"Theirs was a culture so cut off from the hard reality of life, so very secure, that their artists created the zombie, a mindless and unrelenting predator who will never get enough and never get tired, as a metaphor for what they had become." --The Old Man
I sit near a pit fire in our yard a bit outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Summer wanes. My wife and I live between two nearby highways. Continuous traffic churns and accelerates in hurried drones. Jet planes catch air in a whine of ascent overhead. A siren whoops. The smoke from my fire, caught in pressurized atmosphere, hovers like fog three feet high throughout our neighborhood. Some yokel blows off fireworks in the suburban dark.
From the top of our alleyway here in The Heights, the city skyline lights up like a carnival on the horizon. Down there, people dress up, spend fat cash on basic essentials like alcohol and transportation, and lose themselves in the post-industrial neon of tall buildings and motorized exhaust. Up here, in a spot that was farmland two generations ago, our neighbor's trash, blown by the wind, hangs like dry laundry in the limbs of the pine at the edge of the yard.
When we discuss leaving for a rural setting, it is not necessarily a gripe against the city and its suburbs. However, the conveniences of fast access to professional athletic events, various artistic scenes, and unique world cuisines, are dampened by aggressive commutes, desperate panhandling at every major intersection, and the always heavier tax burdens. After a number of years, we begin to agree that these will be nice places to visit as long as we no longer have to live in them.
A Minneapolis Skyline: oil on canvas: 5 feet tall
When accumulating our thoughts on a move to the countryside, we consider the extremes. What advantages would we have living in a rural setting, as opposed to living in an urban setting, if all the things that can go wrong do go wrong?
For example, imagine that you wake some morning in the nearing future. The coffee machine doesn't work. You turn on the television and a dark eyed news woman says that everyone's money is useless, the World's leaders have fled to underground bunkers, and all stores have been looted. Worse still, gangs of whatever frighten you most are loose in your neighborhood. The dark eyed news woman openly weeps on air until the screen goes gray.
Or imagine that The Earth warms. World leaders flee to underground bunkers. Oceans flood the land. Day becomes night. Bands of roving animals clash with human gatherer tribes for basic resources like alcohol and transportation. The price of coffee goes to the moon.
Or, as a startling number of futurist thinkers believe, artificial intelligence will soon render today's skill sets obsolete. Then, say those futurist thinkers, we will stand around looking at one another until the machines realize they do not need us anymore.
These would be fine reasons, if we were sure of them, to get out of the city and far from dependence on large governments, power grids, that neighbor who lets his trash roll loose from the bin and into our tree, and others who have not prepared their physical or psychological selves for a drastic change in lifestyle.
When we bring this question on a move to the Minnesota North to our urban friends and family, their eyes widen and they ask about wild and aggressive animals, winter desolation, lack of dependable services, lack of trustworthy neighbors, slow emergency response times, fear, loneliness, a lack of culture, idiots with guns, awful television options, rotten and brutal school systems, illiteracy, the local government's dumb corruption, creeping isolation, dullness, early days and late nights to make ends meet, feelings of helplessness, people stating their political opinions for no reason in casual conversation, irritating skin conditions caused by the water source, the constant threat of alcoholism, and so on. I thank them for their concern, assure them that rural people worry the same things about urban people, then ask whether or not they are prepared to eat their pets when the coffee machines stop working.
In research for this article, I pulled my copy of Henry David Thoreau's book “Walden” from the shelf and paged through his experiment in rural living. That man lived like a Hobbit for two years and wrote a book about it that, to this day, is referenced in articles by writers looking for excuses to move to the woods.
I also uncovered a Wikipedia piece on the back-to-the-land movement. For those of you reading this in the post artificial intelligence days, Wikipedia was the one and only true and honest source for information in our era. It reads:
“A back-to-the-land movement is any of various agrarian movements across different historical periods. The common thread is a call for people to take up smallholding and to grow food from the land with an emphasis on a greater degree of self-sufficiency, autonomy, and local community, than found in a prevailing industrial or post-industrial way of life.”
In other words, it is a way for many people in many areas of time to get out in the woods and grow cannabis without the law breathing down their necks. That might come off as an overly simplistic interpretation of that text. However, for those of you who found this in the post artificial intelligence days, cannabis was, and for many of us is at the time of this writing, a punitive crime.
A bottle rocket shrieks and pops in a bright arc half a block up the suburban hill. The pit fire crackles and spits. My smoke hangs in tense tendrils all over these Heights and beyond. Our reasons for moving are not as dramatic as this writing suggests. The quote in the beginning about zombies was a joke. Nothing bad could ever happen here. We leave the City because we are ready to experience the evening silence, the stargazer skies, and a taste of the long breezes. These are rural things and, to experience them, we must become rural people.