Town and Country

    
     I have a small book written for children in my weird home library called Town and Country.  It was published in the early 1950’s as a social studies/human geography text designed to show the equivalence and interdependence of two kinds of life:  life in town and life in the country. 

           

     I love it for the time it represents and the sentiment; I keep it for the contrast with today.  We no longer have a sense of equivalence between those who make their living in offices and in barns; the sense that physical labor, which rural life has plenty of, is shameful reigns whether you live in town or country.  The word “rural” now connotes a level of poverty most people gladly shun, while “living in the country” connotes a level of wealth in which physical labor is shunned.  The sense of interdependence between town and country has been lost completely. 

           

     That point was driven home to me last week when I had the opportunity to drive to San Francisco and back in one day.  My friend Andrea Morris, who is an artist with a particularly moving exhibit on the role of art in recovery from the trauma of brain damage, needed to retrieve that exhibit where it had been on display at UC San Francisco, known for its medical teaching. 

           

     I drove to Merced, where she had once been the director of the Merced County Courthouse Museum in that beautiful old courthouse that looks like a capitol building lighted at night, then we streamed across the Valley at its widest, most expansive point through Los Banos and up the face of the dam at San Luis Reservoir.  Curving down through ravines and valleys on the reservoir’s west side, we dropped into Gilroy, then headed down the Santa Clara Valley to San Jose.  Taking 280 North, we climbed into the wooded hills of the Peninsula, skirting the heavily developed flatlands along the Bay, and arrived at the northwestern quarter of San Francisco relatively unscathed.

           

  “Oh, look at all the beautiful houses,” Andrea said, “I would love to live here.”  Her master’s degree in Art History was dedicated to the American Art Deco period, during which much of that city’s architecture was created.  We watched the people tread the sidewalks, jog the streets, bike in the lanes between cars and trolleys, and remembered a time in our lives when we might have been capable of keeping up with them.  We enjoyed the hospitality of the steward of the Alumni Faculty House where the exhibit was hung, and amicably put the images in their protective sleeves and boxes, then loaded them in my pickup just in time to vacate the parking space whose use expired at 4 p.m. for the commuter bus.

           

     As we retraced our route back down the peninsula, we came to have an appreciation for the beauty of our own valley, however.  “I wonder if anyone knows how many cars there are in this place,” Andrea mused, as we kept our place in the long winding lines of autos going both directions, often moving no faster than 10 mph.  For thirty, forty, fifty miles we followed the same cars, all trying to get out of the city, their occupational town, to arrive at their homes as close to the country as they can afford to get, if not the rural reality the country represents.  The road was still choked with cars past Gilroy, when we left the Santa Clara Valley to climb back over the hills toward our own.

           

     The night sky over State Route 152 was a bowl of stars, the land below dotted with a few lights of farmsteads and dairy barns, their light glimmering off the full canals and growing alfalfa fields, the barley nearing harvest.  The ancient, authentic Courthouse gleamed pure white as we pulled into her town; the waxing moon kept me company as I skimmed Hwy 99 heading  home to my own through orchards and fields, dotted by our small, workingclass towns born along the Southern Pacific tracks. 

           

     We both irrevocably knew we were home, despite the discrepancies.  But who now senses the interdependence of these two modes of living, much less the equivalency?

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes from her home in Lindsay.  You can send her your town and country thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.