Small town wages - life in a small town

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1986 by Lance Tapley

SMALL TOWN WAGES

My commute to the office takes exactly one minute, forty-three seconds. By foot. I come home to lunch, a refreshing break from the long hours I put in at the small business I own. In the summer we have salads with lettuce, radishes and tomatoes from the tiny garden beside the house. Sometimes we take our twin six-year-old boys and walk to a nearby park for a picnic.

On the walk we are likely to be joined by neighborhood children. When my wife and the twins return to the house, several of them might spend the rest of the day in our yard. Their parents have only a vague idea where they are. There is no danger to kids in this collection of narrow streets, neat, old white houses, and tall trees.

My wife has worked full-time in the past, but now she wants to be with the kids. We also have a fifteen-year-old boy and a baby due in a few months. All our children can walk to school. The city's high school and neighborhood elementary school are only a few blocks away. The twins are able to come home for lunch.

I have a car for my business, but I use it primarily for out-of-town trips. The city's business district, with the post office, banks, office supply stores, is about three blocks down the hill from my office. The public library, where I go sometimes for undisturbed work, is only a block away. My wife works there ten hours a week as a library assistant. This provides a little money, is a break from housework and tending the kids, and she loves working with books. I once mentioned to a friend, a woman lawyer married to a lawyer, that my wife is content with her "little job.' The friend became indignant at my use of that phrase. However, upon checking, I can report that my wife feels this is accurate.

Across the street from the library is the YMCA, where we swim, the twins do gymnastics, my wife takes aerobics clases, and I fool around playing basketball with my oldest son. On another corner is a small Greek restaurant which serves as a meeting place for the neighborhood. Breakfast ranges from one to two dollars. Lunch may go as high as four dollars.

This restaurant is also the chief political hangout in the state. Just down the street is the capitol building and the state office building. This is not, after all, a tiny village. It is the state capitol, Augusta, Maine, a small city of 22,000. Three blocks from my office are a couple of all-night restaurants. When I want to fly to Boston or New York, it is so easy it is shocking to my big-city friends. I simply walk to the airport, which is at the top of the hill above my office. I claim it is the only airport in the world that one can walk to from downtown.

When my business requires it, it is possible for me to leave the house a few minutes before seven and to be on State Street in Boston at eight-thirty. When I get home at six in the evening, I simply walk down the hill, enjoying the lovely view of the city snug in the Kennebec river valley. The Kennebec is a large river, and Augusta is the head of tide for the ocean. The river flows a few hundred yards from where I work and live. One can put in a boat at the municipal landing and, with a little luck, be catching striped bass in the very heart of downtown within a few minutes.

I am not writing this for the Augusta Chamber of Commerce. There are a number of small towns and cities where this kind of life still can be lived, although their number and quality are decreasing. I just want to show how anachronistic our life is. We have consciously chosen it to be so.

Much of contemporary American life, for many of the people who live it, is terribly counterproductive--a deterioration from the standards of living of the American past. My wife and I have recreated our childhood small-town environment of the 1940s and early 1950s, where one member of the family tended the kids, who walked to school and came home to lunch, and everybody knew the people around them. After living in urban environments--I lived in New York and San Francisco--we, like many young people in the 1970s, moved back to the country. But like many people who fled to a very rural enviroment in places such as Maine, we found ourselves, as kids came along, moving from the country back to a town. In this town, we discovered, it is still possible to escape urban problems while enjoying some urban amenities.

There is a literal price to be paid for this re-creation of the past, however: Money. You can't make much of it in Augusta, Maine. Of course, we spend less than in many urban areas. Big houses here sell for $50,000, and large, two-bedroom apartments rent for $300 per month. But we still live in the national economy. Food and other necessities such as gasoline, clothes, and health care are very expensive. When the cost of living is figured in, several studies have shown Maine to be the poorest state.

Our combined income is only about $25,000. This is with three kids and one on the way. We are not rich. If Peggy were to work full-time (assuming she could get a halfway-decent job, which is not guaranteed around here), I suppose our income would be $30-40,000. But we would rather budget carefully so she can stay home with the kids. I chose an office just around the corner, so I could spend time at home, too. It also seemed efficient in terms of eliminating wasted time driving--not to mention wasted gasoline and wear and tear on the cars.