I have cousins who raised their kids on Sable Island. Swimming on the beach, playing in the sand, and watching wild horses and grey seals were about it for recreation.
That is incredibly small.
Actually back then the men were men, and the sheep had their own rape crisis hot line.
Felt normal to us. There were a couple of places near us smaller, although they didn’t have a post office. (We did.) My graduating class, for a school system that covered half the county, was 80. And there were a couple of schools that were even smaller than that, although they have since been absorbed into some of the larger systems in the county.
Growing up in this kind of environment makes it kind of hard to sympathize with people from “small towns” that have 20,000 people in them.
True, everything is relative. I grew up in a town of less than 7,000 and thought it was small. Now I live in a town of less than 1,000 and suddenly 7,000 doesn’t seem so small.
I grew up outside a small town in rural Arkansas. Since then, I’ve lived in such interesting locales as New York City, San Diego, and Seoul.
Every big city I’ve visited, I’ve noticed the same thing as Ruby. I’ll ask my local friends about specific things to do in their respective cities, and they’ll not have a clue as to what I’m talking about. More than a handful of times, I’ve ended up giving tours to my local friends of areas of their own community!
City folk like to brag that they’re better cultured, but I’ve found that for most of my acquaintances it hasn’t been because they were personally more motivated to be that way. It’s just that they so happened to live in an area with easy access to those resources. In fact, I’ve found many to be basically lacking in any kind of personal motivation to inspect the gratuitous wonders that abound in their “home towns”.
It upsets me, sometimes, when I’m not feeling reasonable. As a young man, I’d have killed, maimed, and possibly practiced witchcraft to have these same opportunities. Not that there’s anything wrong with witchcraft 
That being said, small town life isn’t exactly the purgatory some people claim. While I do like the cities, I find that whenever I’m too long away I begin to miss the simple style of my home. I miss the comfort of stepping out on a quiet, tree-shaded afternoon. By “quiet,” of course, I mean the quiet of rural Arkansas. Bull frogs, katydids, grasshoppers, and the ever present sound of truck engines being worked on or farm equipment trundling through the fields.
What do people do in environments like these? They get to know their neighbors. They attend the same social functions. They get involved with their kids and their kids’ activities. They become sincerely invested in the community, and one wonders what people like this might be able to accomplish with better educations.
We do a lot of small town football, baseball, etc. We do gardening, and some of us do an awful lot of reading. Reality TV is bigger nowhere else, and I could flood your ears with outdoor activities from fishing to hiking to amateur astronomy.
On that note, it depressed me a few months ago when I spoke to a new friend of mine who’d grown up in the suburbs of some metropolis. I was describing for her the fine details of the night sky from my back porch, and I made comparison to the sky above us (we were in Seoul), which had only a handful of stars in view.
Imagine my dismay when she didn’t believe that the night could show more stars than this! She claimed that she thought it was only in movies and with telescopes you could see more than maybe 50 stars on a clear night. When I told her I could see the Milky Way quite clearly from my picnic table near the pond, she absolutely refused to believe it. She was convinced I was making it all up.
How do we get so far removed from the earth and the nature that surrounds us? I know far too many people who’ve never taken the time to stand in the rain, listening to tree frogs, watching the patterns of light that a sodden spiderweb makes. How do you live without ever having torn up soil with your bare hands? Without breaking chunks of moldy bark off of dead trees? Without tearing loose the roots of your own vegetables, raising your own livestock, chopping your own wood, or… ah, I’m rambling now.
Of course, I understand to some degree. Plenty of people, most people probably, live quite satisfactory lives without these experiences. But for some reason, looking back, I can’t see myself alive without them. I see it as an absolutely irreducibly crucial aspect of who and what I am as a human being. What is it like to live in a city your whole life? Some city kids may have opportunities for similar discoveries as I made playing with taddies in our summer creeks, but I’d wager a lot don’t. It seems unfair, somehow, that city kids are deprived of this particular opportunity.
So, for both of us, the country kid and the city kid, I think that there are parts missing. For many, those doors of opportunity never materialize.
PS: I’m far from home right now, and have been for a while. I could be romanticizing a little
From fall of 2005 to summer of 2007, I lived in an isolated beach town of 5,000.
There was no movie theater, no hospital. Downtown was a couple blocks long.
There were a few cultural events, which were quite enthusiastically attended.
Church played a huge role in that town, as did the aforementioned athletic events.
Friday night football games were huge.
The coast was beautiful, and always there for swimming, fishing, surfing, bonfires.
The rest of the time the little kids did all the normal little kid things, except yes, sometimes they had to travel a bit farther.
It gets trickier when the kids get older and more restless.
