This is going to be a bit of a diversion from my usual urban posting on a snow day.
I want to talk about my trip back to visit my grandmother's tiny Kansas hometown, and why it's a bad idea to romanticize rural life.
I've seen a lot of posts bouncing around the Internet talking about how people can should move to rural America, where land is cheap, cost of living is low, and so on. This post on Twitter is one of the species. You see this a lot, where influencers push young people struggling to make it in a major metropolis to seek out small Midwestern towns and settle down to a simpler rural life.
I'm going to engage with the original post in good faith, because my late grandmother came from one of those towns: Attica, Harper County, Kansas, population 516. (I'll set aside the fact the house in the original post has 8 bedrooms and one bathroom, is a former meth lab, and that the original poster is a stockbroker living an hour and 45 minutes from downtown Boston.)
Granny was the brilliant daughter of Attica's town doctor. Her father would sometimes take payment for his services in chickens. Growing up there, she was a voracious reader, skipped multiple grades, learned to drive at 12, and started college at 16, in an age when women's education was still controversial. She couldn't wait to get the hell out of Attica, a small town full of small people - which is how she eventually ended up in New York City, where she met my grandfather. They settled down in Boston, where she lived for the rest of her life.
I went to visit Attica a year and a half ago to satisfy my curiosity. I immediately understood why she wanted to leave.
Attica was a Great Plains town of little importance a century ago when Granny was growing up, and it remains so today. Attica was incorporated in 1885, with 1500 people. When Granny was a girl a century ago, it had 750; now, it has 516. It's a poor, dying town in a state full of poor, dying towns. In places like Attica, most of the jobs are tied to institutions: public schools, a college, a hospital, a prison. Attica is comparatively lucky because it has K-12 schools and a nursing home. But it's 11 miles to the nearest hospital, 13 to the nearest pharmacy, and 17 to the nearest supermarket.
The county's statistics tell a story, too. Life expectancy in Harper County is 75.1 years. If it were a country, it would be worse than Bangladesh, Iran and El Salvador. The median family in Attica made $42,708 a year, less than the pay flipping burgers at In-N-Out in LA.
Outside Attica, the Harper County side roads are still dirt. That one came as a shock to me, because I'm no stranger to rural areas. I went to high school in California's Central Valley. My first job was working for the irrigation district in San Joaquin County, famous for its almonds, peaches and dairy. I spent summers as a kid with my aunt and uncle, who lived out in the country with cows and persimmon trees. The rural areas I know best, like the Central Valley, aren't wealthy - but at least they can afford paved roads.
There are no good options for places like this. Harper County has lost half its population in the last 80 years and the jobs aren't coming back anytime soon. There's just not much future in places like Attica. The best thing anyone can do is to create opportunities so that young people can seek their fortunes somewhere else. It does no good for anyone to pretend otherwise.