Does rural America really look like this? (convert, wild, tractor)
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Just wanted to point out that your description of FLAT applies mostly in the Midwest. North Georgia, Tennessee, Carolinas, on up, it's anything but flat. Lots of small fields interspersed between forested areas and hills. Still have guys that held on to their 8Ns and Farmall Cubs because the fields are too small to turn one of those big JDs used out west
Location: In a little house on the prairie - literally
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Originally Posted by oldtrader
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The hospital system, is the major one to handle hard problems for Montana, Northern Wyoming, Western Dakotas, and Southern Canada. My daughter needed to go to Billings, and as they sent up one of their 2 medical helicopters to pick her up ......
Southern Canada? Really? I'm probably 250 miles north of you, in a very small village in the middle of nowhere (OK... 60 miles from a major center, 25 miles to the nearest town), and I can guarantee you I would never think of going to any hospital in Montana when we have world class hospitals in Edmonton and Calgary. Our healthcare system only applies in Canada, and not outside.
I spend 1/2 my time in Florida as a snowbird, and my insurance I pay for is emergency only. In other words, I get stabilized, and then medivaced back to Canada for full treatment. Florida has some very good hospitals, but the US healthcare system is too expensive. Way to expensive.
As far as living in a small town, I would not change a thing. I lived in a large 1.2 million metro area, and chose to move to this remote village of 350 people when I retired for a lot of reasons, many that you have outlined. I would not change a thing.
The OP started talking about farmland and tractors but all the pictures posted by others are of horses, trees, hills and mountains! Farmland is FLAT...a few rolling hills and not a lot of trees....fields for miles on end with a few farmhouses scattered around and a town every 20 miles or so.
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Have you been to New England? Or even Pennsylvania? Lotsa hilly, rocky places that have farms. Small farms, maybe, compared to what I have seen in the northern Midwest, but farms nonetheless.
Traveling up I-35 from the Missouri border to Des Moines is hilly/rolling farmland.
From Des Moines to MN border is the typical flat black soil rich farmland.
However, in NE Iowa you have farmland so hilly nearly all is contour strips.
As a retired farmer, the variation in areas of Iowa fascinate me every trip thru there.
Not where I am from. Many rural communities there are turning into ghost villages or towns of only elderly people, it's really sad to see derelict houses. And if we talk about the US, there's quite enough place for some more people, urbanization is still going strong even there. I think the best thing about rural life is the safety and nature combo. I consider myself an anti-urbanization, back-to-nature advocate. I realized that my relatives in the 40s and 50s in their little towns and villages lived healthier than us today and that all my health issues are related to big city stress and pollution.
I am on something like a crusade as I spread the country-loving bug in my campus. I got so fed up with their disgusting trance music and big city antics that now whatever convo we have about social issues, politics, food or health I always go on how country folk have it better in many ways (mainly healthier food and environment, less stress, etc.) Of course I do it very delicate, not like some religious guys try to convert people to religion. Tell you the truth I think I "converted" a few people so far and that Ross sisters video helped me tremendously! I guess it's so outrageous that the obviously rural background gets stuck subconsciously or something like that. Now one of my city friends wants to have a wedding in a barn and I created something like a friends of nature club which has a very country-living bias
Thanks for the photo!
You know, you sound somewhat in the same boat (please forgive the pun) as Robin Lee Graham, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Lee_Graham . Sailed the world, experienced life, came back to college, didn't like what he was hearing in lecture, and went off to live in Montana.
As things go, I have read "Dove" but have not read "Home is the Sailor".......yet.
Things change over time. As a reader of a lot of Nat'l Geographic, the images we might have fallen in love with once may not be there anymore. Ie, in the 50's, the Eskimo of Greenland was still hunting seals. Now, they get their food provided by the government, are suffering diabetes because of it and even if they wanted to go back to hunting seals, they can't. Oil exploration in the Arctic has broken up the ice flows they use to travel across.
I read articles from the 70's or so about the last public boarding school in the West; surely it is long gone by now, just like the one room school house in Massachusetts. In the 60's, my family built a minimum maintenance vacation house on Hilton Head Island, in a time when it took 30-60 minutes to get there from the swing bridge of mainland to island. In the 90's, that time was cut to like 15 minutes because they put in a bypass. Us offspring sold the place in 2012 or so because it became so high taxed, so restrictive. It had gone from backwater and isolated (not even phones out at the house in the beginning) to all the comforts one could imagine.
Things change over time.
Can we go back to "how it was before"? Well, I think in order for that to happen, it would take something like an Earth blackout solar flare coupled with a Black Death and that wouldn't be very pleasant.
Probably better to accept what we have, the way it is now, and recognize that even so, things aren't going to stay the same. For example, my well is pumped automatically, powered by a solar grid. That certainly isn't the windmill of the past and even if I did use a windmill, it would probably be an electrical pump and not a mechanical one. I'm going out to the country to, ideally anyhow, study algae applications and now maybe water purification. I picture myself as developing deep space applications that might be used for colonization some century.
Which comes down to an interesting point that if we really want to get back to nature, we better take humans out of that picture. When it comes to people, we change things for the benefit of us, be it drilling wells instead of using a natural spring (or being only where the spring is) or stampeding massive herds over cliffs so to stock up on beef (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump ).
I live in a rural area in the south. I have also lived in a rural area in Montana.
Just remember, no matter WHERE you go, rural area or not, there is no escaping the 21st century, pros, cons, advantages, disadvantages, societal ills, whatever, it's 2016 everywhere.
Damn, since when did farm girls learn to become circus acrobats?
That had to be the most bizarre thing I've seen - Ever!
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Lotsa hilly, rocky places that have farms. Small farms, maybe, compared to what I have seen in the northern Midwest, but farms nonetheless.
