Friday, April 19, 2002

How Big Can A ‘Small Town’ Be?

Last weekend, during all that daffodil-poppingly gorgeous weather, my family and I got to tool around the outer reaches of the WVPE listening area, on the way to an academic conference. We traveled through numberless small towns—some lively and cuted up, with gingerbreaded town halls straight from the picture-book pages of Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, and some saggingly depressed. Upon reaching our destination, we discovered that our friends who had taken other routes had all held the same discussions in their separate cars: “What would it be like to live in a town this small? Or, wow, this small? Or, holy cow, THIS small?” As I heard myself pitying a sad little hamlet we’d passed, seemingly defined by a house flying two Confederate flags perversely stacked atop one another, however, my conscience pricked me, and I recalled my own sputtering defense of Michiana while at an East Coast event some months ago, when a chic New York City type wondered how in the world one could get along in (and here there was much squinting at my conference ID tag through minuscule citified eyeglasses) . . . in, in South Bend, was it?

Like many Americans, I walk the tightrope between filiation and affiliation, maintaining sometimes smug loyalties to familial hometowns, but also hastily inventing ties to places we’re blown by the winds of job markets or simply fate. Every summer, my family drives out to my girlhood home in Colorado, passing through all those small towns along the way that continually evoke this dialectic between those with deep roots in one place and transplants or even passers-through. I think with some envy, for example, of the insider’s knowledge small places make possible when we drove through a prairie village with barely a crumbling bit of brick downtown left, but, happily for us, one tiny gas station. When I popped inside the place to pay, I caught the shorthand of local drama when an grandfatherly type heaved into the station with a gas can in hand, and a younger gentleman took one look and clearly knew a whole story I did not see, greeting the gas can man with, “She run that truck dry again?” The gas can man, tersely acknowledging the ongoing saga, nodded: “Yup—she run it dry again.” My outsider’s imagination scurries to fill in the blanks—a passive-aggressive farm wife slowly murdering her husband’s pet vehicle? Or maybe the woman wasn’t unhappy, just absent-minded—too busy thinking about her next painting, pie, poem, or garden plot to bother with such mundane details as filling a tank with fuel. In any case, that town was small enough that everyone knew what she was up to, and the quick sighting of the gas can was all they needed to complete the story.

As my family follows those faint blue cartographical veins, we inevitably pass through small Nebraskan towns with one square brick restaurant, called “Restaurant,” specializing in indigestion-inducing deep-fried nuthin’s, and on to even smaller towns with restaurants one rung lower, called simply “Food.” And on into tiny mountain towns where last summer I thought I could hear the forced and defensive cheerfulness in a brand new sign proclaiming “Rusty Nail Colorado Welcomes Dr. Brown and Family!” imagining a Joel—or Julie—Fleischman about to embark on the small traumas and pleasures of transplanting themselves to a real life version of Rosalyn, Alaska.

There’s a scene near the beginning of the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story, where Katherine Hepburn, as the socialite Tracy Lord, mocks the earnest Jimmy Stuart character by pressing him to reveal his embarrassing roots in South Bend, Indiana. Here’s the scene I mean: [ film clip ]. In this film about urbane society, South Bend is the anti-Philadelphia—the uncool town, the pitiable hamlet that, as far as a Tracy Lord is concerned, might just as well be flying stacked Confederate flags.

A family who moved from a big city to South Bend a few weeks ago gave the same impression, asking me, with wrinkled noses and worried brows, “What is that SMELL in your town? “ And I realized what a local I had become in my defensive response: that I barely noticed the wafting smell of the ethanol plant just west of town, and, when I did notice it, really, it pretty much smells like baking bread, doesn’t it? (I’d conveniently forgotten this was the same hooey our real estate agent fed to us 8 years ago when our own newcomer’s noses wrinkled with that same question.)

So—how small, or how big, is our town? Well, as one public official found out a few years ago, when he was married, briefly but simultaneously, to two women, our town is almost big enough to get away with bigamy, but not quite. And the more I think about it, that might just about sum up how much we know—and don’t know—one another in this smallish big, biggish small town.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on April 19, 2002
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