Durango, Colorado hosted a colony of social climbers who had hit the skids.
Once their ambitions withered, this is where a handful of them landed. An exclusive retreat awaited them on the outskirts of town off Sawmill Road.
The retreat was the brainchild of a cagey real estate developer from Kanab, Utah. He saw what others missed.
He acquired a desiccated trailer park for a song. Spruced it up just enough to suggest hardscrabble chic. With foresight the people in Durango quickly came to admire, he transformed what had previously been Alpine Acres into The Center For Accelerated Personal Restoration.
Over his career, the developer had extensive dealings with folks forced to cash in their ambitions. He knew this type well. After all, his own aspirations had been dashed more than a few times.
His great fortune was the possession of rarified knowledge, an awareness that the dusky forces driving the social climber are never actually extinguished.
No matter how devastating the setback, how far and humiliating the fall, the ladder of the social climber remains standing.
So he hired a registered therapist. A heartless man who had been driven out of Pismo Beach, California for bedding down an underage girl. The therapist was given a curriculum from which he was ordered not to waver.
Any impressions that this colony was nothing more than a collection of broken-down losers were preemptively extinguished. Only a select group of strivers were invited to Durango, Colorado.
The curriculum addressed posturing and evasion, the delicacies of deceit and the manipulative techniques of misdirection. Members of the colony were shown how to be obsequious without being noticed and how to charm without being caught.
Brilliant methods of disguising an inappropriate past were revealed. So were the finer points of how best to embellish virtually anything without arousing suspicions of exaggeration.
But the most enthusiastically received instruction dealt with illusion.
Members of the colony were shown how to sustain the illusion of an enviable life long after pretensions crumbled. Even how to get others to enthusiastically prop it up on their behalf.
Everyone could stay as long as they wished. They were told that to climb the social ladder was to pursue life’s most noble quest.
So certain were they of this, so hungry to resume their aborted climb, that few stayed at The Center For Accelerated Personal Restoration in Durango, Colorado for more than a few weeks.
