While waiting for the Colorado Supreme Court to hand down its decision, some thoughts on the Valley Floor:

1. The Valley Floor: Always written with capital letters. Really, it’s just a valley floor. There’s one in Ilium, too. And even — gasp! — Ouray.

2. The Valley Floor: But Telluride’s valley is something, isn’t it? If it ain’t utopia, it’s close: waterfalls roaring down craggy, breathtaking peaks. A grinning, deep-pocketed populace in electric cars with Gore bumper stickers and off-season vacations in Cabo and Peru. What goes wrong here? Bunion in your hiking boot?

3. The Valley Floor: It was the fact that the valley was so close to perfect that people couldn’t stand it to change. People couldn’t stand “imperfection.” And the floor was one of the few parts of the valley that threatened to slide into “imperfection.”

4. The Valley Floor: By building things out there, the landowner wanted, in the words of the old Times-Journal newspaper, to “destroy the town.”

5. The Valley Floor: The town stands, in fact, intact. (For now.) The town was “saved,” by the rejection of the negotiated compromise, at least in the sense that preventing some houses from being built can be considered saving it, or allowing some houses to be built could have been considered ruining it.

6. The Valley Floor: But the fiercest wars are always civil wars, fought between people who are indistinguishable to outsiders — Hutu/Tutsi, Shia/Sunni. Which is how it was in Telluride, during the Civil War for the Floor, although nobody actually died during this one. (Telluride is the kingdom where nobody dies.) But people left town, friends quit being friends, husbands and wives turned their backs on each other and went to bed angry, all because this tiny town was trying to take some land from some guy who wanted to build hotels and houses … and some other people wanted to take the land and turn it into a park.

7. The Valley Floor: The bickering may never stop. This paper has a comments section on its Web site, and it rarely fails to devolve into a spat over the Valley Floor. Government, politics, sports stories. They all come back to the Valley Floor. I wrote a story this week about a mudslide in Lawson Hill. And, like Rev. Wright and Jerry Falwell talking about 9/11, a keyboard-pounder attributed the disaster to Mother Nature’s revenge against Telluride for its taking of the floor. Because Mother Nature keeps a very close eye on fifth amendment law.

8. The Valley Floor: Someone, somewhere in town, is building a tower. They’re erecting it over their house, probably on the elevated sunny side of town. Ten thousand watt amps are being placed behind megaphones. An electric cord runs down to a microphone, where a man or woman stands, ready, waiting for the Supreme Court decision to come down. Whichever way the decision goes, whether the court lets SMVC or Telluride keep the Valley Floor, that person is ready to step up to the microphone and rupture a larynx screaming at the top of their pent-up lungs “I TOLD YOU SO! I TOLD YOU SO! I TOLD YOU SO!”

9. The Valley Floor: Once it’s all over, what the heck are we going to talk about?

10. The Valley Floor: The money. The money came in a year ago Friday. A lot of money. People said there were better uses for the money. Affordable housing, so that busboys and teachers don’t have to commute an hour over death-defying mountain passes that scare even the big-horn sheep. Or, as few big-picture people pointed out, there are real problems in other places. The rainforests are still vanishing at an alarming rate — as if they’re being systematically exposed to antimatter — and Africa is not exactly saddled with the same luxury problems I tend to be, such as searching in vain for ripe organic avocados or looking for a good deal on a roof rack for my kayak. They’re dying from the disease of malaria, when they’re not dying of the more painful disease of flying arrow-to-the-temple.

11. The Valley Floor: These big-picture people have some kind of point. How many acres of open space would $50 million have bought in other parts of the world? How many acres of rainforest? Do you even want to Google it? Do you even want to know?

12. The Valley Floor: The cynic asks: Would people have given that much money to stop malaria? If we started a wishing well and an escrow account so that Darfur is less of a bloodbath, would people re-finance their houses to toss money in?

13. The Valley Floor: It’s no secret — and maybe not even a shame — that charity works on the inverse square law, same as gravity, decreasing as you go farther and further away. So while our children would get all our money, our kidneys, our very hearts, Africans and Asians are among the races to whom we might only give our clipped fingernails. If I happened to remember. If a clipped-fingernail-mobile happened to drive through town, and I could clip my fingernails on my lunch hour.

14. The Valley Floor: You lose track of money in Telluride. This is part of what makes this place so wonderful. Everywhere else, people are always talking about money. Who has more, who’s getting more, what they’re doing with it. Not so much here. Veblen talked about the leisure class’s two ways of demonstrating their wealth: through conspicuous consumption and through conspicuous leisure. We do the latter, mostly. Our version of the SUV or the house on the Upper East Side is six months in Nicaragua or a summer off camping. It’s a more pleasant way to keep score, in my opinion. Who needs a plasma screen TV? Who needs a new car? You think my old TV doesn’t show the Super Bowl? You think my beat-up car doesn’t have air conditioning and a CD player? (Even if it does pull to the left.)

15. The Valley Floor: Because you don’t talk about money, you lose track of its value. When the $50 million verdict came back from that Delta jury, and we learned that private fundraisers needed at least $16 million more, friends turned to friends and said: “is $16 million a lot of money?” People who had recently traveled to the outside world contended that it was, in fact, a lot of money. People like me, who live here and seldom leave the valley, weren’t sure.

16. The Valley Floor: But how much money was it, really, when you live in the richest country the world has ever seen, and when one of your friends — eBay’s former CEO Meg Whitman — could have written a check for the whole amount and reduced her total net worth by just 4 percent. The mathematical equivalent of your local bartender writing a check for 40 bucks.

17. The Valley Floor: People have tried to draw all sorts of lessons from this, about determination and what is possible and how Margaret Mead was right when she talked about never underestimating the power of small groups to change the world. But, really, the lesson here is simpler, and narrower, and already-known: never underestimate the power of a small group of people to beautify their own backyards.

18. The Valley Floor: But that’s too pessimistic. This is more hopeful: what we saw in Telluride was a shift in values, one that will continue long into the future. A change in what money is used for. Used to be, wealthy people used their money to build things. Build a nice house in a nice place and have factory workers build you a nice car. Now, if you have money and adhere to a certain worldview, you pay people NOT to build things. You pay people not to build highways and Wal-Marts and dams and power plants and sprawling factory farms. By rejecting the compromise, Telluriders paid a lot of money not to have houses built. About $3 million per house that wasn’t built. They paid to create a park that anybody can use.

19. The Valley Floor: This isn’t over. (God, when will it be over?) Somebody — depending on whom the Supreme Court favors — either the town or the landowner — will eventually want to build something out there, a school or a greenhouse or a small subdivision, and the War will start all over again. It’ll be smaller — the battle over Berlin at the end of WWII, not Normandy on D-day — but the town will threaten to melt down again. Shouting, ruptured friendships, anger. Somebody will say that somebody is trying to destroy the town.