How slow do you want to go? I should have mulled it over before moving to a small town. Didn’t I? Well, to a degree, yeah, I did. I thought I had settled on it.
I knew rural America didn’t promise to be a fast-paced life. Now when you say something definitive in the internet era, make a claim, as they say, you’ll be corrected before you can finish your sentence (and… done). I’ll correct myself. Rural could be fast paced. A farmer racing to beat the setting sun is working fast. An accountant in a small town would be up against it at tax season. The workers at a sandwich shop at lunch time will be assembling at speed. There are situations where a small town can get hectic. I get that. Generally though, on regular days, you could sidestep the time pressures that most city people felt. It was a draw to small town life, and no one I’d heard of was trying to myth-bust it, that you could reject the pace of the city and go at your own pace. It wasn’t to take anything away from that person racing to get to work and hitting all red lights, or money being tight for families struggling with bills, one pressure that likely was not any different from how it felt in the city; rural life wasn’t a cakewalk because trouble found you everywhere. No place you ever lived could be magically stress free but, from a city perspective, rural life was slower. It was less about the environment putting pressure on you. A small town did not have an edgy vibe.
Which raised a question: could any of us city people, those who lived for “the edge” but were left feeling dull over the years, embrace this slower life? Rural living sounded either more pleasant, or like you were adopting life of a tumbleweed, a slow barrel across the street to be stopped by a garbage can.
The city was predictable, from costs to crime, but it was the devil you knew. And it felt like the devil ran the place sometimes. It made you think again about a rural place to live. You would run a simulation in your head. “I wake up in the country, birds chirping, and the room dead quiet. Will a part of me like it?” It was hard to tell. You’re not on a vacation in your mental test. The moving truck has been turned in. Your stuff all around you in your new living space told you, this is the new reality. At some point, you give up trying to run scenarios to imagine your new life. Instead, you fall back on a mental checklist of what’s important. As the advice gurus suggest, to move or not move becomes a spreadsheet decision. “I want this and am willing to give up that. I think.” You cross your fingers.
It’s likely you’ve already made the decision to move and are looking for a validation of that choice. You try to remind yourself, rural living has advantages, doesn’t it? The sizzle, if rural could be said to have sizzle, is peace and quiet. Serenity is a stirring thought from the noise and clutter of a city apartment. Everyone would envy a little serenity, and you know envy is a city currency. If you can sell yourself on having something they don’t, your peers, then your petty city attitude could be satiated. Space to spread out in is another rural advantage. You don’t feel rich enough to buy a ranch or anything, but sitting in your city box, you think, “I can afford more than this.” If you can focus on the positive exchange rate of rural over city, you think, then maybe you could wear down your stubbornness and live in nature. In my case, it would mean for the rest of my life, or for as long as my wife liked her rural job, and she intended to retire from it. A sense of doubt hung around me as I took the familiar steps of moving. As the days marched forward and leaving was a certainty, it was a tossup. Would I regret it?
Sure, I fully expected to regret it up to forty-nine percent. When you lived in the city for long enough, specifically, the first and second largest American cities for more than twenty years, you knew you couldn’t give up the city mentality just like that. Yes, I would regret leaving everything, who wouldn’t, but could I stave off the final two percentage points and be mostly happy about going rural? The city was all about advantages. It had everything, and everything was a good argument for staying fixed on the top-tier, most popular place to pass your temporal existence. A fixation on the city was also a common thing for some of us. The city was a training ground for restless and peripatetic achievers in their twenties and thirties. It was a rite of passage for us. Being a would-be author, I was further invested in the city mindset of writers throughout the ages. Dostoevsky had St. Petersburg. Only, I wasn’t as loony as Dostoevsky, I was learning, as I blew past the age of forty. I was finding a city not to be a forever place unless you doubled down on the craziness that attracted you in a youthful mindset. In my early days, the city was an end-all, be-all for one’s entire life. It was worth sleeping on the floor for, working all hours for, and accepting whatever came back, good or bad. It was the ride-or-die way for a person to live, or at least a hopeless adventurer addicted to the grand story of a mythical metropolis. Now in my forties, I was getting the news: you didn’t stay too long in the city center. If you wanted to remain in the thick of urban life, you had to conquer the damn place. It meant vying for a corner office, so to speak, attaining the measures of success everyone labeled as shallow but also coveted, a status that allowed you to live in a high-rise at the level of middle-aged comfort.
