Car Psychology

I re-read my last entry and the sentence I wrote about one-car families being poor struck me as odd, since EVERYONE where I grew up was poor. Really. I think that people have this vague idea of farms as being pleasant places with green hills, a red barn, smiling cows, and a plump guy in bright blue overalls chewing a stalk of…hay? Wheat? Something. In reality, that’s not how rural life is at all. It’s difficult, and where I grew up most people were either in a state of one-car poverty or two-car poverty. Let me explain the difference between one-car poverty and two-car poverty.

Like I said, I grew up in a community where the homes were either working farms, or had been farms. Most people lived in houses and on land that had been in the family. Some people, like my parents, had mortgages, but a lot of people just lived where their parents and grandparents had lived. The nearest town (about 1400 people at that time) was a fifteen or twenty minute drive away. The nearest small city (a place with a hospital and a strip mall with a K-Mart) was half an hour or so away. My mom usually went into town three times a week – twice for errands, and once for church with the whole family. To make my blog less Google-able to people I might know, we’ll call this little community Farm Town.

Now, Farm Town wasn’t big enough to have its own elementary school. So it shared an elementary/middle school with another too-small little town nearby, which I’ll call Lake Town. Back in the day Lake Town was a cute resort town for people living in Milwaukee or Chicago, but for some reason it had died. There were lots of little cabins scattered around the lake…tiny three or four-room homes. As the tourists moved out and stopped using these places as weekend cabins, regular families moved in and lived there year-round.

I don’t remember any stigma from being either from Lake Town or Farm Town, but I do recall my parents not letting us go to Lake Town too much. If we wanted to play with our Lake Town friends, they came over to our house.

There were some professionals, like my parents, living in both towns. Some middle-class families. But a lot of families were farm families or families where the parents worked in building or factory jobs where they couldn’t earn much. Sometimes both parents worked, sometimes the dad would work a job (or two jobs, like farming in the spring and trucking in the winter) and the mom would stay home. It was tough. However, I don’t remember anyone getting teased because of not having money – like I said, most people didn’t have money.

However, most families did have two cars. Actually, that’s not true…most families had a car and a rusted-out truck or van. This was a necessity…remember, where I grew up there were no buses and nothing within walking distance but fields and pastures. So if both parents were working, or one parent was working and the other staying home with the kids and running errands all day, they both needed a car. And most people were able to scrape together a few hundred bucks for an old beater (keep in mind that not everyone had housing expenses since they lived on family land, so that probably helped).

There were also one-car families. That implied something a little darker. Having one car implied not that you were poor, really, but that you had no place to go all day. You were chronically unemployed and didn’t care to take care of the kids or help out with the house*. For some reason I remember the fathers being the unemployed ones, and the mothers working in these families. Also, the reason for this unemployment was rarely disability, the inability to find work, going back to school, or some other legit reason. As a kid I never talked with my classmates about their unemployed parents, but in retrospect I think some fathers were chronically unemployed or under-employed because of alcohol or drug problems (yes, we have drugs in the country). These were the houses in Lake Town that we never visited, where the fathers were grumpy and unshaven and wore greasy camouflage hats and would sometimes hunt deer for meat, or just poach them if it wasn’t deer season. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a job…it was that he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, hold down a job. I never could quite put my finger on why, but I knew that a one-car family meant trouble.

As an adult I can understand how the never ending cycle of hard work and bills, of never getting ahead, could make a man want to give up. I don’t think they’re bad or evil, and I wonder how things might have been different if someone had been able to help them. But as a child, these men were always scary.

It’s really weird the things that stick with you from childhood. I’m still trying to shake the idea that I’m doing something wrong, like a one-car father.

* I don't remember any stay-at-home dads, but I guess that would be really rare in a conservative farm town 20 years ago.