Goin Up the Country. Babe Don't You Wanna Go?

It happened slowly, with a growing sense of frustration at the noise, the crowding, the uncivil behavior of those around me, and the incremental addition of little rules to follow. Bit by bit I began to dislike life in the city. I was tired of the teenage kids in their baggy pants and gangsta wanna-be attitudes. I was tired of the casual rudeness from people in public places. I was tired of the petty tyrannies perpetrated on my by the state – the seat belt laws; the prohibition against wood burning fireplaces; the ban on smoking in bars and restaurants; the neighborhood “architectural control committee:” the City’s “Business Privilege Tax” that I had to pay just because I maintained an office; the aggressive ticketing in a city short of parking spaces. Between my condo association, the City of Denver and the State of Colorado there were at least a dozen rules governing my daily behavior, and even small infractions of these rules involved a financial penalty.

Gonna leave the city, got to get away...

The enforcement apparatus, however, did not protect me from the bad actors in my neighborhood who stole my brand new pickup truck (recovered by the police three years later when someone tried to get a salvage title for it). The State did not provide any remedy for the bad actors in the business community who acted dishonestly when it was in their financial interest to do so. Through petty crime, fraud, misrepresentation, and outright embezzlement, the hollow little men with whom I did business cheated me out of about $100,000 in various business deals over a period of ten years. I went to court twice; won twice; and was advised in other cases that the legal process would be more expensive than the recovery. White collar criminals, like gang members, rob you with no fear of legal reprisal. They know the system is overloaded and property crime is a low priority. You are on your own, and your only friend is a good civil attorney.

Gonna leave the city, got to get away...

The city is impersonal. I was tired of my neighbors throwing their garbage in the general direction of the dumpster, and letting their dogs poop in the landscaping area around my building. I was tired of the local hoods breaking into cars in our parking lot and tagging the entrance to our property. I was tired of the petty abuses of authority by the small-minded man who found himself in charge of our condominium association – spending our HOA dues on his pet projects. I was tired of waiting in line for everything. I was tired of thoughtless drivers who will actually get out of their cars to insult or threaten you but won’t even consider giving you an opening to merge if they have the right of way. In a zero-sum game, giving away an advantage to someone else is tantamount to losing!

All this fussin and fightin, man I sure can't stay.

I guess I was just tired. Layer upon layer of little irritants built up over a period of fifteen years finally pushed me to the edge. For several years I had been saying out loud (to anyone who would listen) that I was fed up, and planned to move back to the country. Finally, to my own surprise, I just did it. I put my condo on the market, packed everything my wife and I owned, and headed back to the Palouse Country of Eastern Washington. I was born a hayseed, and was going back to the land of hayseeds – to rest, read and reflect on the life lessons of twenty years of travel, education and work.

I’m goin I’m goin where the water tastes like wine...

Returning to the rural landscape of the Palouse Country was comforting for the familiarity of returning to a place that embraced me with a warm, uncomplicated, culture that spoke of old values and an untroubled pace of life. People in the country are trusting and amiable. They have a complete disregard for class distinctions, and regard those of their community as neighbors, with a willingness to overlook personal deficiencies as one might overlook them in one’s own family. They respect work, self reliance, honesty and competence. The only unkind words I have heard since my return were directed at the welfare families, who are increasingly moving to small towns, and the migrants who occasionally steal cattle as they pass through the area.

I’m goin I’m goin where the water tastes like wine...

Gonna jump in the water, stay drunk all the time.

- Canned Heat

My first stop in Eastern Washington was Spokane – a hayseed city with a surprising degree of sophistication, good food, live jazz, and a vibrant downtown. It is a place where people still say “hello” as they pass strangers on the sidewalk. They wave you ahead at four-way stops. They say “excuse me,” and let you go ahead of them in line. The bellman at the Davenport Hotel were college kids – white, busy, and courteous – like young Horatio Algers, working their way up.

