There are some out there in law and politics who believe everyone should live, close together, in an urban environment. They wish to enact public policies that make it difficult to get from the country to the cities.
I am a fan of roads that connect the suburbs and the country to the cities, because these roads make it possible for people to earn a living in the city while living and raising their families in the country. I was recently reading a wonderful book--The Necessity of Empty Places by Paul Gruchow--that includes an essay on the Nebraska Sandhills. Here is an excerpt I love (p. 22):
I remembered happening upon a settlement on a knoll. It was scarcely even a village. A few houses, an elevator, a gas station. Mostly it was given over to an enormous cemetery.The striking thing about the cemetery was not that there were so many graves, but that the spaces between them were so wide. These people needed as much elbow room in death as in life.
And here is another wonderful passage about the country roads of rural America (p. 58):
It is like the difference between an interstate expressway and a county highway. An interstate is broad and swift and in its own way it keeps to the level. You can drive on an interstate across the almost endlessly enchanting of countrysides and encounter only an unrelieved monotony. The expressway exists in its own world, an unwalled tunnel, and moves at its own urgent pace....
The county road, on the other hand, moves in and through the landscape and exists as one more feature of it. Where there is a tree and a sun, the road falls under shadow; where there is a stream, the road follows down one bank, across the water, and up the other bank; where a tall hill intervenes, the road goes around rather than through it and the traveler enjoys the sensation of having moved among the hills; at the village, the road unhesitatingly takes it in, and your own pace slows to accommodate the taking in, rather than swooping to the right or left around the settlement at a curve calculated for high-speed safety. A stray cow might cross in front of you, and you will be obliged to stop to let it pass and so you will chance to hear the song of the meadowlark on the fence post. The hay wagon ahead cannot be gotten around; you are forced to reduce your own speed to the local standard, and so you see the marsh hawk circling above a pothole.
This last, wonderful excerpt reminds me of my commute to the law school each day. Seeing wild turkeys, and hawks, and foxes, and cattle, and deer, and hearing the song of the meadowlark each day makes me, I think, a better teacher and a better husband and father. The best life might be to live and work in the country. But we often have to settle for the second-best in life, and the second-best for me is to work in the city and live in the country. I thank God for sprawl, for roads that connect the empty places to the crowded places and enable me to live in the one and work in the other.
