“I’m living on Nutting
Street now,” a friend told me last week. “You know where that is?”
“Of course not!” I responded. “This is a small town!
Nobody remembers the names of streets!”
When I lived in
the city, I knew the old saw that rural people give directions
using landmarks that no longer exist (“Go past the old Jones place,
then turn left where the big red barn used to be…”). Little
did I know that I would come to live that philosophy, or that the
transformation would happen so quickly.
Shortly after I
arrived in my small town 13 years ago, I had the misfortune of
riding to a party in a car with an arguing couple (it turned out
they were on the verge of breaking up). He, of course, kept driving
in circles without stopping to ask for directions. She, meanwhile,
kept saying, “It’s near the hospital” and “Aren’t we
getting too far from the hospital?” and “Well, the last time I went
it was easy because we stayed close to the hospital…”
But what I found funny was that the argument didn’t
involve the street address. Neither said, “You don’t even
remember what street it’s on?” or “You didn’t even
bring the address?” In a small town, nobody uses street addresses.
They just know what a house looks like, what it’s near, or
who used to live there. In this case, the sparring couple
eventually stumbled across a familiar-looking house, and decided it
had to be the party because they recognized several cars parked in
front of it.
When my friends Dave and Sue moved to town,
people would ask where they lived and they would give a street
address. That would get a blank stare. Then they’d say,
“It’s Joan C’s old house,” and people would say, “Oh,
sure!”
Joan, meanwhile, had downsized after her kids
moved away. “You know Eleanor’s Beauty Shop?” she asked me,
in describing her new house.
“Sure!” I said. The sign for
the long-closed shop had been taken down three years previously.
“Across the street,” she said.
“You bought
Betty’s house? Or the one next door?”
She said it
was Betty’s house, and I congratulated her: “That’s a
nice place.” But there was another person in the conversation who
still didn’t know the location we were talking about. Joan
had to explain it another way.
“You know the Mary Kay
house?” she said. A few years previously it had been painted
lavender. Rumors — untrue, I believe — circulated that
the owner sold Mary Kay cosmetics, and the paint job was a giant
advertisement. A tenant even posted a Mary Kay sticker on the door.
“OK.”
“Two houses south,” Joan said. The
transaction was complete: both of us now knew exactly where
Joan’s new house was. And not once had we discussed a street
name, cross street, or number.
I usually tell people that
I live “two blocks behind the movie theater.” But sometimes I
forget and say I live “on Haggin.”
The usual response:
“Which one is that?”
I then have to say, “The one by the
creek,” and they understand.
Once, near the post office,
a driver flagged me down and said in confusion, “We were supposed
to go to a yellow house at the corner of Hauser and 13th.” There
were no yellow houses in sight.
Puzzled, I asked, “Who
are you looking for?”
They were looking for my upstairs
tenant. They were visiting from out of town, so she’d had to
give directions using street names. But she was so unfamiliar with
the street names (even though — or perhaps I should say
because — she was born here) that after six months in the
apartment she still thought she lived on Hauser rather than Haggin.
Part of the problem may be those street names, most of
which commemorate railroad barons. Our town no longer even has a
railroad. But I think even renaming the streets (“Creekside
Avenue”?) would fail. The problem is not so much the streets’
names as the very idea of street names.
In larger
communities, grids of streets and collections of cul-de-sacs go on
endlessly, with little but names to quickly distinguish them. But
our town has big features (the creek, the mountains, the hospital)
that provide a more natural guide than any street sign.
Too, in the small town, the people have uniquely interwoven
histories. We encounter our fellow residents in many different
settings, with many different types of connections. It’s not
surprising that I would know all the parties involved on both sides
of Joan’s move. And so to phrase a house’s location in
terms of those people is like a celebration of those
interrelationships.
“So where is Nutting Street?” I asked
the friend who’d moved there.
“It’s under the
hill around the corner from Jeff and Betsy,” he said, and I smiled.
I now had a mental map of where he lived, and it was peopled by my
friends.
John Clayton is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He
knows most everybody in Red Lodge,
Montana.
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