As you drive into Westville*, you'll see a field on the left with a small vintage car sitting in it facing the road. On the right, half a mile later, you'll find a hunting and fishing goods shop located in front of the town's only true grocery store. With a population of just over 7,000 and a history dating back to the 1800s, Westville is one of those places where everyone knows everyone. It has been holding onto its past and its tight-knit community spirit while the world changed around it. Only now is it beginning to truly change too, the intimate town it has been for years falling by the wayside in favor of advancement and joining the 21st century.
Almost anyone in town will tell you about what it was like to grow up here, because almost everyone who lives here did grow up here. People of the same age often refer to each other as “cousin” even when they aren't related, because they have known each other since they were children and went to school together from kindergarten all the way through high school. You'll hear stories about when most of the town was agricultural and there were only a third as many houses. If you happen to live in one of the houses built since 1950 or so, you may even receive an accusatory look as if it's your personal fault that your house exists in what used to be a field.
The Men at Ten meet most mornings at Cosy Coffee, the only real coffee shop in town. (The nearest Starbucks is in the next town, over 15 minutes away. That has to be some kind of record these days.) Cosy Coffee is at the east end of “downtown.” The west end, just two blocks away, is at the intersection of 1st Street and Main Street. There's one stoplight in town, but people ignore it late at night if they don't see one of Westville's ten cops around. And everywhere – everywhere – there's a layer of agricultural dust. Opening a bedroom window at night will leave your room coated in it within a couple of days, and you can feel it in your lungs with every breath.
This dust is an omnipresent reminder of the city's deep-rooted agricultural involvement. For miles around, fields and orchards are some of the most notable features. Sure, the mountains containing Lake Berryessa are close enough to see – but you need to drive through orchards and past fields to get there. Half the time, you'll end up behind a tractor or some other piece of farm equipment – indistinguishable to a city person – for at least some of the drive there. It seems like almost everyone in town has a job that relates somehow to agriculture. If they aren't farmers themselves, they work at the local plant processing the bountiful harvest, or they repair farm machinery, or wire and fix the electricity on the farms (good luck trying to get your home wiring repaired during harvest season).
Last year, after repeated calls and with some lucky timing, I did manage to get some rewiring done to my home's electric system during harvest season. The next step was to have the town's one building inspector come make sure it was all up to code. It wasn't, not the first time – but town rumor has it that nothing is ever up to code the first time. Maybe the inspector really is a perfectionist, or maybe he just wants an excuse to get out of the office again next the week. He's a cheerful man in his late 40s or early 50s, with thinning once-red hair and the type of widely-held shoulders that try to make up for a lack of height. The cheerfulness slipped into bitter amusement, though, as he talked about the water situation. (That's the polite term for “drought.”) Some time ago, he stopped signing off on permits for new homes to have lawns in an attempt to encourage more water-conscious landscaping. He was clearly pleased with himself for this, but his next sentence came with a sigh: “Residential water usage only makes up 4% of total water usage, so even if everybody cuts back by 25% at home, that's still...” His voice trailed off and he looked out the window into the dusty heat, the unspoken “only one percent” left hanging in the air.
People here don't like to talk about the water situation, not really. They hint at it all the time, in whispers of dry wells and lost crops, but only a few are willing to actually talk openly about just how severe the drought has become. In a sense, though, there's no need; the dust speaks for itself. Every time you look at a car or window, you see all the rainstorms that haven't come to wash the dust away. All too often, you'll find yourself wiping down a flat surface inside near an open window, asking yourself whether you dreamed cleaning it a day or two ago or whether that much grime has really shown up that quickly. (It's the latter.) You'll forget what it's like not to have a cough. A friend up and sold her house here to move to Missouri, citing air quality issues.
You won't see the “Congress Created Dust Bowl” signs that line I-5 further south in California, but it's hard not to realize that this is still part of the Central Valley and, by all natural rights, should be a desert. Thanks to the drought – sorry, the water situation – the illusion of natural lushness is slipping a little. Some of the agricultural greenness has faded into brown, with certain fields left fallow and occasionally entire orchards abandoned to try to struggle their own way through the dryness and the heat. The natural ribbon of green on the shores of the town's creek has begun standing out against a browning backdrop instead of blending into the lush fields and orchards as it had for years.
