The Exurbs

As I have previously mentioned, I grew up in Brooklyn.  At the time, its population was over three million.  Later on, I lived in Manhattan.  It had fewer people, but they were more densely packed.  Like most folks, I assumed that the world that I knew was the one that made most sense.  In sociology, we call this ethnocentrism.

 The only alternative with which I was personally familiar was the rural Catskill Mountains.  My family spent summer vacations at a guest farm that abutted a working dairy farm.  Both were on a dirt road about five miles from town.  Moreover, the only way we kids could get there was to walk.

The Brown family owned the dairy farm.  We city kids thus played with their kids and became friends with Junior and Clarky.  Nonetheless, I considered these boys to be hicks.  He chewed straw in their teeth and drove the cows back to the barn at night.

My world thus featured a strict dichotomy.  There was the sophisticated realm of the city and the unsophisticated realm of the country.  City people read books and knew how to deal with people other than themselves.  Country people were nice, but ignorant and in-bred.

In the city, you could get anything you wanted.  The stores sold every conceivable item, the restaurants served every conceivable food, and the potential entertainments were non-stop.  In the country, there were the cows—and a few blueberry bushes.  If you wanted something else, you had to walk to town—and they might not have it.

Now I live in Cherokee county.  When I first contemplated taking a job at Kennesaw State University, I consulted a map to see where it was.  The place seemed to be a small town about twenty miles north of Atlanta.  On the map it looked isolated and probably not unlike the town I encountered in the Catskills.

Then after I arrived, I realized Kennesaw was a suburban outpost of Atlanta.  It was tied to the big city by a major highway, and boasted the amenities one might expect in any American suburb.

The next question was, where should I live?  I did not want to be adjacent to the school because I wanted to separate my work from my free time.  Neither did I want a citified environment.  I was fed up with the crowding I experienced when growing up.

And so I asked my realtor to take me to Cherokee County.  I was hoping to find a compromise between the city and country, but the places she showed me were contiguous to farms.  This was a bit too countrified for my tastes and so I settled on Cobb.

That was about twenty-five years ago and today, as I say, I live in Cherokee.  What a difference this short period has made!  Cherokee is now unquestionably exurban.  While it is less densely settled than the suburbs, it is more populous than purely rural areas.

The result is the happy compromise between the urban and rustic that I initially sought.  In Canton, I have access to almost any amenity I might desire.  Although I have to drive to them, I am no longer a child and thus own an automobile.

The local movie theater may not always show the art films I would like to see, but the selection of restaurants more than meets my requirements.  Every so often there is even an arts festival where I can find items not unlike what was once available to me in Greenwich Village.

What is more, I am not surrounded by hicks.  Most of my neighbors are well educated.  Even if they are not, we all have access to national and international media.  Few Americans are as isolated as Junior and Clarky.  That is certainly true of North Georgia.

So here am I, a person who once thought he was so sophisticated and superior, increasingly aware that genuine sophistication is more inclusive.  There turn out to be many ways to live comfortably in this great country of ours.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University