‘Decoding’ U.S. cities, towns
You drive into a new town. It is not a famous place, and it certainly isn’t a tourist magnet. But it has a certain vibe to it, a personality.
You start to explore, stopping by a local store, walking through a park, trying the coffee joint where townspeople are congregating.
It’s an interesting exercise, but the takeaways are vague: Seems like a nice place, you think. But you don’t think more than that, and leave feeling like you haven’t really learned much from the visit.
So how can you “decode” the places you visit, and in doing so better enjoy getting to know them? If you’re planning on vacationing in the United States, I have two non-guidebook books to recommend, works that offer surprising insights into smalltown (and small-city) America today.
The first, “Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America,” is written by husband-and-wife journalist team Deborah and James Fallows.
For five years, from 2013 through 2017, they spent much of their time crisscrossing the country in a single-engine plane so small that if a parachute were deployed, it would not be for its passengers, but for the plane itself.
The cities and towns they visited were also small, for the most part; the Fallows felt that by reporting on the “fly-over” areas, they’d get a better picture of what made America tick. And they devoted several weeks to each town so they could interview residents, and see the parts of it — factories, other businesses, schools, less obvious green spaces — that only a resident would usually be acquainted with. Singer-songwriter Dar William’s book “What I Found in the Thousand Towns: A Traveling Musician’s Guide to Rebuilding American Communities” has a slightly broader scope.
Williams has been performing in communities across the United States since the 1990s, and in the book she compares what such cities as Moab, Utah, and Northampton, Massachusetts, were like then, and now. She does so as a series of “prescriptions”: Williams is hoping that by telling the stories of communities that overcame economic and social difficulties, she can help other towns and cities better their lots. But what is common to both books is how they guide the readers to notice the clues that tell visitors something about the lifeblood of these municipalities.
In Wilmington, Delaware, for example, Williams picks apart a new waterfront development: It has freshly constructed, oversized birdhouses based on famous paintings, she writes; a children’s museum sponsored by the Fortune 500 companies in town; and well-maintained flower plantings and pampas grass. She then ties what she’s seeing with Wilmington’s past: its waterfront used to be wholly industrial; a swatch of land strictly used for factories, placed at the river’s edge so that goods could be shipped downriver. When hard times hit and the factories shuttered, the waterfront became a menacing, deserted place. Until, that is, the community banded together to rehab it. Since this history is a common one in the U.S., readers will be able to go into other towns with revitalized waterfronts and understand the phoenix-like rise that these waterfront parks represent. The Fallows also decode waterfronts, as well as rejuvenated former factory spaces, and downtowns where the historic buildings now bustle with tech incubators and boutique shopping. They discuss what an oversized mall might mean to a region.
In both books, the authors point out landmarks that many burgs have, and show the reader what they likely mean to the lives of the residents. Read these books and you’ll come away armed with a powerful, eye-opening set of tools for understanding recent urban development in America.
Interestingly, all three authors find what they’re seeing across the United States hugely hopeful, if largely unacknowledged.
“By the end of the journey, we felt sure of something we had suspected at the beginning: An important part of the face of modern America has slipped from people’s view, in a way that makes a big and destructive difference in the country’s public and economic life,” write James Fallows.
“Despite the economic crises of the preceding decade and the social tensions of which every American is aware, most parts of the United States that we visited have been doing better, in most ways, than most Americans realize. Because many people don’t know that, they’re inclined to view any local problems as symptoms of wider disasters, and to dismiss local successes as fortunate anomalies. They feel even angrier about the country’s challenges than they should, and more fatalistic about the prospects of dealing with them.”
And with this, these books offer one more present to the reader: the gift of optimism.
By travelling in this “woke” fashion, and by noticing the clues that point to renewal, the reader will be able to get a better understanding of the true state of the country and, perhaps, make better decisions when choosing which visions, and leaders, should guide us moving forward. I can’t think of a better reason to travel around the United States. Can you?