this ain't livin'

This is a guest post from Andrea. Andrea lives in the backwoods of northern Virginia with a small menagerie, where she fritters her life away reading, hiking Civil War battlefields, and surfing the internet when the weather allows her primitive satellite connection to stay up. She’s involved in social justice, battlefield preservation, and is foolish enough to try going to school full time while holding down a full time job that requires a 100 mile daily commute. You can catch her blogging this idyllic life over at the Manor of Mixed Blessings (posts there have no redeeming social value).

There’s a lot of benefits to living in a rural area. On my two and a half acre slice of heaven, I can have chickens, a garden, a tree-planting habit, and the luxury of not knowing if my neighbors have an argument. I can have four large dogs and no one complains about the barking. I can set out food for the raccoons and possums and feral cats and the neighbors do not come antagonize me about my habit of compassion. In fact they’re probably grateful I’m keeping the raccoons and possums and feral cats off their property, because these critters are a fact of life when you live in the middle of nowhere.

There’s a dark side to this idyllic life, though, and I’m not talking about the fact that my precious baby trees are constantly under threat from the voracious whitetail deer. Where I live, the nearest town’s outskirts start 13 miles away, which is coincidentally where the nearest grocery store is. This town had a population of about 20,000 people according to the 2000 census. To the other side is a town with a population of around 10,000 people, located about 15 miles away. These towns have your basic selection of big-box stores, but here’s the thing: I cannot just pop out to Walmart or Target or the grocery and grab something real quick-like.

If I need something from the grocery, the pet store, or the hardware store (all of them big-box varieties) then I will be spending 20 minutes to drive the 13 miles to them. My Honda CRV gets about 25 miles to the gallon, so the round trip is going to cost me $3.05 at current gas prices, and also a minimum of 40 minutes. If I would like to pick up my dog and cat food from a locally owned store instead of a big-box chain, bump that drive up to 15 miles, and if I would like to go to different stores entirely we’re talking 17-20 miles worth of drive, with increased fuel and time consumption because of poorly designed traffic patterns. I live in a typical food-and-retail desert for the rural US, and let me tell you: unplanned trips are not going to happen. Because if you’re going to spend an hour in the car plus whatever time in the store, you’re by Dog going to pick up everything you can think of that you might need for the next week while you’re there, because that $3 per trip adds up pretty fast.

My work commute is even more fun. The jobs in my field are located about 50 miles from me (in various directions, so even if I change companies I won’t shorten my commute). That’s two hours and some change out of my day, every day, to get to work, and incidentally it’s also four gallons of gas for a total of $12 (I’m rounding that nickel off because I’m lazy). I spend, at these gas prices, $250ish a month to get to and from work, and every month I also spend 42 hours at least in the car commuting, or one entire freakin work week. My employer does not offer a regular telecommuting option, so except in extenuating circumstances, I’m stuck doing the drive five days a week. Some days I’m exhausted by the time I get to work. In order to beat traffic, I get up at 0400, check my e-mail, take care of the menagerie with the help of my husband, get a shower, get dressed, and get out the door no later than 0600 so I can get to work by 0700, which means if I’ve packed a lunch that I can generally leave early enough to get through the poorly designed traffic patterns that guarantee delays before they’re backed up for more than a tenth of a mile.

I also go to school on the post-9/11 GI Bill. This is a great bill and I deeply love it, but in order for me to get maximum benefits I’m required to have at least one class where I am physically required to show up in the classroom. This is all good and well except that the only Saturday class I could take for the past three semesters has been located at the campus that’s 25 miles away. Two more gallons of gas and $6 gone every weekend, and that’s if I don’t go anywhere else.