My wife took one look around and announced:

“I’m in the land of guerros.”

“Yes, you are. You will come to know them as I have.”

Except for the Latino communities and the immigrants who have been coming here for decades to work in agriculture, the population of Eastern Washington is white and pale. On my first day, I took the car out of the garage where we kept it while in the process of moving, and drove to a car wash in downtown Spokane. They washed the exterior, cleaned the wheels and undercarriage, wiped down the interior, and hand dried the car for about $20. Every person who touched the car was white – Anglo. I like that, and I’m not sure why except that it reminds me of the way white people worked when I was growing up, before society became bifurcated into an Hispanic class of manual laborers and an Anglo class that avoided hard physical work, even to the point of joining the welfare roles or standing on street corners with cardboard signs to avoid it. I had returned to a time and place where white people would willingly work with their hands.

Yankee egalitarianism sprang from our pioneer origins, and persists in the life of the farm community – in the family-owned auto shop, the corner restaurant, the farm chemical company, and the stubbornly proud individuals who work farmland handed down to them by their forefathers. My own forefathers handed down land to my grandfather; who handed it down to my father; who will hand it down to me, and so on. We have land that has been in the family for 100 years. My great grandfather and grand uncles were shepherds. They herded sheep; took part of their pay in more sheep; and then began buying land. Our family had land and sheep within one generation; more land and more sheep within two; and a comfortable degree of wealth within three.

How many Americans today have a vision for the future that is inter-generational? Our forefathers did, but they came from modest circumstances and had lower expectations. Some day that longer vision of the future will return to Americans as the uncomfortable realities of globalization catch up with us. People everywhere are willing to work harder, study longer, and wait longer to have what we expect to have as an entitlement. Our grandparents had no entitlement mentality. They did not expect to live comfortably simply because they were Americans, and they did not expect to become wealthy in a lifetime.

Country people are resourceful. The women cook, sew and quilt. They raise big well-fed families. The men work – not always outside, as farm work today is largely mechanized. Consequently a farmer is a mechanic. He is also an agronomist, a carpenter, and a part-time firefighter. He is comfortable with tools, and can fabricate almost anything. One of my neighbors graded a flat spot on his property, loaded gravel from the county gravel pit to form a bed where he graded, then poured and leveled a concrete slab. Presto – he had a basketball court. The same guy might be found using an Excel spreadsheet to figure his crop rotations.

You see, people know what they need to know to fill the requirements of their world. In the city that world is defined socially. One's freedoms and ambitions are restrained by other people, and so the skills we acquire have to do with hop-scotching the corporate ladder, elevating our popularity, choosing friends according to their status, and retraining for the next career move. It’s a skill set suited to the urban environment. County people have a skill set suited to the time-consuming and often arduous demands of country living. Their ambitions are restrained by the weather, the pests, and the weeds. They become self sufficient due to the scarcity of conveniences.

On that subject, for those of you who think country living means finding harmony in nature, I will let you in on a little secret: man’s relationship with nature is not harmonious. It is adversarial. There is a constant process of re-asserting human priorities over nature’s predilection for randomness.

This has the counter-intuitive result that everything slows down. Here you are on geologic time. What is left undone today can always be tomorrow’s priority. This is the only place where I can sit down in the middle of the day and read a book. When I try this in the city, there is always some nagging sense of urgency to do something else – some unfinished business intruding on my concentration and keeping me in a state of perpetual motion. In the country I can light a wood fire (without violating air quality restrictions), make my own espresso, and enjoy a book as if in a peaceful meditation for hours at a time. It is the principle reason I chose to live here.

