Small Towns and Parades...

I like the dynamics of small towns, the way everyone minds everyone else's business, where secrets are hard to keep, but there's always someone who'll help out when you need it. 

Hillsboro, OR, 4th of July Parade

Most of all I like the small town festivals--most have them, of one sort or another--Pioneer Days, the Harvest Festival, a Fourth of July Social, the May Fest, or any of a hundred other reasons to celebrate. They often involved old fashioned parades, with tractors and fire engines and decorated farm wagons carrying the local May Queen or the members of the Ladies Sewing Circle or the officers of a fraternal organization. And always there are the proud veterans of wars past and present in full dress uniform, marching tall and proud, saluted and cheered by their neighbors who line the streets all along the route. 

But automobiles are killing small towns. It's taken more than a century, but it's happening. When anyone can drive to the nearest Costco in a couple of hours, the sixty-year-old family-owned grocery or hardware store just can't compete. Although the small town I lived in for thirteen years is still viable, Main Street just isn't what it was when I was there. I remember a jewelry store, a bookstore/gift shop, a newsstand that sold comic books, paperbacks, cigarettes and candy, two banks, a department store and an appliance store. I'm sure there were others, but those are the ones I could put a name to, if asked. Oh, yes, there was a movie theatre, but it was transformed into a church while I still lived there, a victim of television, not the automobile.

Now some of the storefronts are empty, and the rest house smaller enterprises. For the big items like furniture and appliances folks can drive to a city a bit over an hour away, or to the Walmart across the river (in another town, another state). That small town is now more of a bedroom community than a real town, because people go elsewhere to shop. To play, to dine, to see their doctor, dentist, whatever. I really hope there are still a few small towns left, perhaps less conveniently close to a shopping mall or a big-box retailer. Or just more stubborn. 

Some small towns have deliberately re-purposed themselves as tourist destinations. There is a charming pseudo-Swiss village in the Cascade Mountains, a bit over an hour east of Seattle. A fun place to visit. In Oregon's Willamette Valley is a small town that fifteen years ago had more empty storefronts than full. Today is it a thriving wine center, with tasting rooms in what seems like every third storefront, as well as in the old, long-abandoned depot, and several nice restaurants ;along the main street. But those small towns are exceptions. On a recent trip to Yellowstone, we passed through several deserted settlements, with old grain elevators or saloons slowly decaying into ruin. I remember most of them--perhaps not thriving, but living towns or villages--from the first time I traveled that route, a long time ago. People lived in them, shopped in them, went to church and school there.

On this most recent trip I counted the warning signs along the highway: NO SERVICES FOR 57 MILES. The mileage to the next gas station varied, but I counted five signs in an 850-mile journey. Even in the open, sparsely populated deserts of eastern Oregon and southern Idaho, there used to be gas stations in those small settlements, with restrooms and usually snacks, soft drinks, and sometimes even a small lunch counter. Now the traveler has to plan ahead, to hope for a highway department rest area, to bring snacks for those long stretches between cafés.

It's sad. Something lost, perhaps never to be regained.

A couple of my books are about small towns. Yes, I confess to having shown mostly the good sides of them, and I don't apologize. If you want to look at darkness and despair, watch the news. The world needs more Pollyannas, and I am unashamedly one. Solomon'sDecision and Improbable Solution are both set in small towns that are perfect candidates for decay and eventual disappearance, but the people in them aren't ready to give up. They are very different stories, and the towns aren't much alike, except that they are small, a bit off the beaten track, and handling their potential demises very differently. I wish those stories could be true for small towns everywhere.

Don't you?

Jude

Giving Thanks for Wonderful Memories

Until I was six-and-a-half, I lived in a house without running water, indoor plumbing, central heating, or a telephone. We did have electricity: a naked light bulb on a wire in the center of the front room and the kitchen (two of the three rooms in the house) and a third wire that went to the radio in a corner. It was one of those big wooden things, with a curved top and two knobs, one for the dial one for volume. We had a record player too. An elegant, tall mahogany thing with a windup crank on the side, and a box of old records—pre-vinyl. A good many of them were original Caruso recordings, but there were a few of more modern western ballads.

My great-uncle's bed was in the front room, along with his rocking chair, my great-aunt's rocking chair, and a third one for company. Underneath Uncle Bill's big iron bedstead were boxes filled with treasures. Toys from a couple of generations were jumbled together there, along with old magazines, a few hardbound books, and odds and ends too good to throw away but of no present use. Some of the boxes held pulp magazines, but most of those were stacked beside the record player. "Ranch Romances" and "Amazing Stories" are the two I remember best. Yaya (pronounced with long a's) taught me to read with those pulps.

Close to the center of the room was the stove, what I've since discovered was called a "parlor stove", black with shiny nickel-plated embellishments. It had a rounded top that could be removed, revealing a hot plate where flat irons could be heated or a teakettle could provide water for tea. We did occasionally use the flatirons, but I think it was more to teach me how than because we needed to, because Yaya also had an electric iron which she plugged into a socket on the side of the overhead light. It made the bulb grow dimmer, which might be another reason she heated the flatiron during winter's dreary days.

The kitchen was also Yaya's bedroom (and mine, as long as I lived with them), the dining room, and where we took our baths, every Saturday morning before going to town for our weekly double feature movie and grocery shopping. The big iron cookstove had a reservoir where water—brought in buckets from the pump on the back steps—was heated. Our bathtub was a galvanized iron tub, big enough for me, a child, to sit in but probably only enough for my aunt and uncle to stand in. I don't know, because they bathed behind a screen. Modesty was important, and it never occurred to me to peek.

We banked the fires in both stoves at night during cold weather, but they never stayed very warm. More than once I can remember it being my turn to leap from bed to stuff kindling into the kitchen stove, blowing on it until it caught, and dashing back to bed, shivering violently, to cuddle until the room warmed a little. After Uncle Bill died, we had to repeat the routine in the front room, but usually not until we'd had our breakfast. The kitchen stove burned mostly wood, while the other one burned coal. My job was to keep the woodbox and the coal scuttle full, as far back as I can remember.

Even after I went to live with my mother and stepfather, I still went to stay with Yaya on Sundays, and as often as possible in the summer. There I was happy, free of chafing rules and personality conflicts. It was the best of all possible places to be.

Perhaps another time I'll tell about my grandmother's upstairs, about the Big Ditch, the Sunday rides in the rumble seat of Uncle Bill's Model A, and all the other adventures of a childhood that to me in retrospect seems about as close to perfect as possible. For all that Yaya and Uncle Bill gave me, I am so very grateful.