Regardless, my wading into a heated debate about the validity of a whole sport, let alone the world’s most popular sport, is less about soccer’s value per se and more about its value as a substitute good in the economic landscape of sports, particularly when that landscape is snow-white. Because this year’s World Cup is being held during the Northern Hemisphere’s winter, one wonders why the most popular tournament on the rest of the planet would catch on at all here in my neck of the Great White North, where ice hockey is just a television channel or a frigid bleacher seat away. C’mon, people.

Hockey and soccer are close cousins in the family of sports. Not as close as each is to field hockey, of course – with a ball like soccer but a stick like hockey, and with a net like hockey but grass like soccer, no paternity test is necessary – but they’re kissing cousins nonetheless. Both have a goal on each end and a goalie/keeper who’s a little bit crazy and low-scoring games and confusing rules about when a play is offsides. There are differences, too, of course: one is the most popular game in some of the hottest climates on Earth, while the other is popular on the narrow belt of tundra that’s far enough north where ponds freeze before Christmas or Boxing Day or whatever holiday on the Orthodox calendar they use in Russia, but not so far north that you need to pack up the skates when the reindeer herd moves on. Also, one is the cheapest sport to play, and can be played on the most surfaces and in most stadiums or arenas or gyms or parking lots, while the other is the modern-sport equivalent of jousting, complete with weapons and armor and a royal budget to match, but with a Zamboni instead of a horse, kind of.

But the biggest difference among the similarities is the speed of play: not the speed of the athletes themselves, mind you, but the speed compared to the sheer size of the playing surface. Yes, yes, soccer players are near superhuman – they run for an hour and a half across grass best measured in acreage – but the ball can only move so fast across a meticulous turf farm. In hockey, you can reverse the puck from one side of the ice to the other in a second or two, and be deke-ing and juke-ing the goalie on a breakaway a few seconds after a turnover. In soccer, reversing the ball feels like a committee meeting with a light lunch in the agenda. People who know the sport can see a fastbreak coming what seems like minutes before the rest of us catch on – they have time to take another drink of beer before things get interesting, or maybe even leave their seat to go buy another beer. Except this year in Qatar, of course, which is a different story.

Because their gameplay is so similar, hockey and soccer are easy to compare, and the simple, empirical, indisputable reality is that a hockey game looks like a soccer match played by giants, plus with sticks and armor, which adds a lovely Game of Thrones-meets-Dick’s Sporting Goods appeal. For these giants everything else about soccer would be to scale: the larger goals would seem smaller and the larger ball would seem tiny, but the giants would leap and bound from end to end and side to side like a soccer match at 1.5x speed. Flipping from hockey to soccer on television is like watching the same sport except one is played by Munchkins on the Emerald Pitch of Oz, and the camera is on Dorothy’s flying house during the tornado. Or something.

Hockey has other advantages, too, like knowing when the game ends and end-to-end empty-net shots and a number of shots you can’t count on your fingers and collisions where the players actually get back on their feet. But beyond all that, its action and pace put soccer to shame, at least as entertainment, and especially as casual entertainment.

Sure, it’s the world’s beautiful game, but as a substitute good, soccer just isn’t that great.

P. A. Jensen lives in Minnesota with his wife and son. (@P_A_Jensen)

P. A. Jensen (@P_A_Jensen) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

P. A. Jensen (@P_A_Jensen) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

P. A. Jensen (@P_A_Jensen) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

They say not to read the comments. Well, I read the comments. And a letter to the editor. And yikes – in a disappointing way.

I wrote an opinion column in the Star Tribune that made a simple argument, albeit in a covert way (more on that later). The argument revolves around two main points. First, the coach of Minnesota’s WNBA team, Cheryl Reeve, has made many public statements advocating for inclusion of women and people of color in leadership positions, especially as coaches. These statements have included calls for “sacrifice” and “courage.” Second, Reeve herself holds two jobs – head coach and general manager of the Lynx – that are typically held by two different people. I say “typically” here in the sense of professional sports in general, as about half of the twelve WNBA teams are led by coach/GM combos, and it’s not unheard of in the NBA, even if it’s uncommon. It’s rare in the other three major professional sports in the US. These two inarguable points lend themselves to a little syllogism: if Reeve herself wants more people of color in leadership positions, and if she holds two leadership positions commonly held by two separate people, then she should just give one of her jobs to a woman of color. Easy-peasy. Or not, apparently. Now, before we get underway with the good stuff, I’ll make a note about the style, or covertness, of the column itself. I’ve submitted a few columns to a few outlets making similar arguments in the past, and those have gone unnoticed and unpublished. Interestingly, those columns made arguments along the lines of “Hey, if this is true, then this should be true, too, and anybody who doesn’t see the contradiction should rethink her positions.” Did I mention that these went unpublished?

So, to shake things up, I wrote this column without the “told you so” feel. To be clear, I didn’t lie, and this isn’t a hoax: I just didn’t chastise the positions themselves as nonsensical, even if they were. A reader would probably assume that I championed the cause that Reeve claims to champion, even though that’s not true – it just goes unaddressed, and I’m polite about things, to boot.

