I recall my sister answering the door to an insurance agent (locally reviled by all right thinking folk) with a BB gun and she told him to get the h*ll out of our driveway.
so strangers, don’t be afraid of just the menfolk, their 12 your old daughters can be scary too.
It’s bat country! I thought this was common knowledge.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but wasn’t Deliverance set in the woods? Hunting trip and all that?
I’m in Chicago suburbia and not really shaken by either rural or urban extreme. Although, if I had to pick one, I guess I’d get lost in a rural area since there’s less people to mug me. My wife gets very nervous driving through the farmland exurbs at night. She’s not even so much afraid of scary people as much as she dislikes the openness and dark. I think she’s worried that a pack of were-coyotes or something is going to get her.
This is probably a legitimate fear - getting ripped off and having your car held hostage by some local slimeball mechanic, who knows that you’re stuck, unfamiliar with the area and desperate to move along and has no qualms about taking full advantage of those facts.
This is why I love the SDMBs. Just when I think I’ve heard of everything, someone brings up something I have never heard of before. In this case, the Melonheads.
Well, I guess all the obvious stuff has been covered.
Being from the country myself, I’m painfully aware that a dearth of people to ask for directions is really a problem. I’ve been in situations where the only folks whom I could ask were senior citizens unaware of any changes “down the road” over the last 20 years. In an urban/small town area, if the person you’re speaking to appears clueless you can politely thank them and discreetly move on to someone who may have a better grasp of the world. If you’re passing through Loup City, Nebraska on a Sunday afternoon, you may be out of luck.
And as far as I know, no travellers have ever gotten lost and sodomized in rural Nebraska. However, one winter a Greyhound bus broke down and the occupants had to spend a night or two in our church. The local paper (whose chief reporter recently retired at the age of 101) dutifully recounted that two of the stranded sojourners were black. That there was news, dadgummit!
In the city, almost never, because there’s a gas station every three blocks, and I pull over when my temp gauge goes high or I hear a weird noise.
In the country, while I’ve only ever run out of gas once, every time the needle dips below 1/4, I start to worry, because it can be many, many miles to the next gas station. I’ve rolled in on fumes a number of times.
I blew out a tire once coming down a mountain 13 miles west of Green River, Utah. At 1:30 in the morning. Luckily, thanks to the GPS, I figured out there was actually a town (if you can call it that) not too far ahead, so we got the spare on and limped into Green River. There we had to stay in the nastiest, smelliest, dirtiest hotel room I’ve ever been in. (Seriously - I couldn’t figure out which would be worse: sleeping on their linens for a night, or bringing our sleeping bags and pillows in from the car. Eventually, we decided not to bring our things in, so we didn’t get them contaminated from the hotel room.) In the morning, we found the only “mechanic” in town, who no longer ran a full service garage…he just sold tires to people who blew them out coming down the mountain.
Daaaamn, and I thought we were hicktastic for the dude who decapitated and started to eat another passenger on the Greyhound.
As counter-example, the only time I ran out of gas that wasn’t in sight of a gas station, I walked to the nearest farmhouse and was given a gallon of gas, a ride back, and directions to the nearest gas station.
How far down the road do they need to know about? Aren’t you just looking to get to either the nearest town or the nearest main road? Pretty near everyone knows that much, I think.
Alien abductions always take place in isolation, never from the middle of crowded cities. Safety in numbers!
Spending some enforced quality time with their number one fan.
Random cows.
With a cellphone, map, GPS, and a full tank of gas, nothing at all.
Actually, with just a semi-full tank of gas, even without a cellphone and GPS, I’m ok. But I worry about needing to depend on people who might be somewhere between slightly unfriendly and actively hostile and not having any other options.
I also worry that my car will slide off the side of a cliff and I will plummet to my death. There are far fewer sheer drop-offs in the city.
But if I’m pretty confident that I can get unlost before I run out of gas, I like driving around in the middle of nowhere with no particular place to go.
Speaking of cell phones, when did they become ubiquitous enough (in urban areas) that not being able to call for help mostly ceased to be a plausible plot point in movies and novels? Wiki says The Bonfire of the Vanities was serialized in 1984 and published in 1987.
I think of the things I would do or rely upon if my car broke down or I got lost, and the potential for them to not work and disasater to result seems higher in rural areas.
1. Cell phones/GPS. Less reliable in rural areas.
2. Finding someone to ask for help. Populations are less dense in rural areas-- the nearest person may not be for miles. And if that person seems untrustworthy, you have to search again.
3. Waiting for someone else to come along. Good luck with that.
Rural areas are much less developed. Roads are unpaved, there are no sidewalks, there are no streetlights, and forget about payphones.
There’s no public transportation, and no random taxis or police officers passing through.
If you’re stranded outside somewhere at night, then unfamiliar weather, pitch blackness, and nocturnal critters become factors.
None of these things are devastating, guaranteed fatal, etc., but generally, I can too easily envision things going to hell, and I can understand not wanting to risk it.
nm
The more-reasonable-sounding points in this thread, related to matters of density and infrastructure, aren’t those reflected in the reaction described in the OP. That is clearly a matter of prejudice against country people.
And several of the other comments in the thread confirm that the instinctive reaction, the first thought, for many here is indeed that same cultural aversion, not a practical concern.
Head-on collisions with sissy city-folk frantically jabbing at their cell phones trying to find a signal…