Just a Small-Town Boy

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Demographers like Kenneth Johnson at Loyola University point to a number of reasons for this shift. Manufacturing jobs are returning to small towns. Retiring boomers are flocking to recreational zones. Urban professionals are taking their work anywhere they like, thanks to the Internet, fax machines, FedEx, and higher speed limits. Finally, there are many people who see the promise of life in the country as not only a personal boon, but also a model for a sane future. The Fellowship for Intentional Community, which publishes an annual directory of co-ops, cohousing, communal living arrangements, and so on, now reports the highest number of forming communities since the late 1960s.

Within the larger rebound are several types of growth patterns. Small towns near a city are becoming outer-ring suburbs. They retain some individuality but are slowly being swallowed up by parking lots, big-box retailers, and McMansions. Others, like Viroqua, lie far from the interstate and the city. These places often have natural beauty and seem to be specializing in an interesting way. Ashland, Oregon, with its Shakespeare festival is one example. Fairfield, Iowa, home of the Maharishi University, is another. A third type of small town is not growing at all. According to Johnson, these towns rely on the traditional rural jobs of farming and mining. In fact, while more people are moving to the country, fewer Americans are actually farming than ever before.

Instead, they're taking jobs in manufacturing or, increasingly, bringing traditionally urban professions along for the ride. Our neighbors are a typical sample. Next door are a welder and a truck driver. Across the street a retired tobacco farmer resides (for years, tobacco was our county's cash crop). Down the block live a violin maker, a homeopathic nurse-practitioner, a graphic designer, and the editor of a regional New Age newspaper. Widen the circle a bit, and you will find several software engineers, innumerable carpenters, massage therapists, writers, musicians, artists, psychologists, and doctors. (Most of us would smile at this catalog of careers, though. People here say they're not making a living, they're making a life.)

In Viroqua, the influx of newcomers has had a profound effect on the social and economic life of the town. One woman who grew up here, now in her 40s, told me that when "hippies" first started moving here in the 1970s, they were met with hostility -- and sometimes with baseball bats. Today's migrants, who often bring money and jobs into the community, are welcomed. Twenty years ago, as one local puts it, downtown was an empty canyon. Today, the brick main street operates at full capacity, with a jewelry store, two drugstores, a dance studio, a smoothie shop, a restored 1920s theater, and many offices, including my own. An auto showroom has been converted into an indoor market.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print