But it also doesn’t matter: Reeve said what she said, and because she said it, she’s kinda painted herself into a corner, logically. I decided to point that out using honey instead of vinegar, is all. Anyway, the responses to the column self-sort into a few themes of varying levels of cleverness and intrigue. First are the throwaways that are inevitable among anonymous comments on the Internet: I’m a “misogynist,” for example (because Reeve is a woman, and because I didn’t similarly challenge the coaches of the other major professional teams in the state, who are male – more on this later). Or, a little more interestingly, but only barely: I shouldn’t tell other people how to live their lives, never minding the fact that I’m merely repeating Reeve’s words back to her. Or, most interesting of the least interesting: that giving away one’s job to someone else based strictly on diversity quotas is a stupid idea. Ironically, I agree, but I don’t really fault the reader for being confused, largely because my honey-not-vinegar mode of delivery might have made it seem as though I supported Reeve’s position. I don’t. So, I chalk that up to attacking me as if I’m a social justice warrior when, in fact, I’m not – I’m just speaking about social-justice issues more neutrally than people who disagree with them usually do. I’ll consider that an odd flavor of friendly fire. But some of the comments are more interesting. One theme is that I, as a white male, should then give up my job – or “journalism career,” as one put it – to a person of color, too, and my failure to do so demonstrates my own hypocrisy. Ha. This is pretty laughable, for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is I’ve never publicly advocated for inclusion of people of color in journalism, so it’s not a parallel to Reeve’s case. Also, to say that I have a “journalism career” at all is odd, if understandable. Sure, the column was printed in the biggest newspaper in a major media market, but it was published under the “New Voices” initiative (a sort of affirmative action program for new writers, best I can tell), and my bio says that I run a blog, which these days means nothing. And if you saw the traffic analytics for Rurality Check, “nothing” comes pretty close to the truth. To put a finer point on it, even if I had made comments about social justice and therefore were indeed susceptible to calls for hypocrisy (again, I haven’t, so I’m not), I’ve merely started a little blog just like literally millions of other people have – this is far from holding a coveted job in professional sports, as Reeve does. Bloggers are not a finite, exclusive pool, either: nothing’s stopping any nobody from starting a blog and submitting opinion columns for free (evidence: I’ve done exactly these things), but one can’t just wander the Internet in one’s pajamas and cheaply buy one’s way into a head-coaching job of a WNBA team. So, you know, apples and kumquats, or something. (Side note: one commenter asked, apparently as some sort of “gotcha,” if I have ever given up a job in the name of social justice. Hm. Well, I left a tenured professorship that was subsequently filled by a woman – in a STEM field. Does that count? I’m told it does. Gotcha back at’cha, I guess?) One more ratchet-click to the left were the comments declaring that I, as a white man, had no business commenting on social justice issues at all, let alone the career of a woman. This is more troubling, even if it’s silly. I chalk it up to confusion about a well-meaning point about diversity: while it’s probably true that people of diverse backgrounds will produce a greater diversity of ideas than would a monolith of white men, conclusions about scrutiny of those ideas don’t seem to follow, logically. That is, while I might subscribe to the idea that the generation of more diverse ideas is a good thing in the pursuit of some sort of Truth, capitalized – and maybe, therefore, that hiring more diverse people is a good thing – I don’t see how that leads us to a place where the ideas themselves are sheltered from scrutiny from certain groups. The opposite would be true, actually: if anything, in the name of diversity we would want more diverse viewpoints scrutinizing ideas in general, to more assuredly approach consensus, or maybe Truth. So, when I merely parrot a woman’s views, I’m adding to the diversity of the crowd talking about those ideas. Good for “diversity,” no? Puzzlingly, of course, the column is written in a way that isn’t clear that I’m scrutinizing the ideas at all, or even the person. And even if the column is viewed as sarcastic, it’s not so much scrutinizing the ideas as demanding that the speaker hold herself to them. So, for some people, not only is who says the idea more important than the content of those ideas, but an idea can become stained when the Wrong People simply repeat the ideas of the Right People. Or something. So, comments of this stripe seem to boil down to an exclusivity argument wrapped in language of inclusivity, which, sadly, is too common in our discussions of diversity, and maybe on the political left in general. It’s racist, or sexist, really, and people, plural, felt emboldened to write it in plain language, even if anonymously. Seems regressive, not progressive. Sigh. This brings us to the non-anonymous comment, a letter to the editor from one Barb Lutz that the paper published the following week. I have to say that I couldn’t have written a better synopsis of the confused thinking regarding the issue of diversity in coaching – I wonder if a sympathetic reader wrote it as a troll, but I doubt it, if only because I wonder if anyone would be that bored. The letter is four paragraphs, and the first is a pretty fair synopsis of the argument in general, at least after a sardonic comment that she “doesn’t know where to start.” The wheels fall off immediately thereafter. After a throwaway “Really?” to start the second paragraph, Ms. Lutz asks why I didn’t also call on Geno Auriemma, the legendary white, male coach of UConn’s women’s basketball team, to resign his job in the name of social justice. Again, right back at’cha: Really? One wonders where to start. Mr. Auriemma may be the single worst comparison to the Reeve example – both cruxes of the argument don’t apply to him. First, and most obviously, he doesn’t hold two jobs: he coaches women’s college basketball, which doesn’t have separate coaches and general managers. Asking someone to give up his only job is different from asking someone to give up one of her jobs – that’s the biggest reason to single out Reeve in the first place. So, it’s apples and kumquats again, right from the start. More interestingly, Mr. Auriemma has made some (in)famous comments about why there aren’t more female coaches. (He hypothesizes a lack of interest due to grueling schedules and the need to move around the country.) This got him into some hot water. This is the opposite of championing “social justice.” Throw in that the Star Tribune probably wouldn’t publish something about a coach half a country away in its Opinion pages (especially from a nobody writer – “journalism career” or not), and it’s tough to see a worse comparison. No matter – let’s press on. Ms. Lutz continues with some statistics about how half of the coaches in the WNBA are male, and all of the NBA coaches are. This is true. Also, I don’t see how it’s relevant. I suppose that this means that the sex ratio of coaches would skew further female if, rather than Coach Reeve, a male coach would resign and give his job to a woman of color. I suppose that’s true, too. But I’m not advocating for more female coaches, really. I’m pointing out that the woman who wants more women of color in leadership positions in the WNBA is, as a white woman, herself holding two leadership positions in the WNBA. The shifted focus to sex ratios seems like a dodge from the real issue: the contrast between Coach Reeve’s statements and her (lack of) action. The sex ratio of coaches doesn’t change whether Coach Reeve is behaving hypocritically, or whether she can help solve the problem she claims to think is so dire. Next comes more of the same, where Ms. Lutz claims outright that Coach Reeve is “not taking jobs from women of color. Men are.” Sadly, and obviously, these aren’t mutually exclusive: They all are, yes? But one of them, at least, is making comments about sacrificing to include more women of color, which seems inconsistent. Hence the column. This is where the letter takes a fun twist. After citing statistics about the coaches in professional basketball (where the coaches in the women’s game are 50-50), Ms. Lutz pivots back to college basketball to cite that “Division I athletic directors are 90% male,” and that “Men hire men in sports positions because that's who they are comfortable with.” She follows with “That’s human nature, and you can’t ignore it.” Like the singling out of Auriemma, this is an unfortunate choice. 63% of Division I women’s basketball head coaches are female. So, by Ms. Lutz’s reading of human nature, the majority of white, male athletic directors hire… women? It’s exactly backwards. You can ignore it, apparently. We wrap up with a few baffling parting shots. Lutz says that I suggest that Reeve be “penalized (for her success) at the height of her amazing career.” I say no such thing, of course: I merely repeat Reeve’s words back to her, juxtaposed with her choice to hold two jobs. If it’s a penalty, it would be self-imposed. I’m not suggesting anything – Reeve herself is. Lutz saves the best for last: she ends with a “by the way, Mr. Jensen” that alerts me to the fact that “very few coaches select their successor [sic].” See, I outlined in the column that Reeve, as the general manager, would probably choose her successor as a head coach – I think that scenario would qualify as one of the “very few coaches who select their successors.” Regardless, even if she recused herself from the search, one can rest assured that if a woman at the height of her career in professional basketball held a press conference demanding that her job be taken by a woman of color (which would undoubtedly receive national media coverage, both from the sports media and from the news media generally), I’m guessing the resulting hire wouldn’t be someone named, say, Ole Swenseid. Again, sigh. So, what to think? If the letter the Trib chose to publish is the best letter it got, the argument in the original column seems to have escaped unscathed. Instead, there was much screeching about the column (I haven’t mentioned the goings-on on Twitter) that redirected attention to the irrelevant, or the confused, or the ad hominem. But we knew this. It’s tough to make firm conclusions from people writing anonymously in the comments, and even from a letter to the editor, but they seem to mirror a pattern that we see online: a lot of the rhetoric swirling around the issues of diversity and inclusion is confusing, probably because the logic is itself confused, and the statements from leaders are self-contradictory. Or, maybe they’re just hollow P.R., or virtue-signaling, or – best case – aspirational, with no intent of acting out right now. The conclusion? Press onward, undeterred. You know, in the name of Truth, and the diversity of views. These things are important, I’m told. Anonymously.  

    P. A. Jensen (@P_A_Jensen) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

P. A. Jensen (@P_A_Jensen) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

From the article:

“Why the confusion about what ‘diversity’ means? It’s because, for a long time, our need for diversity has been so obvious that we haven’t needed a clear goal — ‘more’ worked just fine. For fear of sounding complacent, we haven’t stopped to consider what ‘enough diversity’ would even look like.”

P.A. Jensen (@RuralityChecker) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

P. A. Jensen (@RuralityChecker) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

P. A. Jensen (@RuralityChecker) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

She rocked and heaved from her car – a newish crossover-SUV, one of the smaller ones – about the time I pulled up. I recognized her from the forty or so weekly interactions at the threshold of her apartment door over the last year, maybe four seconds each, when I’ve handed her a brown paper sack with the “cold” stuff – milk and a slice of bread, maybe – as well as a foil tray with a white lid, the shiny corners tucked over with care by someone in a hairnet, maybe with some extra gravy at the corners.

(Wait – which corners? Of both the foil tray and the person in the hairnet, probably.)

