All that 952 feet of living space was spread across three stories, so we spent a lot of time hiking up and down stairs. We shared walls with neighbors on either side but they were quiet most of the time. Stone walls make for surprisingly poor insulators, so in the winters we heated the place with a pellet stove. In the spring, if you opened a window and listened real hard, you could hear the murmur of the Patapsco River in the valley below.
For a young professional couple with a handful of pets, it was perfect. Then we had the twins.
When we found out we were pregnant—several years after moving into our tiny Oella home—we thought about trying to move to a bigger place. But it was well out of the question. We had nowhere near enough money to make the numbers work.
So we decided to do the best we could with our millworkers’ quarters—after all, we reasoned, back in the early 1800s a family would have packed twelve kids into the place. Surely we could find room for two.
And it did work, for a while. While the twins were still babies and mostly immobile. The finished attic became their nursery, with just enough room for two cribs, two dressers, and a rocking chair.
The living room downstairs, meanwhile, could accommodate a double pack-’n’-play for nap times, which along with a love seat for two adults and a wood chair put it at just about maximum capacity. Yes, the pellet stove was in there, but we’d worry about how to block that off once the twins figured out how to move.
But as the twins grew and became mobile it quickly became apparent that 952 feet wasn’t going to cut it anymore. As they approached the year marker it felt as if the house was stuffed to the breaking point with baby paraphernalia. They were trying to crawl and walk, but didn’t have a lot of space to figure things out. One afternoon, Charles, trying to master crawling in the tight confines of the living room, instead ended up backing himself fully under the couch. Toys, pillows, stuffed animals covered every horizontal surface in the residence. We let the twins crawl around in the dining room for more space, but we had to keep a constant eye out lest one of them squeeze himself through the cat door and tumble down the basement steps.
We needed a bigger place, but we were priced out of the market for a larger home that could accommodate our growing family. We were making decent money, and probably could have convinced a lender to approve a loan of a half million dollars or more if we were ever able to scrounge up a down payment to match. But between child-care costs and the burden of tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, our monthly budget already felt like it was pushed to the breaking point. Taking out more home debt and doubling the size of our monthly mortgage seemed reckless.
Given the demands of our professional lives, time was in short supply as well. My fifteen-hour-a-week commute meant that I barely saw the twins at all during the workweek. I was out the door well before they woke up. If I was lucky I’d see them for maybe forty-five minutes in the evening before it was time to put them to bed.
This time wasn’t typically quality time, either. It was the end of the day; the twins were tired and cranky because they were two, and that’s how two-year-olds are in the evening. Briana was tired and cranky from working a full day at the Social Security Administration and then coming home to deal with the twins by herself for several hours until I made it back. I was tired and cranky from working and being on the train all day.
None of us were at our best between the hours of 6 and 7 p.m. on those weeknights. But that was all the time we had with each other.
The weekends, which we used primarily to recover from the travails of the prior workweek, were not much better. There’s a nearly unlimited number of things to do with kids in the Baltimore-D.C. area on a given weekend—take them to the aquarium, or the museums, or the Eastern Shore.
Problem was, of course, that doing just about anything still entailed a lengthy fight with the region’s heavy traffic while the twins grew ever more agitated in the backseat. Most activities cost money, which was already in short supply. And the twins had the attention spans of your typical two-year-olds, which meant we’d spend an hour driving somewhere only to have them fuss and fret and complain of boredom and hunger within fifteen minutes of arriving.
So while we were surrounded by the riches the D.C. region had to offer, we typically lacked the time and the energy to enjoy them.
After seven years of living in the D.C. area my health was bad enough, but the arrival of the twins pushed things over the edge. Shortly after their birth I was beset by a feeling of hopelessness that I now recognize as depression. It had been there most of my adult life, I realized, not terribly severe but always hovering around the margins, waiting to swoop in at inopportune times.
Things had gradually gotten worse during our time in D.C. This, again, isn’t a surprise: studies have consistently shown that life in major metropolitan areas is associated with higher rates of mental illness, relative to people who live out in the country.
There’s the crime, the pollution, and the paradoxical sense of isolation you experience when surrounded by millions of unsmiling strangers. Where we lived, in a suburb of Baltimore, there was a greater sense of community than in your typical anonymous city. But we were still smack in the heart of a major metropolitan area where it’s easy to get lost in an uncaring crowd.
Studies have also consistently shown a link between population density and happiness: the fewer people around you, the more satisfied you are. A study on well-being in Canada found, for instance, that the average population density in the country’s 20 percent most miserable communities was more than eight times greater than in the happiest 20 percent of communities.
Surveys in the United States, meanwhile, find that people who live in rural areas are happier than those who live in the suburbs, and suburbanites are happier than city dwellers. Some evolutionary psychologists have proposed a sort of “paleo-happiness” theory to explain this. The human brain, they reason, evolved for life on the African savanna, where our primal ancestors hail from. In that environment you’d find a population density of less than one person per square kilometer. In modern-day Manhattan, by contrast, you’ve got a population density greater than 27,000 people per square kilometer. Take a brain evolved for the former environment and drop it into the latter and you can see how certain problems might arise.
