So you think you’re fairly hip, eh? You’ve negotiated college and graduate school and you can read a subway map like you were born with it hardwired into your brain. You know the coolest coffee shops with the most friendly-but-edgy baristas. You have interesting friends who discuss philosophy who come through town and stop in to visit, and you do the same when you travel to their cities.
Welcome to the sticks. Up here none of that makes you remotely cool or interesting. It makes you a ‘flatlander,’ which is someone from the places without mountains. It makes you an object of suspicion. But worse, much, much worse—it makes you a super hefty dork again, just like the first day of seventh grade.
When you go to talk to the mechanic about your car and he asks you about snow tires and you have no idea what he’s talking about, or when you try to light a woodstove for the first time and can’t get it to start to save your life, it makes you realize how little you learned in graduate school that was actually of any value whatsoever for staying alive.
Five years it took. Five full and fulsome years of being a painful outsider who talked only to the minority of other flatlanders. Because it takes at least that long to figure out how to talk to locals. I put my kids in the school here and I went on field trips where I met other parents, to whom I practiced being pleasant and not edgy. Aka not interesting—at least not in that way. I used the local garage and shopped at the local stores, and did my best to be always friendly, always ready to talk about the weather. It’s what the locals do. They might know everything there is to know about you down to who your grandfather cheated on your grandmother with, but if they like you they’ll talk about the weather, and if not they’ll just nod and move away.
The problem they have with flatlanders is that they don’t know all that stuff. You’re an unknown quantity. At least until you stay long enough for them to see you in action. They notice things like how you handle being chair the school board when the budget fails for the first time since 1971, or how you make the best of things when your car rolls off the road and strands you in someone’s front yard while the elementary school concert is starting and your kids are crying. Can you still make a joke? Can you keep your cool and try different ways to get traction for your tires? When you’ve been there, in that dark place, and been rescued by a yokel who heard your car over the sound of the TV and came outside carrying the exact tool you need to get back on the road, your definition of cool changes.
These folks have their own way of seeing things that it’s taken me seventeen years to begin to understand. They don’t expect to agree with you about most stuff, especially taxes, but it’s really more about what you’re like under pressure. They notice this stuff and it leaves an impression. It’s what separates the locals from the flatlanders—this grace under pressure. Because we’re all in the same fishbowl—a fishbowl that freezes into an icy slick for six months of the year—and they don’t have any use for the fish that quickly roll over and die.
And boy, I didn’t learn it quickly. I’ve done my best to watch and to learn, and I’ve had my share of enough emergencies that I take them in much better stride. I no longer fear the cold or the dark as I did when I arrived. Now I know I can always light a fire. I can always put on layers of coats and go out and look at the stars, or the moon glowing faintly through the thick clouds. The quiet and the dark feel normal to me now, as they do to the locals. The pace and noise of city life is what now jangles my nerves. (Though I sure do like to visit on occasion—mainly for the restaurants!) I don’t handle every crisis with the poise I might wish for, but I do OK. I do better than I did. And I keep learning.
And I’ve found a whole different set of small joys in this small-town fishbowl. It’s knowing that the guy who runs the garage on the west end of town is divorced and a super right-wing anti-tax fellow, but has a daughter who become a transgender son and he made the best of it. And he writes fabulous ads for the paper about being 100% organic, all natural mechanics. It’s having him lead the campaign to vote down my pet project to expand the library, but then going to talk to him to see what he’s thinking and finding out he’s got a whole list of interesting concerns I hadn’t considered.
It’s like the members of your family, in a way. You can’t swap them out for other people so you take the good with the bad, the pretty with the ugly, and make the best of them. It’s the same in small towns, knowing there aren’t other fish in the sea, so you have to take all the good parts and bad and make the best of it. Find a way to enjoy someone, or else just nod and move away. It’s your choice.
But I tell you, if you’re someone who can adjust to the pace, the joys are deep and true, and you sleep better at night when you’re not afraid of things beyond your control—when you can fix your own wiring and plumbing, when you have a generator and a root cellar full of food and a woodpile that requires no power to keep you warm. And better yet is having neighbors who will show up when you need them, and will always bring tools. And better yet, will crack a joke to help you through whatever the crisis. It’s a pretty good life in this fishbowl.