The people here are not sophisticated, and they will be the first to tell you so (although you need to be accepted as one of them before you start that conversation). This may be the most searing criticism of country living. It is a misperception that distance and manual labor create not just a psychological separation from the world, but an apathy toward it – a kind of a mental laziness one lapses into when farming and quilting take up too much of one’s available bandwidth. Bill Bryson encapsulated it in one sentence upon his return to his native Iowa:

Their wits are dulled by simple, wholesome faith in God and the soil and their fellow man. (1)

Well, some stereotypes ring true, while others are just the projections of the prejudices and suspicions of those who know too little about the world. The “retro” versus “metro” bifurcation of the country following the 2004 election was one such stereotype: sophisticated voters voted for John Kerry, while fundamentalists and hayseeds put Bush in office. Say what you want, about 46% of the people in the "blue" states voted Republican.

Further, many of the hayseed stereotypes are going to fade as country people are brought into the mainstream by the reach of telecommunications and the internet. As with developing countries, we are experiencing a revival of education and investment as commerce, the internet, and the movement of people bring the city within reach.

There is a migration of retirees away from the cities and back to country towns (particularly resort towns) where they don’t have to live with the problems that drove me from the city. They will bring with them a taste for espresso, good food, and recreation. They also bring knowledge and money to parts of the country that could use a little more of both. They are buying up buildings in the blighted sections of cities like Butte, Montana. They are bringing the best traits of the city with them as they emigrate.

On the other hand, you get a little of the nastiness of city life when you take in city people. I have neighbors now who are from cities on both the East and West Coasts – one where I live and one next to a piece of land I own in a quiet part of Colorado. Both are nice people with successful careers. Although I respect them and get along with them, I also recognize them as members of the urban genus homo egotistas. Self assertion is just one of the qualities that make people successful in competitive environments, and I understand that. On the other hand, the willingness to use the threat of a lawsuit against one’s neighbor is a holdover from the urban jungle that is still not commonly accepted as civilized behavior – not here, anyway.

The Seattle people are particularly assertive and protective of their perceived rights and privileges. When they purchased a 40-acre parcel with a home overlooking the Palouse River and paid what they might have paid for a two bedroom condo in Seattle, they certainly felt they got a good deal. Apparently not satisfied with the bargain, they then warned the former owners, who had lived on that land for over 40 years, that if they came back on the property again (to retrieve any gates or panels for their horse corral) they would be dealt with as trespassers. Our “metro” neighbors dispensed with the need for conversation about the issue, stating that they would simply call the sheriff. Now that is a city mentality. Out here we shoot at trespassers.

Having asserted their rights of ownership, they went on to assert their “boundaries” in a letter to my family, notifying us that the boundary between their new property and ours was on our side of the existing fence. This was a curious thing, as the boundary had never been a cause for dispute for over forty years. Now, researching the records we find that the property line is defined by reference to an old irrigation ditch, long since abandoned. Does the fence along the property follow the legal description referencing the irrigation ditch? No one knows for sure, but if our new neighbors are successful in asserting their claim they can pick up another 12 acres or so. We referred the matter to our attorneys.

In the country people struggle to make a living, just as they do in the city, but the competitive impulse is directed toward the forces of nature rather than at other people. City workers complain about their co-workers and their business partners. Country people complain about crops and the weather.

Small towns share a sense of common destiny that unites the people of the community. It creates a bond of civility that survives the gossip and petty infractions of rural life. It is the social glue that has dissolved in urban areas where no one is really a “neighbor,” but rather an individual plucked from the anonymous mass for their power to reward you in some way. In the city, you include others in your life as part of a calculated effort to further your own social or financial wellbeing. In the country someone may stop by for coffee just because they live down the road, and when they do you invite them in – even though they have nothing to offer.

I hear that our new neighbors have started bringing eggs to some people in town. Interesting, as I did not think they would have tackled the chore of raising chickens so quickly, but perhaps I underestimate their resourcefulness. One thing I don’t underestimate is their capacity to undertake the effort of networking. Having stepped on a few toes within weeks of their arrival, they are building alliances. I am relatively sure I won’t be receiving any eggs – not until our lawyers and theirs have a chance to sit down for an amiable conversation over coffee and biscuits.

(1) (Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent (New York: Harper & Row, 1989, 8)