Welcome to Ruburbia

By J.D. Reed

The backseat of a Mercedes is piled with bags of chicken feed. A jogger is startled when Canada geese suddenly lift off from a soybean field. A sculptor thumbs through Hoard's Dairyman near the life-size statue of a Holstein, while down at Rose & Chubby's Luncheonette, commuters discuss optional features available on new eight-row corn pickers.

Where is this curious landscape of clashing images, this zone of hay and Harvard graduates, of pigs and Porsches, of pancake breakfasts and imported cheeses? This is ruburbia, a geographical mezzanine between the rural and the suburban. Ruburbs are small country towns barely within commuting distance of city centers, where agrarian values rub--and sometimes chafe-- elbows with middle-class attitudes. They are tucked away in numerous places across the American landscape, from the sun-dried valleys east of Los Angeles to the wooded hills west of Boston. Once the ruburbs were self-contained farming communities, but the prohibitively pricey real estate of both city apartments and suburban homes is attracting metropolitan immigrants to places like Harvard, Ill., and Saugus, Calif., where the price is right, the pace is easy and the commute to work adventurous but tolerable. But native ruburbanites, who believe that they are insulated from the excesses and evils of the larger world, view with ingrained suspicion the invasion of aging Volvos, Cuisinarts and the owners who accompany them. The bittersweet confrontations between natives and newcomers across the vanishing cultural chasm of ruburbia are turning some traditional American beliefs inside out. To a nation founded on waves of migration, ruburbia is an inevitable ripple.

After the frontier rolled out to the Pacific, the undertow pulled it back to swell the cities. Then the movement reversed again, spilling millions into newly created suburbs. Meanwhile, the American countryside has been enjoying a resurgence. The 1980 census shows that after a decade of stagnation, rural areas grew 11.1% in population in the 1970s, to nearly 60 million people. The ruburbs fall into a demographic shadowland, at the far edge of the suburbs and the near fringe of farm country, where no statistics establish their health. What seems clear is that more and more city dwellers are fleeing to them, though not all of the newcomers can entirely flee the economic pull of metropolises. Most jobs are still in the cities, and ruburbanites orbit them like far-flung asteroids.

On a weekday morning in Hopewell, N.J. (pop. 2,000), a ruburb some 60 miles south of New York City and 40 miles north of Philadelphia, there is an actual rush hour, nothing serious by city standards but unsettling in a bucolic borough. Cars stream past the grave of John Hart, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Once Hopewell was a quiet locale where farmers retired, and where the churches still outnumber the bars. Twenty minutes away, in the svelte suburb of Princeton, are a university, shops like Laura Ashley, the Nassau Inn and top-notch cardiologists. Hopewell, however, has none of those indications of status. In the blocks surrounding John Hart's monument are native carpenters, machinists and a variety of unemployed young men still living with their parents. They reside alongside such newcomers as a prison guard, a book designer, a stockbroker, a Princeton University Japanologist and one of the 75 women rabbis in the U.S.

What makes city workers move so far away from their jobs? It must be more than the almost nonexistent crime rates, the fertile gardens, the field for the pony and the inexpensive housing.

Perhaps it is an old call in the blood, a genetic resonance of preindustrial life they only dimly apprehend and cannot express. But they are willing to spend hours each day getting there. Some commuters travel only from their outlying ruburb to factories and offices in the nearby suburbs. Others make daunting journeys by ferry, train, bus and auto into the distant caverns of megalopolis. Some of those who ride for hours across rolling landscapes have been known to fantasize about shooting semitrailers from the windows of vehicles, as their migrating ancestors did the buffalo.

Ruburban mothers, many of whom work in the suburbs themselves, put in long hours behind the wheel. Some ruburbs have school systems that do not meet the expectations of newly arrived urban professionals, so children are ferried to private schools. They must also be carted to orthodontist appointments and ballet classes in the suburbs. A commuting father, washing the station wagon on Saturday, has grown used to finding the remains of lunches and dinners that were consumed in the car as it made its way back and forth through the week.

Some ruburban immigrants escape the commuting routine. Airline pilots, who need to drive to urban airports only twice a week or so, praise the ruburbs for their closeness to nature and "quality of off-time." In McHenry County, Ill., which has a 160-acre minimum property requirement and where some pilots have their own landing strips and hangars, they hurry home from O'Hare Airport to don bib overalls and till their land as ardently as their native neighbors do.

The ruburbs retain specific flavors, unlike the homogenized suburbs. They also attract professionals who have been freed by home computers from daily treks to an office or have negotiated reduced work weeks. There are composers, poets and inventors. Ruburban life kindles in most newcomers a revived appetite for small-town particulars: sagas about infidelity, arson, inbreeding and limbs lost in hay balers.

The ruburbs offer an alternative to the retirement meccas where senior citizens shuffleboard toward the inevitable, surrounded only by mirror images of their decline. Seniors on fixed incomes stay young in the ruburbs by mingling with children and young adults. When Sears Executive Dick Klein, 66, and his wife retired to Cloverdale, Calif., 93 miles north of San Francisco, they expected to visit the city at least twice a month. He rarely gets there twice a year. He is too involved in the local Lions and the Boosters and is a passionate follower of the Eagles basketball team. Says Douglas Rankin, the theatrical director of the Woodstock (Ill.) Opera House: "Nothing here really changes, but after a while it changes you."

