As I think I’ve made clear, I have very mixed feelings about small-town America. I kind of hate the little towns I grew up in. And yet, when I bought a house in Nashville, I moved to the Davidson County suburban equivalent of a small town–a couple of restaurants, two gas stations, a grocery store where everyone turns to see whose walking in the door when it whooshes open and enough people know me by sight to smile at the sight of me, where more pick up trucks than cars pass me on the road when I walk the dog most mornings.
So, yeah, I hate it, but only in the way you can hate something you feel in your bones. The hate you feel toward something you can’t live without.
And so I am torn about the pending death of Keithsburg, because it’s not just Keithsburg. Driving to visit my parents sometimes feels like town after town on the verge of giving up the ghost. Places where people where born and lived their whole lives and died after having a life are drying up and crumbling away.
It’s hard for me to imagine that it will ever come back. Jobs, what jobs there are, have moved to the cities and people have to follow.
But it’s weird. It’s like we’re just slowly abandoning the countryside. The land we killed people over and now we’re just letting it go. I mean, I doubt Illinois is going to trudge over to Iowa, hat in hand, knock on the door of the Meskwaki and say “Um, oops. Turns out we don’t want the Yellow Banks anymore. You can have it back.” Or go track down what’s left of the Illinois Confederation and admit we’re emptying out of the land we forced them off of. So, it’s like a tragedy with an insult at the end. We did these terrible things to you and, in the end, we were like, eh, fuck it. We can’t make it work here.
And I see the same thing happening in Tennessee, watching West Tennessee emptying out.
Is that it? We just end up these dense urban centers surrounded by ghost towns?
Like this:
Filed under: America how can I write a holy litany in your silly moo
I know exactly what you’re talking a/b & it makes me think back to when I went in search of my paternal grandmother’s grave. Daddy was born outside of Meridian, MS – a small town called Crandall. If you look at a map, directly to the east, near the AL state line is where it used to be.
I was in the area a few years ago after the first time I had gone. The cemetery exists across the road from an old country church that is still in use by the locals. Anyway, we stopped in Quitman, which is a small town in its own right and asked some guys pulling a bass boat “which way is Crandall?” – they replied, “what used to be Crandall is that way” and pointed down the road.
My own hometown is drying up. A highway used to run directly thru town, but a new 4 lane was built about a mile and a half east and the traffic being re-routed caused businesses to dry up and people to move away to seek job opportunities. It’s sad. But what can you do?
“The hate you feel toward something you can’t live without” is such a perfect description of that thing which, before now, I had never had words to describe. Thanks.
I’m actually lying here in a bedroom of my sister’s house in a very small Midwestern town and thinking I might move back to this area. I know quite a few people here who are somewhat cultured, and thanks to the magic of the Internet, I can work from anywhere. If it weren’t for the stereotypes of small towns (which make us forget about the intelligent people who live in some of them), we might find that there would be a revival of rural living spurred by Internet connectivity.