I grew up in a place that had more cows than people. Now it has more heroin than cows. I’d be dead if I didn’t get out. Real rural life where you’re working for a living eats people alive. What you want isn’t that, it’s this ideal where everything is simple and paid for and you’re distant from the things you don’t like about actually living in a community with people but all the amenities of that life are still immediately to hand. When someone you love dies because it takes an hour for an ambulance to get to your house, that is the rural life that’s actually out there to be had.
Everything about OP’s comment and your response reminds me of every conversation I’ve ever had with anybody else who grew up in a vacation town.
3 months of tourists clogging up every service you can think of and talking about how wonderful it must be to live there as they leave after their 3 day weekend of partying on the beach, and 9 months of the local kids doing heroin because alcoholism is more popular with their parents and you need some kind of addiction to cope with the lack of work and things to do outside the tourist season.
I spent 10 years training kids on how to cut fish, and every single one of them shared the same sentiment. Regardless of whether they wanted to move to the city or farther out into the woods, they all wanted to get as far away from that town as they possibly could.
The reason we did dope instead of drinking isn’t a cultural thing. It’s that the dope man goes to the same jail whether he gets caught selling it to adults or kids, same as it was during my bad old days 20 years ago. Counterintuitively, if it were legal and regulated you’d see fewer kids doing it.
In a way, though, the culture and environment of the area I grew up in is exactly why we had so many addicts in our ranks and why we did heroin instead of drinking.
The county my hometown is in has had the highest rates of drug and alcohol addiction in the entire state for at least 50 years, probably going back to the 1910s (I wanna say its in the top 3 areas countrywide, but I dont remember), and a lot of it revolves around the tourism economy. A tourism economy means that money is made there during the brief time between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and the rest of the year the jobs dry up and something like 60% of businesses close up until the next year. So not only do many people make the majority of their annual wages during a 3 month period and hope it lasts the rest of the year, but there’s also very little to do in the area because everything’s closed and it’s not like you’re gonna hang out on a beach with 4 inches of snow on it. I used to work with a fisherman who would have his son drive the boat while he leaned over the front and used a chainsaw to break up the ice so they could get the boat out to fish in especially cold winters where the ocean would freeze over. The only thing that comes close to the frequency of drug and alcohol addiction there is homelessness. And it’s the same story no matter what tourist town/vacation spot you’re talking about. A veneer of glitzy vacation beauty and plentiful party drugs hiding the addiction and homelessness beneath.
But my generation turned to heroin because, as you said, it’s illegal and therefore unregulated, which makes it cool to do, but also because alcohol is legal and so our parents were the ones day drinking in bars or at home while we were kids, making it not cool to drink, and heroin was easy to get and plentiful. Post 9/11, as the war in Iraq and Afghanistan grew, heroin from the Middle East began to flood into New England ports, and the guys who sold the tourists and rich people in their summer homes party drugs in the summer, were selling heroin right alongside weed and Adderall to us high schoolers in the winter.
And I just wanna make it clear that my comment wasn’t some kinda dig at you or something, but rather that the greentext of “why would you want to leave the idyllic country life” and your response reminds me of the countless conversations I’ve had with tourists and wealthy summer folk who say “why would you ever want to leave, it’s such a beautiful place,” and how every other person I’ve ever met who came from a tourist town has said the exact same thing as me about where they grew up.
“What you want isn’t that, it’s this ideal where everything is simple and paid for and you’re distant from the things you don’t like about actually living in a community with people but all the amenities of that life are still immediately to hand” exactly sums it up.
On Reddit, it actually got to the point where it was weird how often I would describe living in a tourist town without naming anything specific beyond what I’ve said here, and have people either say “that sounds like (the exact area I grew up in),” or, “I grew up in (the area I grew up in), and it was exactly like that.” I guess I kept bumping into them because Reddit was our addiction of choice. What else was I gonna do sitting in the fish market I worked at waiting for the 10 customers we’d have in the 4 hours we would be open on a winter day.
Don’t forget your private jet to get back to civilization when you’d like some decent medical treatment, something other than satellite TV, or a dinner of better quality than whatever restaurant is next to the truck stop.