“Marla!” I call out. She waddle-turns to see me – careful not to spill her coffee, I’d guess. And she pockets her keys to take her food, this week on the street, barely looking my way, maybe due to lack of waddle-turning and perhaps an inability to turn her neck. She perfunctorily mumble-thanks me and I politely respond. This isn’t exactly a Mr.-McFeely-Special-Delivery interaction, with smiles and conversation with People in Your Neighborhood.

Marla is one of only two people I see face-to-face, or maybe face-to-jowl, on the Meals on Wheels route each week. My son and I deliver nine or ten or eleven meals, depending on who’s in the hospital, and at most houses I just leave the sack and tray in a dirty plastic cooler on the porch, or inside the door, or in one case kinda inside the house on a rickety white table next to a walker. If the cooler is outside, its intent is less about thermodynamics and more about pest control: the coolers’ corners are more likely gnawed off than broken off.

My two oh-so interactive deliveries are to deliverees who live in apartment buildings and feel obligated to let me in the front door with a buzz or a ding. The buzz-er is a chipper and thankful and kind of enheartening lady with a permagrin and a now beloved cadence of “Thank you, thank you, thank you” delivered with cloudy, half-cocked eyes. The ding-er is Marla.

I’m pretty sure Marla would be in the leave-it-in-the-cooler camp if she didn’t live in an apartment – she refuses to make eye contact and barely mumbles a thank you, as if I’m bothering her. Or, maybe the arrangement of subsidized food delivery makes her uncomfortable. Or, maybe she’s floating on a raft of mental-health issues. Regardless, it’s not an altogether pleasant experience, for either of us.

Not that that’s the goal. The goal, as I understood it when I signed up with the nice lady in the Fellowship Hall, is to deliver meals to people who are unable to provide meals for themselves. As a former nursing home peon, and having delivered meals in my hometown decades ago, this seemed up my alley, especially as a way to get my son involved in some sort of service project in an otherwise self-service world. Each week he sits in the backseat and hands me the piping hot trays wearing his little knit gloves, serving as makeshift oven mitts, from the hardware store.

But it hasn’t made sense to have him actually get out of the car and deliver the meals to the people, because there’s no delivering to the people – only coolers. And now that I see Marla fresh from her drive-waddle to the convenience store, I wonder about the project’s entire advertised premise. I wonder why a woman capable of venturing into the winter in her new-ish car to hunt and gather convenience-store coffee and cigarettes can’t turn right instead of left at the light and waddle into the grocery store instead. And instead of buying chopped tobacco leaves at $8.00 – name-brand, to boot – she could buy some chopped lettuce leaves at $3.50 and fix a ready-made salad from one of those little kits that are Russian/Romaine nesting-dolls of plastic. And, as long as she’s willing to carry a coffee cup across icy hill and dale, she might as well carry a bag of her own little trays of food, quite cheap, already frozen, that she could, you know, put into a microwave and burn her own little fingers or maybe get her own knit gloves from the hardware store. Or something.

My time at the nursing home taught me that some people really need help, even if they don’t want that help. I get it. But I also remember a whole lot of earnest if not sanctimonious mini-speeches from people – who used to be nurses but who hadn’t actually touched a patient in years – regarding the importance of independence and self-respect and dignity. We orderlies were ordered to let the residents do as much as they possibly could, regardless how ineptly or slowly, for their own sake. I took this as gospel. Still do, I guess. And I would think the technological advances in cooking, etc. in our 21^st-century-American world would make this even easier than just a couple of decades ago.

But this decree of allowed independence from on high does not nicely align with the reality on the ground where the rubber hits the road with the Meals on Wheels program, which seems to steer more towards convenience than to Good Samaritan-style service to the indigent. See the example of Marla above, but also several others, including the man who was full-on snowblowing his alley with a full-size, two-phase snowblower one day when my little buckaroo and I pulled up in our four-wheel-drive sleigh. Imagine our surprise. Little Bucko summed it up concisely: “That’s odd,” he said.

I just set the sack and the tray into the cooler by the back door, as usual, as he kept on working.

Of note: that back door, like the black lid on Marla’s coffee cup, was holding on for dear life.

The houses on our route are a sight to behold, or something you’d expect to see on HGTV – as a “before” picture. Doors hang off of hinges. Eavestroughs hang from eaves. Downspouts have fallen down. Paint peels, if there’s any left at all. Plants grow out of places that no HGTV landscape architect would have approved, or thought possible, maybe.

Delivering to a broken house can be heartbreaking, but thankfully I’m often focused on other things, like the unshoveled sidewalk, or maybe icewalk, and the mounds of dog shit and the yellow patches of snow within the let-the-dog-out radius of a front door in a Northland winter. The ice on the walk can be treacherous for the relatively able-bodied like yours truly, and I wonder about some of the elderly Samaritans who venture to help the even more elderly each week. The sad irony of the prospect of one septuagenarian breaking a hip to deliver food to another septuagenarian, or even a sexagenarian, is heartbreaking, too – maybe more so. Breaking a hip has surgical consequences and can put someone into a nursing home – many never get back out. Maybe irony is too nice a word.

But the sad state of merely existed-in houses becomes downright tragic when we consider their inevitable effects on the housing market. Effects, plural: One, programs like Meals on Wheels allow people to stay in their homes for much longer than they would otherwise, and while this is maybe good and appropriate and relatively inexpensive for each elderly person and her family compared to long-term care, it also impacts the number of houses for sale. Coupled with the miracles of modern medicine, programs aimed at “self-sufficiency” can enable elderly people to stay in their homes for literal decades beyond the norm just decades ago, which squeezes the housing supply available for, say, young couples, or other people who need cheaper housing. Which sounds too familiar these days. I look at the ballooning median home price in our micropolitan area and have to wonder how much of the housing stock is held by people who shuffle on shag carpeting in worn-out pink slippers and who plant themselves on ancient couches watching daytime television at high volume while the guy with the red beard drops their hot meal for the day into the gnawed-on cooler on the sagging porch that cracks and groans and sometimes shifts, kind of an inadvertent combination of doorbell and security system, especially when the dog notices and barks. Every time.

And those porches do indeed sag and crack and groan and shift, which is itself the second problem. People who are metabolically alive but otherwise incapable of getting microwavable groceries instead of cigarettes are also incapable, one would think, of going to Lowe Depot and getting ten-foot sections of eavestrough and laddering themselves two stories to rehang and caulk their own little rainy-day Niagaras. Or, just as important, paying someone else to do the same. Consequently, the houses with the dirty plastic coolers out front deteriorate nearly into the ground, nearly literally, during the extra decade(s) that Medicare and Meals on Wheels et al. afford the occupants for remaining “independent.” By the time those independent indigents move on to a better place, whether in the sky or in Skyline Assisted Living, the house needs either major structural renovation or maybe straight razing. Neither is cheap; on the macro scale, both drive housing costs further skyward.

“Help the needy,” they said. “Do a good deed,” they said. I wonder. The next time I get that treasured, single “Thank you, thank you, thank you” amidst a dozen clunks of dirty cooler lids, I’ll be sure to offer a polite “You’re welcome.” But on my way out the door, to the rest of the world, I can’t help but say I’m sorry.

P. A. Jensen (@RuralityChecker) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

But the logic extends to the state and county levels, too. A "minimum" wage in a rural area wouldn't work in a metro area, etc.

So why not pick from the middle? My latest in the Duluth News Tribune asks the question.

P. A. Jensen (@RuralityChecker) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

P. A. Jensen (@RuralityChecker) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

P. A. Jensen (@RuralityChecker) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

“Charles!”

“But it’s true,” Pa said, stomping off his boots at the door. He handed her a rabbit by the back feet. “Did you know McSweeney’s isn’t carrying fresh produce anymore? Not until summer. We’re in a full-blown grocery desert.”