There have been two different tragic highway deaths (teens, no alcohol involved) in two years.
I agree with Ruby and Crocodiles about the comfort zones. That’s how I was in Denver.
These days, I am in a town of 10,000. You can see the stars.
It’s sort of one big comfort zone.
It’s a great fit for us, but the young chafe a bit. The young often do.
Bravo
For a slightly different perspective, I live in a town of 3000 people, in a poor country where a lot of the stuff some of you are mentioning isn’t really available. Like, no pizza delivery. No ordering stuff on the internet. The nearby larger town doesn’t have a lot of the stuff an American city of 70,000 would have. (I grew up in an American town of 55,000 and there is a LOT more to do there. Turns out that this is what having a good economy means…more stores, more cafes, more stuff in general. Who knew?)
Main activities include gossiping and sitting around at cafes smoking. Whenever there’s a concert or something in the town square, EVERYONE comes.
I used to wonder a lot about what life would be like in such a small town, and I’m glad I had this opportunity to experience it, but I won’t be too sad when it’s time to leave. (Well, I say that now. I’ll probably cry all the way to the airport.)
I live on a county road outside of my hometown – both my wife and I grew up here, we raised our boys here (for the most part) and plan to never leave. The kids complain that there’s nothing to do in a small town, but they bitch about that in big cities, too. Mostly, that translates into “feed my empty mind with continuous, thrilling stimulation because I have no active imagination.”
There’s always something going on, you just have to know about it. A great many social occasions center on food, and the pot-luck dinner is a great American tradition. Grown-ups often have hobbies, too, and we’re pretty serious readers – I can spend at least two evenings a week with a good book, and there are plenty of good books to read, if you know how to actually sit and read a book without pictures in it.
You may not believe this, but sometimes my wife and I actually sit on our front patio and watch the sunset. It changes very slowly over the hour or so we sit there, talking, watching the clouds change color and shape. It’s a great way to pass an hour.
I grew up Logansport, Louisiana which had a population of about 1,300 when I was growing up. My high school graduating class was 39 people and I was the only one that went to a 4 year college straight out of high school. Logansport is very poor and it isn’t a suburb of anything or adjacent to anything bigger. We didn’t have a McDonalds either. It was just one long main street with businesses gasping their last breath.
Growing up, I was always confused when people asked me what there was “TO DO”. My family had about 100 acres of land surrounded by thousands of acres of undeveloped land and my friends also had tons of land. I never felt the need for drive-up, prepackaged entertainment. I spent a whole lot of time deep in the woods by myself from a young age. We had a stocked catfish pond that we fished in. My father was a gun dealer and we had a rifle, pistol, and skeet shooting range at our house. I literally spent two years digging a small pond by hand that I planned to raise crawfish in (I couldn’t get them to thrive after all of that). I built a smallish log cabin once by hand and that took up months of my time. When I was in high school, I worked in the lone supermarket as much as possible and that enabled me to by a new pickup truck mostly on my own. I just drove around a lot after that.
I liked it and still don’t see the need for people to prepackage entertainment for me. My current town isn’t that big or congested either and we have some land as well as abutting conservation land and can seem quite rural at times. A great weekend for me is chainsawing fallen trees and incinerating them in a bon fire.
The concept of “small town” certainly is relative. My late wife came from Cannon Falls, Minnesota, population about 3500, and I was born and have lived all my life in Los Angeles.
When we started talking about moving when I retired, she wanted to live in a town no larger than about 10,000, and I felt I needed to live in a city of at least 400,000 to be comfortable. I could live in a small town if it was no more than ten or fifteen miles from said medium sized city.
Negotiations went on for a while and we finally agreed on Cedar City, Utah (pop 24,000), with only St. George (pop 65,000) the only larger town within an hour’s drive. The nearest city of the size I wanted is Las Vegas, two and a half hours away.
She passed away last July, and though I am still planning on moving to a small town, my definition of the description has begun to grow. Now I am thinking of places like Flagstaff, Arizona, Eugene, Oregon or Kelowna, British Columbia. All between 100,000 and 150,000, but to me,small towns.
I live in the town I grew up in, which has about 30,000 people in it. But, believe me, it’s still a small town. When I was growing up, there was NOTHING to do. Especially if you were like me and didn’t make friends in school. I sure as hell wasn’t going to get involved in school activities so I could spend more time with people who called me a fat whale and laughed at me behind my back because my family wasn’t rich.
So, I read a lot, and wrote a lot, and wished to leave, and I still do the same except with a job now.