I’m not sure I completely buy this theory, but it certainly speaks to me on a purely experiential level. The strains of new parenthood, particularly with two children, brought the marginal feelings of dread front and center. I have the twins to thank for being the crisis that finally pushed me to seek help for my depression and treat it with medication. While not a cure-all by any means, the antidepressants I started shortly after their birth helped me keep things in perspective and function like a person unburdened with an irrational sense of dread.
Then there was the blood pressure. Through a stroke of bad genetic luck it’s predisposed toward being high—my father had his first stroke at age fifty-six, and doctors had noted with alarm that my numbers were what they called “pre-hypertensive” in my early twenties, in what was otherwise my peak physical fitness.
Years of stressful work, long commutes, and bad eating didn’t improve things, and by the time the twins were born my systolic pressure was pushing 150. Time to add another prescription to the regimen.
To cope with all the stress, I was also drinking—a lot. Ten to fifteen drinks per week, maybe? That put me somewhere in the top 20 percent of Americans by alcohol intake. Federal survey data show that binge drinking and heavy alcohol use are more prevalent in urban areas than in rural ones, with evidence of a gradient of use running from the least- to most-populated areas.
In the end, it seems that city life is slowly driving many of us mad. That was the case, at least, for me. Urban life is hazardous to your personal safety, your physical health, and your mental health. Why do we do it? In a word: jobs.
We move to cities that wear us down because that’s where the jobs are. Happiness, health
, safety—nice things to have, but you need to have a roof over your head before you can even start worrying about them. Historically, city residents have tended to be “well compensated for their joylessness,” as one team of economists put it. “The desires for happiness and life satisfaction do not uniquely drive human ambitions,” they rather dryly conclude. “Humans are quite understandably willing to sacrifice both happiness and life satisfaction if the price is right.”
For many years, in America’s cities, the price has been right. But particularly in recent decades the annual return on urban and suburban living has been declining. Rising housing costs and longer commutes have taken big bites out of disposable incomes and the time people have to enjoy them. Wages, meanwhile, have been largely flat for many workers, even those with the best-paying urban jobs.
There’s a lot of good things to say about life in a functioning modern metropolis. Economies of scale, access to new people and technologies and ideas—historically the economic case for urbanization has been rooted in ideas like these.
But at what point does present-day urban dysfunction outweigh those economic gains, and even make the return on urbanization negative? What good is it to have a large pool of talented workers if they’re all commuting ten hours or more a week? How many mental health days does it take for a modern office worker to achieve equilibrium with the stresses of the modern office?
It had been easier for me to ignore the toll of the commuting lifestyle before the kids were born. The body adapts. If a ninety-minute commute is what it takes to put a roof over your head, then that’s what it takes. I would put a good face on it, talk about all the reading I could get done, or all the goofing around on the internet I could do via my phone.
But there’s one big piece of evidence that cities aren’t all they’re cracked up to be: in 2014 the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans on the following question: “If you could live anywhere in the United States that you wanted to, would you prefer a city, a suburban area, a small town or a rural area?”
You might expect that most people answered “city” or “suburbs”—after all, that’s where 80 percent of us live. But in fact, given their druthers, more than half of Americans—54 percent, to be exact—say they’d prefer to live in a small town or rural area. Just 24 percent said the city was ideal, and only 21 percent said they’d want to live in a suburb.
The implication is that a considerable chunk of the U.S. population—potentially as much as 30 percent—is stuck in the cities and suburbs and dreaming of escape to the country.
In the summer of 2015 I was one of them.
D.C.’s one redeeming late summer feature is that many of its people are out of town. Congress is on recess, and much of the nation’s bureaucratic apparatus—the lobbyists, think tankers, and news media—along with it.
Journalists stuck in D.C. newsrooms in August are often kicking around light, offbeat story ideas that wouldn’t see the light of day at other times of year, when there’s actual news to write about. This particular context—the lack of real news and the greater tolerance of editors for general dicking around—is important for understanding everything that follows.
Bear in mind, too, that in 2015 the country hadn’t yet gone mad over the Trump campaign and eventual presidency; the man was still largely seen as a sideshow, a novelty candidate along the lines of Vermin Supreme, the perennial oddball candidate from Vermont who wears a boot on his head.
What this meant is that readers still had plenty of appetite for quirky, out-of-left-field stories that would take off like social fire on Facebook and Twitter. I just so happened to excel at this sort of story.
In the midst of those August doldrums I happened to see a news release about a Baylor University study finding that people who live in more “beautiful landscapes” are less religious. Apparently it’s tough to spend the morning in church when the beach or the mountains call. As a data reporter, however, I was immediately drawn to the independent variable in this scenery-versus-religion equation—how the heck did these guys measure and quantify natural beauty?
