Small Places, Large Lives

The place where I come from is a small town.
They think so small, they use small words.

But not me; I'm smarter than that, I worked it out.
I've been stretching my mouth to let those big words come right out.
Peter Gabriel – Big Time

In Nora’s post about small-town values (Traditional Values, March 7), she wrote about how the kids of rural schools are given opportunities to be “nice” rather than powerful; to live small town lives rather than larger lives.  And I get that.  But here’s another version, with another resonance.

We think of Vermont as a small, rural state, but Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is a quarter as densely populated (half as many people on twice as much land).  Fewer than 40% of the UP’s residents live in towns of 2,000 or larger, whereas Vermont, with its long village history, is closer to 75% town-based.  And nearly half of Vermont’s current residents were born outside the state – I don’t have the analogous statistic for the UP, but I’m guessing it’s closer to 10%. Since 1960, Vermont’s population has grown by 60%; lots of arrivals of folks who have chosen to opt away from city lives by choosing smaller cities.  Over that same 50 years, the UP’s population has shrunk by 2%; low birth rates coupled with very few immigrants, whether domestic or international.

Instead of artisanal cheeses, the UP has prisons.  Instead of dwindling dairy farms, it has boarded mines.  Both have forests, but because the UP’s are mostly coniferous, there’s not much fall-colors tourism, though a fair bit of hunting and fishing tourism and paper-pulp logging.

I have a master’s student this semester who’s from a small place in Upper Michigan, a town about the size of Middlebury VT.  (In both Vermont and the UP, a place that size is metropolitan in comparison to most of its neighboring villages.)  She came to Boston to get her M. Arch, after going to the local state college for undergrad and then working as a carpenter in good weather and a bartender in bad weather.

She described the experience of telling her friends that she was leaving Michigan for Boston and grad school.  Her fellow students cheered her on, happy to see an example of endeavors rewarded.  Others tamped down her enthusiasm, telling her that architecture was a) dying, b) too hard, c) for boys.  But the experience that struck me was the night she got her acceptance letter, and went to work at the bar.

That night I went to work bartending as always and told my boss that I would be leaving him and Michigan in a few months.  He burst into tears!  It was awful!  My best friend that I worked with burst into tears!  It was a huge crying fest, even some of our regular patrons joined it!  They were proud of me but wanted nothing more than to see me stay and work there for the rest of my life. 

"They were proud of me but wanted me to stay."  How many rural or working class parents have felt that, and sometimes said it, when their kids have done well?  You become a different person when you're educated, not just the same person with answers to more Jeopardy questions.  And that different person doesn't hold their original shape in the family or community compositions.

So when she becomes an architect, where will she practice?  They’ll pay her well in Boston or Chicago or Minneapolis.  But those places already have architects, and plenty of them.  The UP doesn’t.  And it’s Ontonagan and Ishpeming and Escanaba and St. Ignace (and Rutland and Poultney and Castleton and Fair Haven) that need attention to their town centers, need aging buildings to be renewed and revitalized, need the kind of community renaissance that good architects can help to spark.

So it’s likely that, in the end, she'll become another data point in the story we call the brain drain, another small-town kid off to metropolitan life. And Upper Michigan will be deprived of one more smart person.  How can we design an education that prepares our young people for vigorous intellectual and civic life, while not simultaneously telling them that those lives are only available to those who leave their homeplaces?