The One About Tornadoes

I’ll be honest, I’ve debated writing about the tornadoes that passed through the area. I could talk about how a co-worker and I drove out during lunch to see the aftermath of the wreckage and the bar food we had at the only place to eat in a small town about eight miles to the north of our office, but it’s hard to talk about. Partially it’s because Joplin, Missouri showcases the devastation a tornado can cause better than anything I can show. Compared to that level of devastation, there were a few buildings that were torn apart, but nothing serious. No one died, which is incredible.

…Okay, I am going to write about the tornadoes after all. Even though the devastation isn’t as catastrophic as what happened in Joplin or even northern Minneapolis, I think the aftermath deserves to be described.

When I came home on the train, I’d heard rumors of a storm hitting the La Crosse area, followed by the train slowing down to the point where a stoned turtle could have outpaced us. Then I heard rumors that a tornado had touched down outside the La Crosse hospital. These rumors were confirmed as I drove through La Crosse, looking for a decent place to eat, and I saw police directing traffic through dead stoplights and power crews in their cherry pickers working on transformers to restore some power. Unlike how I think everyone who doesn’t personally know a public safety employee personally thinks of public safety employees, they appeared to not only be dead serious about their job, but they were also hard at work, as though they were trying to get things taken care of as soon as possible. It was kind of inspiring. Not quite at the level of “Soldiers planting a flag on Iwo Jima” inspiring, but the level of inspiring when you’d see your parent taking care of a leak in the bathroom when you were a kid. I realize this comparison may not be for all people, but when my dad was trying to stop a leak I knew that things would be all right. Eventually.

The drive back from La Crosse to Cresco was not nerve-wracking or concerning in any way. The weather was calm, the skies were clear, and I didn’t hear any mention of impending tornadoes. What I did hear on the radio were the reports that tornadoes had touched down in northern Minneapolis, killing one person. They had also touched down in the southeastern part of Minnesota.

At this point, I need to say that while the boundaries on the map clearly delineate southeastern Minnesota from northeastern Iowa, there’s almost no delineation in real life. People in Cresco go up to visit Rochester when they need a “big city” experience instead of Waterloo because it’s a half-hour closer. One person I knew at work commuted from Rochester to the office. The reason I am pointing this out is because when people on the radio mention southeastern Minnesota, northeastern Iowa is included almost all the time.

So it turned out that a tornado had come down and ripped through the area between Cresco and Chester, the next town north. There had been some property damage, but no one had been seriously injured or killed. This brought back memories of living in northern Michigan, where a tornado had passed within three miles of my parents’ house in 2007, turning acres and acres of forest into clear-cut areas in seconds. It included about 40 acres of an 80-acre property my parents owned, and it did give us a few years’ worth of firewood, but managed to leave the buildings on the property intact. From that point on, I have been amazed at how deadly air can be if it just moves fast enough.

Last week, one of my coworkers wanted to take a look at the scene and see the devastation. I agreed, since I had kind of wanted to myself. There’s something about disasters that draws people like a magnet to them. I think it’s the same intrinsic curiosity that horror writers so successfully tap into when they dare their readers to see what’s under the couch and how badly it can mutilate a human body. Or the often-used comparison of slowing down to see a traffic accident. You get the feeling of “But there for the grace of God go I,” and “Hey, my life’s pretty good!”

The first item on the stop was a bar in Chester that served lunch. The current special was goulash and green beans. Previous specials there have included tater tot hotdish (casserole), and drinks include Pepsi straight from the can. The reason we ate there, have eaten there, and will eat there in the future is because my coworker’s father-in-law or grandfather-in-law once owned the restaurant, so honoring the restaurant with our patronage is something of a point of pride. It must be interesting to have that kind of connection with a business. The closest I’ve ever come is seeing a line of Gottschalk’s department stores out west, before the company was liquidated. (I’m not making this up-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottschalks ) I should point out that whoever founded this line of department stores didn’t have any familial connection with me outside of the last name.