“But my kumquat cobbler!” Ma said. “How dare that McSweeney—fresh produce should be a human right, all year!”

“You got that right,” Pa said, hanging his rifle on its hooks on the wall. “And you won’t guess what happened in town last night. You know Cooter, who’s always at the saloon? The younger Miller boy shot him in the street. Something about Cooter being drunk and trying to take his horse. Shot ‘em with a pistol.”

“A pistol!” Ma cried. “I understand rifles for hunting, but who needs a pistol? Gun control can’t happen fast enough.”

“For sure,” Pa said. “But after all that, they took Cooter over to Doc Baker’s, and Doc wouldn’t fix ‘em—said he was too far gone. But the talk around town is that he was just refusing a ‘pre-existing condition.’ Died right there in the street.”

“Good Lord, another human right trampled!”

“That’s why we need that new Medicaid, and for all of us! But anyway, wouldn’t you know it, people are already lining up to buy Cooter’s house out there on the ridge, since there’s no affordable housing in town. Nothing decent, anyway, with its own stable and porch and at least two bedrooms, and within walking distance to the school, and that costs less than 30% of the territory poverty line.”

“Not everyone can cut their own logs like you did, Dear.”

“I guess. But word is that the Chinamen from out at the tent camp by the new railroad are gonna make a bid, too, and a high one.”

“Charles! Not ‘Chinamen’—they’re Asian Americans!”

“Right, right—sorry, Caroline. But the talk is that if those… Asian-Americans set up shop in town, their kids are gonna have a tough time in school, because they all speak Chinese. Or… Asian-American. Whatever—there’s gonna be a huge achievement gap, because they don’t speak the language. Not like the Irishmen and Swedes around here, anyway. Or wait—maybe European-Ameri…”

“So be it, Charles,” Ma interrupted. “If we have to hire a second teacher for that one-room schoolhouse, that’s just what we’ll do, somehow.”

“I suppose. But once the railroad’s done, I’m not sure what they’re gonna do for work.”

“That’s why we need a universal basic income, or a jobs guarantee. They’re immigrants—they’ve had it tougher than the rest of us who’ve been here all these months.”

“You’ve got that right. But I’m not sure it’s gonna matter, ‘cause there’s a petition to put that railroad they’re building through environmental review. Could take years, Lord willin’. They’re laying that track straight through the habitat of the three-footed grouse, and we all know there are only seventeen mating pairs left in the whole territory.”

“Oh no!” said Ma. “Those poor little birds, hopping around in circles. Still, public transportation is important, for all of us.”

“I know, I know. I really should take to jumping onto the back of the caboose going into town—I feel guilty every time I get the horses trotting and breathing hard, with CO₂ levels being what they are, and all. Let’s not even talk about the cow.”

“Don’t worry, Charles—the Lord has a plan.”

“I know, Caroline. But just to be safe, we’d better start thinking about our other Higher Power.”

“You mean pack the Supreme Court?”

“Amen.”

P. A. Jensen (@RuralityChecker) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

P. A. Jensen (@PrideOnIceCream) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

And the donut is all that’s missing, it seems, what with the twenty-ounce bottle of Coke and the bag of Werther’s Original already in that 300-pound woman’s little Rascal basket. I hope she gives her little blonde heroine a butterscotch for her efforts. But that Coke keeps sloshing and fizzing in the clear plastic bottle with the little red cap, pressurized by now to the point of shooting a belated 4^th of July Coke-bottle rocket through my windshield.

I’m guessing the Coke and the candy have a deeper role in this story, a story that includes a beyond-morbidly-obese woman in a Rascal scooter. I’m sure it’s a sad story, or a gut-wrenching story. She’s obviously pretty frazzled now—her eyes have gotten pretty big during her little Rascal rodeo, which has been a lot longer than eight seconds—but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that she’ll quickly reach for her trusty forms of refined sugar to help calm her nerves once she’s plumply in the van with that purple, cotton covid mask snugly under one of her chins.

Also, I don’t think her little rodeo clown, complete with makeup and brightly colored clothes, will ever suffer the same freight—those pink scrubs are probably an XS. Part of that is probably genetic, sure, but part of it has to do with the fact that she looks like she’s wrestled older brothers or something, the way she’s wrangling that scooter with bared teeth. To prove the point, afterwards she’ll probably scurry away in that universal display of unintentional, feminine coordination: face buried in her chin, hands up behind her head, adjusting her ponytail, walking quickly—the stuff of girls’ basketball players in every high school in the country, somehow. She’d probably have her elastic hair-thingy between her teeth, too, if she didn’t also have a mask on.

Sure, she may also have a Coke when she gets back to the nurses’ station, but probably not a whole one. And she’ll probably burn it off, whether via some college-application-building extracurricular activity or just by metabolism, or her next Rascal rodeo. But beyond all that, her little teenage neck—single chin in the front, still-throbbing vertebral discs in the back—is so little in no small part because it has not yet felt the weight of time. In the sense of sagging skin, I suppose, and also metabolic sagging, but also in the sense of the thickening that comes from the routine calorie-intake of most Americans’ adult lives, decades in the making. She, the dear soul, is still an XS in no small part because she has not yet confronted The Million.

The Million is the ghost of American adulthood, the subtle gluttony of accumulated consumption. The Million is everywhere, all around us, like The Force, only it takes no training to master. All you need to do is crack a can—of soda, of beer, whatever—and watch the Million do its dark magic, twelve ounces at a time.

Suppose, typical Americans that we are, that every week we consume a six-pack of our beverage of choice, sugary or alcoholic, or both. That’s about one beverage per day, giving yourself a day off each week in case you choose to observe the sabbath and let your liver and pancreas rest, lest they become holeyer than thou. Regardless, a six-pack of standard cola or mid-range beer is about 150 calories x 6 pancreas-gasms, or totaling 900 calories, each week, every week. But let’s be inclusive of the overachievers—the pint-drinkers and the milk-stoutly, Orange-Crushed crowd—and round up to 1,000. Which is still probably on the conservative side of beef, as for many people a six-pack is just a day at the beach, not a week.

1,000 calories per week is 52,000 calories per year. If the general rule of thumb, hardly super-scientific, is 3,500 calories per extra pound of fat, that’s about fifteen extra pounds per year, or the freshman fifteen every year—because we keep flunking Physiology 101, apparently. And if that not-so-freshman fifteen continues to pile up for a mere two decades—you’re a lifelong learner, of course—even until you’re only, say, thirty-eight years old, then that’s a flat million calories, a number big enough to have its own six-pack of zeros.

And all of those zeros served exactly zero nutritive purpose. The rule of thumb says that a million calories should be, like, 300 extra pounds. Maybe it’s amazing that so many of us are alive at all.

Regardless, that’s The Million. Kinda sneaks up on ya.

And The Million is just the start—they say the first Million is the hardest. They also say that the human body can survive on beer alone, and while many have attempted to prove them right, the experiment is routinely ruined by failure to self-control for myriad food-intake variables, which, while drinking alcohol, anyway, start to fall like Domino’s. Because, let’s face it, not too many people enjoy a 20oz Dr. Pepper slurry or two pints of stout while insisting that you hold the dressing on their salad. Instead, the little limp lettuce that comes on their burger gets tossed aside as if by some half-in-the-bag Romaine-ian Devil—slobbering and cartoon noises and a whirlwind of napkin bits and extra mayo barely optional.

When I worked at the diner, the family ordering another family of Cokes when they sat down served as a not-so-subtle signal to take back those Fresh Salads for Summer menu-inserts, thank you very much. Sometimes, though, the mother ordered Diet Coke, which sings like double-chin music when accompanied by the unsurprising order of onion rings—it’s “for the table,” she says, of course, as she’s already hyper-pumping that poor ketchup bottle with flab-wobbling arms, and some sort of pinkish aardvark tongue is maniacally licking chin numero uno.

