It's The Pitts
by Lee Pitts

Out Here In The Boonies

Many people who live in big cities on the left and right coasts have no idea how big this country is or that the rest of us poor pilgrims even exist. For example, a Montana friend of mine was introduced to a West Coaster who upon meeting him said, “I have a friend who lives in Denver. His name is Jack, do you know him?”

The coastie had no idea that Billings is a day’s drive from Denver or that there are several people who live in Denver. More than a few of them, no doubt, named Jack.

The trendsetting coasties in urban areas hardly know we exist because we are not visible through the smog enveloping their skyscrapers. We can’t be heard over their ringing phones and honking horns. The urban snobs make jokes and call us hicks, hayseeds, and rednecks. They think we all are missing a few front teeth, are married to our cousins, abuse our wives, torture the animals that share our beds, wear bib overalls, go barefooted to collect our welfare checks and have garbage bags for windows in our broken down cars that we park on our dead front lawns. In their eyes we are all uneducated, have poor personal hygiene and live in a cultural wasteland.

They make jokes that we exist on Spam, Moon Pies and roadkill we scrape off our dirt roads. To hear them tell it we bank at the pawn shop and have only one street and it’s one-way and headed out of town. They assume all this because they once saw Hee Haw, Deliverance, and the Beverly Hillbillies and because we are portrayed that way in the media. To them the world revolves around New York and Hollywood and if you choose to live in a different time zone you must be a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

If an urbanite should accidentally read this little essay I’d like to dispel some rumors. This may come as a surprise to you but we have electricity, refrigerators, color TV and computers just like you. You don’t have to speak slower or louder so that we can understand. I know this is hard to believe but we get mail and newspapers on a semi-regular basis too. Our kids go to real schools and many of us have been inside a mall, on an airplane and in an elevator not of the grain variety. It’s true we don’t get excited about seeing movie stars because on a clear night we can see real stars.

We get the same TV channels as you do and radio waves even reach way out here in the boonies. Admittedly we prefer Paul Harvey to Howard Stern and the weekly newspaper to USA Today. And yes, we do know how to read. It’s just that we prefer our news, not yours. We own stock too, only ours has four legs and if things get really tough we can eat ours. We don’t sew our own clothes from flour sacks nor do we all belong to militia groups with secret plans to overthrow the government.

It’s true that every small town doesn’t have a museum filled with modern art but our refrigerators are covered in crayon drawings by our kids. We don’t have Broadway but we can see our own children in a school play. The opera doesn’t perform nightly but the rodeo, food festival and county fair come once a year. We play sports too and our teams have even been known to beat yours on occasion.

In your arrogance you like to think that out here in the sticks we move a bit slower than you do. I think you’ll find the whole world moves at the same speed, it’s just that while you are busy “raising awareness,” we are raising livestock. While you are producing movies we are producing food. Tofu doesn’t grow in chunks, wine doesn’t run in rivers and steak doesn’t fall out of trees, you know?