Just a Small-Town Boy

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Of course, the rural rebound has its downsides. As agricultural land gives way to suburban tracts (and sumptuous timber-frame retreats) and the highways fill up, some worry that newcomers will destroy what attracted them in the first place: rural charm and a clean environment. And the physical incursions may be matched by a kind of cultural imperialism on the part of some urban refugees who look on their new environs as little more than a pretty painted backdrop to their movielike lives.

I try to remember that I will essentially be a guest in Viroqua for at least the first 10 or 20 years of my residency -- maybe my whole life. As such, I want to honor the specific cultural heritage of the place I've chosen as my home. I want to invest my time making my community a better place for everyone. That means supporting levies for a school my children don't attend, buying from the local hardware store instead of going for cheaper prices at Home Depot, pitching in at community events, and helping my neighbors when they need me.

I even drove a car in the county demolition derby last year. As much as anything, it was an act of ambassadorship -- a hand extended across the internal geography that divides my urban refugee friends from my local friends. It was also a strangely unifying experience for me. For once, my country and city selves felt aligned. Better still, I took second place in my heat and won a hundred dollars.

FOR MUCH OF HISTORY, urban life symbolized all that was sinister and immoral in America, while the countryside promised a utopian idyll. Thoreau's description in Walden of his escape to a cabin on the outskirts of Concord is the classic expression of this complex polarity between wilderness and society: "While civilization has been improving our houses," he writes, "it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them." In recent history, however, Americans have taken a dim view of small-town life. From Sinclair Lewis' Gopher Prairie to Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, small towns occupy a symbolic placeholder for all that is smug, ignorant, and paranoid about our culture.

Not long after moving to Viroqua, I saw a series of events that seemed to confirm this negative view: When word got out that a gay couple would be speaking at the public school's annual Diversity Day, a group circulated a petition opposing the event, and the school board voted to cancel it. It was a low point for the town. A white supremacist group picked up the story and praised the school board on its Web site. Jay Leno mocked the decision on The Tonight Show. The whole episode reminded me of why I had fled small-town America.

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