***
I watched through my window once as the dogcatcher came for a notorious dog. The man was rotund, to say the least, with a net that looked more suited for catching butterflies than dogs. There way no way the angry dog he was waddling after was going to fit in it, but he tried anyway. He only managed to whack the dog on the back, which – of course – enraged it further. It hopped around him in circles, barking and nipping in his general direction, while he dragged himself after it waving the net. Eventually the dog got bored and ran around the corner. The dogcatcher made it back to his van and drove away in the opposite direction. The next day, the dog was back in its owners' yard. The mailman mentioned a week later that he no longer delivers mail to their house, but didn't specify what exactly he does with it instead.
Another time, there was police action right outside my front door as I sat on the porch sipping lemonade and watching the neighborhood. One of those ten cops in the city pulled up, lights spinning, chirping his siren a couple times. The two young teenagers he was chasing pulled over their bikes (yes, as in bicycles, not motorcycles). He reminded them to put on their helmets, which they did with some reluctance. He then inquired about how school was going, asked them to say hi to their parents on his behalf, and drove off. They rode away in the other direction, obediently keeping their helmets on.
The Fourth of July, in particular, shows how much Westville epitomizes the image of small-town America. Almost everyone in town heads to the high school's football field in the afternoon with blankets and picnic baskets. Patriotic music pours through the loudspeakers, and here and there someone gets up to dance along. As twilight falls, the crowd's conversations grow more hushed, but the boisterous laughter of a few clusters of people carries clearly through the warm evening air. When the fireworks start, they're so close you feel you could reach up and snatch the sparks from the sky; there's none of the urban-style straining to see past buildings and trees in the hopes of glimpsing a little of the display put on by the next city over. It's no wonder almost everyone shows up for the event. In fact, the teenage boys who spend so much of their usual time on the football field and their girlfriends are almost the only people not there – presumably because they are too busy partying by themselves. (A nearby fire that started on the 4th of July one year wasn't officially attributed to people setting off their own fireworks in the dry, drought-stricken hills.)
Life may sound sweet here in some ways – and, in some ways, it is. In other ways, the small town atmosphere is a constraint. People who meet me here automatically assume I'm a decade or so younger than I am, because they see that I don't have children or a husband with me. When they learn that I'm in my late 20s, unmarried, and childless, you can see their minds working until finally they conclude that something is wrong with me. Even a little girl of about four years old asked me once, “Why don't you have babies if you're so old? Do you like kids? Do you like me?” When I explained to her that I like kids and babies fine, but just don't have any of my own, her brow creased. After being perplexed for a moment, her face lit up. “My neighbor has too many kids. She has three... four... six... seven kids. I'll get one for you, okay?”
These are all stories of the “real” Westville, the one that's directly descended from the town's function as an agricultural place. In recent years, though, another faction has shown up. These people are solidly middle-class, as opposed to the mostly working-class people who have been here all along. You'll find them sipping local wines in any of the several wine-tasting venues downtown. When they achieve that inevitable buzz, they'll move on to eating at Bird & Basil. This restaurant – with its exposed wood and affected farmhouse style mixed with burnished steel furniture and a list of beers you've never heard of – would be more at home in a trendy San Francisco neighborhood than here in this small town, yet this subset of residents flocks to it. Eating local, seasonal food is, of course, a natural part of life in any agriculture-based community; after all, that's what's available. For this faction, though, it's a lifestyle instead – and it has the price tag to match.
***
The next time the housing inspector came over, he barely glanced at the revised wiring before signing off on the work. Instead, he lingered and talked about toilets. Low-flow toilets were, at that time, about to become mandatory. Any housing inspection for any repair – even if it had nothing to do with the toilet or plumbing – would necessitate an inspection of all the toilets in the home, and an order to replace any that didn't meet the new low-flow standards. “Do you know what that means?” he asked. “It means people won't bother getting any work inspected, because they won't want to deal with the hassle. Some of them can't afford new toilets. Others just don't think it's worth it to save the water.” There was frustration in his voice. When he left, he paused to shade his eyes and look at the house across the street. The stream flowing from its lawn into the gutter as the sprinklers haphazardly chugged water across the sidewalk explained how the grass was so lush and perfect despite the constant heat. The inspector sighed, shook his head, got into his car, and drove away.
It's hard to imagine he'll have much time in the coming months for this sort of small-town chatting with people during his work appointments. A Dollar Tree is opening within the next few weeks. It follows shortly on the heels of a strongly contested McDonald's. Before too long, the small downtown area will have two large hotels (we'll see how long the one bed and breakfast currently in town lasts once they open). A new building, with the first floor devoted to retail and the upper two floors providing office space, is in the works. An energy company plans to open a training facility here. If all goes according to plan, the town will be unrecognizable within a few years, with little more than that omnipresent layer of dust linking the town's past, present, and future.
