I consider myself pretty transient for having lived in the South my whole life. What does the South have to do with being transient or stationary, you say? Well, in my tiny little mountain town, many of the townsfolk have lived here their whole lives. Driving around, you see a lot of roads named after people or families; I myself live on a "family" road that connects to a "person" road. In the city, there are roads named after people, sure, but up here, those people are (1) still alive and (2) actually living on that road. That struck me as odd when I realized that a few years ago. What did these people do to deserve to have a road named after them? Well... they simply didn't leave. And that's what blows my mind.
In this age of cars, trains, planes, and buses, there are myriad ways to get around cheaply and quickly. Why didn't these people take advantage of that and move on to bigger things, bigger places? (Better is debatable.) Why? They don't want to. They have roots here. Their daddies and granddaddies and great-granddaddies lived on the same land, in the same house, updating and expanding on the old homestead for new generations and technologies, for a hundred and fifty years or more. With all that family history, who would want to move? As families got bigger, they simply expanded across the county, naming their new roads after themselves, so everyone would know who lived there.
This age of easy transportation really doesn't have an effect on these rooted families. A 100-mile trip would be a week-long vacation affair for many of them. They have no reason to travel that far from home. I, on the other hand, must travel 100 miles, one way, to visit my best friend. It sucks, but I don't mind it too much. It's not that big of a deal. I can't imagine having ALL my friends in the same county, never mind my extended family too! I barely know my extended family. I know my parents' social friends better than their siblings. My cousins? There are two second cousins I still haven't even met, and neither one is a baby by any means. They simply live too far away and have too-busy lives that don't mesh with my own too-busy life. We seem to get together for funerals. And weddings, right? Nope, it looks like most everyone is too busy to come to mine. No bitterness there, it just leaves more spots open for the friends I know well. Callous? I feel I have to choose my own family sometimes, what with mine so spread out between the Midwest and the North.
With such a strong family support network right here in town, the younger generations usually don't want to leave. Some are afraid. Some simply see no reason to go anywhere. Me, I'm planning a 400-mile move in the next few months. And to me, it's no big deal, just one state. Thing is, what with his job, we'll be moving around quite a bit in the next several years, and that's also no big deal. Neither of us have roots; our roots are planted in pots, easy to pick up and re-place. I have always thought of that as a blessing, a good thing to be able to do. Now, however, after living in this small, rooted town for a few years, I'm beginning to wonder what I'm missing.
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in this place, the comfort of familitarity, regular patterns of activity, constantly changing faces of interesting people between the camps and the schools.
As to the naming of the roads, in a lot of rural places like this 911 is a recent implementation. Every single road, public or private has to be named. Often, in the struggle to quickly find names, the authorities ask whomever lives on the road what they would like to call it or if they have a preference. Around here, green signs are public roads, blue are private.
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