Near the top of the list of
dumb questions I get asked is this: “So, what do you do there?”
This generally follows my telling anyone who has never been to
Logan, Utah, that I live in Logan, Utah. In general, though, it is
a question asked by those who mistakenly believe they live
somewhere and you live nowhere. The “somewhere” people live in the
cities that have their own inserts on the state maps, while your
hometown — if it’s nowhere — is relegated to a
dot.
The prejudice also runs along compass lines. I grew
up in the map-insert city of St. Louis, but also briefly lived in
another insert called Baltimore. People there used to ask me what I
did in St. Louis, as if anything that far from the East Coast was
just a collection of cow pies and riverside shacks. Of course,
since I moved to the dot town of Logan, even those riverside shack
cow pie collectors are starting to give me the what-do-you-do?
I live in a medium-sized dot town where it sometimes
seems like too many people know your name, gossip travels faster
than broadband internet and it takes three generations before
you’re considered a local.
To be fair, I find
myself wondering about living in Delta, Utah, or Delta, Colo., or
any number of even tinier dot towns I drive through on trips. It is
sometimes hard to imagine anyone living in these collections of
buildings, food franchises and homes. Then again, the bitter truth
is that we all pretty much do the same sorts of things no matter
where we live. Sure, there may be a choice of 5,000 restaurants and
bars in the bigger cities, but unless you are part of the leisure
class, you probably stick with your favorite few.
So the
next time someone asks you, “What do you do there?” you can pull
this out and read it to them.
This is what we do:
We get up slightly groggy and wish we had slept more. We
eat something and scan the newspaper for oddities and horrors,
stopping briefly at the obituaries to see if anybody we know or
anyone younger than us has died. We go to work or school, still
wishing we had slept more and pondering the choices we have made
that could have led to more money, less stress, greater
appreciation and a flatter stomach. Some of us listen to NPR and
others listen to the loud morning jokesters on the classic rock
stations because both make us feel somehow smarter. When we arrive
at our jobs, we exchange gossip and complain about anybody who
makes more money than we do, as well as about people we think are
less intelligent than we are. We share our travel photos and the
jokes we got through e-mail.
We have our annual parties
that revolve around holidays, birthdays, going away and sometimes
sheer boredom. We have potluck parties, picnics and too much food
for no good reason. There is a restaurant we don’t go to
because it is too crowded and another one we loved that recently
went out of business.
We have friends who get divorced,
and we take sides. We have friends who we always suspected would
get in trouble, who do. We have friends who we never suspected but
should have. We raise kids and dogs and tomatoes. Some of our dogs
bark and annoy the neighbors. Some of our kids get in trouble and
some of them make the honor roll. We hire our friends to build the
deck and do wedding photography. We buy bumper stickers to express
what we cannot.
We complain about growth and change and
use buildings that used to be something else as points of
reference. Some of us talk politics while others just talk about
sports and movies.
Grandparents and then parents die and
some of us finally reach some semblance of maturity. Some people
always complain and never leave and others just leave without a
word. We eat dinner, wash dishes, pay bills, and mow lawns if we
have them. We worry about the future and lightly reminisce about
the comforting memories that lull us to sleep — all the time
wondering what people do in those other map-dot communities.
Dennis Hinkamp is a contributor to Writers on
the Range, a service of High Country News
(hcn.org). He works in the communications office of Utah State
University in Logan, Utah, the dot of a town he has lived in for 24
years.
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