After lunch, we set out to explore the tornado’s path. There were a few areas that were notable enough to slow down and look—the house that had one wall completely gone was pretty interesting, and so was the barn that had collapsed due to the tornado. What really stood out for me, though, was that if you could get out and walk, tracing the tornado’s path would be easy. What is almost burned into my mind, though, are the copses of trees with paths cleared through them. It really accentuates how random and precise a tornado can be. I’ve seen movies and TV series where a giant laser carves a path through a city, doing all sorts of untold damage, and as I was looking at certain buildings collapsed while others ten feet away were untouched, some trees uprooted while others were untouched, I realized the capacity for a death ray already exists—and we’re breathing it.

Chinese Food and (Maybe) Breakfast

I had lunch with a co-worker today, which means we got to select between a couple of sit-down restaurants. When you do lunch in Cresco, your choices are kind of limited. Yes, there are a few places to eat, but when you factor in parking convenience, service and cost, you’re left with two places—Subway and the Chinese restaurant next door.

We decided to go to the Chinese place, since there’s a better chance for conversation, and personally Subway is my go-to restaurant when I get tired of bringing lunch in, so a change of pace was nice. It doesn’t hurt that it is probably the best Chinese restaurant in a couple of towns, and I include the Chinese buffets in Decorah. On a related note, there is more than one Chinese buffet in Decorah.

The Chinese place, Panda Garden, is kind of an anomaly in small towns. Most small towns I’ve been in favor the mom-and-pop restaurant, where the term “fancy dining” means they have pasta salad at the salad bar. Ethnic restaurants are not the norm. Panda Garden, though, seems to have done all right for itself.

Of course, being a small town there are a few concessions, such as the fact that the only Asian in the restaurant is the chef. Granted, if you’re Chinese restaurant is only going to have one Chinese person in it, the chef position is probably the way to go but it is somewhat strange to be greeted by a blonde waitress who says “Welcome to Panda Garden,” with a slight southern drawl.

Once you get over that little hurdle, the rest of the meal is great. They have some fantastic lunch specials for under $6, and you get a pretty decent portion of food for the price. I’m surprised the fast-food restaurants haven’t put a horse’s head in the owner’s bed yet.

As an added bonus, our meal was delivered by the chef himself, a man wearing an apron, a bar towel over his shoulder, and coming out of the kitchen with purpose. These entrees were going to be delivered, damn it, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The speakers played some soft, tranquil Chinese music, which I thought was slightly inappropriate. For that kind of walk, he should have had a heavy metal entrance theme, like White Zombie’s Electric Head Part 2. Still, he was polite as he gave us our meals, then strode back into the kitchen. Never have I been more convinced that a chef was going back in to do battle with his ingredients. You may joke about restaurants having to kill the animals to get the meat when the service is taking too long, but I would not be surprised if the chef  went back to the kitchen and immediately picked up a weapon that was one part chef’s knife, one part battle ax, and got to work.

Our lunch got me to thinking about another restaurant in town, one where I have never eaten. Not because I’ve heard bad things about it or because it’s out of the way. It’s just that the place is always closed. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure when it’s open. I know that it serves breakfast and lunch, but it closes at some vaguely-defined point after that, like around 1 p.m. or so. To be honest, I have never seen it open. I can’t even say with certainty that the place is ever open. It’s the Loch Ness Monster of restaurants.

What makes this café even weirder is that it has an immense parking lot. In the back lot behind this restaurant, there is a block that is solely for parking. About a third of this is public parking on a lot which was paved sometime back when Iowa was first settled. Then there is the next third, which is this restaurant’s parking lot. The final third is split between the pharmacy where I live, an apartment building next door, a bar and the VFW hall. Every day of the week two thirds of this parking lot are filled, and the parking lot that covers the pharmacy, apartments and bar is at least half-full all the time.

The café’s parking lot has, at maximum, two cars in it at any one time. The questions this raises are endless. The first is, why does the owner guard his parking lot so diligently? There are at least three “No Trespassing” signs on the property, and the owner let me know that if I ever parked there I would be towed off, in no uncertain terms. I can understand him not wanting me to park there if it meant he would lose customers, but I’m pretty sure the customers could find somewhere else to park, like right next to where I parked. At worst it would delay their entrance into the café by about three feet.

It’s not as though parking in Cresco is a rare commodity, either. When I was called out for parking on the owner’s lot, I drove the car forward five feet and parked on the public lot. I’ve already considered that the parking lot may be on top of an underground supper club, but I can’t get any confirmation or denial of this.

