Code Name "CropTop" and other Features of Small Town Living

Carharts from here on out

Small town is a relative term. Having grown up in what New Yorkers have affectionately dubbed a flyover state, it was pretty clear that any place other than Indianapolis would have been considered by most a "small town." In truth, the place I spent my childhood was not a small town but more like a small city, with several hundred thousand people, a nationally acclaimed university (and -- barf -- football team), malls, restaurants, bars, big box stores (more every fucking year), and a large enough Jewish population to support, at one time, four different congregations of various affiliations. 

By the time I was a teen, we were well past the innocent Leave It To Beaver days of people getting their milk delivered and leaving their front doors open. Still, it felt small and provincial enough for me to feel claustrophobic at 17. I realize now that a lot of that claustrophobia had more to do with the overall culture and values of the place than its size. I was desperate to JUST GET AWAY from what I perceived at the time to be stupid and boring and backwards and familiar. Whatever, I was a teenager I hated everything. You can't fault me for that.

I never really set out to LIVE in the BIG CITY. At the time, it was a) proximate to where I went to school and b) the only place one could really make a go of being a magazine writer, back when print journalism was a thing. 

By the time I left NYC twelve years later, it felt familiar and comfortable and "home" enough that it didn't seem like this big overwhelming teeming metropolis anymore. I had my daily routines and the small orbit I inhabited, I knew the people in my neighborhood and couldn't walk down the street without running into a half a dozen of those people. It  felt like a small town.

That is, until I moved to a really really really really really really really  

motherfucking small town.  



The smallness manifested itself immediately in some very obvious ways. Like the fact that everything (a restaurant, a bar, a grocery store, a movie theater) was at least a 30 minute drive. That most everything closed before 8 pm. And that there was .... just .... simply ...  no one ..... the hell .... around. There was, and remains, a dearth of humans. As I mentioned before, I could go entire days without  so much as passing another car on the road. When I did, me and the other driver would wave cheerily at each other, like "Hey, you too?!" The landscape is lousy with sheep and cows and goats and small, seemingly suicidal woodland creatures. But people are few and far between.

What humans there are, however, could very well be cast in the reality TV version of a Mayberry/Twin Peaks mash-up. In this loose constellation of hamlets, there are an assemblage of characters -- CHARACTERS --  who know each other and have reputations for various things. There's Flash, the ironically nomenclatured fix-it man who moves at a snail's pace. There're the proprietors of the Westfield General Store and their beloved dog Taco, who both transmit and are at the center of many of the towns' goings-on. Just yesterday the BIG NEWS was that they were trying out a new (purchased) crust for their semi-homemade pizzas, which are by all accounts the best in town, but also the only in town. There is the couple who run the RendezVous (the only accommodations in town), the husband of which sports one of those waxed mixologist mustachios and the wife of which carries a side arm when going for walks outside. 

Then of course there is Laini, who has a litany of charmingly bizarre attributes that make her the most character-y of all the characters -- the closest thing to a celebrity this little pocket of the state boasts. If the Northeast Kingdom had its own version of an Us Weekly-typed rag, Laini would likely be on the cover at least every other week, sporting jauntily striated pink inflected wardrobe items and waging war against, variously 1) flies 2) the fuckers at the phone company 3) those assholes at [name redacted] 4) people who like Phish 5) conservative government officials 6) Barry 7) knitting OR expounding the virtues of 1) baked goods 2) Airedales 3) the Grateful Dead 4) French stuff 5) public radio 6) murder mysteries 7) Breaking Bad 8) Volvos. She would also be the insider expert for a franchise item called "Goats: They're Just Like Us!" 

Word travels motherfucking fast in this place, and everyone knows everyone's bidness. This sounds like a critique but it's actually one of my favorite things. Because of the smallness and remoteness, and also because winters are FUCKING REAL, everyone really has to depend on one another and if someone screws someone else over, EVERYONE hears about it, so there's transparency and accountability embedded in this place. Be an asshole at your own peril, because you will have a reputation to live down.

A less awesome (for me) but nonetheless amusing (for everyone) side effect of the word-travels-fast small town vibe is that unbeknownst to me I had a nickname within a week of moving here, which if you read the contents of the message from my friend and co-worker Rebecca, above, you will get the background story for. Evidently when I came for my interview I made an impression that resulted in the subsequent unfortunate nickname. Luckily the the dearth of humans means I haven't actually been referred to as CropTop* to my face yet. Good thing goats don't talk (?).


*Let it be known that I was NOT wearing a crop top and would never be caught dead in one. My mid-section is my PROBLEM AREA, fools! So this seems to have been merely an unfortunate case of low-slung cut-offs/too short shirt combination. If anything my nickname should be Skortz but alas, we can't control these things. In related news I need to stop dressing like a goddamned tween.