Eugene Havens

I stare at my neighbor being tugged along by a small dog. At least someone is excited about the early hour. Not me with another school drop-off ahead of me, the car keys in hand, the kids shuffling out the door behind me. Don’t think, they say, just do. Above us is a dim, steely December morning sky. I unlock the car and watch the comical duo. Not my kids. No less comical, there are three of them filing into the car. It’s my neighbor and his dog. As if to take a break from being pulled, the man stops across the road. It’s the first time I think of it as a road, a standard two-lane strip with no sidewalk or gutter. It’s worn out, the pavement thinning to a rough ribbon on either side. I’ve never lived on a road, only the engineered streets found in efficient urban areas, but it’s a road, a dumb, romantic road. My mailbox is planted like a flag on the far side of it, weathered and rusted like rural mailboxes should be, and enormous, large enough for packages. How long has it been there, I’m spurred to wonder? Who owns the property it’s on? Possibly the county. Across our road, instead of the usual house, is a dusty berm. There’s a gravel driveway that leads up to a chain link fence and a gate wide enough for work trucks. The fence guards a largely invisible water facility. Everyone just ducks under the gaps to pass through. When we took our house, there were tall, half-rusted water towers on the property, three stories high. Later, they were half-painted as well. They were an eyesore but, for rural, sort of expected. A new water system made them obsolete. They were removed. How often does an ugly thing disappear? We enjoyed enough tree cover from the front yard to ignore them mostly. Soon, we would get a letter from the county: your trees stick out into the road. Trim them way back. Now we see the berm, but at least the eyesores are history.

We live on the edge of the neighborhood. Beyond us is an upward slope to a very large hill that you might call a mountain if you weren’t from around here. The hill rises a few hundred feet and can be seen from town. It’s a natural destination for hikers. They park on the shoulder of our road and can walk to the top if they don’t mind navigating a forty-five-degree angle for a mile or so. We’re already here. It’s practically our hill. We can walk out of our house, cross the road, and start hiking, but we rarely do.

I start the car while my kids shiver in their seats. Our rig is speckled with frost as if it were the target of an overnight snowball fight. I scratch at a sheet of windshield ice with a scraper. I hack away at it. I haven’t factored in the time it takes, a few minutes even with the car defroster on. The biting cold doesn’t stop my neighbor from venturing out. He’s an older guy who likes a routine. He’s on a schedule also, it seems, as I see him out here most frigid mornings. Usually, my schedule is ahead of his. I’m already up the street by now, driving past him. He’ll wave. I’ll wave back haltingly. Our intrepid neighbor has already reached our house today. We’re running late.

He’s easy to notice in a reflective yellow vest. Maybe a lack of sidewalks or a brush with an SUV has him putting safety first. When you’re drawn to his shiny vest, you notice a winter hat with flaps that, with his puffy coat, makes anyone look like a teddy bear. What I notice first is his overactive dog on a short leash. It’s another safety precaution. With a regular-length leash, the dog would become a speed bump on any given morning as we passed by. I don’t know my small dog breeds, but I guess it’s a German Shepherd mixed with a breed the size of a mouse, as the body is more compact than the long face suggests. Whenever the dog sees my kids and me, it spins excitedly. I watch the dog perform for us at dizzying speed, like a circus trick.

We can almost leave. As I finish scraping, my neighbor calls, “You should get a windshield cover.”

“Oh?” I look up and smile. Listening to him explain it, I see it’s like a sleeping mask for the windshield that prevents ice buildup. “I’ll have to look into that,” I say, thanking him. We have never spoken before.

I join my kids in the car and back out carefully, the neighbor still across the road. I’ve been given advice. Minding my own business in my own driveway, I grumble; advice. I hate getting rural advice. I’ve lived here long enough to form an opinion. It feels like a fair, completely reasonable attitude.

