For those of you who haven’t been religiously hanging on my every tweet (shame on you), I should start by mentioning that my wife and I recently took the plunge. No, we didn’t sell all our earthly belongings and go a-wandering in India. We merely moved from the city to the hinterland. We rusticated ourselves. In short, we are now a couple of bumpkins, catching our eggs as they fall from the chicken and raising our eyebrows disparagingly at the goings on of those dens of iniquity called cities.
On the off chance that you might want to tear yourself away from the gogglebox, the Playstation 3, or the interweb long enough to read about our experience, I’ve set down a few highlights for you.
The Luscious Silence
Living in the city, I had no idea what silence is. Yeah, sure, I’d been on vacation, hiked into the mountains, sipped the pure air, listened to the faint rustle of the wind in the trees. But the moment I got back to the city all that instantly faded from memory. All I really had was the memory of a memory of true quiet.
When we first arrived in our new home, the silence in the country was shocking—as though for twenty years someone had been standing behind me blowing a kazoo in my ear and then suddenly stopped. Maybe the best way to describe the silence is to say that it feels not like the absence of noise, but like the presence of something—something peaceful and good.
Economies of Space
The silence is mostly a consequence of a vastly different human-being to square-footage ratio. Ask yourself what causes all this magnificent silence and the answer comes back, space.
Turns out having space is easier on the pocketbook too. You can have a big garden for one thing. You can keep chickens, ducks, goats, and so on. Even better: you can make stuff. I now have room for work benches and belt sanders and such things. I’m about to turn a piece of discarded cedar into a crude table. It is exactly, precisely in every way not like taking a trip to Ikea. You can even make rooms. Need an extra bedroom or a workshop? There’s a nice spot right there. Start hammering.
People: Fewer, Nicer
Like most people who have had to deal with Vancouver traffic, I had a spring-loaded middle finger. On any given drive across town, the odds were pretty good that someone was going to behave like an asshole. We Vancouverites may not have invented road rage, but we’ve made decent strides in the development of it. Plenty of jerks to deal with off the road as well, whether it’s the gang of drinkers smashing a bottle outside your bedroom in the middle of the night, the leathery dude drowning out your music with his Harley, or the young woman chain-smoking just upwind of your apartment on a breezy day.
Of course the city is filled with a plenty of good folks too. The problem is, so many people are smushed together in so tight a space, you get daily exposure to the full range. This arrangement is infinitely worsened by the fact that everybody is mobile. The people you see are mostly strangers, and the ones that aren’t are likely to be moving somewhere else within a couple of years. To go along with all of our disposable products, the city has given us disposable relationships.
Moving to the country involves two important changes: first, you see a lot less of your fellow human beings on any given day. Maybe that makes some people anti-social, but not me. In the city solitude is precious and rare. Here I get my fill, and that has already made me more smiley and more inclined to want to have nice slow chats with friends and neighbors. Second, many of the people you meet, you’re going to continue to meet for the next ten, twenty, or thirty years. That adds a very un-urban dimension of responsibility and trust. You find you just don’t need as much of that edgy, dog-eat-dog attitude anymore.
The Food
If you live in the big city (or big shitty, as we salt-of-the-earth, hayseed, peasant folk like to say), happily for you, farmers’ markets have closed the gap between town and country foodwise. The excellent, farm-fresh comestibles I was scoring at the f.m. in Vancouver were almost as good as the stuff I find on the island.
Let me explain the “almost.” People have been farming on Salt Spring for a long time, well over a hundred years. The island’s agricultural land is well-stocked with ancient and non-commercial species of fruit tree. The smaller, more diverse farms on the island also allow for a much greater range of veggies and livestock than you find in the urban food supply chains. For me it’s definitely added-value to have, for example, easy access to fresh-picked apples I’ve never tasted before. Galas aren’t bad if you get ‘em straight out of the cooler, but you should try a Gravenstein. Yum.
Another advantage is that out here you can easily form an even more direct relationship with farmers than you can at the farmers markets. The farms are only a short ways down the road. Last week I spent a morning at an island farm seeding a field and picking berries. It was easy to do and it felt pretty good.
The Virtues of Urban Life
Having said all these nice things about my first encounter with rural life, I must add the usual caveat. It’s been pointed out by various eco-people that urban living is a necessary part of the modern world. You couldn’t spread the seven billion human beings alive right now smoothly over the countryside like butter on toast without smothering it. Like it or not, there are energy efficiencies to be achieved by packing ourselves tightly cheek by jowl into giant, insect-like colonies. So, if you live in a city, you can truthfully claim that you are doing your bit for Mother Earth and world peace right where you are. You might even like it.
If, however, you are tempted to go back to the land, the usual advice is: don’t get too hung up on the practicalities of it. There’s no question that cities are where all the action is when it comes to career advancement. A move to the country is a statement about what matters to you. If you’re sincere in your desire, I like to think things have a way of working out. My wife and I made the choice not because we had a million dollars to smooth the path, but because we wanted to do it, and we wanted to see if it could be done.
We’re about to find out.
