I have a pet theory that city and country/small town people have more in common than one would think. Both groups have made some sacrifices to live somewhere that is interesting and at times challenging rather than someplace that is sterile and generic.
IME, one of the differences is that … in cities … there’s usually enough of a background din of some sort that fewer sounds really punch through.
But there is a base level of quietness in the country that – in addition to other factors – lets many noises be ridiculously and surprisingly disruptive.
I’ve lived near multiple train tracks in an urban area that were far less disruptive than when the coyotes got a rabbit in the middle of the night.
I’m a big fan or rural living. In fact it’s getting a little too crowded where I’m living. There is only only house in sight, but I’d still like to move somewhere even more remote.
Things I like about rural areas:
Quiet
Private
No traffic, most of the time I pull onto the main road there aren’t any vehicles coming in either direction
Lots of trees and grass to make lots of clean air
Forests, hills, and fields, lots of wild areas
Wildlife like deer, rabbits, foxes, bald eagles
Rural properties generally have more land, which gives you a lot more options for activities and also great for privacy
Less people = less problems generally
What I don’t like about rural areas:
Hard to get Internet
It essentially takes a half-day to drive to some stores, shop, and drive back. Luckily it isn’t an everyday thing, or even every week
I love rural living in Oregon and could never put up with life among all the concrete and pavement of even a medium size city.
Deer, elk, and other wildlife strolling through my yard. Bald Eagles nesting in the nearby trees, I even have a Sitka Spruce tree on the edge of my yard that is well over 100ft tall and 10 feet trough in diameter. Lots, and lots of trees and greenery. 35ft by 55ft fenced in garden with a gazebo, fire pit, grapes and many kinds of berries. Few neighbors, one to the south about 150 yards away, the one on the other side is separated from me by a year round freshwater creek. Due to the lay of the land there will likely never be any other homes built near me.
12 miles from home to work without even one traffic light, the only stop sign is where I get on the highway from my road. The nearest “town” of 10,000 is 14 miles away and we go there for shopping. All the usual stores are there. Good hospital and medical services there too.
Faster internet would be nice, but that will come in time. I am trying to think of another reason that I might want to live in a city but cannot think of anything. The very idea of urban life would mean the death of my very soul.
With the opioid and meth epidemic what it is, anybody small towns not locking their doors is just asking for trouble. A lot of the rural America myth is just that. Everybody knows your business and people are just as judgmental as they are anywhere else; perhaps even more so. While small towns may look charming, they’re also boring as fuck. That’s fine, if you’re into that, but the lack of good restaurants and entertainment would drive me crazy in short order. Also, the lack of services is a problem. My cousin had to drive 110 miles one way in order to see his cancer doctor, often on icy roads.
This falls under the broad category of “less to do,” but for me, the lack of cultural activities is a drawback. I’m into classical music and live theater, and that stuff generally doesn’t exist in small rural towns. The local high school’s production of Guys and Dolls isn’t going to cut it. If you enjoy things like museums, interesting architecture, big libraries, ethnic restaurants, etc., then living someplace without them is going to be an adjustment. It helps if the small town is within a reasonable distance of a larger city, or if it’s a college town.
I’ve lived in a few towns with under 10,000 people, and generally I preferred it to city life, but in all those cases there was a city no more than an hour away. I don’t think I could handle one of those remote dot-on-the-map towns in rural Nebraska or Kansas.
To this point, I just have to add that I’ve lived in NYC for 20 years and never been the victim of a crime either.
A mile long would be something on the order of a hundred cars, more or less. And, in the countryside, trains can be running in excess of 80mph, so it might only take 45 seconds for a mile of train to go by in front of you.
Our “dot-on-the-map” was ~15 minutes from the nearest big town, where the high school is. Plenty of things to do there.
If you’ve seen The Hunter with Steve McQueen & LeVar Burton, you’ve seen a bit of the big town. That’s where LeVar’s character gets picked up.
“Nothing is good. Anyone who doesn’t live in a city of over 1 million people is a redneck Trump zombie yes man racist.”
Or at least that’s what my friends from the city tell me.
I think my small town was very backward. I’ve been to towns of 3000 people that had more to offer…not sure why that is.
A thought I somehow didn’t finish: there’s some antagonism on the Facebook page I mentioned. Those who stayed behind probably think those who left are burning out in the fast lane and living without connection to the family. Some who left may think there’s no growth potential back there and those who didn’t leave aren’t ambitious enough. Once a real estate broker told me, “A lot of boys grow up in the country and go to the city to work hard so they can retire…in the country.”
Mrs. L and I have talked about some day retiring and that rural thing we just couldn’t. But the noisy, crowded big city isn’t it, either. If I had to pick between a town of 7,000 and a town of 1M? I’d pick the one that’s maybe 100,000, aiming for most of the benefits of each with as few hassles as possible.
Add to the bad, when the farm fields around you are being sprayed with liquid manure. We had a bug zapper in our living room one year.
Or the septic tank needs pumping.
Or you’re downwind of the pig farm.
The worst part of that is when some developer puts in fifty or a hundred houses out on scenic Slide Pointe, the houses fill up with urbankind and then they complain about how bad that farm, which has been there more than a century, smells, and the farmer has to fight the county (which now has a bunch of additional voters who oppose the stinky farm) just to keep operating.
Can’t be more boring than the Penn State helmet.
You should be able to get Internet service just about anywhere in the U.S.
The problem in some rural areas is getting halfway decent Internet (according to many reviews, satellite Internet service stinks - low speeds, limited usage before one gets throttled to a snail’s pace, expensive, being bound to long-term contracts).
I think that’s a bit of a rosy view of rural regions. One of the things to know about rural areas is that they have very little of their own. Everything is shipped in, often from long distances away, and therefore the hammered-down generic mass-market stuff which hits the majority dead-center is most of what you get. You don’t get a nice, rehabbed arthouse theater playing midnight showings of classic cult films, you get a Generic Movie House with two screens so it can play all both of the top two guaranteed million-sellers. You don’t get family-owned restaurants with interesting food, you get chain restaurants (like the horde of fast-casual places which go by the names Shoney’s, Perkins, Denny’s, Village Inn, and plenty of others), the same Chinese place every other small town has, and a mix of fast food places. At best, you’ll get a local steakhouse, maybe a local sandwich shop and a burger place. There are no interesting boutique bookstores, just run-down used book stores with cheap romance paperbacks.
You can find all of those things in big cities. My point is that in small towns, you can’t find anything else.
Precisely, they make sacrifices to live somewhere the find infesting. In the city, we put up with our own challenges, neither of us could live in the burbs.
It’s been awhile since I lived in a small town. But the movie theatre was far from the generic, blockbuster only place described above. Some of the seats were reclining La-Z-Boys - hard to beat. There were loveseats in the first row for the romantically inclined (and for the town gossips). You could buy whisky and cigars at the bar, where the diet cola was so fizzy it took three minutes to pour. Many of the movies were big names, but they threw in some other stuff too. It was a unique and well-liked place. I miss it. Of course, smoking was permitted at that time.
I think you missed the whole point of my post, but I fear it was deliberate.
I remember years ago a similar situation involving a drag strip. There was a drag racing facility that had been around a long time, out in the middle of nowhere. Then they started building housing developments in the vicinity and the residents got the drag strip shut down because of the noise.