I’m never buying one of those things. His advice sounds solid. It will feel good not to take it. I can decline to buy a windshield cover and thwart the town’s plan to educate the city guy. But then, a couple of weeks later, I decide to get one for each of our cars. I end up buying two windshield covers. Once again, I have weakened on taking rural advice. What kind of stand can you make once you’ve left the city? A few nights later, I unfold the windshield covers and affix them. The following day is not an icy one. The covers are enormous. I store them in the garage and forget they exist.

The first bit of advice in rural America comes as a shovel upside the head. OK, no one strikes me. The action is metaphorical, but the shovel is literal. Even more confusing? Likely, someone wants to hit me after my first week in town, as I am a sore thumb on the hand of local progress and harmony. I am not a natural addition to the community. It’s not the community’s fault. Distrust of pseudo-intellectual outsiders is simply the way. When entering a small town, one truth becomes clear: rural decries a city influence. That is precisely why it needs one; a sarcastic city person may rejoin. Such a comment is not helpful, people. You are in a foreign territory. Snark is not a benefit. You may not be seeking to influence anyone as a newcomer. Possibly, you’re beating a path to the town’s only wine store to nab the only bottle of Beaujolais-Villages, which is telling on you. It’s impossible to keep your city self under wraps. You’re you, even here. You can’t be a neutral presence in any place, let alone in a location where gun closets predominate over wine cellars. You’ll try to fit in to make life easier. “Don’t mind me. I’m not being different.” Hardly. Your city perspective leaks out of you like the smell of therapeutic garlic pills.

And why not? City views are what benefitted you just a few weeks prior. They were good. Now, they make you a constant objection to the natural way that rural things are done. What you buy or don’t buy. How you solve problems, or how you hire people to solve problems. What you know versus what you haven’t a clue about. Which brings me to the shovel. Yes, the shovel was literal. It had a squared-off bottom. Given my reference point of a spade shape (not that I owned one), someone appeared to have destroyed this shovel. In that split second, I wondered how you could wreck a shovel scoop. Would you need to heat it first, in a bonfire, maybe? I wasn’t paying attention. “Here,” the man said. “Take this.” I grabbed the offered shovel upright by the handle. Then, I angled it into the hatch of my car and, marveling at how much could fit into a two-door VW, promptly forgot it.

I was preoccupied with a job opportunity. It was not a remote job but one that existed in the small town, a rare position for an urbanist lacking a spade shovel or mechanical skills. The town had a technical college, and I had a Master’s degree, which gave me credentials to teach. I was far from technical. I needed a calculator for real-world arithmetic. How much would I save at a fifteen percent discount? That sort of thing. However, the technical college did teach English subjects to its tech nerds. I knew about those. I was a grammar nerd. I was known to confuse coffee shop staff by carrying a grammar textbook under my arm. I had recently brushed up on my skills while writing a book. I hired a professional book editor to go through my manuscript. It refreshed my understanding of the finer points. I hired the book editor more than once, as I kept erasing her line edits through constant rewrites. I learned grammar pitfalls. I bought a Chicago Manual of Style.

Rural life ended city dreams. This was a start. Could I teach college here? 

Because there was a college located in the small town, I saw a possibility. I could work there. My calculus, to submit to a pun, was based on a naïve view. I regarded the college as part of the small town in a far-off part of the state, which was a sleepier state in our vast country. Could the English department use part-time help? Could teaching turn into a little profession you fell into?

People said if you step out of the city, you could try something new. You could take new approaches and learn without the spotlight on you. I could walk into a college office and introduce myself. Teaching college had been an avenue for writers. It was the dream job for a published author to serve as a way to keep the lights on, and then, to add prestige to a writer’s image for some reason. If students paid tuition to listen to you, yours was a compelling voice. I came from the business world, where no one was important except the executives, and money was better than prestige. This insider-prestige stuff would be a new mentality. I could help influence students to enjoy English, a subject that was being offloaded to grammar apps. English was now a calculator function, not something to be understood or appreciated, but solved in the most automated way. As a result, the mighty book, our civilization-defining tome, was seen as a time drain. AI could summarize an entire book as if it were an article. How would kids avoid temptation instead of reading and discovering the book? It would take motivational teachers. I would become an eccentric champion of inefficient books, the teacher you remembered as relevant years later. Not that it would be easy. English wasn’t a fun subject for non-writers. You appreciated knowing English rules, not learning them. The subject was taught at the technical college to help engineers become more articulate in their papers. It was a mundane job, and the college might need in-town help. They wouldn’t have to bus me in.