It sounded tiring. The adventurer took a breather. Did I love the city that much? I wasn’t a quitter. I had decided the city was my destiny a while back. To leave your calling was to admit you hadn’t conquered much. I had scored a few wins in the conquering department before stopping myself early. I had traveled to the city for a literary dream and, instead, had found an interesting game of achievement. It was an element of the dream, and yet, the city game was about making money. City people were shrewd. They weren’t literary, though, and the urban environment was moving on from that life. The erudite side of the city was retreating by the turn of the century as the aggressive money-flex side had grown.
I would be literary myself. With a spirit I took from my writer heroes, I hopped off the material track to write books and then found out what a racket the publishing industry had become. It made me kind of hate the city. And yet, the city was my identity. So, I hated myself a little, probably. Thinking critically, the city had done nothing good for me in a long time. It didn’t know that I existed anymore. No one was begging me to stay. There was an empty chair in a cubicle somewhere with my name on it, that was all. It would be stupid to double-down on being a city person, I figured, and this was before the city collapse we see now.
Now, half the country wants to leave, at least forty-nine percent’s worth. Delete
Good reasons to bail on the city existed then, and even more today, and yet the step of actually leaving was not universal. Talking yourself into it was the trick. Some alien part of you resisted a change to this degree, moving from a land of opportunity to a land of cows. To prop up the country in your internal argument, you needed to adopt a softer mindset that you lacked for being in a city orbit. You had to remind yourself there was more to life than everything as defined by our material disposition. As you left the city’s benefits, you gained natural ones, which were emotional and experiential. As advantages went, they were of a heart kind. The city person in me gagged at the idea. “What is this, the Hallmark Channel?” And yet, you had to tap into that thinking, and feeling, to give the country its due.
Being surrounded by lakes, forests, hiking paths, and campsites (the legitimate nature-bound ones, not the city-sidewalk variety now popular in too many cities) was clearly a pleasant thing, wasn’t it? Could you soften up enough to enjoy it, or would you grouse that you couldn’t do this or that thing because the small town lacked it? I’d probably be the complainer, I recognized, which wouldn’t do. I needed to soften up. From the home base of a major city, driving to a bounty of lakes, forests, and campsites (legitimate ones) was a hours-long ordeal. You heard of rural people kayaking after work, which beat sitting in traffic. Would I trade in the city for kayaking? Not in a million years as my own idea, but as my spouse’s?
It was a factor pushing up my buyer’s remorse: it was my spouse’s dream to move to a small town, not mine. Supporting her dream was my only buy-in, which made it challenging to accept with a good attitude. You know how it is. When you go along, you reserve the right to do it reluctantly. You can exercise this right for years, dissenting and regretting. It’s selfish, but you gave away something valuable, you tell yourself. To find equilibrium takes time, if you ever do. In this case, I couldn’t stand in my wife’s way of wanting a new rural life, but I couldn’t embrace the life for myself, so I decided to go along and hope for the best.
From experience, you knew that “hoping for the best” rarely worked, but you hoped for the best that hoping for the best would pay off this time. My anti-rural attitude was partly self-inflicted, I reasoned. Had the big move been my idea, I would see my objections differently, most likely. I would embrace country deficiencies as minimalist benefits, ways to simplify, as a chance to read books and to give up the busyness of a city where little actually changed. I would see outdoor recreation as an excuse to age better and live longer. These benefits were there, and it was my new job to find a way to appreciate them, the polar opposite of my preferred concrete, steel and glass, impersonal neighbors, uncertain job prospects, and worsening economic position as time went on. Sure, the city didn’t make sense in area of comfort, and yet, there was a benefit if you stuck it out. It was a truth I held to. Bad things could happen to you in a city, but also good things.
Could good things happen to you in a rural place, or was it just the absence of annoyances? No bad things, no good things; pure mediocrity. Was it a fair trade?
To seal the deal, they told you nice people lived there, more relaxed and less competitive than in the major cities, they said. I was skeptical of fitting into such a nice environment. I wasn’t more relaxed or less competitive. I was, in order, less and more. I had an internal speed stuck on the top setting. I lived to find ways to go faster, and to get more done because time was short. I was in the four-cup-of-coffee club. Slowing down was a waste of opportunity. It’s what had made the city and me perfect companions. It offered no impediments to the pace of life. The city could go as fast as I wanted. I woke up every day trying to match its speed. Delete
I’m in rural America, where the car ahead drives a steady 25 miles per hour. The speed limit is 35. Leaving a precious ten miles per hour on the table, so to speak, has me squirming in my bucket seat. It’s unheard of, isn’t it, a driver going under by this much, and for this long? Rural streets being what they are, the lane is single file with no legal place to pass. I feel my life ebbing at a snail’s pace. It’s time I won’t get back. I’m burning minutes here. We pass another sign: Speed Limit 35. The car ahead doesn’t go any faster. I’m not that guy who speeds up to pretend to turn left, passes, and then gets back in the lane. I wouldn’t even think of it. No, not me. I’m working to keep far enough back. Maintaining a polite distance is an achievement when I’m tempted to creep up to prod the driver faster. I stare at the license plate and note the absence of incriminating bumper stickers. It’s my habit of guessing why a driver is a turtle. I think, older person, either one afraid of going 35, or one who doesn’t notice. The car is a Subaru. I go with, doesn’t notice.
