This country has a long history of judging people by where they live. It’s actually an interesting historical subject, though maybe not for the people living on the short end of the stick, such as people from “the sticks” or any of its hazy synonyms —“backwaters,” “hinterlands,” “flyover country.” Our geography of denigration. Even a neutral-seeming phrase like “remote community” can suggest some kind of exile. No one ever asks, “remote” from what? From the people who do the judging?
By most people’s standards, Meadville (pop. 12,000), our town in rural northwest Pennsylvania, is somewhat remote and certainly small. How small? One of us had a colleague who said the town is so small you can recognize other people’s clothes at the dry cleaners. That’s pretty funny, especially if you’re a transplant, as she was, joking with other transplants. (She left Meadville after four years.)
The town has its fair share of transplants, many recruited by the local college, Allegheny, and the Meadville Medical Center. In the late 1980s, at the start of her career, an acclaimed novelist taught for a year at Allegheny. Years later she offered an off-hand description of Meadvillians in a short essay about her own looks for the magazine Real Simple: “It was a place where people had made a lot of mistakes with their appearances: bad tattoos, dyed-black hair, unfortunate piercings. I think it was because the weather was so awful. A certain restlessness drove people to mess with themselves in a way they wouldn’t have if the sun had come out more regularly.” She knew not to name Meadville in the piece, but it’s hard to imagine her writing this way if she knew anyone from here would read it.
The two of us are transplants as well, Allegheny recruits. But we’ve lived here for decades and it’s taught us things about “small town life.” That the pleasure of knowing many of the people you run into in a day doesn’t wear out. That the reputations of professionals in small towns—carpenters, lawyers, electricians, doctors—are dependably accurate, because those reputations rests on the words of people you know. That merging with a community with its own proud history, aspirations, and civic commitments can make the craziness of the larger world feel a little less overwhelming.
On the other hand, Meadville isn’t immune to many of the social conditions that compromise a sense of community all across our country. We have enormous wealth inequality (18% of the population lives below the poverty line, 7% higher than the national figure), various forms of class segregation, and other barbed divisions along cultural or political lines. A couple years ago someone posted a comment in The Meadville Tribune complaining about “faculty or staff” from Allegheny “inserting themselves on many of Meadville’s various municipal boards, commissions, committees and authorities responsible for how the city functions and is managed.” The comment probably spoke for many. It seemed spurred both by the recent leftward drift of local governing bodies like City Council, which now included two Allegheny-affiliated folks, and a much longer standing resentment of the college’s tax-exempt status. One of us wrote a letter to the editor saying college folks (tax-payers all!) are of course part of the community, inseparable from everyone else, that “we’re together on the soccer fields and band booster meetings, pre-school boards and church congregations, held together by a thousand threads of commitment, affection, and grief.” This sounded great in a Frank Capra sort of way but also felt tinged with wishful thinking.
Community. Has there ever been an idea more humanly important that, in practice, is more loaded with ambiguity, contested meaning, and conflict? We know community when we feel it? If so, the feeling is unequally available to people living here, as anywhere else.
Our Profiles project means to push against this sense of division, an attempt to show just how flimsy such dividing lines can feel in the face of people’s individuality. In that sense, the project is its own modest attempt at community building. It assumes the simple idea that the labels, resentments, and suspicions that prevent social connection can be dispelled, at least a little, if people knew each other better.
The project’s other goal is for non-local readers. If you all touch down in this flyover country and live a little with our subjects, hearing their words and seeing their faces, it might usefully mess with your mental geography. The place is full of interesting people with their own stories, each wildly different from each other, each deeply worth knowing, no matter where you and they are from, or how many lines seem to stand between us.