At three in the morning a few weeks ago, on one of those red-eye cattle-car flights to Seattle, I had a lot of uncomfortable sleepless time to think about how urban America doesn’t “get” rural. How they can’t understand fish and game issues, how they don’t even know that tofu comes from soy beans. Coiled concrete freeways and dressing to impress—ack!
But I know that I also don’t “get” urban—and the reasons I don’t, as usual, are my own prejudices. Like all prejudices, they differ in usefulness.
Example of a useful prejudice: Rural people are more resourceful and independent than urban people.
Mistrustful of plumbing, we dig outhouses. We have generators and flashlights and candles, ropes and buckets and our own potatoes and we aren’t afraid to use them. After Hurricane Katrina you could hear all kinds of rural people say if it had been us, we’d have had boats tied up on our roofs, certainly friends in high places—maybe friends with float planes.
Instead of stacking ourselves on top of each other like helpless cordwood, or like equally helpless and crowded passengers in steerage on a Boeing 767, we say we prefer room around us.
What’s really useful about how independent we think we are, though, is that we are lucky and willful enough to disagree when we need to. You might note that we often do this when we don’t need to. If we don’t like what our neighbor proposes, we have a lot of room to go home and do it our way.
Example of an un-useful prejudice: Rural people are more resourceful and independent than urban people.
The attitude of believing in our own sturdy individualism is likely to give us one helluva shock if we ever notice what official and unofficial cooperation can accomplish in a city.
Lights stay on, toilets flush, garbage gets picked up, and people trust each system to work. I don’t know if it amazes you, but I’ve lived with burn barrels and five gallon buckets so long that I can enjoy being surprised, for a few days, by the cooperation that makes the garbage go away, the poop disappear, and the clean water flow out of the faucet.
During my short stint as a teen counselor out west, I once sat up all night talking with an outstanding high school teacher in the Yukon village of Grayling. She said the most educational field trip she was ever able to give her students was a trip to Chicago, where they asked, “How can the buses know where to go?” She said experiencing trust in large systems such as subways and skyscrapers gave her students confidence in themselves and in democracy—which if you think about it is an extreme form of trust.
You don’t have to live there, and if you are like us, you don’t want to live there. You just have to know that it exists.
Footnote example of an un-useful prejudice: Rural people are friendlier than urban people.
This may even be true, but forget about it. You don’t need help from everyone who lives in the city. Take the wrong exit, lose your wallet, spill your vanilla latte on the counter, and the kindness of strangers will astound you.
Besides, even the idea of what’s urban and what’s not can be up for grabs. Riding to Anchorage with my neighbor Rosemary Bartley a few years ago, I could feel my fist tightening around my Sam’s Club list as we approached the region of exits and converging lanes. Rosemary, a native of Chicago, gave a contented little sigh as she nimbly maneuvered her green van through the traffic. “Anchorage is such a nice little town,” she said.