Vining

Vining, Minnesota is the proud home of Karen Nyberg, astronaut;  the Charles Nyberg Sculpture Park and the annual "watermelon days" festival. Vining, Minnesota, the place where I have spent portions of my last seventeen summers, has a population of sixty-eight people.  The ramshackle post office, soon to be closed, greets you as you drive through, the whitewashed walls peeling away to reveal a dull brown, the American Flag flapping proudly above the weatherbeaten green shingles. There are two bars along the remarkably smooth tar of the main street, two old pickups on either side of the road.  I learned to drive along these streets (parallel parking was impossible because there were never enough cars to park among).  I have been to the Bigfoot Gas Station at least thirty-four times, always smiling at the five old men who occupy the same table, pivoting to stare; their eyes scanning along my frame, as though looking for a reason to yell at me.
The idea of Vining terrified me.  And it still does.  How can you live in a world 3+ hours outside of the Twin Cities, isolated but for a statue of a cockroach betwixt a set of pliers?  No one wanders the streets, everyone knows your name and privacy is a distant dream. Am I too cynical to find the appeal, or am I simply missing something?  
We like to romanticize the idea of small town life.  The idea of waking up every morning and not needing to lock your door to feel safe.  Wandering the streets after dark, being on a first name basis with everyone around you. establishing yourself as a pillar in this microcosm of human life.  Is there any greater appeal than to be somewhere that needs you to function?  Is there anything that can inspire as much fear? 
But with every romaticization (I enjoy making up words), there comes the inevitable deconstruction.  Human beings enjoy tearing apart the things we love. Is that an example of a destructive tendency?  Is it just a simple balancing act that rarely succeeds? Either way, each archetype has its parody.  For every Mayberry, there comes Our Town, with Thornton Wilder's famous quote:

 "We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being. "

Maybe when we look at these small towns, whether to love them or to fear them, and we're really just grasping at that bit of eternity.  People come and go, but "there's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being." Eternity can inspire fear, but it also can inspire admiration.  We remember the people of the small towns, whether it be Karen Nyberg, astronaut or the old man that I nicknamed "Gus." The stories about them go on, long after the pliers squashing cockroaches have eroded away.