How the Subaru’s image has changed, I think, trying to keep my mind from evaporating. Subaru was a car that attracted a forward-thinking driver. It was a kind of car, like an ambulance was a kind of vehicle, meant for a certain purpose. You might have wanted a Subaru like you wanted a Swiss Army knife. It kept you prepared for anything. Subaru drivers were slide-rule types legendary in their preparedness. You imagined they replaced smoke detector batteries before they chirped, owned a closet full of the same turtleneck, and filed their taxes on January 1. Now, we saw what happened to that kind of person when they were elderly. They drove slow. The speed limit was as fast as they felt safe to drive.
I couldn’t sit there and complain about safe driving. A Subaru moving like a stalking panther through small town streets would not cause any accidents, ever. Kids on bikes would be safe. Pedestrians at crosswalks would have no issues.
Subaru drivers did something else when they got older. They moved to small towns. Savvy people retired to where it was cheaper. They might outnumber people my age in this town. It would make me the person in the way, not them.
And yet, to sit under the speed limit was a rare side of hell I never would have envisioned being a crisis. In the city, you saw it sometimes. An older driver would clog a lane on the freeway. Everyone went around that car like water around a rock. There were multiple lanes for you to escape a time drain behind the wheel.
It wasn’t like this in a rural town. Single lane roads were the norm. Patience became a requirement for going anywhere. I didn’t sign up for having patience. I did, though, when I moved here and stepped into someone else’s environment.
Where I came from, the worst driving problem was reckless speed. On the freeway, an aggressive road warrior slalomed around the rest of us going plenty above the speed limit. It was a little much, you would think. You stayed in your lane, playing the role of orange cone at 75 mph, allowing the speed freak to veer around you. Fortunately, you were never part of an accident. You thought there couldn’t be anything worse than too-fast drivers who disregarded your safety. Delete
I was ready to argue that going too slow was worse. I was a city stereotype. Even I could see it. I was all-in on progress over all. I would be happy to speed in a circle as long as I could feel the wind in my hair. I loved to work the simulator controls. Keep headed in a direction until everything broke down. Now I had to reevaluate. Slowpokes were not worse than maniacs who made you grip the wheel and check your defensive perimeter. The local drivers, mostly cautious old ladies sitting up over the wheel from my glances as I passed them, acted like moving speed bumps but, likely, were invisible to most everyone else. Their driving was a minor inconvenience. As they say, this gripe was a “me” problem. Inching along with no way around brought up the elephant in the room. Where was I going, really? I had a lot of time to ponder things in a small town. If I were able to shoot around as usual, my busyness-for-busyness sake’s habit would’ve kept me feeling progress. A lack of destinations gave me time to reflect. Going slow made clear, my world was smaller. I wasn’t headed anywhere special. Maybe it was the lesson.
Smaller living meant playing observational games, a form of pacing in your cell. I tested my Subaru theory through copious observation. When a Subaru drove under the speed limit, it validated my hypothesis. It meant I knew what I was talking about, and a smug feeling made the inconvenience worth it. You had to give the Subaru drivers their space, I concluded. They got there, eventually.
There was another destination in town. I went to and fro, not feeling I was going anywhere. The short distances and relative lack of traffic were part of it. You could go anywhere without effort. But where to go? I wasn’t in a rural town to make fun of it but, to the city eye, a rural town was a deflated balloon. A certain sense of ho-hum-ness suggested that something meaningful had happened, but I missed it.
The roadsides looked unfinished. The fun stuff would be added later, you thought. When the town was gentrified, maybe. If it ever was. What would this fun stuff be? A view that something was missing from a town that others called home and enjoyed as-is was my own bias. My critical attitude, even privately held, put pressure on me to suggest improvements when I lacked the credentials. I was no city planner. I was as petty as the next person and judged a place by my personal likes and gripes. I guessed the town could use more coffee shops, as those were my work spaces, serving as an idea hut for a writer, and a place of refuge from usual routines. There were three sit-down coffee shops in the town. One closed after lunch, and the other two were Starbucks’. I didn’t think anymore in terms of corporate coffee or not. I thought, does the door open when I pull on it?