Unlike the suburbs, many of which consist solely of 20th century buildings, the ruburbs harbor run-down Victorian-and Federal-era homes that natives often refer to by the name of the families who built them a century ago. They are advertised as "handyman's specials," and newcomers are dazzled by their charm and possibilities. Young homeowners cannot afford to have tradesmen restore them, so they hammer and paint in their own spare time. Conversation at backyard barbecues focuses not on which country club is the "right" one but on discoveries like Rube Goldberg plumbing in the bathroom or death-house wiring in the basement.

Newcomers may find local shopping a shock. The major mall is too far away to visit regularly, and ruburban stores, trying to attract both natives and newcomers, carry schizophrenic stock. The appliance-repair shop also sells running shoes; the wine selection at the liquor store shows promise, but the owner still recommends Riesling with meat loaf; the grocery displays bagels next to the pork chops, and one store may handle both hot tubs and pool tables.

The uneasy encounters between newcomers and natives in the ruburbs have historical precedents going back to Massasoit and the Pilgrims. The Indian chief surely wondered who were these guys in their buckled shoes and pale skins. The wood-stove installer emerging from the package store with a six-pack may also wonder who are these characters in their button-down shirts and patchwork shorts, and what are they doing with the Economist instead of Dirt Rider?ln fact, what the hell are they doing here?

Everyone has heard endless clash-of-cultures tales involving summer folks who invade rural enclaves like Nantucket and Maine. Newly minted ruburbanites get to be treated like interlopers the whole year round. When one commuter stood waiting alone for the last morning train, a dog-walking native asked, "Train late?" "Yes," replied the commuter, thinking he was finally being accepted. "Good," said the native. "Maybe you'll go back where you came from." Sometimes, though, there will be touching signs of grudging welcome. A doorbell will ring, but no one will be there when it is answered. Instead, paper bags of tomatoes and zucchini, the bounteous excess of native gardens, will be left like unwanted infants.

Tenderfeet will find natives shockingly nosy. The plumber may ask personal, pointed questions of new arrivals. The auto-body repairman may insist on discovering how one likes local living before he repairs the station wagon that hit the deer. A simple request to have the Sunday paper set aside at the variety store may bring on a village history about how things have always been done and will never, if God remains in ruburban Heaven, ever change.

Indigenous ruburbanites have developed interesting ways to remind migrants of their presence. Inner-city inhabitants carry ghetto-blaster radios to announce themselves, but ruburban teen-agers favor, as the weapon of aural aggression, the 1973 Pontiac Trans Am with full-throat custom muffler. Rubber is applied to Main Street far into the night, accompanied by rebel yells and the shattering of beer bottles. Newcomers create different problems for the police. Although such naughty amusements are passe in the suburbs, the police chief of Harvard, Ill., had to ask the host of a nude cocktail party to pull the shades, and a Cloverdale, Calif., officer confiscated the large marijuana crop of an immigrant gardener.

Although Republicanism dominates in ruburbia, the struggle between natives and newcomers is not a truly political one. Like historic clashes on the frontier, ruburban standoffs often concern land. Once it was the Johnny-come-latelys who disfigured nature and tamed the wilds, but the case is now reversed. The environmentalists sweep into town from the cities, demanding that nothing change. Movements to create historic districts are started by ruburban newcomers who want codes to protect the small-town flavor that drew them there in the first place. But longtime residents proclaim their right to add vinyl siding and aluminum tool sheds to their property. The ruburbs, after all, are a free-fire zone, where aberrant aesthetics are one of the pleasures. It is not, after all, Sunnybrook Farm any more than it is Haight-Ashbury or The Bronx. Notes Russell Minick, a newspaper editor in Newhall, Calif, (pop. 12,000), 35 miles east of Los Angeles: "To be a liberal out here means to be in favor of baffles on dirt-bike mufflers."

The stubbornness extends to community-wide issues as it did in the recent piggery war in Bolton, Mass. (pop. 2,500), 35 miles west of Boston. Newcomers, nervous about property values and ground-water pollution, proposed an ordinance limiting new piggeries in the traditionally pork-producing town to no more than eight swine. In the biggest turnout in village history, the issue was defeated by 110 votes. But the natives are worried. Selectman Charles Brown, whose son went to college on his pig earnings, says, "If it's pigs this time, will it be cows the next?" More likely it will be junked cars on lawns, a perennial ruburban sculpture form, at least as prevalent as the whitewashed iron jockeys in the suburban landscape.

How long will the ruburbs retain their flavor, diversity and individuality? Many are already being processed into satellite suburbs. For natives, some advances cannot come soon enough. Fast-food restaurants and discount department stores rise from wheat fields like architectural designer jeans, and zoning boards are favorably pondering plans for garden apartments with names like Executive Oaks that will replace orchards and pasture lands. Down at the new supermarket in Gainesville, Ga., a live-lobster tank has been installed. It is supposed to attract the gourmet urges of newcomers from Atlanta. But the new ruburbanites moved out there to experience the country, so they stock up on grits and black-eyed peas. Although the locals do not buy lobsters, they love to stare at the drifting, clawed shapes in the cloudy water bumping against the glass to escape. Banged if they don't look a lot like eager developers. --By J.D. Reed This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.