The daughter has apparently prepared for the feast by opening a jelly packet already, for some reason, perhaps by habit. Which she finds difficult with her obligatory wrist brace.

Which, it should be said, has a staggeringly high appearance rate among the morbidly obese. I get it—the bigger they are, the harder they fall—but why are these braces always so half-assedly loose? This isn’t Fashion Week, and this sure as hell ain’t Paris, so your attempt at accessorizing is suspect, as is the utility of this half-tied, barely Velcro’d, bright-pink splint that somehow looks like you’ve worn it for a long day behind the manure spreader, or perhaps has been ruggling around with the Cheez-Its on the floor of your rusted-out Chrysler minivan parked outside. Not that your limp-wristed tying job is your first failure at self-care, apparently—I imagine it’d be hard to tie those laces tight with those greasy-sausage fingers. (Are the fingers greasy with sausage grease, or are they greasy and shaped like sausages? Ambiguity intended.)

The wrist brace, worthless if used improperly, harkens back to the covid mask under the chin of our Coked-out lady in the Rascal. In that case, the mask is worthless unless it’s maxed out over her jowls like a swimsuit model’s mini-thong over the nose of a pit bull. That poor cotton square and not-so-elastic bands probably contributed to her bulging eyes as her back end was front-end-loaded up into her tax-funded disabilities chariot: I couldn’t tell whether her eyes were the size of peppermint patties because she was scared of falling, or because she was asphyxiating herself, seconds away from shrink-wrapping that Mickey Mouse-patterned cotton to her uvula. Jesus, Lady, lose the mask. The situation is already devolving into the precarity of a life-sized version of mechano-flab-Jenga, but if you pass out, there will be a lot of paperwork for somebody, and I don’t want to pop a hemorrhoid Eagle-Scouting you from the sidewalk. Seriously, the mask isn’t helping: if you had the virus already, you’d know it.

Also, that sidewalk is going to hurt: your wrist brace isn’t even tied right.

Maybe all of this is a dramatic, cynical instance of half-fictitious extremes. Maybe. But our country’s actual mask debate is less fictitious, even if it is just as dramatic. Worse, all that drama overshadows the otherwise neon-glowing irony, or hypocrisy, or futility: we’re probably the unhealthiest country in the history of countries, yet only now—in a debate involving two layers of cotton sewn together by the old ladies at church—are we getting riled up about health. Never mind that we already hang ourselves with onion rings and drown ourselves in beer and soda, or that we have drunk and eaten ourselves through the lockdowns that were supposed to protect… our health. No, when other people might get us sick—the nerve!—we instantly become advocates for public health, writ extra-large.

Now, I’m not opposed to a lot of public-health arguments, I guess, especially regarding infectious disease, but in this case the prevailing logic seems inverted. Specifically, the anti-mask crowd has taken its usual Live Free and Die Coughing approach, its rhetoric mucus-slimed with repeated hacking of Freedom, and Liberty, and the like. I’m not opposed to this, either, but it seems that the mask-wearing crowd should be shouting the same thing: the mask argument seems like a public-health parallel of the age-old libertarian maxim of not caring if you swing your fist, as long as it doesn’t hit me in the chins. In the case of coronavirus, spread through the air, mask-wearing serves as an almost textbook example of the positive/negative-freedom debate, where someone else’s failure to wear the mask impinges on your freedom to Live Free and Not Die. Stated simply, Don’t Spread on Me.

Unfortunately, the pro-mask-wearing crowd appears to have fallen into its usual “for the herd” mentality and accompanying rhetoric, as if wearing a mask is a duty one has to the flag, or something—an odd turn of dubious patriotism. They’d be better off fighting fire with freedom fire instead of following the same old “we’re all in this together” trope, which might indeed be the last bastion of rhetorical hope for why a small minority should pay for the fat majority’s health care, for example, but isn’t necessary when arguing about why the fat majority shouldn’t have the expectation of a virus-free experience in line at Dairy Queen. You know, to pick another non-random example.

Non-random, indeed: have you been to a Dairy Queen lately? The only non-obese people in line at a DQ are either kids themselves (i.e. haven’t yet hit their first Million) or have kids with them (e.g. are too busy managing Little Susie’s dripping Dilly Bar to enjoy the latest installment of The Million’s payment plan). The Rascal Scooter company should serve as remora to this whale shark and set up shop next to every DQ in the country, and hit their target market in the red-spoon bullseye. One-stop shop.

Sure, all of this is a little more complicated than a little essay can hope to unravel, but this pandemic irony persists without stating the obvious: we’re apparently fine when we kill ourselves, but not fine when other people might kill us. Fair enough, actually. Unfortunately, though, to have a serious conversation that arrives at this seemingly unavoidable conclusion would require a level of honesty that’s out-of-bounds in today’s PC culture. I’d be quicker to respect the mask-wearing crowd if they were blunt about the realities of their argument: that sure, many of the co-morbidities synergizing with covid-19 infection are self-inflicted wounds, or the result of metaphorically shooting ourselves in the foot, or dropping the two-liter soda on our foot. But that bluntness is nowhere to be found, probably because to admit that reality as obvious, even during this time of genuine medical crisis or pandemic, would also lay bare a deep flaw in the rest of the “all in this together” progressive wish list for the past few decades. Namely, that if so much of our health hazards are self-inflicted in this country, and if such self-inflicted wounds are an issue of freedom of choice, we should probably reconsider whether it makes a lot of sense to socialize our healthcare system. After all, if Not-So-Little Susie has a choice to sleep next to the grocery box, and minivan around in a drive-thru wonderland, then it seems odd to follow that language of freedom with a coercive demand that someone else pay for the buffet of her health problems that follow.

One immediately sees the problem. We’re told that some people are just “curvy,” or it’s genetic, or it’s a chemical imbalance—as if blamelessly, as if without question—and that those same people are therefore also just as inevitably prone to its smorgasbord of health problems. To be glib, this is downright impressive from a scientific standpoint. Neuropsychologically speaking, that we can apparently link genetics to the impulse to order a twenty-ounce frappuccino pancreas punisher, with sprinkles, every morning, instead of plain old coffee, or, you know, herbal tea, strikes me as an undersold miracle of #science. Ditto with what must be an equally genetic and biologically determined aversion to rigorous exercise. I didn’t think that we had advanced that far—I’m impressed.

Or—or—we’re unable or unwilling to talk seriously about healthcare in the time of a pandemic because we’re also unable or unwilling to talk seriously about health at all. We have chosen to pretend that the unhealthy choices that Millions of Americans make haven’t already overstretched the waistband of our healthcare system. For all the people pointing the fingers at our politicians (left and right), or the Chinese, or people unwilling to strap a little cotton to their faces, how many people are pointing fingers in the mirror? How many people, rather than talking about “unforced errors” in terms of emergency response, are talking about the greatest unforced error of all, that we’re a country slack-jawedly lounging around with a staggering number of co-morbidities that are making coronavirus a bigger deal than it should be?

Instead, as usual, it’s gotta be—gotta be—someone else’s fault. A lot of us are screaming, some of us through masks, about failures of public-health policy, but our principal failures have been our not-so-public choices, and our unwillingness to talk about them plainly. Our failure has been our repeated, fierce denials that obesity and high blood pressure and Type II diabetes are largely preventable problems—denials made in the name of privacy, or politeness, or political expediency. Rather than confront the obvious, we’ve chosen to pretend that all of us should be responsible for each person’s choices, and for the abuse of their own bodies—passing the Millions of bucks yet again. And now, we’re all really in this pandemic together, like it or not, and to a degree that we probably needn’t be.

