I recently finished teaching a literature class at our campus in Littleton, New Hampshire, a new class with a working title of "Rural Notions." The aim of the course was essentially to find out what the word "rural" meant in New Hampshire.
We came up with some interesting notions. (By the way, the insightfulness of these ideas is completely my students'; I'm just borrowing them for the time being.) We started out by debunking illusions, and the first to go was the usual split between "urban" and "rural." We are all urban creatures -- "rural" simply describes a lesser degree of urbanization. In fact, much of what we would call "rural" in New Hampshire is possible only because there are large "urban" efforts to generate electricity, create transportation, and manufacture goods. We are all tied to the cities, even the ones we'll never visit.
Another myth that broke apart was the belief that the word "rural" actually describes any kind of specific reality. What "rural" means depends on where you are. The students came up with such splits as "comfortable rural" (living in downtown Littleton) versus "uncomfortable rural" (living in a trailer on a class 6 road); "college rural" (the move out to the land in the 60s) versus "native rural" (people born, and often stuck, there); "condo rural" versus "village rural." These dichotomies suggested other splits between different educations, family histories, economic expectations. "Rural" is not a neat word and is as sociologically tangled as a street corner in New York.
The final myth to go was the Robert Frost myth of plain sense and high living, the myth of simplicity, of honest contact with nature, of hard-nosed independence. One student, who works with rural clients, went so far as to say that "rural," for her, meant isolation and diminished self-awareness, that "rural" too often brutalized rather than uplifted. They decided that the myth of rural was a convenient smoke-screen for people with certain interests, like legislators and certain newspaper editorial writers.
They finished the course with a heightened sense of why they had made the choice to live where they are. We also learned another example of how reality always out distances our conceptions of it, how we constantly need to be reminded that there is more for the eye to meet than our clichés and presumptions. The North Country won't be the same for any of them again, and they won't be the same for it. They are mild conquerors in this regard, re-discoverers of the territory north of Plymouth, new settlers in old places who make the old new again.
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