COVID-19 Turning Tables on City vs. Rural
The virus shutdown circus is permanently popularizing on-line work from home, but it is also elevating the viability of trading urban high-rise confinement for a less urban “home on the range, which sounds a lot like a “home in La Grange,” that comfortably rural town where what’s really peaking is the ire of local business owners. Shutdown in the big cities, however, has been a hammer blow with some ugly long term consequences looming.
Up until now it’s been a greener grass thing. If you’re 16 you crave the city’s excitement, and if you’re 60, you’d rather retire here.
Living in any large American city has its darker edges. My own country mouse in the big city experience began when I left upstate New York’s dairy farms and bean fields fifty plus years ago to work in the Big Apple. The job meant commuting by rail and subway to Manhattan from Hempstead on Long Island, and unexpectedly discovering social “intimacy” during rush hour.
Two commuting lessons I learned right away were: 1) rush hour in New York is mostly a hundred yard dash event and 2) subway cars come from the factory with their passenger seats pre-filled. The remaining commuters board by forcing bodies into an upright crowd and spending the next 20 minutes, more or less, full-body jostling each other like wind chimes in a hurricane — the lucky ones clinging on the turns to overhead hand-straps, and others just enduring the inevitable. The experience falls somewhere between foreplay and a mugging while duck-taped to the becalmed eye of ventilation scented with stale armpits and tobacco breath.
Nor was motoring the Island east on the Southern State Parkway in my unsafe-at-any-speed Chevy Corvair any less of a harrowing experience. The Corvair was cheap. News of how one or two of them spontaneously scorched Corvair silhouettes into the pavement on being rear ended by a bicycle was rife.
Highway designers who in their wisdom a generation earlier — and no doubt believing a fair speed for the Parkway would never exceed a blazing 30 mph - created all its entry merge lanes to be an abrupt zero car lengths.
Behind me, a phalanx of horn blaring veteran Kamikazes would have willingly performed the blind slingshot merge were not my gas bomb idling at the precise point of their max velocity game of chicken trajectory into a troop train of tailgating, type-A drivers hurtling along at 70 mph.
My first try was not unlike summoning the courage to leap out of a plane while sky dive training without a parachute. I was sure I would die. I didn’t.
Three years later I had moved to Houston, traded the rear engine wannabe fireball for a brand new milk white Chevy Impala and drove it into a Gulf Freeway fender bender while exiting the Bob Robertson dealership. These days, on Texas FM 957, I’m known to the white tail deer as a road hazard to be avoided at all cost.
Looking back on my years in Houston from the more wide open spaces of small town Texas leaves me questioning whether the city mouse/country mouse issue isn’t, as well, one of the main drivers of our fractured politics.
“Self reliance” defines rural conservatism and “works well with others” is pretty much the main city liberal resume requirement.
The irony could be that the tail of the donkey in every room is also the trunk of the elephant. Too bad for us the DC political animals are hung up in a civil war instead of realizing the country needs both of them working well together.
In Houston and other metro areas, COVID-19 social distancing and shutting down services and business is making a mess out of the social closeness and interdependency that defines them.
People with non-COVID-19 illnesses are reluctant to go to a hospital or clinic where patients with the virus are being treated.
Movie theaters, if not dead, are sentenced to solitary confinement, until a vaccine for the virus is found.
Airlines are in trouble because their economic loading model no longer works with social distancing. Ticket prices will have to rise big time. Ground transportation innovation could replace a lot of short haul air travel. Shortages of food and essentials will be more critical in high density metro areas.
One of the more predictive COVID-19 related questions might be: If the national economy totally crashes, where are your chances of thriving better: in Houston, New York, San Francisco, or La Grange, Flatonia and Weimar.
With the COVID-19 shutdown forcing the spotlight on work from home and other online telecom and transportation advances, the idea that home could be 50 miles out instead of five, has big metro areas facing some enormous transitions, and small rural cities like Schulenburg and La Grange pondering how to deal with something they are not sure is good or godawful.
The author lives in Schulenburg.