Author Wallace Stegner warned that a place loses its soul when it forgets the hardship that made it. In “Angle of Repose,” he wrote not of triumph, but of erosion, how communities hollow out when they forget who built them and why. The American West, he believed, was shaped less by myth tha n by labor, endurance and people whose names rarely appear on monuments. I’ve been thinking about that as ICE raids move quietly through Park City. Quietly matters. There are no sirens on Main Street. No press conferences. No interruption to après ski. Restaurants remain open. Snow is cleared. Work gets done. And yet people are missing. Workers don’t show up. Familiar faces disappear from job sites, grocery stores and school pickup lines. The town absorbs this absence without much comment the way dry ground absorbs the first weeks of drought. We reserve our urgency for other things. City Council campaigns take on a kind of Hollywood-style attention, with supporters arguing in restaurants on Main Street as if the fate of the republic were at stake. Meanwhile, the quiet removal of the workers who keep this town functioning barely registers beyond whispered conversations and a scattering of empty job sites. Perhaps that’s because these are people we’ve trained ourselves not to notice. They clean hotel rooms before dawn. Frame houses they will never be able to afford, in a town that depends on their labor but rarely names it. Prep food we photograph but don’t ask about. They are neighbors until suddenly they are gone. I come to this not only as a Park City resident or an American history teacher, but as the daughter of an immigrant. My mother was born in rural Canada, descended from French fur trappers and Native Americans. She grew up poor, one of 14 children in a household where everything was handed down until there was nothing left to pass along. French was her first language. English came later. Her town existed because of a lumber mill. Its only link to the outside world was the daily train whistle. Eventually, she boarded that train. At 18, she left to join a brother in Detroit. She once told my sister and me that what struck her most upon arrival wasn’t the size of the city, but its people. It was on that train that she saw a Black man for the first time. Until then, her world had been small — not by choice, but circumstance. In Detroit, she did not arrive empty handed. She worked as an ice skating instructor, carrying with her a skill learned outdoors and without formal training. It was on the ice that she met my father, then an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, who was struck by the ease of her skating despite the fact that she had never seen the inside of an ice rink before leaving home. They later settled in rural Florida, where I grew up. As a child, I knew our family was different, though I couldn’t yet say how. Other kids’ cupboards held Little Debbie snacks. Ours held smoked mackerel. Other mothers showed up to PTA meetings. Mine rode a lawn mower around our yard, a bandana tied around her hair, grass clippings stuck to her legs. For a long time, I resisted the self-reliance that came from her upbringing. I wanted to blend in. It took adulthood — and teaching American history — to recognize how familiar her story really is. Immigration, labor, adaptation, invisibility, reinvention — these are not exceptions to the American story. They are the pattern. Which brings me to Park City. We like our Western stories tidy. We celebrate miners and settlers. We turn them into mascots. We name structures after the stairs that once led to a Chinese immigrant neighborhood that helped build this town, while rarely asking who occupies the margins now. Endurance is easier to honor when it is safely in the past. Stegner understood that the West isn’t sustained by nostalgia. It’s sustained by memory, and memory requires attention. When a town stops noticing who is missing, it begins to lose its balance. Not all at once. Quietly. Gradually. Until it no longer recognizes the forces that hold it together. Park City should ask itself a simple question: If the people who keep this town running can disappear without much notice, what does that say about who we believe belongs here? These are not abstractions. They are workers. Parents. Neighbors. Their labor is woven into the daily life of this place, whether we acknowledge it or not. A town that forgets who built it — who builds it still — doesn’t just lose people. It loses its story. And in the West, once that story is gone, it rarely returns. The post When a community stops noticing who’s missing appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less