8 Simple Rules For Small Town Survival

December 7, 2024

I don’t always write about tech. I work remotely in a small New England town in Canada and have a weird life. Sometimes, I write about that life. I hope you enjoy this break from tech and view into my life.

I grew up in a city of over 6 million people and moved to a “small” city of about 600K in my teen years. That was quaint; the difference between those two populations is huge in terms of infrastructure and personality. Then, in my late 30s when that city had reached almost a million people, I moved to a town of about 3,700 people and for the first time learned what the term culture shock meant.

I’m not sure at what population level anonymity kicks in, but I had grown up and lived as an adult in relative autonomy. Cities of the size I lived in provided a good level of anonymity and my relationships with people were largely dictated by where I would run into them. Because travel distances are so far, in packed trains and buses, I would rarely run into school friends at the mall or run into neighbourhood buddies down town.

Services were delivered with the same faceless autonomy. When you need something from the city, you call up the proper phone number and wade through the voice menus in the hopes of eventually reaching a person who could help you. Or, god forbid you have to actually go to City Hall for something. That’s a recipe for writing off an entire afternoon standing in huge line-ups with pretty irate people.

Neighbours were hard to come by. It wasn’t that I did not have neighbours — if anything, I had too many neighbours. My family was middle class so we lived in houses, not apartments, but the sheer population density of large cities means you’re stacked on top of your neighbours all the time. I am not sure if it was a defence mechanism or just introversion, but our family didn’t interact much with our neighbours. We moved every few years — which I learned later in life was unusual— and except for one house I lived in when I was about 7, I don’t recall the names or faces of any neighbour I’ve had in my entire life until moving to the small town I now live in.

Going from a city of a million people to a town of 3,700 was much stranger than I thought. There’s a very simple set of rules in large populations: keep your head down and push through the crowd; don’t engage anyone because they might be crazy; keep remembering that you will get through this. The rules of living in a small town are vastly different.

Here’s what I’ve put together in the last 13 years:

Rule 1: Realize that (almost) everyone knows you. Instantly.

If you’re harbouring any secret thoughts of quietly moving to a small town and disappearing into obscurity, forget it. Before you’ve even seen the house you’ll eventually buy in this small town, the townsfolk have been wondering who will end up living in the old so-and-so house. Houses in small towns only have street addresses as a polite nod to convention and for first responders. Your house will forever be known as “the old so-and-so house” regardless of how long you live there.

By the time you’ve signed the deal for the house, you are starting to get well known. Some of your new neighbours are almost certainly friends with your Realtor, so by the time you show up with your moving truck, the town already knows “that nice couple from wherever” is moving into the “old so-and-so house”.

To be fair, this is just good-natured curiosity, nothing insular.

Eventually, you will be settled in enough to venture out to the local businesses to get a few things you need. In the smaller businesses you probably won’t get out of there without someone in the store stopping you to say “oh, you just moved into the old so-and-so house, right?”

So much for the notion of disappearing into obscurity.

Rule 2: Look for tradespeople early and never stop.

In the big cities I lived in, there was an identifiable line that separated the people you knew socially, the people you knew professionally, and the people who did work for you. Well, to be honest, almost nobody did work for me in the cities because my house was never old enough to need work. The house I live in now is about the age of Canada, and so are a lot of other houses in this town. Consequently, there’s a never-ending need for roofers, window replacers, plumbers, electricians, and some other trades I’d never heard of before (more on that later).

Unlike big cities, there is a usually only small pool of tradespeople to draw from in small towns. In cities, you can call three people for a quote for some piece of work and you can choose the quote you like the best. You’re probably not getting three quotes in a small town. You’re usually hoping to god that at least one qualified and insured tradesperson will come to your house and give you a quote you can afford.

Much like any other place, the people who do the best work tend to be booked the furthest in advance. If you need some work done, start asking around for names as early as you can — your Realtor would be a good starting point. Many Realtors maintain a list of local tradespeople and businesses to help new people get settled.

Eventually, you’ll reach a point where your house is good to go and you don’t need any work done. Resist the urge to get complacent and stop looking for tradespeople at this point. Keep quietly collecting names through casual conversation. One day you will need a tradesperson again and that guy who did that work for you 10 years ago has probably retired by then.

Rule 3: Be prepared to learn about technology you’ve never heard of.