It was my naïveté. The college wasn’t there. It was only in the small town geographically. 

The department chair wanted to meet with me. It was to tell me he couldn’t hire me. I didn’t have a PhD, and his department didn’t feel I was qualified. Without a PhD, I hadn’t proven I could teach freshman English. I had a Master’s degree. It accredited me to teach at the college level, of course. But the Masters was in creative writing, not English composition, a vast difference. May I betray a little confusion to the chair? I asked how society rose to its point of literacy if a PhD were necessary to teach English comp. Schoolchildren learned grammar from teachers with undergraduate degrees or possibly even associate’s degrees. Most published authors lacked a PhD. 

It appeared the department head was conflicted. He was meeting with me to get more information. He knew I had written a book. He wanted to hear my response before he made a decision. I saw his dilemma. His professors were protecting their turf. If a teacher with a Master’s degree could do their jobs, what was the point of that additional schooling? These English PhDs weren’t teaching in the Ivy League, and they likely wished they were. They were stuck at a modest technical school in a rural part of a western state. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune were theirs. It wasn’t an English PhD’s dream gig. They had to maintain exacting standards to justify themselves as overeducated, debt-ridden casualties of the university system. Teaching gerunds to daydreaming freshmen had to be difficult, or it was all for naught.

What else could I say? I gave the department chair my website URL, although he already had it. The chair was less confident than you expected a man in charge to be. It appeared he would like to add me as a resource but was being denied permission to do so. The chair admitted that he was new. He had only recently taken over the position. Before his promotion, he had been among the professors he now spoke for. He nearly said he didn’t feel in charge, I suspected, and if he were to hire me, it would have to be a group decision. The department chair alone couldn’t do it. It made me imagine a long sofa filled with stone-faced judges. Of course, I suggested meeting with them, but the chair already had that answer. They would decline.

Franz Kafka was the guiding writer for understanding the malfeasance of cultured society. The arbiters of life promoted their high ideals. Kafka reminded us, no, it was about power. The feeling that a Kafkaesque tribunal had found me guilty followed me outside. I had interloped the college ecosystem, which wasn’t geographical. It was a country where the smallest college was a member. My assumption that a modest local college could use teaching help was misguided. I received more advice. Stay in your lane.

What other activities was I overestimating my ability to do? Was driving a car back to the house prohibited without a Formula 1 driver’s experience?

That night, snow began to fall. When I awoke to the driveway covered in white, I remembered the shovel. I had been advised to clear the snow promptly. Otherwise, it would become an icy mess and trip you up. It was common sense, but someone took the time to tell me. Maybe I looked like I didn’t have much sense to work with. I scraped the driveway, one pass at a time. It began to snow again. When I was finished, it was still unfinished.

Am I making friendly advice sound like a bad time? Could I say it’s what rural life led me to? No? I was a big believer in advice in the city, which made the difference between good and bad living. Unsolicited advice wasn’t a problem. It could be the most valuable currency that helped you to land a job, find an apartment, or meet the right people. It could save you from dumb mistakes and looking foolish. 

I couldn’t get enough of advice there. Urban life was an intricate puzzle I couldn’t put down or make sense of. I would get stumped on basic things. Getting a hint or a clue from those who knew the game helped. I didn’t see advice as a challenge to my autonomy. I wanted to get things done, and advice was the way.

Needing assistance would prove to be a big city issue alone. I found that a smaller city wasn’t as challenging. I lived in one (Portland, OR) and got by on my own. I didn’t want to be told what to do. It wasn’t necessary.

