Irrurality
All across america the rural lifestyle is disappearing. Anywhere you go you can find abandoned farm houses, barns, farm equipment. The loss has been lamented by some. Steinbeck commented on it, decades ago, in his Travels with Charlie. What is this loss, which is like the loss of so many other styles of life that reached the end of their usefulness? What was their value, other than appropriateness or sufficiency to a particular place and time, a place and time that was, perhaps, the home of many generations of people who found comfort in it, or constriction.
The communities the rural lifestyle supported are disappearing too. Not that there aren't still people living there, even people moving there. But the community these people truly belong to is the one associated with the shopping mall fifty miles away. As mechanization increases, and speed, the need to be nearby (to plant, cultivate, harvest) decreases - people can afford to live farther and farther from the agriculture that needed them. The Great Plains, once home to multitudes, are now planted by crews that spend their year on the road, following the weather north, cycling back south to start again, following the harvest, from the Gulf coast to the Canadian border, and beyond. So, people who want to feel they are "in the country," build fancy new houses out where pigs and chickens once roamed. And when they want something, they drive 50, 60, 70 miles to the mall to get it. After all, it only takes an hour or so. And of the communities that once were? Only decaying houses and Main streets are left of all but a few.
Some few find second lives, as with the town of Edenton, North Carolina, blessed with some attraction, such as access to the Albemarle Sound. Farms nearest to Edenton's "downtown," and nearest the water, are being converted to "Waterfront Homes" at a furious pace. The population of Edenton is expected to grow 30% in the next decade or so as retiring baby boomers seek to distance themselves from the stresses of city living. Edenton, once home to peanut farmers, cotton mill girls and fishermen, will become a quaint "olde timey shoppe-ing" mall, with a "historic preservation district," and museum stuffed with the memorabilia of a faded style of life.
Edenton, one of the happy few.