Places to hang out and get away from routines were lacking unless you wanted to fill up on beer. The places to recreate were all outdoors, as they should have been, the outdoors types would say. The places to lounge, shop, to hear live music; the common denominator that a small town lacked was a cultural district. The cultural center of a small town was its grocery store. It let you buy your goods and go home and enjoy them in your backyard or at the lake or wherever.
Small towns didn’t promise you a rose garden, and I got it. You brought your own purpose and routines or sat on the porch. I wasn’t sure in which camp I landed. The town felt as if it lacked something when, from a material perspective, it had a choice of pharmacies, furniture stores, tire stores, home improvement stores, and a surprising number of car dealerships. From the hospital to the mortuary, it had the bases covered. What did an outsider need to complain about?
It was nonsensical to hold a small town to a standard other than its own. It sufficed for those who lived there. Everyone else left. In the city, the driven and unsatisfied citizens cultivated the land as far as the eye could see, dominated it, in fact. You were fortunate to get the reprieve of a park every ten miles. Rural people left alone the spaces out there, and allowed nature to have final say. The vastness outside your car windshield was relaxing. Then, the light changed. The car ahead didn’t move. Five seconds, six, seven… You didn’t honk in the country. Delete
Simply climbing into my car triggered a crisis against fate, and yet, I let up on shooting eye daggers at the Subarus. At least, I tried. I accepted the tentative style of these older drivers as understandable, even inevitable. I was in early middle-age, where their age was not a weird thought, but a scary one. It’s what we would wake up to someday, making life work with what we had left. I held back my accelerator foot when a Subie stayed under the speed limit by five or ten miles an hour. This same car would approach an intersection with the light turning red and, unflinchingly, run through the red light. It was a grab bag of too cautious and a bit clueless. It wasn’t a problem only for Subaru drivers. The pace of traffic in a small town was, to use an online term, laggy. It was normal to wait for cars to catch up to whatever was happening. The only way to have these drivers see what you were talking about, if you sat them in front of a computer with dial-up internet maybe, the old version where you called up the internet using a phone modem, and a web page had to load in stages, these drivers might see how a city person felt about their driving. Green lights took a while to get going. Right turns were an excuse to slow down to a stop.
But wait, you ask. Isn’t city traffic always at a standstill?
The apparent insanity of criticizing rural driving when city driving was nearly always slower was weird, and I had a strange, reflexive logic to explain my view. They want to go faster, I would shoot back. City drivers would go faster if they could.
Why go on about driving habits at all? Wasn’t driving a small part of a day? Depending on a person’s schedule, it may have been. Driving was a major sign that I wasn’t in the city anymore. Whenever I was indoors, I could forget the rural change. Often, I was online, lost in my digital habits. In a car, on a rural road, it was crystal clear: you were of an impatient minority who had to wait his turn.
I should not have been surprised. Slow was one of the stereotypes you prepared yourself for. But mentally accepting a new limitation was different than living with it. I had to remind myself that most people around me weren’t in a big hurry.
Why should they be? You could be five minutes late. Time was used politely. Probably, it was what bothered me. I was geared toward action movie-style deadlines, as in, the bomb would go off if you were late. I likely made arbitrary timelines matter to myself as a writer. When writing a book, you convinced yourself the world would collapse if you didn’t finish, for example. My new neighbors didn’t view time in this way. I hadn’t needed to define why I rushed more than others, because city people were often results-oriented. I lived with a sense of urgency because I had a goal, a side hustle as the kids called it. When you had a goal, you needed to fit it into a life already filled with busy work and chores. You carved out time by hustling through the have-tos to engage in the want-tos. Not everyone in the city lived this way. More than a few did, and they generated the energy that everyone gravitated to. Maybe these city go-getters were running a side-business or were serious about fitness. Maybe they were weekend musicians late to practice, or late for a second job. It could be anything that lit a fire under you and kept you fuming behind a slow car on the road. Were there people like this in a rural town? I was seeing the opposite. The local indifference to a faster pace was like a different language they spoke than an achiever did. I wondered how this would work. To me, striving was proof that you were living. Delete
A side hustle economy being the reason for city energy? It was a novel idea for me but made sense. Others probably saw it this way from the start, but I had assumed the most visible aspects of the city were the reason for urban energy. The city was run by owners of skyscrapers, employers of major companies, and the famous residents. They were the ones I keyed off of and had sought to emulate. I viewed the rest of us, the side hustlers, as the city’s supporting players. We all wanted to participate in the club that earned recognition, that made the money and spent it. We drafted off of the energy the elites created, I always thought. Then I left the city to land in a place with no discernible hustle. In the absence of a community of would-be successes, I saw how important it was. Side hustlers made a city feel big. Established players were the symbol of that success but didn’t generate the buzz.
