After anti-Yuppie rants, mountain dating guides, dog photos and queries about writing The Lost Art of Getting Lost, if there is a favored theme to Mountain Gazette submissions, it is the lament of the urban arrival who for a lover, a career or no damn good reason at all has forsaken the magic of the High Country. It seems like every other week someone sends in an essay detailing his or her own personal deal with the devil — how they followed the flash of the cash to the city and left their soul twisting back up in the hills.

The articles go into detail about trading blue skies and white mountains for a commute and a cubicle, and paying to go to a gym to get half the exercise most of us get for free just by walking out our front door. Memories of mountain streams are lost in the cacophony of honking horns. Cool clouds are burned black by cigarettes and smog. And, almost to a person, the writers note how much happier they were when they were “poor.”

“Maybe if I get laid off right now then I’ll still have time to use my season pass,” wrote one Denverite in his introductory e-mail. “It’s paid for.”

I think people tell better stories when they’re poor. Rock stars make better records when they’re hungry, and writers write better books when they still want to set the world on fire — when they have something other than money that they are living for. At least in the mountains, they seem a lot happier, too. There is a lasting contentment to having been outside all day, watching the pace of the world. It is the confidence of setting in that old cliché, “Poverty with a view.”

That’s one reason why I wonder if maybe this is the year the American mountain bum returns. Maybe with all that lost money — and the lost time spent on making it — people will again focus on the quality of their lives, rather than the quality of their lifestyles. I know that sounds like a bumper sticker. As so does the idea that 10 years from now we may look back on this moment as one of the most innovative – environmentally, economically and socially — in the history of the world, precisely because we given ourselves no choice but to do what we always dreamed we would do.

I just can’t help thinking that we after all the disquiet and disappointment of the past eight years, we’ve finally reached the starting line for the path we’re supposed to take from here. And rather than reading all those resumes of regret, I’m looking forward to reading a new wave of essays that start with, “I moved back to the mountains this year…” (Of course, you can also always send us your best stories of being poor, too.)