When the cable renovation show announced it was going to take over a different town for its mass renovation special, the town council called for an emergency town meeting right after the regular one.
A town on the river, not necessarily better, the renovation show hosts said in their rejection video. But more filmable, more photogenic, more renoviable.
The two stars of the show, a couple in their mid-thirties, smiled and chuckled their way through the pre-taped video, aww-shucksing and yee-hawing and charismatic in their letdown of the townspeople, who wept at the news. The commemorative programs the townspeople held in their hands—printed specially for the initial town meeting—turned instantly into taunting notices from a future they would not attain.
The townspeople cursed the whims of cable networks that could direct tourist dollars to inundate towns like theirs with sales tax revenue to last for eternities. The townspeople made impossible vows against the show, against the two stars, against the concept of visual entertainment.
“Folks,” the mayor said that evening at the emergency town meeting, “I know this is tough to hear. First of all, we’re on a river too. It’s muddier, sure. We don’t have the prettiest fish either. Our river is chock full of invasive snails and mussels. There’s no reason they’d need to film those, though, come to think of it. This town is just as good, if not a little better, than that other town. I won’t even say the name. They want community? We have community coming out of our ears. Civic pride that rises right up to the point of blasphemy. That’s our town. They want down-homeness? We’re so down in our homes that some of us never leave, am I right?”
Murmurs of agreement bubbled up within the crowd, erupting here and there like deepwater thermal vents, bringing new life to what had been, moments before, a cold and lifeless place. Small remarks. Ideas. More vows. Sweet talk. Esquisses of chitchat. Someone said, half in jest, that the town should move forward with the renovations on their own. Go one better on the other town. A Leibniz on the other side of the room put forward the same notion at the same time, and soon the general mood in the room was: defiance, excitement, and parochial rage.
The spirit of infrastructure improvement swept through the townspeople, and a mania gripped them. Small acts, they perceived, could aggregate into big change. Their old-ass, left-behind, infested-backwater burg could—with the right paint, the right murals, the right goddamn lights, the fonts—transform itself into the hot new cosmopolitan small town on the scene, eclipsing the other town in both appearance and authenticity, for they would have made the transformation themselves, without the help of two admittedly magnetic, immoral outsiders.
It started small: everyone within town limits painted their front doors a different color. Brightening up the place, they said. Nothing like a fresh coat of paint they said, chuckling. There’s nothing god loves more than a marked door, some said, sweating as they applied their paint in a thick impasto. True, some of the latecomers had trouble finding shades that hadn’t already been chosen, so scattered throughout the neighborhoods were all the exotic pantones, along with unfortunate browns and greens that hadn’t seen the light of day maybe ever, and menacing pastels.
And it worked. Neighbor helping neighbor. Neighbor chopping it up with neighbor. Saying hey. Crossing the street to ask how the kids were. Dodging traffic to cross the street to help neighbor carry grocery bags inside. Hurling, in a fine, tight spiral, an unopened carton of milk across two yards to land snugly in the outstretched hands of neighbor.
Everyone started posing the right kind of questions: How can we make more community, commune harder? How can people take more pride in living in this town, a town that, even on its best former days, could feel like a hostile, toxic little hamlet, so benighted and unattractive, all the more frustrating because there was no economic or environmental collapse to point to as a cause for what it had become? What makes a small town small, or a town? Can a small town become smaller and more adorable? By knocking down a few houses or blocks? How many little knickknack stores are too many? A chirping, bespectacled busybody stands on the corner of each block leading to the center of town, humming a civic tune and offering you dixie cups of herbal tea—who says no? Could the town become so small and so towned that it would consist only of one perfect hand reaching into one perfect mailbox to retrieve a single, crisp envelope adorned with perfect cursive and enveloping a letter of powerful and honest love?
And further: Could you bake a hot dish that required multiple sawhorses to support it in the front yard? A hot dish the size of an extravagant in-ground pool, the same depth, filled to the brim with melted cheese and potatoes, the comfort-food equivalent of the Greeks sacrificing like a hundred fat bulls on a beach, a gift to the gods and a blessing to all those who partook in the sacrament?
It all really did work for a while. Accolades poured in from across the county, the state, the country. Their town blew past the other town in rankings of: best small towns to visit, hidden gems to see before you die, monuments of mankind that reflect god’s grace, best places to get your heart broken, best places to see invasive snails, the getaway’s getaway’s getaway, hidden gems to see after you die/best small towns for burial.
The other town, although it’d had a flash of celebrity and TV-related tourism after the premier of the big renovation show, could not match either the tenor or the depth of the rejected town’s small-townness. The TV-renovated town’s many murals meant nothing, and no one believed them. People wept openly at the special mandatory farmers markets and craft fairs. In church, they all made specific prayers under their breaths against each other, the renovation show, and god. The chair of the chamber of commerce tried and failed to hang himself from the newly built gazebo in the city’s main park, but one of the rafters—a beam of haunted reclaimed pine salvaged by the renovation show hosts from an old ferry shipwrecked in the river—broke.
However sweet their victory over the prettier but ultimately phonier and weaker-willed town, the people of the rejected town could not enjoy it for long. Sure, it was nice when nearby mayors and county councilmembers and state legislators and even the governor stopped by to get their pictures taken on Main Street, shouting with joy and possessed by the quickening spirit of city-forming, of conurbation, laughing almost alarmingly at the fact that civilization and settlement had produced this town, here, a true jewel.
It couldn’t last. The homeostatic townness of the town had been violated. Too much community, too much neighborliness, too much camaraderie. Everyone knew everyone’s business forward and backward. A pleasant pancake breakfast that had gone on too long; the townspeople felt talked out, full, sticky, exhausted.
Everyone started posing the wrong kind of questions: How do we return to what we had before, an atomized, isolated little burg full of hostile folk wearing sunglasses and camo shorts? Can we, as a town, go deeper and further away from small townness, banish the tourists, let the murals and doors and the knickknack shops lie fallow, and embrace what brought us this far in history? A main street dead and crowded with mystery business, never open: gold and coin shops, battery collectors, VCR tape dupers, tiremongers, old gray men selling old gray dust to each other over and again.
In pursuing decline, many townspeople turned to chemicals, to solvents and aerosols. No more mom-and-pop shops, only angry business uncles who waged war against each other through impenetrable card games and fine gradations in the add-ons, shininess, and pure hurtling tonnage of their trucks and utility vehicles. No more community gatherings, or hoedowns, or rallies, or bazaars. If you weren’t down in your home, deep down in solvents, you better be scheming, rummaging, or congregating in a car and with aerosols.
They wondered, the town, if they could spend so little time around each other that they would fully dissolve the bonds. A small town dissipating into vaporous nothing, an unincorporated stretch of habitable land, inhabited grudgingly, no name, just streets and numbers. The snails finding new sloughs. Could it have been a crime to hold too tightly? And further: could you hold a town so lightly in your arms that it would fly apart, houses and whole neighborhoods straying off by themselves, heading straight for the prairies and the grasslands full of camas?
Kevin Hyde
Kevin Hyde's work has appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Ninth Letter, Gigantic, Redivider, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from the University of Florida. He lives with his wife and their two kids in Tacoma, Washington.