The amount of advice I was getting for a rural move made my head hurt. I didn’t get it. Rural living was meant to be easy, wasn’t it? The only reason to consider rural life was simplicity. Who would reverse-migrate to a smaller, less fabulous place if it offered the same hassles as in the city? Why was advice a thing? If you had a nest egg from your urban exploits, and mine was small, it was supposed to solve the settling-in problems. Rural life was a case of point and shoot, so I had been told. Or maybe it’s only what I heard. 

I understood rural life from what local people had said. It was an alternative to the urban grind, a rebuttal. Rural was anti-city, anti-stress, anti-strain. Rural life would be as humane as if you had started civilization over. There would be less traffic, if not almost none. Life’s biggest problem, housing, could be figured out without the city’s existential struggle. You could find a house with a wraparound porch, a stone fireplace, and two acres for the price of a one-bedroom city condo, so went my thinking. Food was farm-fresh. Kids rode bikes along dirt roads day and night, always riding, their skin aglow from the unsullied air their lungs had never known. You would have a dog, hearty and true. Your dog would have a dog. It’s how bucolic the rural experience would be. The lifestyle would hit me between the eyes with its refreshing grandeur. Advice? A few tips here and there, I could see needing those. What seasoning should I use on tonight’s grill meat? That sort of thing. And yet, it wasn’t the type of advice being offered. It was serious advice, as you get in the city. “Rent a house before you get here.” Say, what?

The housing advice predates the snow shovel advice. It was offered before I arrived, so I didn’t think to count it as the first bit of advice, although, likely, it was. It’s how much advice there was. I can’t keep track.

“Rent a house before you get here” was a jaw-dropper. It brought back nightmares of housing scrambles in the city, what I was trying to avoid in the move. How could rural life be easy if you had to rent ahead to live there? It was a renting problem, I was told. Limited housing was a widespread rural issue. How much new construction had been done after the ’08 crash? Not much. The solution to renting was to buy a house. Where had I heard it before? Every city I ever lived in. I wasn’t in the position to buy a house for a couple of years, not even in the country. It left a renting scramble. There were pictures on a website, I was told. It wasn’t like you couldn’t see what you were getting. Still, you would need to move all of your belongings into a rental without actually seeing it with your own eyes, smelling it with your own nose, or shaking anyone’s hand. People did it all the time. A sight-unseen rental was a desperate move I had avoided for years. 

I needed to get with the program. Renting was a means to an end, so I opened a web link and found a house within budget. It was only a matter of contacting the rental manager and putting down a deposit.

But the manager didn’t want a deposit. He was country. He would hold the house until I arrived. It would be three weeks later, I told him. Are you sure? He liked to do things with a handshake. The gist was my significant other and I were vouched for by the locals we knew. The house was ours. When I offered to fax an application and mail a deposit check anyway, the rental manager wouldn’t hear of it. He was a stubborn cuss on this point. The rental house was here waiting. Don’t worry about it.

A move to the country was full of advice I didn’t like. What if I wanted to worry about it? What if my quarter-century of renting was filled with worry? What if I got rid of worry by signing a deposit check? 

Finding a city rental had always been hell. You landed in a new location that was unaware of your presence and running just fine without you. You found yourself in the fight of your life until the fateful day you found a place. You wanted a legal claim to a rental. You wanted to sign a paper. The relief of knowing you were “in” was everything. The rural property manager, in his kindness, took it away.

He was strangely, even unnecessarily, friendly. The rental became a loose end for me that wouldn’t tie up. I thanked him on the phone and wondered why I thought this arrangement would blow up in my face. Could I not allow something to go well? Must I be suspicious about the country’s kindness and make an informal business deal an enemy? Or did I know? Informality in legal matters was a mistake. Honest people followed the rules. The situation was a bad start.