But try telling all of this politically-correct hoo-ha to our little blonde Sisyphus over there. She’s definitely paying for someone else’s choices: she’s sweating through her pink scrubs trying to move an equally sweaty boulder up a concrete-and-steel mountain. And thanks to her mandated mask, she’s practically in a self-induced hypoxia like she’s training for the SCUBA Olympics. Poor thing.

Actually, we’re all poor things—literally. One way or another, we’re all paying for it.

By The Million.

P. A. Jensen (@RuralityChecker) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

P. A. Jensen (@PrideOnIceCream) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son. 

P. A. Jensen (@PrideOnIceCream) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

That’s my friend Matt, kind enough to go golfing with me. He’s a good enough golfer to know how to help you, and a good enough teacher to make you feel like you’re learning instead of being taught. We’re out for my first round in years, as a practice round before league play starts in a couple of weeks.

We’re standing on the first tee of what I would call a pretty picturesque view of a pretty decent golf course, brown-ish spring grass aside. I’ve started to feel a bit self-conscious, though, not only because I haven’t golfed much since I stopped going home for summers in college, but also because I just watched Matt bomb one down the middle of the fairway, hopping and skipping over the winterized grass like some sort of steroidal and over-determined bunny. The ball, I mean—not Matt.

And, well, Matt golfs. As in, had scholarship offers to golf at small colleges. I hadn’t been on a course in a while, but I was taken aback at Matt’s swing. I’d never seen one like it, I don’t think. It’s like watching an F-150 carry the Dairy Princess in a parade: it glides along smoothly, effortless, but you can tell there’s power there, if you notice it at all.

My swing, meanwhile, is more like an intoxicated clown on a unicycle, juggling, even if I have much smaller shoes. Nonetheless, I remind myself to swing easily but still swing—the kindergarten-roundup of golfing instruction compared to whatever masterclass about spin velocities Matt is reviewing in his head—and hope for the best.

So, I also shoot one into the fairway, though mine is much easier to see, being how it’s so much closer. Also, mine had a bit more Jedi magic going for it, or against it, spinning and turning and bending to make things interesting. A PGA cameraman would have gotten vertigo, which would have paired nicely with the commentator’s laughter and the gallery’s snickering. At least I didn’t hurt anybody.

“Did you say you played in high school?”

Ha. No. Matt is being polite, again, I think. Or, maybe he’s being politely incredulous. But while we drive the cart to my ball—a theme for the day, as mine was always closer—we talk about basics of golf swings and how I learned to golf in a small town, which was nice because the greens fees were so cheap that we could go pretty often on our bikes, but it also meant that I never really, you know, was taught to golf. Which he found surprising, apparently, because he’s seen swings far more awkward—I’m guessing one unicycle, but two clowns, maybe also trying to carry the Dairy Princess. More significantly, he claimed that I’d undersold my golfing abilities, with some sort of Minnesota Modesty misleading into self-deprecation, I guess.

But if the self-deprecation had been intentional, it was out of politeness. I knew Matt was a good golfer, and it had been years since I’d touched my clubs—I didn’t want Matt to think that I golfed. But Matt made clear that my simultaneous downplaying of my golfing ability and my confidence that I could golf in league had puzzled him. He doubted that I would set myself up for a summer of torture (and set him up at the same time) if I had been awful, yet my self-assessment sounded pretty awful indeed. This goes beyond Minnesota Modesty into a downright communication failure, seemingly.

The paradoxical combination of humility and confidence seems natural to me, for better or worse. Maybe it’s because I’m from the stoic Midwest, but maybe more so because I’m from a small town, with its shallow pool of leisure options. At home, if you want to be active and outside in the summer, before hunting season, you’re kinda stuck with golf, unless you find hiking through sections and sections of flat farmland fascinating, which no one does. It doesn’t mean you’re a good golfer, but you can pass as passable.

Maybe this circumstance alone breeds a certain level of humility, because participating in activities that aren’t your favorite or for which you have no obvious talent reminds you exactly how untalented you are. This becomes obvious when you actually try hard at something and still stumble or fail, which neatly describes my relationship with golf. It becomes especially obvious when you try hard and fail in front of other people, which describes my relationship to all other sports in high school. In front of crowds, you can be made aware, even painfully aware, that you can utterly lack talent, at least at some things. That can be demoralizing, but at minimum, it’s humbling.

This flavor of humility can seem foreign to people from bigger cities. Bigger systems have enough people to create sub-communities centered around specialization, and it would be silly to expect them to spend time thinking and talking about the things they do poorly, or that make them uncomfortable. You see this in big high schools, or even when small-town kids go to big colleges: band geeks and jocks generally travel in different circles, and neither has to meaningfully confront the reality—on a daily basis and with people they know—that they’re just so untalented at so many other things. They certainly don’t risk vulnerability and attempt those things in front of other people, setting themselves up for ridicule.

That’s different in a small town, where there are too few people to form many “sub-communities,” resulting in semi-forced comraderie between people who excel at different, even non-overlapping, activities. Yet, this is how friends are made, especially among young people: in the shallow pool of options. Bigger systems aren’t paradise, either, of course, but there is a bigger menu of leisure, and you can make friends with people who choose the same items on the menu, and you can collectively live your lives as if many of the other menu options didn’t exist.

In a tiny town, you weren’t a band geek or a jock—you were probably both, which meant you were neither. And if you hated football—the only boys’ fall sport offered in my high school at the time—you’d better get in the weight room or sit at home.

It’s important to emphasize that this special flavor of humility in small-town people isn’t necessarily due to principled modesty or self-flagellation. Nor is city people’s aversion to generalism necessarily due to elitism or a unique discomfort for failure, obviously. It’s just a natural result of having small and large systems. Many small-town people are more comfortable confronting and wrestling with mediocrity and failure in this way in no small part because their lives are full of other people who are also outside their comfort zones, wallowing in the same mediocrity. It all kinda works out as a certain kind of normal.

As one example, rest assured that the men’s golf league on Tuesday nights in my hometown does not boast anyone trying to qualify for the PGA circuit. I used to golf with people who golfed once a week: on Tuesday nights. They’d come screaming into the parking lots in their pickups, straight from work, buy a sixer in the clubhouse, squirm into some golf shoes (probably still tied from last week), take three practice swings, and let ‘er rip. That was “golfing” to me. Actually, that was the “big-time,” after I got older—golfing pre-men’s-league-eligibility involved kids in flip-flops and too-big Twins caps lugging the hand-me-down bag of clubs from Target. Frankly, for a lot of us, driving someone’s family’s golf cart was our first experience learning to maneuver anything larger than a bike or pedal tractor. Farm kids—at least those who still lived on the farm—were naturally excluded from these casual get-togethers on the links, as they were learning to drive bigger equipment.

Again, “golf.”

Imagine my surprise when I golfed league in the “big city,” population approx. 100,000, whose residents insist is still a “nice, small town.” Everyone in branded golf shirts. Many fewer people drinking beer. Beer sold by an attractive young woman driving a golf cart modified into some sort of battle tank of beverage service, making sales with her megawatt smile under a glistening-white Titleist hat. This is in stark contrast to home, with the open keg at the seventh tee, sponsored by rotating local businesses, each the employer of a couple of the league players, probably. That keg would effectively slow down play on the whole back half (“Back nine?” There were only nine.) as men would cart across every adjacent fairway to get their SOLO cups a hole or two early, or to refill a hole or two later. It was self-serve, or maybe pumped by the guy who beat you to it, probably with a significantly lower-wattage smile, in a less glistening hat, and in much longer shorts, thank God.