I grew up in a place that had more cows than people. Now it has more heroin than cows. I’d be dead if I didn’t get out. Real rural life where you’re working for a living eats people alive. What you want isn’t that, it’s this ideal where everything is simple and paid for and you’re distant from the things you don’t like about actually living in a community with people but all the amenities of that life are still immediately to hand. When someone you love dies because it takes an hour for an ambulance to get to your house, that is the rural life that’s actually out there to be had.
Everything about OP’s comment and your response reminds me of every conversation I’ve ever had with anybody else who grew up in a vacation town.
3 months of tourists clogging up every service you can think of and talking about how wonderful it must be to live there as they leave after their 3 day weekend of partying on the beach, and 9 months of the local kids doing heroin because alcoholism is more popular with their parents and you need some kind of addiction to cope with the lack of work and things to do outside the tourist season.
I spent 10 years training kids on how to cut fish, and every single one of them shared the same sentiment. Regardless of whether they wanted to move to the city or farther out into the woods, they all wanted to get as far away from that town as they possibly could.
The reason we did dope instead of drinking isn’t a cultural thing. It’s that the dope man goes to the same jail whether he gets caught selling it to adults or kids, same as it was during my bad old days 20 years ago. Counterintuitively, if it were legal and regulated you’d see fewer kids doing it.
In a way, though, the culture and environment of the area I grew up in is exactly why we had so many addicts in our ranks and why we did heroin instead of drinking.
The county my hometown is in has had the highest rates of drug and alcohol addiction in the entire state for at least 50 years, probably going back to the 1910s (I wanna say its in the top 3 areas countrywide, but I dont remember), and a lot of it revolves around the tourism economy. A tourism economy means that money is made there during the brief time between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and the rest of the year the jobs dry up and something like 60% of businesses close up until the next year. So not only do many people make the majority of their annual wages during a 3 month period and hope it lasts the rest of the year, but there’s also very little to do in the area because everything’s closed and it’s not like you’re gonna hang out on a beach with 4 inches of snow on it. I used to work with a fisherman who would have his son drive the boat while he leaned over the front and used a chainsaw to break up the ice so they could get the boat out to fish in especially cold winters where the ocean would freeze over. The only thing that comes close to the frequency of drug and alcohol addiction there is homelessness. And it’s the same story no matter what tourist town/vacation spot you’re talking about. A veneer of glitzy vacation beauty and plentiful party drugs hiding the addiction and homelessness beneath.
But my generation turned to heroin because, as you said, it’s illegal and therefore unregulated, which makes it cool to do, but also because alcohol is legal and so our parents were the ones day drinking in bars or at home while we were kids, making it not cool to drink, and heroin was easy to get and plentiful. Post 9/11, as the war in Iraq and Afghanistan grew, heroin from the Middle East began to flood into New England ports, and the guys who sold the tourists and rich people in their summer homes party drugs in the summer, were selling heroin right alongside weed and Adderall to us high schoolers in the winter.
And I just wanna make it clear that my comment wasn’t some kinda dig at you or something, but rather that the greentext of “why would you want to leave the idyllic country life” and your response reminds me of the countless conversations I’ve had with tourists and wealthy summer folk who say “why would you ever want to leave, it’s such a beautiful place,” and how every other person I’ve ever met who came from a tourist town has said the exact same thing as me about where they grew up.
“What you want isn’t that, it’s this ideal where everything is simple and paid for and you’re distant from the things you don’t like about actually living in a community with people but all the amenities of that life are still immediately to hand” exactly sums it up.
On Reddit, it actually got to the point where it was weird how often I would describe living in a tourist town without naming anything specific beyond what I’ve said here, and have people either say “that sounds like (the exact area I grew up in),” or, “I grew up in (the area I grew up in), and it was exactly like that.” I guess I kept bumping into them because Reddit was our addiction of choice. What else was I gonna do sitting in the fish market I worked at waiting for the 10 customers we’d have in the 4 hours we would be open on a winter day.
Or they don’t call an ambulance because they cannot afford the $5000 bill.
That’s also a very fair concern that isn’t limited to rural areas but tends to hit them extra hard.
Don’t forget your private jet to get back to civilization when you’d like some decent medical treatment, something other than satellite TV, or a dinner of better quality than whatever restaurant is next to the truck stop.