It has been a quick adjustment to the small town style. I love the fact that my daughter could play out front with her cousins and she was safe – that’s cool.
Saturday night I was talking on the phone with my dad after dark. (The way I knew it was late was because the fire station did its nightly 9pm emergency klaxon test. You know, like an air raid?) While talking on my cell walking down the street, I heard three house doors open, pause, slam, click lock. That I could get used to. I just walked in the middle of the street and talked quieter.
The more disturbing part were the backlit silhouettes in the windows. Staring. As my dad says, I was Saturday night cable. I hope the town warms up to the 6’9″, Scion xB-driving (should I mention the MacBook?) city boy before the July 3 boot scoot. Yeah. Wasn’t that the plotline to Footloose?
I have some very funny stories (especially for those following my Twitter feed in the “From the Field” sidebar), but I also have some crazy stories. Everyone knows everyone’s business.
Literally, business.
Everyone knows who’s making what and where it goes. I mean, the car dealership has everyone come out and shake your hand when you buy a car. “I’ll be working on your brakes.” “I do mufflers.”
But there’s some downsides to knowing more info than in a big city.
Gas Prices
Town Pump
7985 Highway 200 E
Missoula, MT 59801
$4.05/ gallon regular unleaded
Town Pump
Highway 93 S
Polson, MT 59860
$3.98/ gallon regular unleaded
as of June 30, 2008
Here’s the complaint: people know the truckers. They know that the fuel trucks go to Missoula first and then Polson. Polson has more shipping tax/trucking expenditures and yet is cheaper. The Missoula people traditionally charge more than Polson, sometimes from 10 to 15 cents more.
This doesn’t sit well with Small Town, U.S.A. We also have a major oil refinery and coker here (cokers turn left-overs from the refinery process into usable stuff like asphalt. Yep. Makes you want to reach for that Diet Coke, right?). Townspeople know that the price of oil for Montana and all of its exporting areas was bid and locked in months, sometimes years, ago. Gas prices are a very sore subject here because they know the people trying to rip them off at the gas pump.
But the most fun I’ve had so far with small town dynamics is the “Don Quixote Project”.
Being a refinery/coker town, Laurel is also a train town. (Laurel High Locomotives. Get it?) Trains go non-stop, 24/7. Each time they pass a crossing, they must sound their horn. Makes sense. But the funny/annoying thing is that you can hear the signal from the next town, your town, and the town coming up. Horns blow all the time, especially at night “when no one notices”. (Unless you have an infant.)
But the issue is that the townspeople of Laurel are being trained to ignore the trains. (My youngest daughter adjusted by the second night and slept right through them.) In a town that has had only 3 train-related accidents in the past 30 years (2 involving people getting hit by the 5th/6th cars of a train by trying to go around the crossing arms (don’t ask) and 1 where the guy was drunk), people are starting to get a little too cozy with the crossings.
The town has adopted the Don Quixote Project (called that at city hall) and they are trying to take on Big Rail. (The guy at Hardee’s had a “S. Whiplash” nametag, but now that you mention it, his moustache did look familiar.)
The funnier/scarier part is early in the morning the trains will stop on the tracks so the engineers can get out to get breakfast.
The town is surrounded by tracks. The morning trains trap the town. In order to get from the south side of town to the north, you have to go to the neighboring town, loop around, and come back to Laurel on a different route. The volunteer fire/EMT department beats the state average in response time by 6 minutes.
Unless they have to go to the other town first.
Surprisingly, more than a few babies have been delivered in parking lots.
You gotta love small towns
with all its quirks.
