Joseph Bottum, ex-urbanite.
Our Town Ican 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...
...Ah, well, most hatred of suburbia is really only a species of romanticism...
...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...
...A home, in other words, instead of a dwelling...
...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...
...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...
...I don't recall this as a problem faced much by the happy suburbanites in New Brunswick...
...And the answer was obvious: Find a nice suburban house in New Jersey, say, and commute into Manhattan every day on the train...
...Still, even if no one knows us, South Dakota should make a nice escape from summers in New York...
...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...
...Vincent Millay or just a few houses down a tree-lined Empo-ria street from William Allen White...
...It's a world of small prairie towns and long empty highways...
...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...
...Actually, you probably do...
...A small town calms your nerves...
...In truth, part of it was the [ -desire for permanent bookshelves...
...A town, I should note, that was threatened, within days of our purchase, by wildfires in the surrounding countryside...
...South Dakota exists, for me, in the same kind of romantic fog...
...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 great city excites your senses...
...No suburbs here: just a friendly place where everybody knows everybody else—where my family name is familiar, where my grandparents remain living memories...
...Or so I've always said...
...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...
...Their books aren't usually at risk from forest fire...
...Of strange bare canyons in the Badlands and long alleys of dark trees in the Black Hills...
...The contractor is wandering through the house mumbling about crazy people who want bookcases put up on every wall...
...We've built bookcase after bookcase, only to abandon them like kindling all along the eastern seaboard...
...We've lugged them up and down the stairs of New York apartments, Washington townhouses, and back again to New York apartments...
...Do you get that kind of his-^- tory in a suburb...
...Hot Springs is an old resort town, built back in the days when people still went to mineral springs to "take the waters...
...A suburb eats your soul...
...Joseph Bottum...
...We've hauled our books—boxes and boxes and boxes of books—from Boston walk-ups to Baltimore bungalows...
...It's home: the place I grew up, the setting I left for the giant cityscapes back East...
...Is it too much, my wife asked midway through last year's move, to have a place where the books can just stay...
...And the neighbors are all gathering across the street to watch the new circus that seems to have come to town...
...The movers arrived from New York an hour ago, not particularly pleased with the prospect of hauling in all those books...
...And the house, too, will be a change from a tiny Manhattan apartment...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The New Jersey suburbs are starting to look a lot more attractive...
Vol. 12 • August 2007 • No. 44
