Small towns are just dull little places where there's not anything to see--right?

Around Town

A rainy forecast disrupted my New Year’s Day plans. I had planned to drive to a certain state park and hike the long trail around the lake there. This was how I had welcomed 2014. The January 1, 2015 forecast virtually guaranteed cold rain in the later morning and afternoon. I wasn’t going to drive two hours to hike in that.

Instead I decided to try something closer to home—something I’d never done before. I decided on New Year’s Day morning, when there would be little in the way of traffic and other distractions, to walk all the way around our town. Or at least all the way around the main core of the town; I decided to leave the industrial parklands on the outskirts and the modern commercial strip on the main highway out of it. With some luck I could get the walk done before the rain started. I made sure to take a large umbrella in case I didn’t make it.

The walk naturally started in the neighborhood where I live. It’s an ordinary 1960s-style subdivision of a sort nearly everybody in this country has seen. The houses are almost all built of brick and almost all have one story. Almost all have simple shed roofs, and carports or garages on one end or the other. They’re not identical ticky-tacky houses. Some have an L-wing, or are built in the shape of a U, or are higher in the middle or on one end. There are several different styles of porch roof. Some (including mine) have blond brick instead of red. Here and there you’ll see something that particularly stands out. A few places have two stories. One has funny-looking porthole windows on one end. On one U-shaped structure the area in the bend has been walled in to make a lovely little courtyard garden.

The people vary a bit too. There are retired couples and widows, families with children still at home, and very rarely a single person like me. Some grow gardens in back, or keep a motorcycle or project car up under the garage. Some work at the mill, or for the city or school district. One of my next-door neighbors works with a timber company and travels across a large region. The director of the county hospital and his college-age son live across the street and a house down. Another neighbor has a black lab that barks at everybody who passes by. Still another has a large half-grown puppy who recently ran after me wanting to play and had to be fetched home by their young son. All in all, it’s a pleasant place to live.

It only took me a few minutes of walking to reach the nearest edge of town. There are no outskirts there—the town just dead-ends along a large pipeline and power line cut. Across the cut you see mostly pine plantations. The cut makes a good walking trail when it isn’t too muddy. I don’t walk on it this time of year, though. Since it’s on the edge of town some people hunt there during the season. Pleasant weekend afternoons during the spring and fall aren’t the best time to walk either, thanks to the continual four-wheel ATV traffic. Early mornings (outside hunting season) are easily the best time. I wasn’t sure whether New Year’s Day was part of a hunting season, so I decided not to take a chance.

About fifteen minutes more took me to the main highway that forms another edge of town. At least it would serve as a boundary for my walk. The aforementioned industrial park and commercial strip areas lie beyond, but they aren’t good places to walk. After making a left-hand turn, I also decided to go back a block “inland” from the highway to avoid the noise of the morning’s sparse traffic. The fast-food places, convenience stores, and such along the highway aren’t a terribly inspiring place to walk in any case.

Now I was walking through the old downtown commercial district. In many towns these old retail areas have declined into virtual wastelands. Ours has a number of vacant storefronts here and there, but overall it’s still a going concern. We still have an annual downtown Christmas celebration here, hosted by the Chamber of Commerce and downtown merchants (Sad to say, I missed the latest one). It’s not a particularly pretty downtown. We do have a few of the fine old brick structures that make up a good downtown. There’s also a lovely little park that stands on the site of a beautiful hotel that all who remember it still lament seeing torn down forty years or more ago. The park incorporates stone from the lost structure. We have a few artifacts from it at the library.

The commercial district is only a few blocks square. Surrounding it on this side of Main Street is one of the town’s original residential neighborhoods. It has lots of little frame houses, many a century or more old. They were built for function rather than appearance, using a few standard designs. Generations of additions and remodeling have seen to it that no two of them now look alike. On some lots the original house was replaced years ago by something different. Some lots—there seem to be more every year—are vacant or derelict. Quite a few of the houses have very obviously seen better days. Still others remain in good repair for now. Though I didn’t pass near any of them on my New Year’s walk, the neighborhood also boasts a scattering of neighborhood schools and churches. My grandfather pastored one of the latter for a time back before I was born. Before I moved here it was the only time any of our family lived in this town.

Across Main Street the commercial district peters out after a few more blocks. From here we have the town’s other original neighborhood. There were originally two, on opposite sides of Main Street. This second one was the designated neighborhood for the black population. Legal segregation is gone now, and the town’s black citizens now can, and do, live all over town. There has been no corresponding move by white families into this section.