I think it may be a matter of principle. Let’s face it, in the Midwest, your home is your castle, and your property boundaries are sacred. It’s not such a stretch to imagine that this parking lot may be empty most of the time, and the restaurant may be closed most of the time, but it’s still the owner’s parking lot, darn it, and a man’s parking lot means something. It means that people are welcome to park there and wait for the restaurant to open, and it means that as long as that parking lot isn’t filled up with people who are going to get their prescriptions refilled or going across the alleyway to the bank or whatever, that restaurant is undeniably there. And I respect this.

Besides, it’s a nice view to have while I’m eating take-out stir fry.

Trains, Trains, and…Well, More Trains

Well, there is a definitely not a shortage of things to talk about. On Sunday, a tornado or two passed through the next town up, wreaking their fair share of havoc. So I was going to talk about that, but then I remembered I did promise to write about the train ride to Chicago, and it would be unfair if the only impression I left of the train was that it was TWO AND A HALF FREAKING HOURS LATE.

When the train actually arrived in La Crosse and I was able to board it, it turned out to be one of the nicest rides I’ve ever experienced. The seats were all comparable to those you see in the first-class sections of airplanes, provided they’re the larger airplane that takes you on a flight that lasts for at least an hour and a half. Two seats on either side of the aisle, with plenty of leg room. This is a must if you’re trying to get comfortable for a long trip, and I was more comfortable on the train than I usually am taking a plane. Five minutes later, we were moving.

Compared to airline travel, getting on a train is a very brief, even rushed. The typical station stop is about five minutes, and then the train leaves. Fortunately, I didn’t know how long I had, so when I was jogging toward one of the cars near the back it was not because I was worried the train would leave without me—I just wanted a good seat.

Actually, five minutes was plenty. Say what you will about the trains being late, but once they arrived they were the model of efficiency. It seemed incongruous to me that they could be so efficient, like a water buffalo sashaying into Carnegie Hall and performing Swan Lake, followed by some light tap dance.

After I’d gotten seated, the train began to move, and I was treated to a view of America most people don’t get to experience. Most of the rails have been designed to interfere with the highways and city traffic as little as possible, so most of the time you’re looking at the backs:  backs of businesses, backs of houses, backs of property lines and backs of the country side. Most of the time it’s a fascinating experience. Just outside of La Crosse I saw acres and acres of scrapped cars. Some were in good enough shape I originally thought it might be a storage lot for used cars, until I saw a light blue sedan with the front quarter of it crushed and twisted into a jagged nightmare of modern sculpture. Then I noticed the rust, the open hoods and the lack of doors and tires on models. There were so many cars that calling the area a car graveyard is much too vague. A necropolis is more accurate. Thousands of cars were arranged in a rough sort of order, and they stretched for acres. I could not imagine visiting the auto necropolis and being unable to find a usable part for any car made since the 1950s. I don’t know who owns the necropolis, but I’d like to imagine he loves cars and spends his nights walking down the rows, inspecting each chassis and refreshing his mental records of the models he has.

Another building that stood out was an old brick factory in Milwaukee that had several bright red wooden doors on its back that led out to small cement docks. I don’t know what the factory was, but I assumed they must have shipped a lot of product by rail. I wondered how much product the factory workers could load in five minutes and if it depended whether or not the employees were Teamsters.

Other interests included the back lots of gas stations, which all seemed to have the same emergency equipment in back: orange traffic cones, sandbags under a tarp, an emergency speed limit sign and a snow shovel. Now, the orange traffic cones I can understand. The emergency speed limit sign makes sense if a gas station owner is very concerned about someone not crashing into the store in bad weather. But the sandbags mystify me. So you can have two sandbags holding up the emergency speed limit signs, and if you’re paranoid I’ll give you four, but then what? Why would anyone need that many sandbags?

Anyway, there was also the lounge car. This car has much larger windows for observation, and seats that face the side. Some of them swivel for better conversation, not to mention better leg room, and there are small tables between them with metal rings where you can set your overpriced drinks, such as a $2 can of soda that does not, unfortunately, have gold flakes mixed in to justify its cost. It also serves beer, and on the way to Chicago I saw a young man in a camouflage t-shirt go into the lounge car empty handed and come out with a bottle of beer about seven times, looking happier and happier each time. Quite possibly the only person on the train whose smile was bigger was the person manning the drink counter.

