To the Stars, Through Difficulties

dueling cultures, dueling trajectories, mild to moderate blurring

Thoughts from the road about where we’re headed as a culture, with as much tentative how and why as I can summon. This one is much too long for email, so click to read the whole thing.

In 2022, the New York Times announced that the tiny southeastern Kansas town of Humboldt was entering its renaissance, earning it a spot as one of the few “must-see” places on the entire planet. It was, the newspaper explained, an “oasis of cool” in a rural sea of farm fields — with extraordinary new restaurants and bars, and a bookstore and a boutique hotel on the way.

That endorsement echoed through media, in a long round of stories about revitalization and renaissance. Someone had found the key to switch the trajectory of small-town America:

After an extended period of family negotiation, I finally drove in this week from Los Angeles — watching through a windshield as big parts of the country are converted into a wind farm, the old thing and the new thing sitting side-by-side:

Finally arriving at the site of the small-town renaissance, I rolled down the main street to see this:

When evening came and the temperature plummeted into the low 90s, I took a long walk around town:

Here’s the empty book store (with the reflection on the left of the town’s electronic announcement sign across the street), sitting in front of the cocktail lounge that someone, the sign says, hopes to re-open:

“Small Kansas town bursting with bold revitalization projects.”

It’s mid-week during a media-declared heat wave, so I’m starting with a mildly unfair impression. But something clearly began to fly, here, and then began to lose airspeed. A woman rolling by on a mobility scooter this morning stopped to talk, and said that this place I had photographed the night before….

….had been a pizza restaurant for a few months, before the owner found that he couldn’t keep it staffed or maintain steady traffic. I saw someone working inside at night, and I’m hoping for them.

There are brilliant businesses here, and I had one of the best breakfasts of my life this morning at this place — which wasn’t, I’m sorry to say, anywhere near full. And I’m staying here, at a cabin on a pond that used to be a quarry site:

It’s perfect, a bunch of cabins around a lake with boats and bikes and fire pits. Right now I’m watching rain fall on the water.

I’m also here alone, with the only car in the parking lot. Given the empty downtown and the closed businesses in the evening, I made dinner — “hot chunk of meat,” my road trip specialty, and click the subscribe button for more recipes — on the grill you see in that picture of the cabin. As far as I can tell, that was my dinner option, gas stations aside. Triscuits were also served.

So there’s something here, yes. There are creative and interesting people, gathering, urgently trying to build things. But the momentum….

The group who are trying to rebuild the town call themselves A Bolder Humboldt, and here’s what they say about the effort:

If you don’t want to watch all of that, just note what co-founder Paul Cloutier says:

There’s a story about rural America that is about this sort of weird cities versus rural areas, and all of that. And the reality is, I just don’t know what that even means anymore. But what I think is really compelling is, changing this idea that young people, young, creative, ambitious people, you think, I’ve got to move to a city, because that’s where the action is. But the reality is, you’re gonna spend so much time just trying to make ends meet that you don’t really get to practice whatever it is you’re excited about. And so one of the things that I love about the possibility of things like our project and many others is this idea that we can change the story for young, creative, ambitious people to see rural America as a real option — not just an option, but a magnifier of their capabilities and talent.

So.

American “mainstream” culture is telling itself a story about danger and withdrawal, certain that the Covid-19 threat and the climate threat and the MAGA threat and the threat threat and the crisis crisis mean that you should treat your life like a bomb shelter.

And it seems to me that anyone who’s trying to build, especially in the rural space that makes people in Brooklyn clench up and say but don’t they have Trump flags there, has to fly into that headwind. A Bolder Humboldt started in 2016, Trumpyear One, launching straight into the face of a cultivated mass neurosis about travel and disease and the terrifying characteristics of red state culture. A story about building and growing collided with a story about shrinking and hiding.

The irony is that at least some of the builders in red spaces are speaking in blue dialect. Paul Cloutier, who I quoted above, returned to his native Kansas from the Bay Area, with his Californian wife, who ran for a seat in the state legislature as a progressive Democrat. (Result: sad trombone.) The vernacular of Santa Monica keeps showing up in the effort to make new things in the small town midwest, as I thought this morning when I drove up to Iola and bought a loaf of bread at this place:

So I looked it up, and it’s owned by an actress who moved to Iola recently with her filmmaker husband (who is also, continuing to intertwine the red and the blue, a Marine Corps combat veteran). Red states with blue builders could create some purple spaces, but maybe not. TBD. Maybe we’re blurring some cultural lines in healthy ways; maybe some blue zone parachutists are painting pictures of themselves and mistaking it for landscape art.

Related, the culture that increasingly turns inward and sits in front of screens seems to be leaking out into all kinds of places, and I was surprised to see signs in small town Kansas encouraging children to go outside:

Though I did watch a bunch of very young children run around downtown Humboldt this morning, in a group, without parents. Maybe they read the sign.

It seems to me that we’re watching an old culture and a new culture fight for the future, creative builders versus culturally insane symbolic performers, with a collision of boundaries and identities that could be productive or could fizzle out. A battle for place, against cultural homogenization and the corporate commodification of everything, is quite remarkably being fought in small-town Kansas by, among others, some Californians who just got here. The chasm between the media Humboldt and the Humboldt I’m seeing is….interesting. Whatever’s happening here, it bears watching. I’m on the side of anyone who’s trying to build something.

More to come. I emailed the people at A Bolder Humboldt last year, trying to open a discussion with them, but didn’t get a response. Maybe I’ll have more success while I wander around town.