Just a Small-Town Boy

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The Pleasant Ridge Waldorf School, one of the only rural Waldorf schools in the country (and the first Wisconsin school to offer an organic hot lunch), will celebrate its 25th anniversary later this year. I didn't know much about the 85-year-old Waldorf curriculum before I moved here, but I knew the school attracted a lot of people like me who want their lives to harbor more meaning and passion than the American imperative to "work, buy, consume, die." I've grown to value the school's commitment to art and creativity, and to what Waldorf pedagogy calls "the whole child" -- physical, spiritual, and intellectual.

It was when we visited Pleasant Ridge, where the students all seemed so capable and poised, that we met Paul and Paula Grenier, both chiropractors, and the ad hoc ambassadors of Viroqua. Paula struck up a conversation with my wife, Anne, during the school assembly. Then she whisked us off to their house in the country. They fed us, answered our questions about Viroqua, and then kept an eye on our kids while Anne and I hopped into their hot tub under a brilliant January moon. There, beneath the stars, we made up our minds to move to this place.

What we didn't realize then was that in Viroqua, such encounters are typical. Back in Minneapolis, we had terrific friends. But our visits were penciled in. Social life -- the essence of community -- got scheduled around work, soccer practice, and the daily grind. Here, social life simply materializes. Picking up the kids from school turns into an afternoon at the playground, which turns into a shared dinner, which turns into a bonfire.

This palpable sense of community extends to mutual assistance. When we showed up with our moving truck, we were met by a dozen strangers who helped us bring the boxes in. (Last week, I helped move my fifth piano.) One of our neighbors caught pneumonia last winter, and within days a food brigade had been organized to deliver supper -- for several weeks. My wife and some other mothers with preschoolers meet weekly to share housework.

This social life is the essential difference between city and small-town life. In the city, "community" meant neighborhoods, the city council, the news and issues of the day. My friends and neighbors fit in somewhere, but the primary collective structure was the polis. Here in Viroqua, the primary collective structure is, well, us -- my circle of friends and neighbors, held together from year to year by a thousand shared moments.

WHEN MY FAMILY MOVED to Viroqua, we joined one of the most significant population shifts in recent history. Demographers call it "the rural rebound." Rural counties like mine have been losing population since the Civil War. In the 1970s, that trend reversed for the first time. Interrupted by the 1980s farm crisis, the rebound resumed during the 1990s and continues today in spite of recession and war.

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