Town mice, country mice

I drove home to Spokane for Thanksgiving this year. On the way back over to the Puget Sound region, the girl hitching a ride with me plugged her iPod into my stereo and put on The Arcade Fire’s new album The Suburbs, which I hadn’t heard yet. The second-to-last track, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” is like many Arcade Fire tracks beautiful, angry, sad, and exhilarating all at once. Part of the refrain goes:

            Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small
            that we can never get away from the sprawl.

Under ordinary circumstances, I would probably have found myself identifying with this sentiment. As it happened, though, I was driving through central Washington state, a vast reach of utter nothingness stretching to the horizon in all directions. Scab rock gorges give way to farms give way to scab rock give way to one-horse towns give way to forests give way to farms. For over 200 miles. I wanted to pull Régine out of the speakers by her beautiful voice and have her take a look around. You want to escape from the sprawl? Move to Waterville, WA.

Or if the emptiness of central Washington doesn’t appeal to you, try Oregon. Idaho. Montana. Wyoming. Nevada. New Mexico. British Columbia. Alberta. Saskatchewan. Manitoba. Most of North America is empty. Of course, nearly all city folk (dissatisfied Arcade Fire–types included) would instantly balk at the suggestion that they actually move out to the quiet stillness of any of these places. We would regard it as impracticable and offer excuses to that effect. How could we make money? Where would we buy groceries? How would we even start?

Plenty of country dwellers have figured out the answers to these questions, so when a frustrated city dweller asks them it must really just be an evasion from the larger issue, which is that most us would find ourselves terribly bored living in the country. This is surely our greatest fear when contemplating such a move. The distractions and superfluities of town life comfort us and define us. We may claim to hate much of our surroundings, but we all rely at least once in a while on movies, shopping, bars, restaurants, or other entertainments to spice up our otherwise dull evenings and weekends. To move to a prairie in North Dakota would be to rely on oneself for entertainment. It would mean sitting alone with one’s thoughts.


The juxtaposition of poetic urbanite’s lament and near-uninhabited countryside made me think that it’s more our own weaknesses that constrain our lives than it is any external circumstances. Our personal freedom may be out there, but it would require more courage than we possess to actually achieve it. Can we ever get away from the sprawl? Not us, no. Because we depend on it.