QotD: Everywhere Has Its Problems

What prevents your city/town from being the best place in the country to live?
Submitted by Cherney.

What a strange question...

A lot of things.  There aren't many jobs here, and the Idahoan plant (it makes various processed potato products, mostly dehydrated mashed potatoes and crap like that) is about to shut down.  It doesn't pay really well, but it does employ, I dunno, perhaps half of the employed people here in town.  What does a town do when suddenly half its labor pool becomes unemployed?  The options:  Work somewhere, even at another Idahoan plant, that's further away--but there aren't a lot of jobs close by.  There's a fresh potato packing plant 17 miles away, but it pays really crappy and the hours are horrible, too.  Then there are more potato processing jobs in towns 50 miles away.  My husband works at one of those, and he freakin hates it, although it pays well and has really pretty good benefits (although no sick leave, so if you get the a really nasty virus from your KFC mashed potatoes, it's possibly my husband's fault).  He hates the commute, too, not to mention the bleedin price of gasoline.  Other options:  Move away.  Sure, but the people who worked at the Idahoan are pretty invested in this place.  Many own their own homes, and a lot of the recent Mexican immigrants who work there have a pretty good deal living in some state-subsidized apartments that just about make their lives here economically feasible.  Where to go?  Aye, that's the rub.

Then there's the weather.  God, this place has the worst weather of any place I've ever lived.  It's got the wind like Great Falls.  It's got the cold and the 6-month winter like any similar place--I lived in Montana long enough to be used to that.  There is no spring or fall to speak of (seriously, the trees go from lovely summer green to brown in less than  week).  And then the summer's are unpleasantly hot and dry.  Usually.  This summer--and last one as well, now that I think about it--are cold all through June so that you can't get your tomatoes to grow properly and you end up having bushels of green tomatoes in September.  Because of course, despite the fact that it was still frosting in June, first frost will come again around Labor Day.  Yah, good luck with those Brandywines, sucker!  So much for global warming.

It has the usual inconveniences of a town this size and this isolated, too.  It's an hour's drive to do any of the usual things--get groceries, see the doctor, maybe take in a movie--which forces you to cram all your unpleasant errands into one day if possible, which not only makes scheduling something of an art form, it makes your kids damned cranky and probably you as well.  

Besides that, it has its own sets of annoyances.  All places do, of course.  But this one is special.  I've lived in towns much smaller than this (this town has about 600 people, nearly half of whom are Mexican and most of the other half are Mormon; the town where I went to high school in southern New Mexico had only around 300 people, most of whom were Mexican but with a not insubstantial Mormon population as well) that had about 8 times the life in it.  The town where I went to high school had regular dances at the community center and rodeos and all manner of things like that.  There wasn't *always* something fun going on, sure, not like in a big city, but it wasn't bad.  There was a bar and a couple of restaurants, and one of the restaurants had a big kind of pool hall in the back where we could eat nachos (damn good nachos, too) and hang out and be stupid.  There's really nothing like that here.  There isn't a restaurant in town anymore, not since the family who ran the taco place had some kind of family trouble back in Mexico and closed down.  There's word that some Californians are planning to open a cafe here, but there is also word that they're aiming to make it a "bistro" type place, so it's anyone's guess if it will last.  The taco place did a booming business, so it's too bad about whatever happened to them.  No restaurant, no pool hall, no dancing, and certainly no large-scale drinking, as I doubt the LDS approves.

It's got me to thinking.  I've lived in a lot of religiously oriented small towns.  The towns in Arkansas were mostly Baptist; in New Mexico, mainly Catholic.  And there was plenty of sinning.  The Baptists (at the time--by all appearances, they've lost their heads now) and the Catholics--I've attended both churches but never paid enough attention and always had a kind of inborn faithlessness--seem to have a notion that we're all sinners but God forgives.  So, we may as well sin, then.  There's a theme in country music, actually, about the sins of Saturday night getting redeemed on Sunday morning.  I can live with that kind of religion, man.  But the Mormons seem to have some idea that God actually means for them to be, like, good people and not sinners.  I just can't get on board with that kind of thinking.  The thing is that most of the ones I've known are good people--relentlessly good people, such that you feel like some kind of dirty whore just for wearing a V-neck T-shirt when you take your kid to preschool.  The local bishop, who is an incredibly nice guy, the kind of guy you think, "That's a good man, there" as soon as you meet him, works with my dad at the Forest Service, and I remember feeling a kind of low-grade shock the first time I saw him wearing his uniform shirt with the top button undone.  Normally, he buttons his shirts all the way to the neck.  He and his wife are like the poster children of niceness, and their kids, predictably, are well mannered and orderly.  I want to make cleverly ironic comments about their niceness, yet even thinking about doing it makes me feel like an asshole.  I'm so much more comfortable among the sinning set, though.  Yeesh.

There are good points about living here, too, of course.  The price of housing is very, very reasonable.  Nobody cares what you do in your backyard, whether you keep chickens or hang out your laundry or sit around in your pajamas drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and reading Richard Ford novels.  The lot sizes are generous so that, if you can ever get the damned tomatoes to grow in this weather, you can have a nice garden.  The niceness means that when you have a baby you will get presents from people you really barely know who just simply wish you well and like babies and people will bring you frozen meals so that when you're all exhausted from having a newborn you don't have to cook.  It also means that if you're of the type who still unironically says "ma'am" and "sir" (as I am and want my kids to be), nobody will look askance and make cheap jokes about you and your backwardness.  There are no metal detectors in the schools, despite the fact that nearly all the kids live in houses with guns in them and go hunting with them, and you can feel pretty safe about your kids never running into any serious crime here.  There is really no need to lock your doors, although some people do and that's OK, too.

Mmm, all things considered, though, and I hate to say this, but our tolerance for this place has just about run out.  Actually, my husband's ran out long ago.  He likes the small town vibe, but there are just too many other complications.  My son hates it because there is no ocean.  I hate the weather and the days when we have to go into "town" to do all the errands.  So, I have a feeling we aren't going to last too much longer.  My guess is that this town will not be much more than a Forest Service town in a few years.  And we'll be on to some coastal small town somewhere.