The decline in the town’s population in recent decades has hit this neighborhood hardest of all. There are lots of bare lots and obviously abandoned houses. Some that are still in use don’t look as though they need to be.
Many white inhabitants will only drive through the area on the main streets—they’re too afraid to even think of setting foot there. For no reason, really. Though we have a blight of domestic violence, and the occasional feud that turns violent, muggings and random assaults on strangers are pretty much unheard of. The neighborhood’s own residents walk around it all the time with no problems. Some walk nearly to the other end of town to the library on a regular basis. Others must walk across most of the community in another direction to get to work in the newer commercial strip near the Wal-Mart. On my New Year’s walk I saw two people out and around in this section—a man rolling down the street in a powered wheelchair, and a woman who had stepped outside to speak on her cell phone.

On the far edge of the neighborhood the houses become noticeably nicer and more likely to be inhabited. Many of them look no different from the ones in my own neighborhood. This is still not considered one of the most desirable parts of town, though, thanks to an industrial zone that bounds it on the outskirts. This was the only one of the town’s several such districts that I passed through on my walk. It’s not a large industrial area. The small manufacturing plants, warehouses, and service businesses are all arranged on either side of a single street. To reach the street I had to cross a set of railroad tracks. A work detail in orange hazard jackets were already at work on a section of track a few yards from where I crossed. I couldn’t tell what, exactly, they were doing, and decided I had no business interrupting them to ask.

At the street I made another left turn and headed down the street away from the main highway. Soon I left the industrial buildings behind and saw another neighborhood to my right. This is another subdivision. The houses are brick, like the ones in my own neighborhood. They’re also noticeably smaller, have carports instead of garages, and are generally more uniform.

In a far corner of the neighborhood, on the very edge of town, lies a cemetery. I like to browse through cemeteries now and then, reading the stones and the tiny summaries of people’s lives that they bear, and the simple and often touching sentiments that the ones they left behind sometimes recorded. But I was still only halfway through my walk, and didn’t feel like taking the time to visit this one.
Past this latest neighborhood the street continues to skirt the edge of town. For a little way there are no houses to see. It’s just woods and more utility line cuts, and a private road (commercial, not residential) with a gate and “No Trespassing” signs. The public road runs several miles out of town, past a scattering of houses and a place that used to bottle water from a supposedly medicinal spring, before dead-ending. I’ve bicycled to the dead end before.

On New Year’s Day I didn’t go that far. Instead, I turned left once again and headed down a street that quickly turned residential. The streets in this area form another subdivision of brick houses, a bit—just a bit—more affluent-looking than the last. The street I followed has houses on one side and woods on the other. A sign on one of the trees advertises that the land is for sale. It’s been there no telling how many years.

The street ends in another street, and another left turn. This street runs along one boundary of the city’s main park. The park is my favorite place in town to walk. It’s centered on a large pond, divided into upper and lower ponds by a causeway. On the street side of the pond the grounds are open and park-like, with picnic pavilions, playgrounds, public fishing piers, a couple of historic buildings, and playing fields. On a pleasant day it’s a good place to stroll, picnic, and watch the tame ducks and swans cruising the pond’s waters.

Toward the downstream end, and back from the road, the pond becomes wilder and woodsier. I chose to head in this direction, making a right turn for once. The trail goes for a couple of miles altogether. My usual weekday morning routine is to cut across town to the park and walk the loop around the pond, then return home for a bath to get ready for work. I love to see the park and the pond in the dawn’s light, in all seasons and moods of nature. Most mornings I’m there early enough to have the place almost all to myself.

It’s also a good place for spotting wildlife. Almost always I spot from one to three grey herons fishing along the banks. Less often I’ll see a white heron. At this time of year there are usually wild ducks on the downstream end as well. Now and then I’ll see deer in the woods, and I have spotted foxes, young armadillos, raccoons, and owls.

By the time I reached the pond on New Year’s Day the rain that had been threatening all along broke. On the downstream end I paused and looked out across the water. The raindrops spotted the pond with ripples. As I watched, the ripples grew more numerous, until they had the whole surface in motion. I stood for a bit and listened to the patter of the rain on the water and on my umbrella.

A grey heron skimmed across the pond. Beyond the track of the heron’s flight, I saw one of the little wild ducks cruising along. It suddenly disappeared beneath the water. A moment later it surfaced some feet away. The next thing I knew, another duck had appeared beside it after approaching underwater. It’s always startling to see one suddenly bob to the surface like that.

As I resumed my walk I felt a sense of great joy swelling inside. It was a bit funny to think that, of all the places I had walked that morning, the place where I felt the finest was the very trail where I had already walked literally thousands of times over the past ten years. The park trail never grows old.