*The names of the town and businesses, as well as other identifying features, have been changed.
Almost anyone in town will tell you about what it was like to grow up here, because almost everyone who lives here did grow up here. People of the same age often refer to each other as “cousin” even when they aren't related, because they have known each other since they were children and went to school together from kindergarten all the way through high school. You'll hear stories about when most of the town was agricultural and there were only a third as many houses. If you happen to live in one of the houses built since 1950 or so, you may even receive an accusatory look as if it's your personal fault that your house exists in what used to be a field.
The Men at Ten meet most mornings at Cosy Coffee, the only real coffee shop in town. (The nearest Starbucks is in the next town, over 15 minutes away. That has to be some kind of record these days.) Cosy Coffee is at the east end of “downtown.” The west end, just two blocks away, is at the intersection of 1st Street and Main Street. There's one stoplight in town, but people ignore it late at night if they don't see one of Westville's ten cops around. And everywhere – everywhere – there's a layer of agricultural dust. Opening a bedroom window at night will leave your room coated in it within a couple of days, and you can feel it in your lungs with every breath.
This dust is an omnipresent reminder of the city's deep-rooted agricultural involvement. For miles around, fields and orchards are some of the most notable features. Sure, the mountains containing Lake Berryessa are close enough to see – but you need to drive through orchards and past fields to get there. Half the time, you'll end up behind a tractor or some other piece of farm equipment – indistinguishable to a city person – for at least some of the drive there. It seems like almost everyone in town has a job that relates somehow to agriculture. If they aren't farmers themselves, they work at the local plant processing the bountiful harvest, or they repair farm machinery, or wire and fix the electricity on the farms (good luck trying to get your home wiring repaired during harvest season).
Last year, after repeated calls and with some lucky timing, I did manage to get some rewiring done to my home's electric system during harvest season. The next step was to have the town's one building inspector come make sure it was all up to code. It wasn't, not the first time – but town rumor has it that nothing is ever up to code the first time. Maybe the inspector really is a perfectionist, or maybe he just wants an excuse to get out of the office again next the week. He's a cheerful man in his late 40s or early 50s, with thinning once-red hair and the type of widely-held shoulders that try to make up for a lack of height. The cheerfulness slipped into bitter amusement, though, as he talked about the water situation. (That's the polite term for “drought.”) Some time ago, he stopped signing off on permits for new homes to have lawns in an attempt to encourage more water-conscious landscaping. He was clearly pleased with himself for this, but his next sentence came with a sigh: “Residential water usage only makes up 4% of total water usage, so even if everybody cuts back by 25% at home, that's still...” His voice trailed off and he looked out the window into the dusty heat, the unspoken “only one percent” left hanging in the air.
People here don't like to talk about the water situation, not really. They hint at it all the time, in whispers of dry wells and lost crops, but only a few are willing to actually talk openly about just how severe the drought has become. In a sense, though, there's no need; the dust speaks for itself. Every time you look at a car or window, you see all the rainstorms that haven't come to wash the dust away. All too often, you'll find yourself wiping down a flat surface inside near an open window, asking yourself whether you dreamed cleaning it a day or two ago or whether that much grime has really shown up that quickly. (It's the latter.) You'll forget what it's like not to have a cough. A friend up and sold her house here to move to Missouri, citing air quality issues.
You won't see the “Congress Created Dust Bowl” signs that line I-5 further south in California, but it's hard not to realize that this is still part of the Central Valley and, by all natural rights, should be a desert. Thanks to the drought – sorry, the water situation – the illusion of natural lushness is slipping a little. Some of the agricultural greenness has faded into brown, with certain fields left fallow and occasionally entire orchards abandoned to try to struggle their own way through the dryness and the heat. The natural ribbon of green on the shores of the town's creek has begun standing out against a browning backdrop instead of blending into the lush fields and orchards as it had for years.
***
I watched through my window once as the dogcatcher came for a notorious dog. The man was rotund, to say the least, with a net that looked more suited for catching butterflies than dogs. There way no way the angry dog he was waddling after was going to fit in it, but he tried anyway. He only managed to whack the dog on the back, which – of course – enraged it further. It hopped around him in circles, barking and nipping in his general direction, while he dragged himself after it waving the net. Eventually the dog got bored and ran around the corner. The dogcatcher made it back to his van and drove away in the opposite direction. The next day, the dog was back in its owners' yard. The mailman mentioned a week later that he no longer delivers mail to their house, but didn't specify what exactly he does with it instead.
