Cast Down Thy Bucket

Notes from a Cantankerous Hinterland Geographer

I.

Imagine marrying someone toward whom you feel nothing save for a vague sense that you’ve gotten a ‘good deal’. She’s a warm body, that’s for sure — and a cheap date. There are times where she may resist your attempts to ‘mold’ her, but she is generally in such a confused state that her resistance is minimal — and with relative ease you can shape her into the wife you’ve always wanted. Then, after so many years, you tire of her and arrange for another man to take her over — while you look for your next one.

This is a disgusting idea, viscerally nasty to such a degree that I scarcely want to publish it here. And yet I cannot think of a more suitable metaphor for how Americans purchase homes and interact with the towns they move to. A place, like a human being, has an unbelievably dense and rich biography, a distinctive character that reaches deep into the land. Any town really constitutes a multi-generational collective effort — it is the art of a people, a craft which takes centuries to really unfold and mature. The act of settling somewhere is quite like I imagine a marriage ought to be; it must spark undying loyalty and be undergirded by an unquenchable desire to know the other, to be intimately unified as one.

To open Zillow, set one’s filters, and proceed to say “wow, what an excellent deal” is very often a sort of brutal and callous bit of arithmetic for the home-buyer. Mortgage numbers are considered, architectural features and amenities noted, proximity to employment found suitable. Of course all of these things matter in purchasing something as large as a home, but often enough our harried search for a place to cast down our bucket causes us to entirely gloss over the detailed beauty of the locality in which our prospective home sits.

I find this so intuitively wrong that I hesitate to write about rural America at all. A simple search on Zillow or Trulia will lead the aspiring homeowner to believe that a vast amount of ‘affordable real estate’ exists in our hinterlands. True as this may be, I must preface anything I write about our obscure and rusting villages and small cities with some remarks on how wrongheaded a relationship to place this procedure really inculcates. God forbid that hordes of out-of-towners and developers should descend on my town without remembering that its charm is the fruit of great men and strong families who sought modest fortune in what were frequently wildly harsh conditions. They did this at great risk and won — for a time. Their legacy may have gone to the yardsale; it may have been abandoned by cosmopolitan politicians and governments whose sphere of concern centers on cities and their wealthiest citizens. It may seem boring or dysfunctional, but their legacy lives.

That legacy is so resilient that its scraps not only continue to breathe but can still be salvaged. The very last thing we need is for those shining scraps to get buried by an influx of deracinated quaint-seekers and unwitting homogenizers in whom a cosmopolitan sensibility is found. I proclaim with every strand of my own heart that such a burial constitutes everything I arch my back against — and I write here to exhort likeminded reactionaries to band together to both protect and revitalize our small villages, rural townships, and little forgotten cities.

None of this is to imply that ‘from-aways’ are entirely unwelcome. They’re actually needed rather desperately in dozens of forgotten regions of our country, as the demographical worst-case-scenario of low birthrates, increasing median ages, and high out-migration sets in. Some would say we ought to be feathering our beds for anyone to move in — that ‘beggars can’t be choosers’. But we are not beggars. The legacy of those who came before us is simply too strong for that to ever be the case. We fervently insist that if you’re going to come to our town, that you share the values that make the place what it is. We demand that you are a good neighbor.

Many cases exist in American towns where people came from away who were not good neighbors. They came and in mere months, began seeking leadership roles in town councils and school boards. They called their big city friends and told them about ‘great investment opportunities’ in local real estate. Soon, the ‘charming atmosphere’ of the towns was advertised nationally, and waves of newcomers arrived, along with yoga mats and rainbow flags, taking no heed to the wishes of the locals whose families built the town from the ground up. Those same local families would eventually be priced out of purchasing real estate in their own towns. (Bozeman, MT is a particularly egregious example of this)

Forgive the village-dweller for his scorn as he pisses and moans about ‘Californians’ and ‘city libs’ buying up his town; the memories are fresh and they are bad. Being from a small town myself — a town that is by any standard a ‘dying place’ — I would affirm the possibility of newcomers moving to the town and earnestly improving it. If they are conservative, if they match the culture, if they have a sincere desire to listen and move slowly, they could constitute some of the greatest residents in the modern-day history of our towns.

Moreover, this possibility is actually necessary for the fact that so many Americans are from nowhere. There is a massive population of American citizens who’ve grown up without any flesh-and-blood connection to a storied place, and many of them are rightfully dissatisfied with that fate. Many are not content to bounce from suburb to suburb in rootless fashion. I think of one friend of mine whose childhood home was torn down to make way for a CVS: “Where can I go? My hometown is unrecognizable and everyone has moved away anyway.” So long as him and others like him are willing to wed themselves to our gasping villages and townships, to hold fast to our traditional values, to help refract our dusking twilight into a dawn by commitment and sweat — we welcome them.

Thus begins what I intend to be an ongoing series on precipitating a revival of our forgotten American hinterlands.

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