Thursday, 26 July 2007
Don’t Fence Me In
By Kent McKamy of KentsUSDrive
Since late May, I’ve been driving across the United States. Many experiences stand out, which you can read about on my blog if you are interested, but this one tickled me.
As one enters many of the very small towns in the Dakotas, Montana and Idaho, one sees small green signs listing the name of the town and the current population. A few miles north of Cascade, Idaho (population 982), I drove into a “town (population 147)” that boasted a small grocery store, a gas station and a convenience store. That was it.
After gassing up, I went into the convenience store for a bottle of water. Inside, a woman of mature years was buying a pack of cigarettes. I asked her if she lived in this town. She said she did. I asked if she’d lived here most of her life. “No,” she said. “We used to live in Cascade, down the road.”
Why did you move? I asked. “Just got too crowded for us,” she said. “We like our space.”
Posted by Ronni Bennett at 05:30 AM | Permalink | Email this post
Comments
LOL. She surely would hate it here!
Posted by: kenju on Jul 26, 2007 7:54:20 AM
And "We like our space", at least here in the southern mountains of Kentucky, means a whole lot more than "Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam..." I live as far north as you can go in this state and it's a different world down there. Good people; but a very private people with their own culture, their own sense of "community". I made a mad dash once, back in the mid-sixties, from here to Seattle, trying to avoid being AWOL with the Navy. My route was old I-4 and passed through some pretty strange, beautiful scenery in Utah, then winding northwest across the mountains of Oregon. The Dakotas, Montana, and Idaho have managed to escape me in past travels. It must be awesom country...
Posted by: jim on Jul 26, 2007 8:10:04 AM
This town had just under 12,000 when I moved here, Now, it's around 80,000. I'm ready for that Idaho town, pop 147!
Posted by: ronni prior on Jul 26, 2007 12:32:14 PM
Hi kent,
I used to live in a very small town in Pennsylvania. Population about 2,000. We had all sorts of jokes about living in a little village like that.
" We're so small we don't have a sanitation department. We have a woman come in twice a week".
'We're so small and straight laced you have to have a prescription to but a brassiere."
"We're so small the candy counter in the movie was a Pez dispenser."
And so on and on.
Posted by: Nancy on Jul 27, 2007 8:51:25 PM
