The Best Place to Live in America
A former co-worker of mine told me that she never watched the
news, or read a newspaper or a news magazine because she'd heard
that people who follow the news score higher on tests for
depression. She figured that if something really important were
going on in the world, people around her would be talking about
it and she would hear about it that way. Her goal in being
purposely ill-informed was to be a happier person. To my mind,
she wasn't very successful at being a happy person, but maybe
she would truly have been less happy if she knew what was
happening. These days, I can definitely see her point.
In past tragedies, like this one in New Orleans (and Missippi,
too, and other areas) I've wondered out loud why people live in
these areas. My motivation for asking that question, often, has
been frank envy. Coastal areas frequently are home to fancy,
multi-million dollar mansions and it's easy to see that those
people have a choice of not living there. They spent more money
than I can imagine to get and maintain those homes and, yeah, if
a huge hurricane comes by and they're inconvenienced ... nope.
I'm not sorry for them at all. Even with the loss of their
giant, gross castles on the sea, they're still a lot better off
than me.
The fact of the matter is that most areas of the country have
some variety of crappy, and occasionally, life-threatening
weather. I'm drawing a mental map of the United States and I
can't think of anywhere that you'd want to live year round.
California? Mudslides and wild fires. Seattle? Rain. Arizona?
Heat. Hawaii? Hmm... is there anything wrong with Hawaii? Oh.
That's right. Monsoons. Actually when I was living in Minnesota
I met a guy who had grown up in Hawaii and moved away as soon as
he could. 'Why,' I asked him, 'Did you decide to move to this
frozen Hell?' (It was mid-winter) 'Did you get sick of
paradise?' The reason, he explained to me, was that the
temperatures in Hawaii were usually in the mid-eighties and very
humid and that wasn't very pleasant to him. And Minnesota looked
better.
Here where I live in Western Wisconsin, the crappy weather comes
in the form of brutal Winters. Say it gets a little colder than
usual, like now, when Fall's coming, you can never say: "Gee,
it's kind of cold out today." Because Someone is definitely
going to one up you. "You think this is cold ...?" For the
record, if I ever slip and say that again, what I really mean is
that it's colder than it has been recently, and not that it's
the coldest that I've ever experienced in my life. You don't
have to regale me with tales of how frigid and nasty it can get.
Believe me, I have my own stories, thank you.
By the way, the coldest day I ever experienced in Wisconsin was
fifty-five below. That's fifty five regular fahrenheit degrees
below zero, too. No windchill. That was, of course, an unusually
cold day for the area, but every couple of years or so it will
get to thirty or forty below. Here's an interesting fact: When
it gets to thirty three below zero, you can take a pot of
boiling water outside, throw the water into the air, and it will
then come down as snow. Then, as you're watching the pretty snow
that you just made fall to the ground, you're also thinking that
somehow you've got to start your car.
The reason that I live through this is because simply this is
where my life is - job, family, friends, memories - the whole
ball of wax. To move would be to sever all connections and leave
my foundations. Which I've done in the past. When I was in the
military I moved around quite a bit and when I went to school, I
did it in a different state, Minnesota, and stayed there
afterwards. I did stay within driving distance of my hometown so
I could visit on weekends. I'd have to think it's like that with
most people. Like those in New Orleans, and Mississippi.
Okay. Assuming there was somewhere in the United States where
the weather was always perfect and every citizen lived in
prosperous peace and harmony with all their neighbors, what
then? Should all two hundred and seventy million of us move to
that little bit of paradise? You'd think - wouldn't you? - that
with that number of people it would just stop being a paradise.
No. We have to spread out a bit. And those with less means are
naturally going to have to be in the less deireable areas. Do
you think, perhaps, that millionaires are living in trailer
parks in Tornado Alley? None that I know of. You live there
because that's what you can afford.