I try not to be too political on this blog, but I really think that if the government were to pour in some money to train travel, they would have a gold mine on their hands. It’s cheaper than air fare, arguably more relaxing, and the scenery is mostly nicer. True, you don’t get the complimentary juice or soda, nor do you get the complimentary airline peanut, but you can take a snack aboard. If you ever get the chance to go Amtrak and you have a few hours to spare waiting, try it.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles, but not in that order

I’m sitting in a train station in La Crosse, Iowa, waiting for an Amtrak train to take me to Chicago, off to the side, typing on my computer. I’ve got time to kill—the man in the ticket booth told me when I got here the train had been delayed by two and a half hours, and the first thing I thought was, “this would never happen at an airport,” even though it does all the time. Still, airplanes wouldn’t be delayed in weather like this, the sunny spring weather that is starting to get just a bit uncomfortable for long sleeved shirts. There are clouds in the sky, but the sun is so brilliant that they all get faded out somehow, so that the sky is a washed-out cerulean, which transitions to green tree-tops, rather than the sharp contrast that is so eye-striking on a clear day.

In fact, the train station couldn’t be a more stark comparison to the airport if it tried. While my apartment says 1920s, this train station seems like it was constructed in the 1950s. I’m not quite sure what strikes me as being 1950s about this place. It has a high ceiling with support beams dividing each section into squares, and in each square a brass light fixture juts down. The benches around the edge of the station and bisecting it remind me of pews. Old, dark pews. You might expect people to be praying rather than waiting for the train.

What really drives home the oldness, though, is the semi-circle ticket office, with its yellow-brown stone base, mini counter and stained wood divider. Two ticket windows are in the center, with a brass cage protecting the Amtrak employee from his clientele. It’s rather ornate, actually, and “TICKETS” is etched into the brass. It’s actually rather calming to be here.

Airports, though, are ultra-modern. They feature the latest in design and architecture, and just walking through an airport makes me feel like I’m a man who is going places, an up-and-comer. Partially, this is due to the fact that everyone is going places in an airport, and everything in an airport is geared toward helping you get where you are going and helping you pass the time while you’re waiting to get where you’re going. When you look at the prices you also get the sense that the stores are there to soak as much money from you as humanly possible while still leaving you with enough cash to get home, but they’re at least trying to make your stay more pleasant.

In the La Crosse train station…I don’t feel like I’m going anyplace for the next two and a half hours. You don’t get a sense of how thoroughly air travel has won over train travel than when you sit in a train station.  Instead of bookstores there is a library of sorts where you can take a book at one location and leave it in another location. There is a restaurant here, but it won’t open until 11 am. And there are people here who look as though they just got done working on the farm or on the assembly line. This you would never see in airports. If the prices wouldn’t keep them out, the TSA definitely would. I suspect part of their mandate is to deny anyone with stained jeans access to the airport itself.

That’s what is nice about taking the train, though—you can travel long distances and just be a passenger, and it isn’t prohibitively expensive to do so. While I mostly travel by car, along with 99 percent of everyone else in America, I think the train gets neglected. Granted, this whole two-and-a-half hour delay is pretty irritating, especially when I think that I could be on the road and almost to the Iowa border right now. Not to mention that this is the earliest train available. Seriously, the first train on the schedule is over two hours late. If Congress could fix that little detail I think they’d make train travel much more attractive.

Okay, back to the advantages of traveling by—seriously, two and a half hours! Can you believe that? What could possibly delay the first train on the schedule by two and a half hours? How can I get a job where I can be two and a half hours late and it’s no big deal? Okay, obviously be an Amtrak engineer but still…

Okay, still, if you’re going on vacation in the United States and you are traveling across state lines, a train might be the best way to go, especially if gas prices keep going up. When I actually get on the train, I’ll write more.

The Old Apartment

In all the entries I’ve made, I have somehow failed to talk about my apartment. This is a crime, because my apartment is really kind of a hidden treasure.

