Tag Archives: rural america

Self Quarantine: March 26 2020

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Watched a couple Star Trek movies yesterday.  Called my parents twice.  Talked to an old college friend yesterday.  His school in rural South Dakota is doing online teaching now.  He spends several hours a day with that.  His wife is also a teacher, so there is usually always someone on their home computer.  A friend of mine in Denver was classified as essential worker status because she works for a financial institution.  She’ll probably put in lots of hours for the near future.  Saw that my home county now has two confirmed cases of covid 19.  I live in a small college community of less than 40,000 people.  The town has gone eerily quiet since this was declared a pandemic two weeks ago.  For the last two weeks the only time I’ve left my apartment was to pick up grocery and medicine deliveries.  It will probably be this way for awhile.  The only time I see any real traffic on the highway outside my complex is during the morning and evening commutes.  I have a friend in Lincoln, Nebraska who works in a pharmacy and she said things are crazy there.  She wears masks and gloves every time she leaves her house.

My brother and his wife have worked from home for the last three weeks.  Their four kids are all doing online school for a few hours a day.  My mom and dad are doing alright.  They sometimes binge watch westerns on their streaming services.  I call them at least once a day.

I call my neighbors at least once daily.  My neighbor lady helped me with my laundry yesterday and her husband cooked dinner for us.  My cleaning lady will be here this afternoon.  I just realized there were some supplies I was supposed to pick up for her that I forgot about.  But some cleaning supplies like disinfectant sprays and cleaning solutions are in short supply some days.  Twice in the last two weeks I tried to buy Lysol spray only to find the store was out.  Fortunately I found an old can I had forgotten about stashed away in my closet.  I didn’t go stock up on toilet paper or anything crazy like that.  The craziest things I did buy was some bottled water.  At first I was afraid the water might go out.  But I needed some as I try to keep a few days worth of water stored away just in case.

I’m still holding good on my psych medications and over the counter pain pills.  I bought some ibuprofen a few weeks before things got real hectic.  I haven’t had a real shortage of anything, at least not yet.  I’m glad my family took disaster preparation serious when we were kids.  Living in a small Nebraska town with the nearest Wal Mart being an hour drive away, we stocked up whenever we had the chance.  It wasn’t unheard of to have a major snow storm shut down the highways for a few days.  When I was thirteen, we had an ice storm that knocked out power and water in our town for three days.  Some of the farms outside of town were without power for a few weeks.  So I guess disaster preparations were never foreign to anyone living in our small town.  Most of the people I grew up around worked in farming or ranching, so they were people who were used to having to be on their own just by the nature of their work.  Even though my parents weren’t farmers, I learned some of those habits of being self reliant and prepared just by growing up around it.  I guess my family and those I grew up around kept some of the old pioneer mentality even in modern times.

My Thoughts on Possibly Moving to a City

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I’m going to go off subject for this post.  But some major changes may be happing in my life soon.  I might be moving to a larger city.  Which excites me as most of my friends and family have already moved to larger areas.  I’m pretty much the last person of my group of friends left in a rural area. My father has been saying since the 1980s that rural America’s greatest export isn’t crops but it’s most intelligent young people.  I didn’t believe him when I was in school because even though I was around some troublemakers who didn’t want to be there, I could find smart people to hang out with whenever I wanted.  It wasn’t until I got out of college and into the workforce did I realize just how right my father was.  Finding intelligent people to have in depth and far flung intelligent conversations with is brutally tough.  And it got tougher the older I became.

I should have known something was amiss when most of my friends left the rural area I lived in and went to major cities to find jobs requiring lots of brain power.  Even most of my cousins moved to larger areas.  One cousin of mine lived in a suburb of our state capital but still telecommuted from his home for several years.  Even I telecommute with this blog.  I wouldn’t have anywhere near the reach without the internet.  Yet I think I could do even better if I was in a larger city with more in person contacts.  I stayed in a rural area mainly because of my family and wanting to be close to family while I worked though life with a mental illness.  Now my parents are talking about moving to Oklahoma City to be near my brother and his family.  If they go, I’m going with them.  It was always my plan that I would move to be near my brother after my parents died.  But I might not have to wait that long.  Besides, I like having my parents around.

It’s not that I am anti social or don’t like communicating with people.  I love having intelligent conversations.  A half hour intelligent conversation with family members or old friends is enough to recharge my batteries for a few days.  Intelligent conversation and learning new things actually makes me feel physically good.  It gives me a high that no drug, money, or woman can duplicate.  Yet I don’t get that much in the low income housing complex or rural town I live in.  I didn’t used to believe it, but I now really believe that there is a “brain drain” that is taking really smart people out of rural areas and sending those brains to urban and suburban areas where there are high paying jobs that require lots of brain power to accomplish. I have met some really sharp farm workers and factory workers over the years of living in rural areas.  But I still think they could be doing much better had they gotten some high tech education and moved to a larger city.

Most of my friends in high school and college were really sharp people.  As a result, all of them moved out of the rural area I grew up in.  And most of them are making pretty decent money.  My brother is an engineer for a large firm and so is his wife.  He wouldn’t be doing nearly as well had he stayed in the rural areas.  A friend of mine living in a Midwest city and her husband are considering moving to the coast because of better job opportunities.  My parents are considering moving to Oklahoma City to be closer to the grandkids.  If they move, then I won’t be far behind.  Part of me has always wanted to see what life in a city was like.  I do find it annoying that public transit doesn’t really exist in my town.  If I had access to public transit, I’m not sure I’d even own a car.  I don’t like driving.  I never have.  And I know many younger people don’t even want to own cars.

I have never lived in a city.  Yet pretty much every one I know who lives in rural areas are trying to tell me how bad city living is and how unfriendly city people are.  I have met plenty of unfriendly people in rural areas too.  If you look hard enough, you can find whatever you want in people pretty much anywhere.  I’m not scared of moving to a city.  I am ready for a new chapter in my life.  And I feel I have gone as far as I can go living in a rural area.

Reflections Back on Early Years

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I live in a small town where the main source of activity and jobs is a local state university.  The university just started classes this week for the fall semester which got me to thinking about my time going through school and the friends I had.

I grew up in a small farming village of about 400 people in rural Nebraska.  Our lives more or less revolved around the changing seasons, crop prices, church activities, and the local school.  Since my town was so small, we actually shared a school with another town about ten miles northwest of us.  The school was a big part of our town’s life.  It didn’t matter if it was Friday Night football, competitive speech meets, the prom, academic bowls, etc., the town supported all of our activities.  I never thought much of it while growing up in the late 1990s, but then most kids don’t think much of their hometowns when their 16 or 17 and are looking to venture out and see what is out there in the world.

I wasn’t Mr. Popular in my high school, but I was far from anonyomous too.  I like to think that most of us in my high school who were involved in some kind of extracirricular activitity (which was probably 85% of our student body in my small school) were somehow embraced and noticed by the people in our town one way or another.  Years ago when I went through (I’m not sure how it is now), our school was more academically inclined then some because we had some really amazing teachers, so there was no embarassment in being in the band or the school play or speech teams.  Though we also had some decent sports teams as our football team did make state finals one year in the mid 1990s. 

Even though we didn’t have many advanced placement classes or any accelerated programs, we still recieved a good well-rounded education at our school.  Sure it may not produce any Rhodes Scholars or Ivy Leaguers or may not make the list of Top 100 High Schools in America.  Sure I had my difficulties because of the beginnings of my mental illness problems, especially late in my academic career.  But I won’t trade my four years of classes, friends, experiences, activities, and times I spent at Anselmo-Merna High School in Merna, Nebraska for anything.