Hi, I'm a Little Bit Country

I feel the rhythm of city living every night when I go to bed: the light from the street lamp that sings between thin plastic blinds; the brassy wailing of fire engines’ horns; the smooth tenor of police sirens accented by the roar of a Crown Vic’s V8; the pitchy soprano of the twittering ambulances; the diesel monster trucks rumbling by. They all mingle together to form an insipid chorus barring any possibility of sleep…for a moment anyway. Then silence, and I remember that Forest Grove is a sleepy little town, just on the suburban side of “boondocks” qualification. It’s not that much different from Rock Falls, Illinois, another quaint little village built up by farmers and folks looking to stake their own claim in life, where my dad, and his dad, and his dad’s dad, were all born and raised. It’s a place where I’ve always dreamed of settling down, carrying on the family legacy of good old-fashioned hard work, ingenuity, and small town living that delivered a joyful and prosperous life to my grandparents and propelled my father to get the hell away as fast as he could.

My dad is no farmer. He’s certainly not a steel mill man (though it wouldn’t much matter now since the mill in Rock Falls has been closed for decades). He demonstrated this clearly when, during the summer after high school he spent working in the wire-fence section of that factory, he chose to pass his breaks out on the loading dock with a book, instead of sharing a smoke with the other men in his crew. The next summer my father wasn’t hired because his foreman had given him a poor review, citing as his chief complaint the fact that he “read too damn much.”

So it’s easy to see why my dad might try to find any way possible to escape such a suffocating town. He married my mother while they were both still in college, and the two of them made out pretty well in a series of jobs in and around universities in Wisconsin and eventually Minnesota until my older brother and I came along, cementing our family into a nice community in St. Paul, Minnesota. My dad went back to school for his PhD in philosophy, my mom worked for some big insurance company, and my brother and I beat up on each other (it was cold and we were indoors a lot). I rode the bus to school, I had friends on the block, and I could see skyscrapers from the park just up the street. It was city living at its finest, without all the crime, smog, or filth that normally comes with it, and I thrived on it.

Yet most of my favorite childhood memories involve time spent not in St. Paul, but Rock Falls: bouncing around in the little red trailer my grandfather towed behind his John Deere mower as we cleared brush or moved dirt; daring my brother to touch the electric fence the neighbors used to keep their horses in the pasture; hitting walnuts with fifty-year-old baseball bats into the cornfield less than a hundred yards from my grandparents’ house. After hearty dinners I heard amazing tales of my grandfather’s exploits during his childhood in the Great Depression, old war stories about Korea, anecdotes from my grandmother’s days in teaching…anything and everything that I could soak up during my time in Rock Falls I tried to hold on to, even as my life continued during the week back at home.

Our family moved to Eugene, Oregon when I was only seven, making visits to Illinois a rarer occurrence even as I was entering my most formative years. As I experienced the homeless veterans, smelly hippies, and ne’er-do-well college students that plague Eugene, Rock Falls became an idyllic place that I refused to let go of. I can’t say that I wasn’t changed by years of city living; I’m just as plugged in, tech savvy, and text-message happy as any other twenty-year-old. And I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing. The truth of the matter is, though, I’m still a little bit country after all these years, if only so that I remember where I come from, what I’m here for, and how I can achieve the happiness that we all so desperately seek. My answer lies about two hours west of Chicago down I-88, where generations of my family created success and happiness through the cardinal virtues of hard work, discipline, ingenuity, and love, virtues I hope to carry with me for the rest of my journey through life.