web of dark splotches from the Canadian border to Mexico.

In Washington state, the hot spots are in a swath from Port Angeles east and north to Canada; Kittitas and Okanogan counties; the areas around Pullman and Long Beach. But the growth is everywhere. In the 1980s, only half the 27 rural counties had net in-migration. In the first half of the 1990s, all of them did.

The reason is not all lone eagles. Retirees are a big group, as are manufacturers seeking cheap land. The lone eagles are of particular interest because, in the geographer’s taxonomy, they’re a new species.

How many are there? Washington State University professors Don Dillman and Priscilla Salant and graduate student Lisa Carley surveyed driver’s license applicants, and estimate that 2,600 lone eagles move to Washington each year. How many move within the state they don’t know. They tend to be older, better educated and more affluent than the average migrant. Most are self-employed and earn more than $50,000 a year.

These are “very significant movements of high-quality wealth creators,” says Burgess of the Center for the New West.

Why Washington? Almost all cited the natural environment, including the climate and outdoor recreation. Next, cited by 65 percent, was personal safety. Third, 59 percent, mentioned lack of a state income tax.

Half the lone eagles moved to urban counties, where they are lost in the mass of humanity. The half that moved to rural counties are more significant.

They bring urban incomes and urban tastes. They will not put up with bad coffee, underfinanced libraries and Chinese restaurants that offer up chop suey and egg foo yung. Though older, they are early adopters of technology. Seventy-nine percent use fax machines; 59 percent, modems; 66 percent, overnight mail; 31 percent, cell phones.

“Their entrance can help a whole community wire up” to the Internet, says Tim Sweeney, consumer policy specialist at the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission.

Sweeney recently took a car trip across the West, and was amazed at all the new houses. He thought, “How do all these people make a living?” Not from mining, logging or sheep ranching.

Salant, who helped run the WSU study, grapples with that question, too. “There are more ways than you might think,” she says. “Lone eagles are only the most dramatic examples. People say, ‘This is where I want to raise my child,’ and they make it work.”

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