I was a charity case. “Will this guy break his neck on an icy driveway? Better give him a snow shovel.” The town didn’t want to step over a body. People went out of their way to keep the winter from doing me in. The next bit of advice was my ride. I heard that I needed a four-wheel-drive for the snow and ice; one practicality to be traded out for another. I was driving a small car that was economical and easy to park. It was the smart buy, if unimpressive in a car culture that prized import badges and engine displacement. Here, the car was wrong for different reasons. A puny vehicle wasn’t going to cut it in the great outdoors. 

It was another expense. Who had forty grand to buy an SUV? I had it wrong, they said. It wouldn’t cost that much. People in rural areas didn’t drive new cars. They didn’t drive gently used cars, either. The target vehicle wasn’t a beater, per se, but you searched up to the edge of beater status. It was cheaper.

I learned it was also smarter. Some pickup truck drivers in a small town swung their doors wide. It was common to notice a dent in your car door, the rear passenger ones, when returning from the store. “How long has that been there?” It was as prevalent as a deer sighting. A guy in the small town even had a mobile dent-repair business. I watched him heat the door and use a suction cup to even out sheet metal. I sang the guy’s praises to everyone I knew. “You should learn to do it,” someone challenged me. The person was a local who was unimpressed that I had hired someone. In true rural fashion, I was encouraged to learn a skill to become self-sufficient. You had to do for yourself because a small town didn’t have all the bases covered. Door dents were common enough that going into sheet metal repair was a real consideration. To avoid new dents, I followed the LA practice of parking at the lot’s edge. No dice. I would see another door dent sooner or later. And if I were to parallel park on a downtown street, they got me there. The back of the car would show scrapes from the love taps of other cars. Parking is hard.

The dent hookup wasn’t to last. The guy stopped returning calls. People skipped town all the time. Now, I had to drive over the hill sixty miles to find dent repair. Do it yourself rang in my ears. I’d need a blowtorch.

If the car I brought from the city was a modest ride by LA standards, it was a VW with a turbo engine. It got good gas mileage if you didn’t floor it, so really, it didn’t get good gas mileage. The car fit into the hot hatch car culture while staying inconspicuous among the BMWs, Audis, and Mercedes’ on the freeways we came from. In a small town, I learned a hot hatch VW was considered an exotic import car. It wasn’t a compliment from the town’s gatekeepers, more a display of wastefulness and simply, “Why?” The car was small and useless due to its front-wheel-drive drivetrain. The car only had two doors. It weighed half of a pickup truck soaking wet. I’d lose a battle with a snow berm. I’d also lose against any bigger vehicle that slid over the center line. It had to go. 

A few onlookers knew what it could do, including sheriff’s deputies. I would earn a speeding ticket on a Sunday morning with no one around. It was a mythical landscape that car commercials and road movies showed in dewy light, with a ribbon of road, a lone driver, and an eager engine. I let it rip. A lone pickup that passed me suddenly doubled back. Safety had become a national obsession, even in the middle of nowhere. A cop friend later told me the county deputies didn’t have radar guns in those pickups. The ticketing deputy got me talking as they do. I volunteered the info like an idiot. Ticket.

It turned out my VW with a turbo-four was also a favorite in meth culture. The pickup truck cop had doubled back because I looked like a tweaker flying toward some greater lawless activity. (I was doing sixty-five.) When I parted with the car, I got a notice it had been totaled. They wanted me to come get it. I called the number on the letter and said it wasn’t mine anymore. It had been totaled one day after the tweaker purchased it before there was time to transfer it into his name. They said there was nothing left.

It was time to put away childish things, they said. To aid this effort, I was bequeathed a hand-me-down Ford Explorer that was old enough to drink. It was built on a truck chassis, riding tall, if not sturdy. The steering wheel had a boat-wheel feel. You wanted to start turning a few moments before the turn came. The dashboard was a mechanical throwback to cars of my grandfather’s era, and the cloth interior had a museum of two hundred thousand miles of use. The steering wheel was loose enough to feel like it would come off in your hands, but it had a four-wheel drive. No one would blame you if you slid off a snowy road because the car was old enough to fall asleep during the day. You had a rural rig. They’d say it happens.