Another time, there was police action right outside my front door as I sat on the porch sipping lemonade and watching the neighborhood. One of those ten cops in the city pulled up, lights spinning, chirping his siren a couple times. The two young teenagers he was chasing pulled over their bikes (yes, as in bicycles, not motorcycles). He reminded them to put on their helmets, which they did with some reluctance. He then inquired about how school was going, asked them to say hi to their parents on his behalf, and drove off. They rode away in the other direction, obediently keeping their helmets on.
The Fourth of July, in particular, shows how much Westville epitomizes the image of small-town America. Almost everyone in town heads to the high school's football field in the afternoon with blankets and picnic baskets. Patriotic music pours through the loudspeakers, and here and there someone gets up to dance along. As twilight falls, the crowd's conversations grow more hushed, but the boisterous laughter of a few clusters of people carries clearly through the warm evening air. When the fireworks start, they're so close you feel you could reach up and snatch the sparks from the sky; there's none of the urban-style straining to see past buildings and trees in the hopes of glimpsing a little of the display put on by the next city over. It's no wonder almost everyone shows up for the event. In fact, the teenage boys who spend so much of their usual time on the football field and their girlfriends are almost the only people not there – presumably because they are too busy partying by themselves. (A nearby fire that started on the 4th of July one year wasn't officially attributed to people setting off their own fireworks in the dry, drought-stricken hills.)
Life may sound sweet here in some ways – and, in some ways, it is. In other ways, the small town atmosphere is a constraint. People who meet me here automatically assume I'm a decade or so younger than I am, because they see that I don't have children or a husband with me. When they learn that I'm in my late 20s, unmarried, and childless, you can see their minds working until finally they conclude that something is wrong with me. Even a little girl of about four years old asked me once, “Why don't you have babies if you're so old? Do you like kids? Do you like me?” When I explained to her that I like kids and babies fine, but just don't have any of my own, her brow creased. After being perplexed for a moment, her face lit up. “My neighbor has too many kids. She has three... four... six... seven kids. I'll get one for you, okay?”
These are all stories of the “real” Westville, the one that's directly descended from the town's function as an agricultural place. In recent years, though, another faction has shown up. These people are solidly middle-class, as opposed to the mostly working-class people who have been here all along. You'll find them sipping local wines in any of the several wine-tasting venues downtown. When they achieve that inevitable buzz, they'll move on to eating at Bird & Basil. This restaurant – with its exposed wood and affected farmhouse style mixed with burnished steel furniture and a list of beers you've never heard of – would be more at home in a trendy San Francisco neighborhood than here in this small town, yet this subset of residents flocks to it. Eating local, seasonal food is, of course, a natural part of life in any agriculture-based community; after all, that's what's available. For this faction, though, it's a lifestyle instead – and it has the price tag to match.
***
The next time the housing inspector came over, he barely glanced at the revised wiring before signing off on the work. Instead, he lingered and talked about toilets. Low-flow toilets were, at that time, about to become mandatory. Any housing inspection for any repair – even if it had nothing to do with the toilet or plumbing – would necessitate an inspection of all the toilets in the home, and an order to replace any that didn't meet the new low-flow standards. “Do you know what that means?” he asked. “It means people won't bother getting any work inspected, because they won't want to deal with the hassle. Some of them can't afford new toilets. Others just don't think it's worth it to save the water.” There was frustration in his voice. When he left, he paused to shade his eyes and look at the house across the street. The stream flowing from its lawn into the gutter as the sprinklers haphazardly chugged water across the sidewalk explained how the grass was so lush and perfect despite the constant heat. The inspector sighed, shook his head, got into his car, and drove away.
It's hard to imagine he'll have much time in the coming months for this sort of small-town chatting with people during his work appointments. A Dollar Tree is opening within the next few weeks. It follows shortly on the heels of a strongly contested McDonald's. Before too long, the small downtown area will have two large hotels (we'll see how long the one bed and breakfast currently in town lasts once they open). A new building, with the first floor devoted to retail and the upper two floors providing office space, is in the works. An energy company plans to open a training facility here. If all goes according to plan, the town will be unrecognizable within a few years, with little more than that omnipresent layer of dust linking the town's past, present, and future.
*The names of the town and businesses, as well as other identifying features, have been changed.