Shady Acres was exactly what I needed in August of 1995.

That spring I had been living out of my pickup truck while waiting tables at Grand Canyon. In July I quit the job and set out to bicycle across the Great Basin desert–a fool’s errand writ large. On the afternoon that I peddled into Laughlin, NV, the temperature spiked at 117 degrees.

Four searing days and 200 miserable miles later, I called my best friend in Flagstaff, pleading for a rescue. She obliged, and on the drive back from Nevada mentioned that the cabin next to hers was vacant. After four months of roofless-ness, an actual dwelling sounded good. I moved in.

Shady Acres was a rough jewel in the pine forest south of town–a cluster of flimsy wooden shacks with woodstoves and grid electricity, but no plumbing. Tenants shared an outhouse and carried kitchen water from a central shower building. The graceful lines of the San Francisco Peaks rose above the treetops. Morning and evening sunlight splashed the pines with gold; throughout the day ravens swooped down to heckle the humans; at night, a million stars would shimmer in the jet black sky,

The renters were a revolving cast of oddballs: woods hippies and radical environmentalists, dropouts from the corporate world, itinerant rock climbers and starving artists. My friend and I fit right in.

M had already rented at Shady Acres for years. A semi-famous writer who also taught writing, she was, like me, a transplant from the humid East. We had each picked Flagstaff for its mountains, its nearness to the desert, and its decidedly un-slick, small-city feel. We had become fast friends the previous year, and would be neighbors for the next four, wearing a distinct footpath between our cabins.

The friendship has lasted to this day. Always platonic, it has been closer than any I’ve known. Our brains and senses of humor clicked from day one. We shared good books, great music, raucous laughter, and a confirmed lack of interest in the middle class American Dream.

We launched a never-ending cutthroat Scrabble tournament. We talked and talked and talked some more, a river of words that eddied on each other’s porches and kitchen tables, and swept us down a hundred desert backroads.

For 25 years we road-tripped together, making camps in the back-of-beyond, cooking killer meals on the tailgate, and walking the stony ground beyond roads-end, just to see what might be there. We celebrated each other’s successes and walked each other through tough times. Neither of us ever found life partners, and each of us would for various reasons leave Flagstaff, but eventually return.

Across the decades our friendship hit rocky patches, but survived. During those years, funky little Flagstaff–like the rural and small-town West as a whole–morphed into an entirely different place. Gated golf course developments gobbled up open space. Northern Arizona University nearly doubled in size. Rents skyrocketed. Traffic choked the once-quiet downtown streets.

Over time we have changed, too. I was just shy of 40 the day I moved into Shady Acres, M was 56. Do the math and you will know that neither of us is young any more. Somehow, medical care has become a hot topic for conversation. We still laugh together, but not so often or so loudly. These days, the road-tripping, like much else, has become a set of cherished memories.

Shady Acres is gone now, too. There is no longer room in the Flagstaff real estate market for low-rent plywood shacks under the tall pines. No developer itches to build a bare-bones haven for misfits, bohemians and freaks.

The last of the cabins was knocked down this summer, and a new McMansion is springing up. Like much of Flagstaff’s housing stock, it will sit empty most of the year–a second or third-home “investment property” for rich folks from somewhere else.

The end of Shady Acres, like the end of the West we once knew, broke my friend’s heart. Today she lives in a single-wide trailer a couple miles from the home she knew for a quarter-century. She visits Shady Acres every day, to grieve what she can’t forget.

I live in an off-grid tiny house 40 miles from town, and drive to Flagstaff once a week for groceries and to visit my old pal. I shovel her walk in winter and help to locate her hearing aids, car keys and eyeglasses when they go missing. She listens to me complain about my latest aches and pains, and the noise that plagues my once-quiet neighborhood. We still play Scrabble at her kitchen table.

But instead of planning for the next adventure, we recall the ones we’ve shared. It’s the way of life, I suppose. Some things fade. But friendship doesn’t. Not if we’re lucky.