Past the spillway that drains the pond the trail has a stretch of perhaps three-quarters of a mile where all the walker can see are woods and shallow pond inlets—no houses, no stores or park structures. On days when the noise of not-too-distant traffic and industry is not too loud I can just about imagine that I’m miles away from anything else. On this holiday walk all I heard was the rain and my own footsteps. It felt wonderful to be alive and facing a new year. Now and then I paused to look across the inlets at some of my favorite views.

Then I saw houses again. The wooded park had shrunk to a strip only a few yards wide along the banks of the pond. Past this strip lay outlying houses of the town’s fanciest subdivision. They’re big houses, some with two stories. Some appear picturesque when seen through the trees along the bank. Over on the pond I saw that the tame waterfowl had ventured beyond their usual haunts around the upper pond. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, paddling along individually, or in pairs, or in little groups.

As I crossed a little wooden bridge that spans one narrow inlet, I saw several paddling out from under the bridge and heading into a swampy spot in formation, looking for all the world like a flotilla of tiny warships on maneuvers. For a moment they paused, milled around as if discussing which way to go, then resumed formation and paddled off toward more open water. I’d love to know how these duck flotillas arrive at their decisions about where to head next.

Past the tree-lined causeway I found myself on the bank of the upper pond. On the far side, through the rain, I saw a white heron. Grey herons, white heron, diving ducks, tame puddle ducks—the whole gang was here this morning. The only other human out to see any of this was a guy in a sodden yellow shirt I met cheerfully jogging along the trail.

On an ordinary morning walk I would have kept going, over two more little bridges (one partially collapsed) to the far end of the park and back toward home. On this morning I left the park trail via a little side trail that gives access from the subdivision. As noted above, this subdivision is easily the most affluent part of town. It has the biggest and prettiest houses, the best trick-or-treating (say parents and kids), and the most elaborate Christmas decorations. One house I passed in particular had a small army of colorful Christmas figures. Only the previous evening I had deliberately driven out of my way coming back from church to see it. On the rainy morning it looked much less impressive. The inflatable Christmas scenes now lay on the ground, flat and flaccid. Nearby a simple Nativity scene stood in sodden dignity.

Before much longer I reached lower Main Street. I walked along it for a way, past a couple of houses, to the library. On any other day except a Sunday I’d be there. For a moment I had a wild thought about going inside the empty building and just having it all to myself. Libraries are great places to relax—there’s nothing like finding a quiet corner with a good book or periodical. But when you’re in charge of the place you don’t have that luxury. The closest I come is reading the newspaper in our periodical room at lunch before going back to my office, and even them I’m liable to get interrupted.

From the library it’s only a few minutes’ walk to my house by the most direct route. I wasn’t quite done walking yet. The city limits extend on down the road past there for a bit. First there is a succession of cul-de-sacs on the other side of the street. Then there is a cluster of churches of widely varied denominations and architectural styles—vaguely modernist, conventional brick, clad in siding, even built of sheet metal like a shop building. I know people who go to all of them. They’re all equally houses of worship.

Behind the churches are a couple of short streets lined with houses that could politely be described as very modest. There are a couple of vacant houses here that would no doubt be perfectly habitable with a bit of fixing up. Years of gradual population decline have made such houses a common sight all over town. The depressed real estate market is the reason why I was able to afford to buy a roomy two-bedroom house on a small-town librarian’s salary.

Modestly paid as I am, I still make a good deal more than many workers in town. There are quite a few individuals and families who can’t afford to buy even a cheap house—and decent rental properties are not in good supply. I thought that day, as I’ve often thought in recent months, that there is something terribly wrong with so many houses going to waste, while some must squeeze in with family members and struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Surely we as a community ought to be able to find a way to match these available resources with those who need them.

What if a church were to buy one of these cheap houses, fix it up, and offer it as housing to someone in need—perhaps a woman with children who had recently escaped an abusive situation? What if several churches were to follow this example? I decided that morning that I would start speaking to people in our own church about that.

From here I proceeded into one last subdivision. The houses in this one are a good deal more recent than the ones where I live. Though not by and large bigger, they are, in my eyes, nicer looking. The subdivision sits just off a street that leads to the city waterworks, the wellhead protection area, and a nursing home. The previous morning I had seen an ambulance heading for the place in no particular hurry. I was glad to learn a couple of days later that it was taking a resident back to the home, not coming to pick up somebody whom the staff had found dead that morning.

From here I had only a few more blocks to go to reach my house again. I glanced at my watch and found that the whole perambulation had taken right at three hours. By now my feet and lower legs were soaked from the rain. It looked as though it would go on raining for the entire rest of the day. I looked forward to going inside and getting out of my wet clothes and into a warm bath.
And that’s our town. It covers only a few square miles. It contains a great deal within that space.