I grew up in a rural area, though I didn’t realize it at the time. As a child I thought that since I didn’t live “out in the country,” but rather in the city limits that I lived in an urban setting. The problem was that my “city” had a population of 4,000 at the time, making me a rural kid by any reasonable standards. You could walk from one end of town to the other in half an hour. Police spent the majority of their efforts on traffic violations and maybe some underage drinking. People knew each other and if you didn’t know someone, you weren’t separated by six degrees, it was more like one. Regardless of whether you knew someone by name, you smiled when passing them on the sidewalk. We exchanged baked goods with neighbors at Christmas. And while students in my high school had their own sets of friends, we didn’t experience cliques the way they’re shown in movies.
There was little air or noise pollution and I got to experience much of nature first hand. I remember being stunned when I learned that a cousin from L.A. had never seen a cow in real life before. By the time I toddled off to college I had seen cows, sheep, rabbits, skunks, deer, groundhogs, beavers, toads, frogs, snakes, cranes, robins, raccoons, possums, mourning doves, blue jays, cardinals, finches, eagles, hawks, lightning bugs, turkeys, pheasants, turtles and more all in their natural habitats and all within a ten mile radius of my house. Sometimes right in my backyard.
As a student, I didn’t appreciate these benefits. I wanted to explore the world. I knew I was not “sophisticated” like kids growing up in large cities. I could not go to prestigious art museums or see professional theater shows. I could not eat at an Ethiopian restaurant or find a studio where I could learn fencing. I was not exposed to much demographic diversity. People were basically white or Latino, middle class and Christian(ish).
Perhaps it was the rural atmosphere that led me to read so much. I couldn’t go to museums but I could experience art in books. I could learn about other religions, other cultures, etc. I even read about dining etiquette so that one day if I dined in a ritzy joint, I would use the correct fork. Since there was little in the way of distractions (read: places to go and things to do), my options for keeping myself occupied centered on school activities, both academic and athletic. And that really benefitted me when it came time to apply to colleges and scholarships.
Now that I’m an adult, I understand the benefits of having grown up in a rural environment, but I also understand rural flight. Because it’s not kids who are making the choice to move, it’s adults. Urban areas offer not only more things to do, but a greater variety of people to meet. As a kid, it doesn’t matter if you have friends who are soul mates. You’re too busy amassing all the knowledge you absorb K-12, and thinking about what you want to be when you grow up. You only need friends who will fill out your basketball team or enter the science fair with you. You don’t need someone to discuss existentialist dread or foreign policies with. And you don’t have to worry about finding a job that is both profitable and meaningful.
As an adult, I can’t imagine living in my hometown (though I’m here for the post-Peace Corps interim). Urban settings are where the jobs are; they are where the museums and universities are. They are where you can easily find rice paper or garam masala to do some home cooking. They are where you can meet people with differing backgrounds, and maybe people who “get” the aspects of your personality that made you “weird” in your rural environment. An urban setting would, statistically speaking, offer someone like me a better chance of meeting someone to share my life with (read: someone with similar values and who can keep up with me, physically and intellectually).
But here’s the rub. I’m an introvert. So while I long for the many opportunities afforded by an urban setting, I also dread the noise of the city. And the crowds. And the noise, the noise! When I visit cities I always think, ‘that was nice to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.’ They are exhausting energy drainers. The problem is that I have struggled most of my life with never feeling like I quite fit in anywhere. Rural settings are too lacking in diversity (both in terms of demographics and in things to do) and urban settings are too loud and busy. I am too restless for rural folk and too staid for urban folk.
The only solution seems to be for me to become a best-selling writer so that I can afford a penthouse apartment in a city like New York. I could have all the benefits of a city at my disposal but my job would allow me to hole up in my abode for as long as I liked and only brave the bustle of the city when I wanted to. Now, to get started on that novel…