On Small Town Life [matt]

I grew up in the county. It couldn’t even be considered a town. I grew up six miles outside of a small town. And not surprisingly the teens in my small town had the same broad ambition that is shared by all small-town American teens: graduate and get out of town. Although I didn’t necessarily share their abhorrence of our locality, I did have a great desire to see big cities and important places. Like a million teenage boys before me, I saw myself as somehow picking up where Jack Kerouac had left off. Adventures, crowds, noise; this was my future.

Nobody in that stage of life pictures themselves at thirty. But that didn’t stop me from aging to this point anyways. I’ve been all over the US and now find myself hunkered down in Ferndale, Washington. I am rooted down in the far northwest corner of a state that is already pretty far from everything. Local bands play cover songs at the bar, and a few ma and pa shops still eke out a living while the big box shops move closer each year. Main Street is lined with flags every national holiday and we even have a celebration of the old settlers every year. Every Saturday I wake up to the sound of gunshots; Civil War reenactments are a big deal to some in this town.

Things change slowly here. The changes that do occur are as likely to be from the slow decay of time as from progress. And I think that is why I have started to put down my roots in this place. I have seen what progress brings us. Progress brings us cars that pollute, pills that dull our senses, computers that give us hundreds of “friends” while causing us to neglect real friends, TV’s that make neighbors unnecessary, bombs that make places like Nagasaki and Dresden non-existent. This noisy destruction of all that creates life is what we call progress. I left home looking for noise. I found home when I started looking for peace.

Small town life: my neighbor and I share some space between our houses, and both of us mow it, but never try to figure out who owns which part. I’m getting my mail when another neighbor drives by; he stops in the middle of the road and we talk for twenty minutes. People drop-in regularly.

Nearly every day we pack up our daughter and go walking. We walk in the snow, rain, sun, even when it is well below freezing and icy. Often we go to the grocery store, but other days we walk just to walk. We see the building that is half police station and half Masonic hall. We walk through a group of Bandido bikers, one of whom can’t help but momentarily let down his outlaw stance and smiles at our daughter. Friends stop and talk for a bit with us. On the left we see the infamous Ferndale bridge which has had Metalica spray-painted on its flank for decades. Down the road to our right we once saw a mother skunk with five young ones waddle across the road. More than once we’ve spotted bald eagles circling overhead.

If I’m leery about progress, I suppose that’s because I am excited about digress. To digress is to wander from the point. I take this as my duty. The world around me begs to be entertained away from neighbor, nature and Creator. It wants to destroy or kill what it does not understand. I do not believe people think this way, yet people en masse act in ways that few individuals would on their own. The point in a capitalist society such as ours is to seek whatever it is that provides you with “happiness,” to gain as much of that as possible. Together, with all of us seeking our own good, we will collectively succeed is the thought. Getting to the point, then, is what ultimately brings about the problems I see around me. But I digress.

And I digress some more.

And I will continue to do so. In small-town life I see the possibility of living a revolutionary life. It is not likely to be noticed because it is quiet and calm. But in a world of noise and hate and greed, what could be more radical that quiet, peace and generosity? I experience this in my town and give it to others.