Rural Life

This post takes, as a launching pad, the story of the man's house who was allowed to burn down because he hadn't paid the $75 annual fee to the local fire department.

I have lived in areas that run the gamut from sketchy urban to very rural. Currently, I live in an area that is sort of exurban in that there are still a few working farms around.[1] I live within a town's borders, but there is no town police force.[2] The town is part of a neighboring town's school district. Fire protection is by a volunteer fire department.

I can't praise the volunteers enough. They have to have all of the training of professional firefighters, which is a shitload of training, and many of them also have paramedic certifications. To my mind, volunteer firefighters deserve all of the praise and glory that we give our servicemen and women.

But there is a problem inherent in living outside of the cities and larger towns: If you call for emergency assistance, the response times are long. I now live within earshot of a fire station. Early one morning, as I was feeding the cats, I heard the fire siren go off. Twelve minutes later, I heard the siren of the first truck leaving the station. Add in the time it took to drive to wherever they were going and get set up, well, that's a long time to have your home on fire.[3] (In their defense, they do have paramedics on duty, so if you call for a medical emergency, those folks roll immediately.)

I lived for a time in a rural county that had one state patrol car on duty at night. If you called for an emergency, even if the officer had responded with a high-speed lights-and-siren run, it could be as long as 20 or 30 minutes before he showed up, and that was if he wasn't busy at another call. You might get lucky and a town cop or another state trooper might show under mutual assistance. In that town, the unofficial motto of the volunteer fire department was "we've never lost a cellar hole."

I have had personal experience with calling the cops in my current location for a trouble call, and that one was an incident where two people were beating the shit out of each other right out in the parking lot. It was at least a quarter-hour before a cop came by and by then the combatants had given up and limped away.

Living away from the city has its charms. It's usually quiet. You can look out your window and see the green of forests, marshes or grasslands. Muggings are rare. Life seems slower. Other than you have to have a car or two, it's less costly to live here.[4] On the other hand, if you want good coffee (not Dunkin Donuts) or food other than American, pizza or Chinese, you are shit out of luck or you make it yourself. If you want to see an indie film or a documentary, you'd best join Netflix and you're not going to be browsing through quaint bookstores.

The biggest drawback is that you are often on your own for a first response in an emergency. You need a good first-aid kit, fire extinguishers (depending on your home size, at least a few) and a gun. For you cannot count on help arriving in time to do more than clean up.

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[1] Horse farms don't count.
[2] 911 calls go to the county sheriff's dispatcher. If people around here call for the cops, they almost universally pray that the state police show up, not the sheriff's deputies.
[3] That assumes that the first truck is a tanker truck. If a tanker truck doesn't respond and the first truck is either a ladder truck or engine truck, then all they can do is make sure that everyone is out and then watch the fire spread.
[4] City folk have been known to load up on groceries here before heading home because the prices are cheaper and the selection is more varied.