I Was Born in a Small Town

Is it too obvious that music plays a pretty big role in my life? No… okay. Maybe I’ll ask again in a few months. Anyway, besides giving me an excuse to poke fun at John Cougar Mellencamp’s name, the fact of the matter is that yes, I was born in a small town.

Technically I was born in a hospital that is now a parking lot, in a city that was bigger than where I was actually raised, but I won’t get to wound up about it if you won’t.

Anyway, I grew up in small town rural Idaho, something that I’ve mentioned a few times. First off I’ll get a few of the assumptions or questions that I usually face out of the way.

1. No they didn’t really grow all that many potatoes where I lived. Were there a few potato fields? Sure there were. But for the most part my end of the Treasure Valley grew onions and sugar beets. I lived in western Idaho and most of the really big potato farms existed further east.

2. Yes I grew up in what equates to a desert. We relied on irrigation canals and dams to help regulate and move water to the places that we needed it. During drought years PSA’s would run telling us to only water our lawns on certain days (even house numbers watered on even numbered days while odd watered on odd).

3. Yes watching Napoleon Dynamite will give you at least a bit of insight into what it’s like growing up in Idaho. Moon boots, tetherball, FFA and all.

4. No we aren’t Iowa, our state isn’t located close to Wisconsin, we weren’t all hicks (but yeah we had them).

I’m sure there are more but that covers a lot of it.

I’m not getting on here to poo poo all over growing up in a small town. I actually very much enjoyed my upbringing, though that likely had as much to do with my family as it did my surroundings. Of course the era in human history during which I was raised greatly effected things. I feel like this would be especially obvious if you compared the kids growing up in my hometown these days vs. the kids who grew up with me.

Back in the 80’s America was changing. Those that grew up during that time probably know what I mean. But here’s the funny thing about Idaho, or at least my corner of it. In the early 80’s cable TV was just finally making its way into our community. Or maybe I should say affordable cable was just starting to make its way into our community. Up until that time our only real way of hearing about what was going on in the world came in the form of ABC, NBC, PBS, maybe CBS (I think it’s signal was really crappy so we didn’t watch it much) or good old fashioned newspapers, magazines and radio stations.

As such, many things like fashion, music and even hairstyles arrived in Idaho on sort of a delay. At the time this wasn’t something I realized. Maybe others did, I guess I can’t officially speak for every resident of the Treasure Valley during the 80’s. What I can say is that the kids in my school were wearing things in the late 80’s that had already run their course in say New York much earlier in the decade.

But as we gained more and more exposure to things like MTV and Nickelodeon we started catching up with the times. Fashion suddenly became more current. We got an actual pop station, followed closely by the rock station jumping on the grunge bandwagon. We were close to Boise, so that helped. I don’t know for sure how well some of the more northern towns faired, but I feel that once the internet came to town, all of the disconnects that I sort of look back on and see have pretty much dissolved.

So beyond being 10 years late for most trendy things, what else did I experience growing up in a small town? Well, it was, at least at the time, a much more trusting existence. From a pretty young age I was allowed to walk several blocks to the corner market to buy penny candy, or play arcade games. Several people didn’t lock their cars, or even roll up the windows on them for that matter. Everybody really was kind of in everybody else’s business. At one point there were many more bars than churches (this might actually still be true, it’s been awhile since I’ve been back).

We also had scandals, and even a couple of murders. But we also had festivals and rodeos. People tended to help their neighbors, and when things like floods or fires would cause destruction within the community, we always seemed to rally together to prop up those that were affected the hardest.

Were things all sunshine and roses? No, not by a long shot. Were there bully’s and privilege and racism and the proverbial turning of a blind eye? You better believe it. But it was all just part of the cycle, like the crops in the fields, or the seasons with their winter snows or summer heatwaves.

I now live in a city of somewhat large size. My children have all been raised and attended school in this area. There are some things that I did that they just don’t really have the chance to experience. The entire population of my high school (teachers and all) would barely equal the graduating class at the one my daughter attends. We have more murders in our town in a year than my home town probably has had the entire time I’ve been alive. But there are some trade offs.

My middlest took German in school. She could have also taken French or as my youngest is doing, Spanish. They offered a Spanish class at my school, but it was an utter embarrassment. My girls have taken AP classes every year of high school. I think we could maybe take one or two AP classes but you had to do at least some of the work at a nearby community college, which was a hassle at best. Not that it’s an excuse I’d be particularly happy with were it to be spoken by my girls, but when I graduated high school I really had become pretty fed up with education. I felt at the time that I had just spent years of my life stuck in a box, and I didn’t feel any desire at the time to pay a college for the opportunity to be boxed up again for a few more years.

Twenty-five years later, I have zero regrets about the course my life has taken. And I feel no shame at growing up in a small town, in fact, at the end of the day I’m pretty proud that I did. I have so many memories from that time of my life, many good, a few bad, and a few that I’ll simply keep close to my sleeve, shared only with those few friends that I got to experience them with.

Where did you grow up good reader? A sleepy small town, a great big city, all over the place as a military family, or something else altogether different and wonderful? I’d love to hear your stories, so feel free to leave a comment below. Until next we read, take care.