Small Town Life
Sunday, October 26th, 2008
High winds blow unobstructed over the prairies and shake the suburban houses built on the outskirts to the foundations. The farm houses that have withstood the westerly winds coming down unbroken from the mountains for a century or more are weathering another autumn. White-washed and worn, the sturdier structures were built with farm hands and passed down through generations to present day, today, an afternoon wrought with strong atumnal gales separting the weakest leaves from their branches.
Rural living has changed much in the last 20 years, but its basic conceits have stayed central. Small towns in American culture are thought to be inviting places where the people have simple aspirations, high moral standards and deep religious beliefs. The chosen profession is farming, so many of the inhabitants are people of the land that produce crops as a living and to serve the needs of others, only taking a small portion for themselves so that their own families can grow and prosper.
Working the land at this latitude can be a perilous job. The August heat is terminal, but it can be side-stepped if the day is begun early enough and the duties are done in darkness or half-light. The winters, though, are killer, and it doesn’t befit a soul to rise on a January morning to attempt to gain an advantage on the weather.
I’ve heard from aquaintances that many farms are changing hands in modern times. Children who grew up milking cows and throwing feed to chickens are not acquiescing to their parent’s hopes and dreams. After earning a business degree at a moderately sized university, one friend of ours intentionally left behind all he knew about combines and pesticides for a technology career. Now he travels the world and takes extended stays in foreign countries assisting corporations in setting up computer networks and trouble-shooting any impending issues.
Our friend is not a single part farmer anymore, it would seem, not on the outside – not phsyically. He dresses dapperly (when we’ve seen him) and is professional even in casual conversation. All that remains of his ties to the heartland are his disarming friendliness and what seems to be legitimate concern for the people he encounters. His wages, I would guess, are in the six-digit range, considerably higher than what his take away might have been from his family’s farm. Luckily for his parents, who’d established a large family, the farm’s responsibility fell to his brother.
Where we live, the farmers still frequent this town’s historic downtown area. The red-brick strips in the business district hold an old drug store, a couple antique shops, a saloon, a tobacco store and barber shop, and an old-fashioned cafe. Before sunrise, the cafe opens it doors and by the time first light cracks the sky, the air is filled with fried eggs, maple syrup and tobacco smoke, all rolled into one thick and undated cafe smell.
I expect that some of the old timers – the ones who are the most jovial – who sit around the wooden tables have been coming here since the 50s or 60s. Maybe their fathers brought them or a place like it when they were boys. They sit and gingerly flirt with the waitresses, but knowing their age, drop the inquiries with them before it becomes anything close to harassment, and discuss their land and their animals, their crops and their women that they’ve been married to a lifetime and will be until passing on. They are out to pasture themselves, heros in a way, that have provided for their families and married women as strong or stronger than them to live lives contrary to passing time. They keep different hours than the rest of the world and keep different standards.
Their trucks line the slanted parking spaces downtown, the truck beds dirty with stray straw and work gloves and boots, the wheel wells rusted out, the dashboards dusty so that their grandchildren and can scratch their names into them.
Time has managed to progress and the proof is closer than might be expected. On the corner in the downtown area now is a wireless phone store. Some have embraced the technology on their farms and using to stay in constant contact with the house or employess, if the farm is large enough, but some are also completely clueless to that technology and feel all the better for it.
They walk out from the cafe and look at the sign with its odd shaped logo – a couple dots arranged arpound and odd swoosh with arms – and know they are not the audience for this place. They climb behind the steering wheel in cowboy boots and cowboy had, slam the old creak truck doors and drive back home, leaving town, this little patch of shops and the thoroughfare through it being the busiest, most populated place they’ll travel to for the day and quite possibly longer.
These farmers are not in town long enough to really shape the town’s feel. Many are already come and gone before the average citizen here begins to stir. The city has gown and its outlying areas erupted with development when the urban growth was stunted here in the 1980s and 1990s. Suburban neighborhoods done in beige have sprouted all around this central business disteict, so now there are minivans and foreign cars on the streets, hordes of people compared to 20 years ago. Along with the houses, big box department stores have sprouted and traffic here anymore isn’t for mecessities. Instead, there are children to run to school, Halloween decorations to buy, pizzas being delivered, and satellite dishes to install.
This makes an interesting dynamic. The surbanites are invading the small town life with houses built in corn fields and cow pastures. At least in the Bible belt they all share a passion for God and share each others comapany in little chapels and slightly larher denominational churches built in the 1950s. Aside from these places that naturally divide the population according to religious affiliation or public schools that do the same with district boundaries – completely ostracizing residents with no children – the library is the most welcoming social destination in town.
Membership, which comes in the form of a library card, is free except for any fees incurred on late materials. But a card isn’t required to peruse the shelves or read the day’s newspaper in the quiet rooms in the corner. Boy Scout groups, quilters and craft makers, culinary artists, politicians, community groups and tutors are just a few of the groups that come together in the meeting rooms.
The deeply religious object to many books available here and so keep a distance to the town’s information center. The only book they need is the one written by those who spoke to or were spoken to by the creator. They live by and quote the words of the apostles and interpret those stories literally.
Small town life is not at all small in concept. These people all have big things on their minds, big issues to face, and the answers more than likely might be found in a place where the people believe in their neighbors and can make sense of the world.