And what if I want to buy something that isn’t available locally? Many things aren’t; while we’ve got the usual assortment of big-box stores there are times I would like something a little more specialized, or maybe a book that the local Borders or Barnes and Noble doesn’t carry because they’ve judged it unsuitable for this market. Sometimes, hunting around online, I can find a company that cuts a deal better than I might otherwise expect, like when I found a place that sells the dog food I wanted not only at a substantial discount off normal retail but with flat-rate $4.95 shipping. In that case, it’s cheaper for me to order from them and have it delivered than it is for me to drive ($3!) to the feed store or the big-box pet store and buy the food there if they even bothered to sell it. They don’t, and my closest option for purchasing the food is 50 miles away, which would be $12 in gas if I drove to get it myself. But flat-rate shipping can be a rarity, and when it comes time to actually calculate shipping I often get to pay a premium¹, either in money or in time until delivery.

And while property costs are often lower in rural areas, and property taxes as well, what do you actually get for your money? If I call the county sheriff, it will take a deputy 20 minutes to get to my house if that deputy hurries. When heavy snows come, my road is one of the last to be cleared, which can result in being effectively housebound for a couple days. If those same heavy snows take down a power line we’re really screwed, because the population density isn’t high enough to put it on the power company’s priority list, but electricity runs everything out here that isn’t run on heating oil or propane or kerosene. No electricity doesn’t just mean “no television” and “no internet” but for me it means “no heat pump” and “no well pump” and “no stove.” It means that I become deeply thankful I own a wood stove, because at least I can keep the pipes in the house from freezing while I wait for the power to come back on.

During the 2010 Snowpocalypse and Snowmageddon, shelters were set up in the urban areas for residents who had no heat, but how the hell were the residents of my unincorporated township, who also did not have heat, supposed to get to them when the county wouldn’t plow our roads out any more than the power company would fix the downed line that returned us to the 19th century? Living off the grid sounds very romantic until you find yourself trying to haul enough wood to keep the fire going long enough and hot enough to heat just enough water that you can have a sponge bath. Sure, property taxes are low, but it means we get zero social services. My tax money may be staying in the county, but it’s not coming back to the community.

All of these money and time costs add up to what I call “the rural living tax.” I spend $3000 a year or so to drive to work, and spend 3 weeks of my time every year commuting. I could cut the cost of this commute down by driving the 22 miles to the point at which I could pick up public transit to work, but it would double my commute time to four hours total a day. I add a minimum of $3 to the cost of whatever I buy locally, and have a reduced selection of goods and services from which to choose. Shipping is slower and more expensive when I resort to the internet, although I don’t have any hard numbers for my totals, I suspect it would just make me burst into tears. Generators cost money to buy and maintain; wood for a wood stove costs you either money or time, and the chimney will need to be cleaned (more money). There is no municipal sewer service, so you’re going to pay to maintain your septic system. There is no municipal water service, so you’re going to pay when something goes wrong with your well. There is no municipal recycling pick-up, if I want someone to pick up recyclables it will cost me $35 a month, which incidentally is more than the cost of the trash pick-up service I pay for so I don’t have to drag trash down to the dump and pay there to drop it off.

For me, the rural living tax is further amplified by disability. I have fibromyalgia, and it means that I have to carefully ask myself if I have the energy to make that trip to the store, which is going to mean a minimum of 40 minutes sitting in the car. Driving is not particularly comfortable for me, being trapped in one position for an hour every morning and night on my commute leaves me in pain, and while I could stop off at the store on my way home from work, I may just not have the energy after an hour’s commute in the morning, eight hours and some change at work, and then the thirty or forty minutes it takes me to get from work to the store. My reserves may be so low after a day that is guaranteed to be at least 10 hours long if traffic cooperates that the thought of adding 20 minutes onto it so I can stop at the grocery is unthinkable, let alone going out after I’ve gotten home.

I’m one of the lucky ones. My industry wasn’t hammered by the recession, my job is secure, and my paycheck is solidly middle-class. I can afford to live in the back of beyond and pay the rural living tax. Some of my neighbors have not been so lucky and have lost their homes, gone hungry, and otherwise suffered as the bottom dropped out of the economy. If they’d lived in an urban area they might have made it, but out here the rural living tax will nail you every time.