
5 Best things about living in small town America:
Living in a small town definitely has it’s disadvantages; unless a new place opens you’ve already sampled all the local cuisine, God help you if you need some odd piece of technical equipment in a hurry, you have a limited amount of (typical) entertainment options… The list goes on, anyone who has ever lived in po-dunk-ville for yourself could easily add a couple hundred items to that list. But there are some pluses to living in a slice of Americana with fewer bodies per acre, here’s a few of of my favorite things about it:
1) The special pace of small towns:
Over the course of my life i’ve lived in a couple of small towns and worked in many more and one thing that seems to be common amongst them all is the pace that life seems to move at in a small town: s……….l………..o………….w…………….e…………….r…………………
There are times when i think i’ll have an aneurism having to wait behind a pair of “good-ole-boys” catching up on hunting conditions! What’s the problem with that my metropolitan friends may be wondering, it may have just a tad to do with the fact that they just stop on almost any two-lane road, back up and sit window to rolled-down-window talking shop; deer-scat, gutting techniques (the new “use your pick-up truck to yank the hide off” method seems to be quite the talk these days), calibers, bans on flavored tobaccos and just whatever other girlish chit-chat they need to catch up on.
Trips to Walmart can also wind up playing like something best reenacted by the likes of Bill Murray. Jet into Walmart in any sort of hurry and you will find yourself practically assaulted by a spirit of Sloth, and i don’t mean laziness- i mean human beings channeling the very essence of the three-toed sloth of South America, moving slow enough to foster a thriving population of moss on their backs!
But overall, in a world that seems to be winding itself up to higher and higher speeds, a world where we don’t just want high speed internet- we want it in our pocket! The slower pace can be so refreshing. When i see some old guys sitting in a local eatery, lunch long consumed, just sitting and reading the paper or chatting or hitting on some calloused yet southern-friendly waitress i’m reminded that soon enough, just around the corner really, i’ll be dead and feeding microbes and invertebrates and if i don’t take a breath and drink in TODAY, today will be gone for good.
2) “Rush Hour”
Yep, there really is none! Sure there is a surge of traffic around quitting time but compared to the flames of tortuous aggression and bumper-to-bumper retardation of the D.C. beltway small town traffic isn’t even a match-flame.
3) You have a name:
In small town America, everyone has a name and lots of people know it. In a world where we are striving to live in anonymity (from online shopping to self-checkouts to ATM’s to automated call centers we are steadily removing human interaction from our world) it is nice to NOT be anonymous from time to time.
Sure it has it’s own breed of irritations, just try and do ANYTHING secretly in a small town! You have a colonoscopy and they are running the images on page 3 of the paper! Try to be anti-social for a day and you’ll find you have to stay at home to pull it off, go out for a tube of Pringles and a movie (even from the Redbox) and you’re going to bump into at least three people you know.
But, it was nice when a few weeks ago the manager of Walmart greeted me by first name. Or when the theater manager let me in for free. Or when i go down-town to grab a cheese-burger at the Grill and if the owner is in there i have trouble paying, he just won’t take my money just because i’m his nephew’s youth pastor.
It’s nice to be more than a social security or a debit card number.
4) Creative entertainment
i’m sure i’ve mentioned this before sometime but this is one of my favorite things about living in a small town. Life in a more metropolitan area means free time is usually consumed with going out to eat. i think if i lived in a city i would weigh 300lbs, i’d be that guy on the hover-round, heart straining to push my gravy-blood around my sprawling body-mass, lungs working like an asthmatic summiting K-2, ladling au jus over deep fried french toast sticks. Man, i LOVE food!
But i don’t live in a city, i live in the dead center of nowhere! Living inside a post-card picture has nurtured my love of the outdoors. And it’s to the outdoors that people in small towns must look for many of their entertainment options.
“Going for a swim” for me an my friends doesn’t involve a single drop of chlorine, instead it involves a minimum two mile round-trip on foot, a full fledged “swimming hole”, heck often they become full fledged Huck Finn-esque endeavors.
Small town living has to get some credit for my love of back-packing, biking, canoeing, and a flagrant disregard for “No Trespassing” signs!
You can have your Ruby Tuesday’s, PetSmarts, Sam’s Clubs and Cold-stone Creameries… give me my abandoned mines, fire-roads and low-traffic black top!
5) Firearms!
Where else can a man who hasn’t been on a hunting trip since he was 13 or 14 years old own an assault rifle and not raise a single eye-brow?
MAN! i do love my guns!
i don’t own many, but if you’d like to see them just break into my house one night while i’m asleep and i’ll introduce you to at least one of them!
Just knowing they are in the house makes me want to wear something that says “Carhart” on it, put the dog in the bed of the pick-up, crank up some Waylon Jennings crooning about “makin’ their way, the only way they know how” and ride to the store for a CASE- yes a case, not a box- of shells! My inner red-neck is cutting donuts in my brain on his four-wheeler as i write this!
When i was a kid growing up in a small town all i wanted to do was get out of small town living, but like so many who shared those same aspirations i found that i didn’t really mind living in a small town… in fact i prefer it!








Ok, this story is a couple of weeks old I know, but I’m just now able to blog about it. I’ve had several discussions with friends and family and thought maybe I need to put in a blog.(plus Tony is hounding me again to blog something)

