Cowflops

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It would also prove to be the most rewarding work I’ve ever done, before or since. But first, I had to figure out how to do it.

For starters, there’s rural, and then there’s the West.  I grew up on a wildlife refuge in Delaware. Our nearest neighbors were about a mile away. Town was 7 miles. It might as well have been on the moon – or so I thought then.

Then I moved out West. I still remember that first trip to Jordan, driving the 80 miles north of Miles City and never seeing a house, a convenience store, or – uh-oh – a gas station the whole way. I was used to the New Jersey Turnpike, with its rest stops every 10 miles or so. I coasted into Jordan on fumes.

Lesson No. 1: Don’t let your gas gauge drop below half.  Then there was the matter of learning to translate maps. Early on, I got bored while driving west on Interstate 70 in Colorado and decided to take what looked like a shortcut to Durango, in the southwest corner of the state. So the line on the map for my shortcut was a little squiggly. And maybe I should have peered more closely at those triangles that meant, well, mountains. Three mountain passes and a couple of hours later than it would have taken had I just stuck to the main roads, I coasted into Durango, again on fumes. (I’m a slow learner.)

Lesson No. 2: Pass your newfound knowledge along to your editors.  My editors on the East Coast were forever calling and telling me to get some place fast. “That’s an eight-hour drive,” I’d say.

“But it looks so close on the map,” they’d say.

*#&$@!

Lesson No. 3: The West is about more than cowboys and Indians and those headline-grabbing, photo-hogging, “charismatic mega-fauna” – grizzlies, wolves, and bison. (Although, it must be noted that those stories always found a ready audience.)

But the longer I stayed in the West, the more similarities I found with the stories I’d done back East. Just because people were living in tiny, far-flung rural communities instead of inner-city rowhouses didn’t mean they weren’t struggling with low-paying jobs, bewildering changes in federal programs, and burgeoning drug problems. In my experience, Philly readers enjoyed the “Hey, me too!” factor when they recognized their own issues in people seemingly so different.

The problems of people in fast-emptying Eastern Montana towns were eerily like those in the old, inner-ring Philadelphia suburbs where abandoned shopping centers stood like ghost towns, albeit surrounded by concrete rather than exhausted grazing land. In each place, it seemed the only way to survive was to leave.

Colorado’s mountain communities found themselves grappling with exploding immigrant populations, when Latin Americans came to work in the ski resorts; just as Italian neighborhoods in South Philadelphia struggled to become accustomed to the Vietnamese and Cambodians now in their midst.

As for getting those stories, interviewing techniques turned out to be pretty much the same everywhere. That is to say:

Lesson No. 4: You’re an idiot.  Seriously. The person you’re interviewing is the expert. Be humble. And give him or her time to warm up. Talking about the weather for longer than you ever thought possible lets somebody size you up, and relax enough to get down to the matter at hand. If I’m going to a place off the beaten path where people aren’t used to talking to reporters, I always budget two to three times as long as I would for an interview with, say, police or county commissioners.

Still, some things apply only to rural areas.

Lesson No. 5: Wear good shoes. By which I mean sturdy. Lest you think this is frivolous advice, try walking through gumbo in loafers. Or savor the nice warm feeling of a cowflop squishing into open-toed sandals.

And on your way to change your footgear, go fill your gas tank.