If there were a buzz in a small town, however niche, I needed to find it.
The roads were a place to start. The sure sign of hustle where I came from was your choice of car. In my last city, the most noticed car was a BMW 3-Series. This car telegraphed to everyone else on the roads that you had good taste and a relatable ambition. It wasn’t a Porsche, but neither was it a Volkswagen. Driving the entry-level Bimmer let people know you were working hard to move up.
I wasn’t looking to befriend BMW drivers in the small town, although it would’ve been a good strategy. (There were a few.) I wasn’t BMW owner myself, owing to my writing goal and its lack of pretension (and money). I drove a two-door VW Golf and had nothing in common with BMW drivers (aside from an appreciation for German engineering). I wanted a BMW, though. Who didn’t. Fast and slightly sinister looking, the BMW covered the all the bases, from luxury, to sporty, to creative. Basically, every city person could want to drive one.
There was a different reason to notice cars on the road. With my sociological hat on, in my estimation, the car that “drove the culture” gave you the attitude of the locals. In Portland, Oregon, back when I lived there, it was the VW Jetta—a rebellious anti-Toyota Camry in style and, sadly, in reliability.
I would’ve driven a Jetta, and it wasn’t much different from my VW Golf. And yet, anyone who knows anything about rural can guess the most popular vehicle was a pickup truck. I had never known a pickup truck driver. I strained my brain to think of one pickup I had seen on the freeways of my last city. I couldn’t think of one.
Of course, pickups were cool. The pickup was the quintessential American vehicle, outshining the Mustang and whatever other cultural icons. The old pickups were particularly striking. A well-maintained vintage pickup was a rolling museum of mid-century American design with a boxy shape, chrome bumpers, vibrant paint color, and a name on the rear bed door in big type. Many in the city would take an old pickup over a BMW simply for how rare they were.
It was the classic view. The pickups I saw on rural roads were modern. I drove past pickup trucks left and right. Three of every five vehicles was the telltale snub silhouette. There was a shiny new American made pickup with a hood taller than I was. There was a runty old import, and every size in between. The pickup was a king in the summer and a liability in winter. Whenever you saw a report of a fatal accident in a snowy pass, the chance of a pickup being involved was high. The problem was the fact that the pickup was, in essence, half a vehicle. The bed was lighter and prone to fish tailing. In my limited city view, the pickup truck was kind of useless. Anything left in the bed would get stolen. The cab area could fit maybe two-and-a-half people. I would learn about the extended cab that was a sedan with a shorter bed. I would find my VW Golf swallowed up in its parking space with an extended cab pickup truck parked on either side of it. My car was invisible as I backed out between two walls and hoped not to get T-boned. I had no problems with pickups, other than I was in the city mindset. They solved zero problems in the city. The contractor class drove them around with a logo slapped on the doors. I hadn’t noticed. I was eyeing the BMWs while driving a VW.
Now the ratio was flipped. The contractor truck was everywhere. The BMW drivers were few and far between. I was a thousand miles away from a BMW-dominated landscape. I liked them around, even if I couldn’t own one. Here, pickup trucks were a royal presence on the streets, driving at a measured pace and making turns that were slow enough to make you almost grind to a halt. Their drivers had a high view of the road. They were ready for anything with their long beds usually always empty. These things could get as long as a stretch limo.
I learned new models could cost as much as a sports car. These young bucks would get their first real job, working in law enforcement or in construction, and go hog wild. They’d finance $70K. I respected it when I heard that. These young guns had a passion for their culture, even if it wasn’t my culture. It was a culture. It was something. When you spent that much on a truck, you babied it. They didn’t drive too slow. They cornered slow. They would slow down almost to a stop to make a right turn. If they entered a driveway? Forget it. They would turn into a parking lot like the truck were made of paper and could crumple at the slightest bump. You can imagine the image that my VW Golf gave off in a truck town. Even in the city, the VW was a compromise car. It was half-way to a BMW, or OK, twenty-five percent. In a truck town, it looked like a golf cart.
Could a city person fit into a town of pickup trucks? Sure. Get a truck. Join the locals. I didn’t think of it. I was too busy living off the Bimmer sightings.