No, these city guys were serious. They had decidedly non-Target clubs and watched the Golf Network in the clubhouse. They carried golf bags that didn’t look like they rolled around in the pickup bed all week, along with the 6, 12, and 18, etc. empty beer cans that accumulated throughout the season. These city boys golfed.

And this wasn’t one of the fancier places “in the city,” either; Matt and I opted for a boondocks course a few miles outside of town. Which, it should be noted, was still a different animal than the course back home. Sure, my home course was nicely kept and well managed, but it was in… farm country. Flat as a pancake, though with maybe a pool of butter as a hazard on nine, and a little river of syrup through seven. But flat. Not so much in not-so-farm country, where I’m golfing with golfers, who seem to be comfortable teeing off into what seems to be the Big Sky abyss, a blind dogleg hard left over a hill and over a river and through the woods and you’d better hope you don’t plunk Grandma. Oh, I’d bet you’ll be fine with a five iron, they say. Like hell—here comes the five wood and the bug spray.

I’ll take an octuple-bogey and a PBR, thanks.

Regardless, this just-outta-town course didn’t attract the fancy-pants country-club types—they were just regular golfers. But no one back home would ever call himself a “golfer” at all. There, the dreaded “Are you a golfer?” is met with the immediate squinting of the eyes: “Well… I golf, I guess…” immediately sizing up his conversant, especially whether he is wearing some sort of Callaway apparel over tanned skin, and probably a nice watch. To use the term “golfer” at all is to fall victim to the fallacy of specialization that undergirds the fragility of an identity whose supposed bedrock is a sand trap of leisure. Unspoken in the small-town mind, instead: “I work at a bird-seed plant—who the hell is a ‘golfer?’”

This seems like alien humility to the city person, to whom “I’m a golfer” translates in the native tongue, roughly, as “Yes, golfing is one of the things I have consciously chosen from the dizzying array of leisure options available to me, and because that choice was probably driven by some sort of talent—don’t we all like to do things that we’re good at?—I’m pretty good.” Or something.

This exercise in lexicalisthenics is barely fictional. Some extended family of mine live in an affluent suburban neighborhood in a major metro area, and a few years ago I was informed that their “little neighborhood golf tournament”—for reference, my entire hometown can barely field a tournament during its annual “festival,” probably because people are getting their tractors and combines ready for the parade—had a foursome that was only a threesome, and they were looking for a stray player to fill the void. So I hesitantly agreed, and a relative of mine was kind enough to make the arrangements with a neighbor of his, and even to introduce me to someone on his street who would also be in the tournament, because “he golfs, too.” Which was nice of him, sure. But it turns out that this guy on the street used to golf at a Pac-12 school that you’ve heard of, undoubtedly on scholarship. This guy was literally going to the same meets and tournaments as Tiger Woods (who played at Stanford); the conversation quickly died an awkward death. My experience was somewhat different as I waited to tee off while someone from the bird-seed plant crossed the fairway in a NASCAR-themed golf cart to get his third refill of light beer. But we both “golf,” I guess.

But you see how it’s a bad combination of well-meaning suburbanite and gun-shy country mouse: true, I can hit a golf ball better than people who “maybe golfed at a work-thing that one time,” but I’m not sure that I’ve ever golfed three days in a row, and I’ve never, ever had any kind of one-on-one instruction. Which, if you ever see me re-landscape a bunker with a sand wedge or snap a hook like I’ve pissed off Yoda, you’ll immediately understand. But I don’t “golf.” I just grew up in a place where golfing was one of the, like, six things to do, and where somewhat literally everyone golfed accordingly.

But as promised, there’s a flip side, a paradoxical kind of confidence that comes with that humiliation-driven humility. I, Captain Generalist, don’t “golf,” but I do kinda golf. And I kinda play basketball, and I can kinda play trombone, and kinda act onstage, and kinda sing, and kinda know what a nickel defense is in football, and kinda distance run. In fact, I lettered in all of those last six things in high school. Again, the humility shines through: I did not belong on a varsity basketball court in any meaningful way (which was probably why I sat on the bench), and I stopped playing football in tenth grade, and became the manager instead, which bafflingly still earns someone a letter as a senior. Yet again, that’s the point: I had no grand desire to help manage a football team. (What am I, the coach’s kid? Am I seven? No, and no.) I had no grand desire to call plays for the scout-team sophomores (we gained a yard!), especially at whatever dark time of the morning those practices were (before school in the seemingly barely sub-Arctic, to boot). But literally the majority of boys in my graduating class were on the football team, so, hey, why not. (Also, that meant less time for cutting grass in the fall.) But if I had been stupid/unaware enough to tell a girl in college that I played basketball in high school, she’d probably look me up and down and think I meant on PlayStation, and run away, fast.

Alas, small-town kids do indeed do lots of these things, albeit sometimes poorly—when there are only six things to do in town, small town kids are more likely to do them all. And that can give them an odd confidence, one that focuses on an increasingly uncommon state of being, a state of being that is so foreign to us in these hyperspecialized times: willfully accepted mediocrity. Sure, I can “do” something. Anything, maybe. It might not be very good, though. It might be awful. But that’s okay: I’ve been awful at stuff before. In front of people. People I knew. Whole towns’ worth of people. Meh—I’ll let ‘er rip.

The subtly obvious case in point is this little website that you’ve visited just now. RuralityCheck.com is not the New Yorker, or even the Upstate New Yorker, and my only MFA is my Master of Failed Attempts. But if you’re one of the nineteen people reading this, it’s either because you feel obligated to patronize someone you know, or because you’re able to find at least some value in something that’s overwhelmingly mediocre.

What, are you from a small town?

This is that weird intersection of humility and confidence. Some of us, regardless where we grew up, have developed the humility to understand that we won’t excel, yet the confidence to know that failure won’t kill us. And that the fear of failure might be worse than the failure itself. In fact, the failing can be wildly fun, as long as the expectations were right. In small towns there are plenty of opportunities to hone these skills. Or, maybe there aren’t many opportunities, which is the same thing.

For people who grew up in more specialized worlds, though (the kids who quit Scouts because they’re “hockey players”—in first grade), these can be foreign concepts, and sometimes scary. “No, no,” they say, “I don’t do that. I do this other thing.” I empathize: in a bigger system, there’s always someone better, and no one revels in doing something poorly, even relatively poorly. Also, in a bigger system, there are just so many more things to do—why dwell on something you don’t like, or aren’t good at? The ability to specialize, even in leisure, is a luxury, and many people from small towns would do the same thing, if they could.

But they can’t, so they don’t. In general, anyway. Sure, everything’s a shade of gray, and we all go to specialists sometimes—countryfolk don’t exactly crack their kids’ chests open to do surgery, emboldened by the confidence of generalism. But even if we’re all qualitatively similar, maybe small-town kids are quantitatively different, slightly. Their ratio of willingness to “give something a try,” even a mildly important something, might be different. The willingness to let themselves fail at something, especially not professional somethings, might be different, too. After all, in a small town, miles past Nowhere, it’s actually conceivable that there’s no one else who’s better. Sometimes there’s no one else at all. I’m biased, but that’s probably a good mindset for us—all of us—at least in doses. That’s probably good for our kids to see, at least more than they do.

In many ways, it’s probably just good, period.

I enjoyed golfing that summer in the city, outside the city. I got better at golfing, that’s for sure—playing with people who are serious forces the upping of one’s game. But sometimes, I kinda missed home. I didn’t want to “golf”; I just wanted to golf.

“Do you golf?” Hm. Maybe. Kinda.

Why, where are you from?