My apartment is located on the second floor of a store that is a combination pharmacy and gift shop. It’s kind of impressive—walk in the front, and you have an old-fashioned gift shop, with painted wood signs, antique-ish knick-knacks, cookbooks featuring old-fashioned recipes, and a very large greeting card section that somehow serves as a transition to the pharmacy area. Like everyone else in the world, I’ve been in a pharmacy, and I can honestly say I have yet to see a combination pharmacy and gift store. Pharmacy and general store, yes. Pharmacy and medical supply store, yes. But a pharmacy and gift shop makes me think about what other combinations you could see. A pharmacy/deli would be a fun combination. So would a pharmacy/bookstore. For that matter, a combination pharmacy/fast food restaurant would be particularly appropriate—you could raise your cholesterol and lower it at the same time.

Fortunately, I don’t have to go through the pharmacy when I enter and leave. There’s a small door to the side, and in the front there is an old wooden staircase that has pretty much been sanded smooth from the time it was constructed. There’s antique wood paneling on the lower half of the wall, and a single light bulb provides illumination at the top of the landing. It should by all rights look cheap, but it doesn’t. Instead, it just gives off a sense of history. I get a very 1920s vibe from the place, although I’m not sure when it was built. But I say it was made in the 1920s, so there. If the House of Representatives can vote to not accept scientific findings on global warming, I’m well within my rights to say a building was constructed in the 1920s.

From the landing, there’s a door that leads to a hallway with a bank of four doors. Each apartment gets two, which is kind of extravagant. It helps that these doors also have an antique feeling, like they’ve stood the test of time. They’re darkly stained, have old-fashioned doorknobs with deadbolt locks, and glass windows that have been opaqued for privacy, which I don’t mind. Authenticity only goes so far. 

What is truly neat, though, is that on the apartment door nearest to the landing chipped and fading painted letters read “Doctor Field Waiting Room.” Apparently, both apartments were once a doctor’s office. I can tell this because in my bedroom there is a space that pretty obviously used to house a door. The fact that my apartment was once a doctor’s office charms me to no end. To me, things that have a history to them gives them character. I have a very nice leather jacket, for instance, I got at a goodwill store, and it is slightly scuffed. This pleases me to no end, because it obviously has some character to it, and it’s pretty sturdy. Also because the scuffing is pretty minor and the jacket is far from worn out. The apartment is the same way—it has character, but it is still useable. I should take a moment here to note that my mom also loves antiques, that she has a passion for it that has manifested in her having her own antique shop which is more or less an excuse to buy more antiques. It strikes me that I have started to become my mother, and if not for one key difference this would either send me screaming for the nearest therapist or convince me once and for all to take up something my mother never would, like skydiving or rap battles. That key difference is usability. That, and I’ve never made my family drive a thousand miles wedged in between an antique piece of furniture and the sides of a conversion van like human play-doh. (Yes mom, I still remember that trip.)

As for the apartment itself, it’s pretty simple—one bedroom, one bathroom, and one living room/kitchen. There are only two things really unusual about it. First, the ceilings are pretty high. At a guess I’d say at least twelve feet—maybe more. Then there’s the fact that the rooms are laid out in a line—living room, bathroom and bedroom. It’s an interesting setup. It also has five large windows in the living room, so a lot of natural light comes through. It’s a nice feature, the only problem is that the windows let me look out across the huge public parking lot instead of down main street. It’s not the most interesting view in the world. Granted, I can tell when the church across the street is having an event on Saturdays, or if one of the bars is more packed than usual during the weekend, but that’s about it. Still, they are windows and at least they let in the light.

The only real problem I have with my apartment was during the move-in phase. The best way to move furniture into my apartment is through the back, from the public parking lot, and up a set of steep steel stairs. It says something that I can feel a knot in my stomach just thinking about it. See, my parents performed an act of kindness akin to sainthood when they drove down to Iowa with all my stuff packed in a moving van since I had only a motel room and no leads for apartments when I got here. If that weren’t enough, they helped me to move my stuff into this apartment. If for no reason other than that, they should be canonized. My dad and I made at least thirty trips up those steep steel steps, and at the end of it all each step was an accomplishment in and of itself, and literally every muscle of our legs was screaming in agony. I hate moving for several reasons, but moving into this apartment was its own special kind of hell. When we went back to the motel room to rest, all of us were asleep, on the same bed, within five minutes and slept until roughly noon the next day. If I decide to spend the rest of my life here, rest assured it is not because I have fallen in love with the land or that I think I have the best job ever. It is because I am terrified of having to move out of this apartment. My parents are way too smart and have way too much survival instinct to help me move from here, and I can’t think of what I would have to bribe my brothers to get them to help. I could ask the people I know around here to help, but I am reasonably sure I would not remain friends with them afterward. Actually, I’m not sure I would remain friends with them through the entire moving project.