As it turns out, a group of data nerds at the U.S. Department of Agriculture did just that in the late 1990s, creating what they called a “natural amenities scale.” It all started when the USDA’s statisticians were searching for a better understanding of what was driving population change—and more specifically, population decline—in rural areas.
Economic concerns—jobs, again—were a big part of this. But the researchers knew there was another factor at play: the weather. Between 1950 and 2000, for instance, there’s a striking correlation between January temperatures and overall population growth in a given city or metropolitan area.
The warmer a place’s winters are, in other words, the more people seem to be drawn there. The USDA’s researchers reasoned that temperature wasn’t the only such amenity. People like interesting landscapes, for instance—craggy peaks and rolling valleys. They like to have water nearby for swimming and boating.
These are the things, in short, that regional tourism boards put in their brochures, or that newcomers call back home to brag about after they arrive. In the end, the researchers arrived at a set of six different measures:
Average January temperature (warmer is better)
Average January days of sunshine (more is better)
Temperate summer, measured as the difference between average temperatures in January and July (a smaller gap is better)
Average July humidity (lower is better, for fairly obvious reasons)
Topographic variation—hills, valleys, and mountains (more are better)
Finally, water area—coastlines and lakes (more are better)
“Natural aspects of attractiveness,” as the USDA puts it. They’re physical characteristics, products of the landscape and the planetary environment. They’re immutable, unchangeable, invulnerable to the machinations of mankind. “Natural amenities pertain to the physical rather than the social or economic environment,” the USDA writes. “We can measure the basic ingredients, not how these ingredients have been shaped by nature and man.”
The USDA’s researchers took all of these measures from existing federal datasets, mashed them together in a statistical blender, and voilà—the natural amenities index was born.
Here’s the great thing: there are 3,108 counties in the contiguous United States, according to the Census Bureau. In creating the natural amenities index, the USDA statisticians went ahead and ranked every single one of them according to where they fell on the scale (sadly, Alaska and Hawaii didn’t make the cut, in part due to a lack of comparable climatological data for those states).
It was an official federal ranking, in other words, of the lower forty-eight’s most beautiful and ugliest places to live.
I pitched the idea of a map based on the index—“a government ranking of the best and worst counties to live in,” as I characterized it—to my editors. They gave the thumbs-up, and the rest is the history you’re about to read.
The coasts, as it turns out, look pretty good on the natural amenities index, as does much of the mountain west. Ventura County, California, came in at number one on the list—not surprising given the shore, the hills, and the temperate climate. In fact, every single one of the ten highest-ranked counties is located in California.
The county that came in dead last on the list, meanwhile, was a little place I’d never heard of called Red Lake County, Minnesota, which appeared to be far up in the northwest corner of the state.
I had never set foot in Minnesota in my life. So I googled, naturally, which led me to a generic-looking midwestern county government website containing, among other things, a “community calendar” for August that was completely blank.
“Fun fact,” the website proudly proclaimed, “it is the only landlocked county in the United States that is surrounded by just two neighboring counties.”
Fun!
According to Google, Red Lake County was so far north that in order to
get to Fargo from there you’d have to drive two hours south. It was tucked so far away in the middle of nowhere that it was twenty miles from the nearest McDonald’s, forty miles from the closest Starbucks, and three hundred miles away from the nearest Whole Foods.
Wikipedia wasn’t much help, either. It noted that the county seat was the town of Red Lake Falls, population 1,427. “The last significant historic event in Red Lake Falls occurred on August 27, 1927,” Wikipedia’s editors noted, “when the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife landed at the nearby airport during a barnstorming trip through the Upper Midwest and were taken on automobile rides to Huot and Crookston.”
Lindbergh, the only famous person to visit the town in the past century, evidently left just as soon as he arrived.
I wanted to add some local color to the story but there simply wasn’t much to work with, at least not from my vantage point of a D.C. newsroom. It looked to me like one of those sleepy flyover places that dot the middle of the country, just barely holding on as migration and urbanization slowly whittle its population down to zero.
So I wrote this:
The absolute worst place to live in America is (drumroll please) . . . Red Lake County, Minn. (claim to fame: “It is the only landlocked county in the United States that is surrounded by just two neighboring counties,” according to the county Web site).
And that was it! My first encounter with Red Lake County amounted to just forty-two mildly snarky words, tossed off on a slow Friday afternoon.
The story went up at 9:27 a.m. on Monday morning. By 9:32, the hate mail started rolling in.
It started, as so many unpleasant things do, on Twitter: “As someone who grew up in the heart of ‘ugly country’ on this map, I hereby declare this map garbage,” a Minnesotan named Matt Privratsky wrote.
By midmorning, people who lived in and around Red Lake County started sending me photographs of golden wheat fields, meandering rivers, and deep blue prairie skies. “This is what the ‘worst place in America to live in’ looks like in late summer,” one of them said.
If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now Page 2
