Small Town Versus Big City

" You Cant Go Home Again"

[King_Fisher]

I was raised in a small town (pop. 8,000) in the rural south.

After finishing school I went off to college and then to the service.Disharged
I spent the next few years kicking around the country till finally settling down in a major West Coast city(L.A.)

Ever so often I get nostalgiac for the simpler life of my youth and wonder if I
could be satsfied with that style of living again?

It reminds me of the quote of Lyndon Johnson after he left the White House and
returned to Johnson City, Texas.

" I am going back home where they know when your sick and care when you die"

Or is it like Thomas Wolfe's book " You Can't Go Home Again"?

Does anyone have any thoughts on this quandary?...KF

[grandpa]

Sure. After spending most of my adult life in large metropolitan cities, I can say without reservation that I prefer the small town. Right now that small town has a population of 951, I'm 12 miles from the nearest store (thus reducing my intake of Dr. Pepper and Snickers bars) and every night, except when the moon is full, or it's cloudy, I can see the Milky Way in the sky. When I want to take a walk, I walk up the mountain right out the back door, and the ground up there is covered with beautiful white quartz and brilliant clear quartz crystals.

Stay in your big cities, I love it out here :)

[LifeinAsia]

KF,
At the rate LA's expanding, it should swallow up your hometown in about 25 years...

I think that there are some small towns that somehow manage to stay that way and avoid the outside influences to modernize and grow. Others succumb to the big city life and add a WalMart, Home Depot, a couple of Starbucks, a few dozen strip malls, WiFi, etc. and quickly end up looking like every other urban area.

I've lived in a number of small towns before being assimilated into the Anaheim-Los Angeles-Ventura megasupercity. I've Google Earthed (hey, is that a new verb?) all the palces I've lived before to see how different they look. Some look relatively unchanged, whereas others have gotten completely urbanized. (The Maryland house we lived in had a 1/4 acre back yard then forest for at least a half mile beyond that. Now it has homes behind it, with nary a tree between them.)

However, even in this huge urban area, the area we live in has definite elements of rurality in it. It has several open space areas zoned and future development will (supposedly) be extremely limited.

[edited by: LifeinAsia at 10:56 pm (utc) on Aug. 31, 2007]

[digitalghost]

I grew up in a mid-sized town, but spent the summers with my grandparents on their farm. After college I lived in big cities because that's where the work was, but I always wanted to go back, and now there's no way I could live in a large city again, I don't even like visiting cities. The current population in my hometown is 464.

It's a huge change though if you're used to the convenience of cities. It's a one hour round trip to go grocery shopping. Or to get a Filet of Fish at McDees or a tire for the car.

Can you go back? Certainly. But you have to really want to. We've had a few neighbors that moved in from the city and found that the peace and quiet was just too peaceful and too quiet.

[Essex_boy]

I prefer the mid size town, just big enough for people not to natter about your business but small enough to be able to walk from one side to the other.

[rocknbil]

I am going back home where they know when your sick and care when you die

Or,

"Home is the place that when you go there, they have to take you in." Stephen King

I'm the opposite - from age 9 to 18 I spent my days in L.A., urban raised and grown. When we moved to Oregon I vowed to get back, I hated it. It took three months. I made the trip back just to visit . . .

Using your favorite quote, I really did see the place for the first time. Descending into the San Fernando Valley, the layer of smog, the sheer size of the humanity, I began to get a sickening feeling in my stomach. I lived in this? And liked it?

I vowed to get over whatever culture shock I was experiencing, whatever it took, to get used to living in the country. It was not so much a lowering of expectations, more of an adjustment. So the sidewalks roll up at 5 PM. So there's less money. So the things I did in the city are not here. There's so much more to life, and we've forgotten about it.

I live in a small town, 30k+ spread out over rural areas, a river is nearby, I am surrounded by mountains. Deer, wild turkey, and coyotes pass through my yard semi daily. People still wave when we pass on the street, and life is still good.

It is not without it's problems. There are lots of trailers. Lots of people that are a target for redneck jokes, but if you get to know them, they are better people than anyone you've ever met and will give you the shirt off their back without a second thought. Not many jobs and the ones there are don't pay well at all. There is crime, there are drugs, but I can safely say most of this is from people moving here from the city who forget they are supposed to leave that behind. And this, actually, is the worst part of it all - people decide to leave the city, and bring all their city-borne social virii with them - the graffiti, the gangs, the California style of driving, the attitudes. Someday Eden will fall and I'm off to a new place.

But for now, there is nothing that would get me back to the big city. This is where I belong. Since my first epiphany I've been back twice. I managed to fall into city life very well, but like an old drug habit, I didn't like it at all. All my old haunts are gone, replaced by condos or tall buildings. The scariest thing for me was the tall concrete walls in "upscale" neighborhoods with barbed wire across the top.

wonder if I could be satisfied with that style of living again?

Hell yeah. :-) Depends on what you really want out of life.

[digitalghost]

Sorry, just can't let Stephen King be attributed with that quote-

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”- Robert Frost

[rocknbil]

Bah. "The only thing new is what you don't know about history." :-)

[ceestand]

Ask the people of Colorado and Montana how they feel about people from the big cities moving into the small town. All of a sudden it's not a small town anymore.

I moved from Long Island to a less populated area. I run into people from Long Island all the time. I don't mind people moving from the cities, just that they tend to bring the problems they were looking to escape with them (crime, taxes, pollution, exceedingly idiotic legislation). I promised I wouldn't be like that.

[steve40]

I live in a small town in the midwest and would never never go back to city life , I only wish I had discovered rural life 20 yrs earlier.

And I will agree with an earlier poster about people coming from the cities and bring their problems with them crime, drugs, etc.

steve