Still, I’m here for now, and I feel pretty good when I get to come home and feel like it is actually a home, not just some place I’m staying.

Wal-Mart and Alco

So, I mentioned that Decorah has a Wal-Mart. It’s on the outskirts of town, almost delineating the eastern border. There are a few shops past the intersection that leads to Wal-Mart, but they’re isolated outbreaks at best. When you hit Wal-Mart, you know you’re in the town proper.

While this may sound sad, Wal-Mart is my one real tether to the larger world in northeast Iowa. Okay, sounds sad nothing—that is sad. On the other hand, you can’t get new releases of DVDs anywhere else, and the magazine racks at Wal-Mart blow away the magazine racks at any other place in Decorah or Cresco. They also occasionally have a decent selection of Transformers (shut up).

I should admit up front that I’m not the biggest fan of Wal-Mart stores. My sense of fair play is offended when I hear the reports that they keep their workers at a part-time status to avoid paying benefits, that they snatch up illegal immigrants to pay them below minimum wage and that they occasionally try to build on sacred burial grounds, which I swear I am not making up. It doesn’t help their reputation that their prices attract the type of customer who would previously be found skulking between the aisles at a dollar store. If you go to a Wal-Mart, you’re not going to see the most affluent members of society. There’s already a website or two devoted to the “People of Wal-Mart” that showcases the Freaks and Geeks (mostly Freaks) you’re likely to find. If you want to see the real people of Wal-Mart, though, go to the cash registers. That’s where everyone has to count the cost of what they want, and you can see it actually hurts some people. I’ve seen women trying to control two children using an EBT welfare card to pay for some off-brand groceries that consist mostly of frozen food and entrees in bags, and the tired, defeated looks on their faces always gets to me.

However, recently another store in the Wal-Mart vein was built in Decorah. I can’t really call this store “big-box,” although it is boxy and it is the biggest store in Cresco. I think “medium-box” is a better adjective. Its  name is Alco, and if you haven’t heard of it, you’re probably not from around here. I have seen exactly one other Alco store since I’ve been living in northeast Iowa, and that was in a town just across the border in Minnesota, one that has the same design ethic as a 1980s K-Mart.

Alco is supposed to bring in people who want to shop at Wal-Mart, but don’t want to make the half-hour drive. It’s definitely an appealing concept. The problem is that, having been in Alco a few times, I don’t think people are going to be leaving Wal-Mart in droves.

The main problem is that the store seems more like a larger Dollar General or Family Dollar store than a Wal-Mart. Off-brand groceries, knock-off electronics, DVDs that you could get at other big box stores a few weeks before, and discount books that are usually featured in high-end bookstores “Last Chance to Buy” bin by the entrance, filled with the kinds of books you really don’t want to buy—cookbooks by now-dead celebrities, kids books and a disturbing number of self-help books covering fad diets whose time has passed, the best investment system in a pre-recession market and how to have a healthy and fulfilling life in a pre-recession market. Going through the Alco discount book bin is a uniquely depressing experience.

All this combines to create a sense that perhaps you are wasting your time shopping here, when you can drive half an hour to shop at Wal-Mart. It doesn’t help that, on the whole, Alco charges more per item than Wal-Mart.

That said, however, I have shopped at Alco before, in fact bought a couple discount DVDs there, and for a small town store it isn’t that bad. The big problem is that it is trying to be a small-town “big-box” store. They could have done much better for themselves if they had simply said they wanted to be the next step up from a dollar store, like the nearby Dollar General.

Going into the Dollar General is like going into a dollar store that has decided to pull itself up by the bootstraps. They’ve got a ton of discounted DVDs of blockbusters that were popular last year that nobody wanted, but they’ve also got a pretty decent selection of more critically acclaimed movies. I mean, where else will you find Slumdog Millionaire on the same rack as Transformers 2? And yes, Dollar General carries off-brand food and cheap clothes, the same way that Alco does. And Alco does carry things Dollar General can’t, like do-it-yourself furniture and outdoor furniture. Still, I think I’d rather go to the little store trying to be something more, rather than frequent the store trying to be the small-town version of an urban store.