Everyone who is acting like you have to be a dummy to not be satisfied with having solitary lonely hobbies like reading, like it’s some sort of symptom of youth – I’m really glad you’re happy in a boring town, but I like people. I like things to do and places to be. And 45 minutes is too damn long to have to drive to go to a bookstore or do anything fun. (Yes, there’s Amazon…but there’s no people in Amazon, is there?)
I grew up in Shattuck, Oklahoma, population 1,200.
We have all the ‘stuff’ a big city has…
We have a 9 hole golf course, a hospital, one bank, two grocery stores, usually three or four bars (technically they’re taverns); one of which my brother owns. A nursing home, a grain elevator. We even have a Pizza Hut! We only have one high school (Shattuck, Indians football team is a five-in-a-row state champion this year! 69 consecutive wins!)
When I graduated high school in 1980, we had a perfect record too… we lost every game :(. My graduating class had 30 people. I think last year they graduated like 5 people. My nephew tells me that the neighboring town of Gage will graduate one student next year! “Woo Hoo, I’m tops in my class!” Although that does suck the life out of a senior trip, plus the graduation ceremony won’t take long. 
So what is there to do? Well we drank a LOT of beer. Golfed on Sundays, worked on the farms pretty much any other daylight hour… especially during wheat harvest.
I was born and raised in a town of 18,000 people.
I hated it.
It was like everybody knew everything about everybody…Bill is a drunk, Susie is a slut, Don was the high school football star and sells used cars and still likes them high school girls and, well, you get the picture.
You couldn’t fart in that town without the fact being published in the local paper the next day.
I vividly recall my mantra while mowing grass in our front yard, “I have to get out of here, I have to get out of here, I have to get out of here…”
I left when I was 18 and never returned except for a few occasional (short) visits. Last visit was 10 years ago and it will most likely be the final visit.
As you might notice from my location, I then moved to Chicago, New York City, Berlin, Los Angeles and now, the smallest city since that hometown, Las Vegas (greater metropolitan area is currently 2 million).
I would never live in a small town again. Hated every minute of it.
Dmark Do you feel you hated the small town you grew up in because of being gay and the attitudes towards it then?
We live in the sticks. Not off the grid, churn your own butter kinda sticks, but a place where we have no pizza delivery and dirt roads. The roads keep away our citified friends most of the year because their cars get dirty. The pussies.
What we consider our hometown ( our mailing address is another town.) is 15K. Being active in the community as we are without having to belong to one of the 90 bajillion churches here., there are probably 4k-7k people involved with the schools and sports and that is our town. The rest are the floatsom of humanity that either drive to the burbs for their jobs or are elderly.
The biggest to-do here is Homecoming. We first attended this past fall and it was an awesome, awesome game marred only by two things: Teenagers never sit the fuck down and actually watch a game and cheerleaders doing their chants at all. Very distracting.
Our crimeline in the Fuckall Newspaper is 80% drunk driving arrests ( usually 3 or 4 a week.), some kind of mail order/ebay scam, and the ever popular Domestic Disturbance Catch All that 90% of it happens at our local trailer park. ( big surprise, huh.) Home invasions are at about 1 a month. If you don’t count the mail box bashing, which is the number one event here in the spring, then the next biggest thing in the crimeline are the Car-Deer Accidents. Fucking Deer.
The big news story a few years ago ( before kids or when they were toddlers. CAn’t remember.Doesn’t matter.) was the uproar over an adult video store going in at the strip mall. Very tastefully done store. Blacked out windows. Had to be buzzed to be let in. It brought out the santimonious prigs like you would not believe and that was all that was on the front page for that year. ( Mind you, the Smoker’s Discount place two stores down didn’t even get picketed for selling fags. Yes, that joke went above many heads here. Because, you know, smoking is a vice, too, but not as EVUL as sex. The prunes. The second big news story of the year. The Beaver Dam problem. I shit you not.
Two main bars. One is the family oriented place. The other is seedier, smokier and where skanks and assholes go. (I’ve never been, but anyone who isn’t a skank or asshole who goes there and say it is excellent people watching.)
The gossip in a small town is like wild fire and having been on the front line with a friend during the Scorched Earth Fallout of his divorce, we have witnessed the real event and then watched the words as they get twisted around and come back to us via 97 degrees of seperation. Very fascinating, indeed. Who needs Reality TV when you have small town gossip?
I love it here. I couldn’t live in Stepford Place Estates in a McMansion.
Public libraries in Wyoming. These are small towns. For example: Afton (1,818), Alta (400), Baggs (348), Bairoil (97), Basin (1,239).
Virtually every home in Wyoming can pick up hundreds of channels via satellite television.
Ok, so here’s my impression so far, both from what people have said and my own personal experiences:
Small towns are great if you are just like everyone else. It helps to not be too black, too gay, too foreign, too educated, too excessively wealthy or poor (relatively speaking) or too different in any way that may appear threatening. Depending on how rural your community, it also helps to enjoy stuff like hunting, fishing and other outdoor activities.
