First Post

Bill Bryson is a darned fine writer. He’s also the inspiration for this blog, so if you don’t like what you see, blame him. The second inspiration is my history with small towns.

I grew up in a small rural town in Michigan whose population consisted of about 3,000 people. When I was in high school, kids used to talk about “cruising the town,” which took all of two minutes. Three, if they decided to hang out in the parking lot of the local supermarket. Still, I had fun. My dad is an avid outdoorsman, and so I learned all about hunting, fishing, camping, and how to enjoy myself just by going for a walk in the country. Of course, being one of those intellectual geeky types, I’d also go into the local library and check out a book or two. Or see if the local supermarket had any new comic books. And that was pretty much it.

By the time I’d graduated high school I was more than ready to leave. When I went to college I lived in an honest-to-god city, with multi-level buildings and sirens going past my dorm room at midnight and everything a city is supposed to have—including book stores and game stores, which have since become two of my favorite addictions. Not to mention I just like living in a city, having an apartment and being part of what writer Neal Stephenson called the biomass.

Now, however, I’m back in a small town. This is mostly due to my desire to make it as a writer. Unbeknownst to me, you have to either have a job while becoming a writer or starve gracefully until you’ve proven you can write and some company takes you on when you can successfully present the façade of a seasoned professional. I chose the latter route, and after only five or six years of living on ramen was picked up by a company located in northeastern Iowa. Here’s the irony, though—the job is in a small town. I’ve got two cities each an hour away from me and a pretty decent-sized town about a half-hour to the east, but for the most part my work and my free time is spent in a small town. I pretty much resigned myself to the crippling boredom that only a small town can provide unless I traveled extensively on the weekends. Then I read Bill Bryson’s excellent book, “The Lost Continent,” in which he explores several small Midwestern towns. He writes about them with humor, but also with the understanding that small towns are different somehow. The things that affect people here are different than in cities. They’re smaller and more personal. Benefit dinner posters get put up in the windows of the local fast food eateries—the electronic town sign posts church get-togethers and VFW happenings. You get to see some quirks that would make city dwellers cock an eyebrow. Small towns may also contain surprises, things you just wouldn’t expect or people you might not expect. After all, Brad Pitt had to come from somewhere, right?

So that’s the reason for this blog. My intention, barring any unforeseen circumstances, is to write about this area, explain what makes it unique. If nothing else, it beats sitting around all day watching reruns of Mythbusters.