I can understand why somebody would want to live in Manhattan. And I can understand why somebody would want to live in Moscow, Idaho. It’s all the places in between that remain a mystery. A great city excites your senses. A small town calms your nerves. A suburb eats your soul.
Or so I’ve always said. Which is why, after more than a dozen years of living in the great cities of the East Coast, my wife and I decided we would try calming our nerves a little with a summer place in a small South Dakota town.
In truth, part of it was the desire for permanent bookshelves. We’ve hauled our books–boxes and boxes and boxes of books–from Boston walk-ups to Baltimore bungalows. We’ve lugged them up and down the stairs of New York apartments, Washington townhouses, and back again to New York apartments. We’ve built bookcase after bookcase, only to abandon them like kindling all along the eastern seaboard. Three moves is as good as a fire for clearing out possessions, Benjamin Franklin once observed, but somehow the flames never touched the thousands of books. Is it too much, my wife asked midway through last year’s move, to have a place where the books can just stay?
A home, in other words, instead of a dwelling. And the answer was obvious: Find a nice suburban house in New Jersey, say, and commute into Manhattan every day on the train. That’s what any sane person would do, and so, instead, we got on an airplane, flew 1,500 miles to South Dakota, and bought an old Victorian house in the town of Hot Springs. A town, I should note, that was threatened, within days of our purchase, by wildfires in the surrounding countryside. I don’t recall this as a problem faced much by the happy suburbanites in New Brunswick. Their books aren’t usually at risk from forest fire.
Ah, well, most hatred of suburbia is really only a species of romanticism. I’ve constructed a long, political-science argument about why conservatives should favor cities and small towns over suburbs, but the subjective origin of the argument, I know, remains my own half-baked romantic visions of how wonderful it would be to live in Greenwich Village next door to Edna St. Vincent Millay or just a few houses down a tree-lined Emporia street from William Allen White.
South Dakota exists, for me, in the same kind of romantic fog. It’s home: the place I grew up, the setting I left for the giant cityscapes back East. It’s a world of small prairie towns and long empty highways. Of strange bare canyons in the Badlands and long alleys of dark trees in the Black Hills. No suburbs here: just a friendly place where everybody knows everybody else–where my family name is familiar, where my grandparents remain living memories.
I said as much in an op-ed about longing to come home, which I wrote for the Rapid City Journal as a way of announcing our arrival back in the state. I suppose I should have understood just how crazy my romantic vision of home had grown, when the newspaper misspelled my name in the byline–a typo that weakened, a little, the thesis of the piece, that the small towns of South Dakota are places where everyone is familiar with everyone else.
Still, even if no one knows us, South Dakota should make a nice escape from summers in New York. Hot Springs is an old resort town, built back in the days when people still went to mineral springs to “take the waters.” On the southern edge of the Black Hills, it fills a narrow canyon: red sandstone buildings stretching along the banks of a stream called Fall River, warmed by the thermal springs bubbling up in town. And the house, too, will be a change from a tiny Manhattan apartment. It was, we were told, the longtime home of Leslie Jensen, the only governor of the state to come from Hot Springs and an interesting figure of the 1930s. Do you get that kind of history in a suburb?
Actually, you probably do. The movers arrived from New York an hour ago, not particularly pleased with the prospect of hauling in all those books. The delivery drivers from the lumberyard are trying to get me to sign a receipt for the shelving they’ve unloaded on the front porch. The contractor is wandering through the house mumbling about crazy people who want bookcases put up on every wall. The man from the telephone company is trying to get the movers to move the books they just piled up against the wall he needs to reach. And the neighbors are all gathering across the street to watch the new circus that seems to have come to town.
The New Jersey suburbs are starting to look a lot more attractive.
JOSEPH BOTTUM