Growing up, school will pretty much be a jockocracy. Even adults will speak with reverence about the quarterbacks arm or the new centers jump shot. Activities will pretty much consist of getting drunk or high at house parties or in out of the way parts of town, hanging out at a couple of restaurants or diners and going to high school sporting events. Maybe there’s a shopping mall nearby. If you’re lucky, the town is big enough to have some sort of town fair or similar event a few times a year.
When you graduate high school, there are a couple of tracks. Some kids wil go off to college. Some will go to good schools but the majority will end up at State U or local community colleges. A bunch of kids will join the military. The rest will go work in local businesses or industries. Maybe they’ll become a local cop or work for their dad’s business or become a bartender.
People tend to get married young. Often to their high school or college sweetheart. Then they start knocking out a couple of kids and lead a lifestyle of watching reality TV, drinking Budweiser in their backyard with their buddies or hanging out at the local bar, pool hall or bowling alley where they will talk about their glory days back in high school.
Sorry, but that’s just not for me. I like being able to have my pick of sushi, Chinese, Thai, steak, Mexican and any other restuarant that comes to mind. I like take out. I like that I can go to bars and clubs and lounges that have more to offer than a couple of drunk townies drinking shitty beer and picking fights over the local skanks. I like working in a city with unlimited career opportunities where I can work with educated, interesting people. I like that there’s a Barnes & Noble, a Virgin Megastore and ten Starbucks within walking distance. I’m not much of a sports fan, but I still like watching basketball games at MSG, baseball games at Yankee Stadium and even the US Open at Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Excellent question, but no…back in them old days, being Gay anywhere in the US was no picnic.
I think I hated the isolationist mentality - to say the community was set in its ways is an understatement. From hearing subtle to overt racist comments my entire life, ridicule of anything new or out of the norm, neighborhood gossip mongers worse than East German informants - they might as well have built a wall around that town and anything outside of it was “just not the way we do things here.”
A neighbor woman once got drunk at a Christmas party and kissed a married man. She and her family literally had to move away in less than a year as that innocent act by a woman who couldn’t handle her eggnog turned into wildass vile rumors and she, and her entire family, were ostracized. That is just one example of the good Christian womenfolk of that town wagging their tongues en masse.
The local police turned their eyes away from some crimes, depending on the family involved, but made no secret of tormenting others who didn’t come from the “right” family. People were hired and fired from local businesses for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with ability, but everybody knew the reasons.
As a kid, I would come home from grade school and say my new playmate was Billy Jones and in five minutes, the neighborhood women had reviewed the history of the Jones family to determine if he was a fit playmate for me. Godforbid his family was new to the area, or not upstanding - didn’t make any difference that he and I were both just seven years old and just playing on the school jungle gym.
Sure - there were some fun moments sledding down hills with friends, riding my bike across town to get licorice whips at a candy store, camping out by the river with friends on a hot July night, going to the drive in for tenderloins and chocolate shakes…but by the time I was a teenager, the small town mentality was beyond oppressive.
It seems I was not the only one to feel that way growing up. I still keep loose contact with a high school friend who stayed there and he told me about our last high school reunion. Of about 300 or so graduates, about 14 still live in the general area of the town, and less than 20 people showed up for the reunion. Doesn’t sound like a lot of loved lost for the old stomping grounds. Even he and his wife take every chance possible to get away and go into Chicago or fly to exotic locations for vacations. (He inherited a very lucrative business and was unable to move away for other family reasons.)
I love the freedom of a big city - the idea that if I want to, I can go eat Indian food, see a late movie at an art house, hit a bar or nightclub, meet people from cultures around the world, get lost in a crowd or have a small group of friends over to the house, and know that when I go to work on Monday, not every employee already knows where I was, who I was with, and what I said over the weekend.
Lots of hard truth on this page.
I’ve lived half my life in small towns and half in a large city. One negative about small towns that (I think) can be made into a positive is that, because of the low population, people tend to cut each other more slack. There aren’t enough of us to where we can dismiss someone quickly as a potential friend. If there’s even a spark of possibility, you explore it.
I didn’t have a single good friend in Seattle who attended church regularly, but here I have several. I’m friends with people who don’t share my taste in books and movies but we have other things in common. In Seattle I might have never bothered to get to know them. And because we aren’t always looking for the next best thing (friends, food, activities), we learn to appreciate the things we do have, maybe try to improve them.
If the trade-off for not having myriad choices is living without stress, traffic, high taxes, smog, crime, etc., I’ll take it.