From the (Admittedly Small) City, Towards the (Admittedly Imaginary) Country

06/24/2008 6:43 AM – 7:28 AM

Take a few days off and this gets rusty. I spent the morning reading a book about moving to the country. Oh, that is one of my favorite fantasies: the garden (big garden), the chickens, the turkeys, the goats, the big kitchen, the chopping of wood, the building of things that no one in the city in their right minds would consider building.

It’s a bit tantalizing, almost cruel to imagine myself in the country. I can’t even afford a car. Ah well, a little more hard work, a little less eating out, then a car, then some land, then a garden (big garden), then a shanty. Tin roof. Rusted. I ask myself questions that have no bearing on my now. How deep do you have to dig to build a rabbit-proof fence? Is it still viable to have a hand-dug well? Really, honestly, how much freedom do you have to do the stuff that you want to try out if you’re out in the boonies? As in, could you really build a sod house if you so desired? Not that I desire. I don’t like sharing my bed with worms this side of a coffin. But could I?

Strange dreams these, that still creep in from time to time. And so much resulting from the fact that I really don’t like being told what to do. Even now, having so many good bosses and not chafing under the lash hardly at all, and certainly not at the bosses themselves just the fact that it isn’t my recognizing a task that needs doing, but my need for money. And knowing that, once you get a little above the poverty line, the rise in happiness drops dramatically. It doesn’t fall. It doesn’t really level out. It just climbs so slightly as to require very powerful magnification equipment to recognize it. But there, in the country of my interior, there is a degree of inherently rewarding activity that makes me wonder why anyone would leave it. But that’s an easily answered question. The country of my interior and the country of reality are different places. Growing up, I never raised chickens and my garden work was trivial, if occasionally pretty. But there is something in knowing that if I hadn’t shoveled the driveway (well, I would have gotten in trouble, but aside from that), it wouldn’t have gotten shoveled (well, my brother probably would have shoveled it). But it was my driveway to shovel. The lawn to be mowed was my lawn and if, every spring, my brother and I wanted to push the lawn back into the field a few feet, we mowed the tall grass and no one really minded.

I don’t really understand the impulse to the city. I’m glad some people do. That river of capital, endlessly churning and reproducing and red-tooth-and-clawing gives me cheap used books and thrift-store clothes and perfectly good couches on curbs, but after four years in (an admittedly small) city, and I still don’t understand the seemingly a priori desire for cocktail bars and expensive gyms and clothes that can only be worn for three months. Those girls sure are purdy though. But why would you want to be looked at by so many when it’s so unlikely that you’ll be seen by even one? Does being purdy make it easier to believe that everything will turn out fine in the end? But they are purdy. No denying that.

Ah, well, back to the books. Maybe I’ll actually do some writing today.