P. A. Jensen (@RuralityChecker) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.

Or, until some jackass shows up with a rip-roaring lawn mower, trying to hack his grass into a semblance of a prairie in the Northwoods, one little outpost regained in the Battle of Mosquito Ridge, a la the War on Nature. In which he is a foot soldier, booted in cracked, perfused-green old running shoes with remnant padding like a hardtack pancake that’s been sitting in the sun, that relentless blazer also responsible for this tropic of skin cancer that he hopes to machete with a six-horse Briggs and a cloud of blue smoke. And also exhaust from the mower.

But no smoke plumes while the fawn hides in plain sight. The city, this micropolitan hub of this hunk of the Northland, is no place to send a fawn ambling without Mom, not with four lanes of camper traffic nearby, where canoes obstruct views and the parents in the front seat cajole the candy from the last stop before The Woods starts, Where the Interstate Ends, which sounds like the title of a parody book of kids’ poetry. No, don’t scare a spotted, doe-eyed fawn into a real-life game of Frogger with the city types who are settling in with their Big Gulps, and with bigger campers goosenecked into their pickup boxes with bike-handle streamers whipping in the impatient winds of the nascent but ever-passing weekend. I don’t have much of a desire to sample venison veal, especially this early in the season. But I suppose I could grill it in my newly mowed backyard, which would be nice.

What a stupid place to set a fawn down, Mom: in a bed of rock, behind a little bush, inches from a wall. Where it has sat for days, less sniper and more billboard, advertising its presence for all to see and not hear, waiting for good doe. A brown beacon. Last year, at least Mother had the good sense to hide Brown Baby in the ferns by the fence, which I didn’t realize until I got too close with the mower and got shocked by a flash of brown lightning, and the deer jumped out, too. After that felony cardiac arrest, deer and lawn-care warrior kept their distance from each other for a while, until the not-so-neon “no” burned out of the fern’s “vacancy” sign, at which point I quickly did a little housekeeping with a weedwhacker and re-fernished the accommodations into a minty mash, like a botany bomb warding off other interlopers—a lusher Chernobyl with flecks of vascular plant clinging to white vinyl.

So maybe it’s my own fault: no more ferns by the fence this year, so now a fawn by the wall, and I’m pinned by my own sense of guilt about unleashing a spotty wobbler into oncoming traffic. This would have been handled differently at Home, no doubt, with the woods within spitting distance and a quick “Git” to get things moving. After all, a Mother Dearest that sets its little panter into someone’s landscaping instead of the acres and acres of old-growth forest just yards away would be a well-vetted candidate for semi-natural selection, one would think. Not so much in a micropolitan area, though, as the deer here are easily more tame and conditioned to humans than at least half of the cubs in my son’s Scout pack, feral creatures themselves. No, city deer wander up to you, stare at you blankly, chewing, unafraid, or unaware of the high-speed lead therapy that might become of their docility. These are the animal kingdom’s city slickers, these deer, a metaphor for us all, long out of the jungle, wrestling to the forest floor the flashes in our minds of primal pasts long gone, supplanted by thoughts of convenience and regulation: why kill this deer in my backyard for meat when it’d be a lot of work to clean it, and would probably make a mess of the snow—damning evidence when someone called the cops because they heard the gunshot? There are permits for these things, I’m sure, with Fat Suzy shuffling them between her not-so-lean-venison-sausage fingers back at City Hall after you e-file on YourFriendlyGovernment.gov, a process made necessary by the inevitable removal from nature that the concrete jungle represents. And have a nice day, they say, the kings of that concrete jungle who become a real pain when, you know, the real nature clippity-clops its way among the manicured trees.

Like the raccoon that I cannot legally shoot because, you know, love thy neighbor and Nature, I’m not sure in what order, or perhaps because of whatever union represents the people in new, white, city-seal-emblazoned pickups whose job it is to rescue us helpless townspeople from fuzzy vermin that can be stopped dead with .22 shell, as if they were Raccoon-zilla terrorizing the village, though this particular village seems increasingly like Tokyo these days, and this raccoon is especially large, the consequence of a city-garbage diet, no doubt. These white-pickup cowboys in their khaki uniforms seem to prefer to keep it in their holster, though, and instead play rodeo clown after trapping the little ‘zilla with cat food, and probably transport it to a lovely city park, maybe after a spa-kennel-bath-weekend, all on the taxpayers’ dime, of course. Which back home would be even more ridiculous, and much more easily solved: decomposing garbage is the easiest kind to put into the woods, or the river. As a bonus to this return-to-nature method of disposal, maybe a Scout would find the skull while doing his environmental science merit badge, or maybe a canoer would find it on the river bank, that is if people dared enter the herbicide-infested drainage water called The River back home—many fewer goosenecked trailers heading that direction come Blessed Weekend, no doubt.

So, no, instead of cutting my grass I become an overly conscientious objector and enter a days-long stare-down contest with my fawning friend, blinking stupidly as it lays his head in my rock. (Who is blinking stupidly? Both of us.) He knows he’s hit the motherlode as he waits for his mom: he found a resting spot in the backyard of yuppie-hippie-yippie who doesn’t want to see it die in traffic, at which point I am reduced to a blithering member of PETA or the Sierra Club who refuses to scare a deer or swat a mosquito, because Nature, because Animals Are People, Too. Or some shit.

Which is a lie, especially the part about the mosquitoes, because an unmowed backyard in this country will end up biting you in the ass, kinda literally, or sending you up the West Nile. So, dammit, I cracked a PBR and bit my lip and fired up the mower and made a round by the rocks and the deer ambled away—less brown lightning this time, on both ends—and I went on my oh-so-merry way, sweating and looking down at the seconds-old buzz cut to ponder how long I could go without having to sharpen this stupid thing again, my mind no longer occupied with the strife of the spotted comrade in harm’s way. And the little deer apparently survived, as I saw something identically nonchalant and spotted with a similarly obviously stupid mother gambling across the highway an evening or so later. I hadn’t given the deer enough credit, apparently. Perhaps it was hubristic to think I needed to give credit at all, or could at all.

Which is maybe the point, that Nature is a fun concept to hold holy as long as you don’t actually interact with it, at least in a way that matters. If it’s a cute fawn in your rocks and the choice is between letting it sit there all cute and letting it get burgerized by the grill of an F-250 off to Camperland, you let it sit and you consider yourself all Nature-Loving, probably while wearing some tech-kinda-fabric pants from Eddie Bauer or Patagonia. And sipping fair-trade coffee. The second your kid gets red-peppered with mosquito bites, though, you’re yanking that pull string and letting the turf bits fly, cute little brown friend be damned to a hood ornament. That probably says a lot about how a lot of us think of Nature: we all love going to the Wolf Center and supporting wolves’ inclusion on the Endangered Species List, and join a Facebook group, at least until we see how unendangered those bastards seem to be by killing our livestock en masse, etc. Which is probably why the Save the Wolf rallies in Montana seem to center on the college towns, not in range country, where people live not in dorms, but in and among Nature itself.

Alas, because I have no livestock and for years haven’t even been into a barn that didn’t have newly awarded ribbons flapping in the fan breeze over fresh straw, Nature is at arm’s length for me, too, just off the hiking trail, a place I don’t care to venture because, you know, ticks and stuff. So when I’m confronted with the ferocity of Nature in the form of this yawning fawn, it makes for a not-so-epic tale of man’s dominion over nature and human nature and the not-exactly-Hundred-Acre Wood, to be sure. But this tale will have a sequel, no doubt, so long as the deer that thinks that a dryer vent makes for a nice feature in her fawn’s hiding spot doesn’t die on the highway or drown in the shallow end of the gene pool. Next year, though, whether by way of reluctant resignation to coexistence or maybe one of those in-city archery permits, I’ll be ready, and maybe waiting, for my deer friend, and all he represents.

Or, maybe I’ll go plant some ferns by the fence.

P. A. Jensen (@RuralityChecker) lives in Minnesota with his wife and son.