I come from the land of central heating and natural gas. I don’t know how my house was heated — the underground pipes pumped what I guess was natural gas into the thing I was able to identify as my furnace. When I was cold, I turned up the thermostat on the wall and hot air came out of the floor. That’s just how the world works in big cities.

I now live in a province with little natural gas. A small percentage of the population has natural gas in the capital city. However, most of the population of my province does not live in that city. In fact, most of us live in small pockets of a few thousand people, or on individual properties scattered across the landscape in counties, rather than towns. It’s not affordable for any company to run natural gas lines across the sparsely populated landscape, so we mostly burn furnace oil.

Oil burning furnaces do what you’d think. They burn distillate oil to create heat. Houses have a small oil tank in them or outside in the yard, and trucks come by periodically to refill that tank. There isn’t a never-ending stream of fuel that just appears on demand such as the case with natural gas.

How the heat from that burned oil is used varies with the house. In my house, I have two boilers — a wood and an oil boiler — and both of them heat water which is pumped through my house into big old cast iron radiators. In other houses, the oil is used to heat air which the furnace pushes through the house. Regardless of which method is used, oil furnaces are not something most city folk have a lot of experience with.

We also burn a lot of wood out my way. Oil is a petroleum-based and is therefore as fickle in price as gasoline. To take the unpredictable edge off that, many people also burn wood either in wood-burning stoves or in a wood boiler to help centrally heat the house.

The tradespeople that look after wood burning furnaces should hold a Wood Energy Technology Transfer (WETT) certificate. That’s a term I had never heard of before moving to a small town.

Your house may also contain materials or features which are hard to maintain these days. Specifically, I am thinking of ornate plaster crown mouldings. Plaster crown moulding is expensive because it is set in place on the ceiling. It is not built elsewhere and then mounted as today’s wood crown moulding. It has fallen out of vogue with builders for this reason and finding a skilled plasterer in 2020 is a fool’s errand. You may luck out and find one, but it will be expensive.

Rule 4: Dispense with the idea that the town will “need” you

If your plan is to swoop into some podunk backwards town and “help” it work its way into the modern world, stay in your condo. Don’t get me wrong; people in any town or city can be equally welcoming. We all want new stores and services and an influx of people. Newcomers won’t usually be shunned. But people from away who come to “fix” a small town will have a hard time.

I mean, think about it for a second. Small towns have vastly fewer resources than cities. Fewer people, smaller budgets, fewer services. Yet people thrive in them. They thrive in them because they know how to get things done regardless of whatever perceived shortcomings may exist. Whatever big thing you’re thinking of “fixing” has been fixed, probably generations ago, in ways that haven’t even occurred to you.

Rule 5: It is hard to buy local, but try.

Shopping local can be hard. And, unless you’ve lived in a small town before, you’ve probably never given it a second thought. I can get almost anything from Amazon delivered to my door and it will almost always be cheaper. Amazon and other online retailers have made their fortunes by streamlining the shopping cycle to surgical precision which makes it hard for any other retailer to compete on price or availability.

But you still have to try. You have to try because of Rule 1. The people who run those stores are your neighbours and they know you. You want to help them succeed because small towns are awesome, but if nobody can make a living in them, then they’ll continue to dry up. Plus, you just want to help people succeed because you’re a good person, right?

I’d also be remiss if I did not mention that there are unique stores in small towns. Yes, you can get that toaster anywhere online, but the gemstone handmade earrings are a one-of item that you can’t get anywhere else at any price.

There’s also a compelling argument to be made that the Amazons and Walmarts of the world are terrible global citizens. Amazon, in particular, is sociopathically competitive. Take a look at what Amazon did to poor old Diapers.com when Amazon decided they wanted that business.

Take some satisfaction in buying that book or dress or set of tires from your nice neighbour.

Rule 6: Look after your car

This rule should be prefaced by: you will need a car. Many people who live in cities don’t have cars and don’t need them. Public transit exists and is efficient, and there are stores and malls galore. Most of this is not likely to be true in your small town.

You will need a car because your small town won’t have everything you need. Movie theatres and pet stores and gyms might be one or two towns over. If you don’t have a car, you may become very lonely and bored.

Once you have said car, take care of it. Do things like buy snow tires and get it serviced regularly. You will likely spend more time on the road than you did in the city and the roads are probably not going to be as good. Major highways in Canada are maintained fairly well, but few people live on a main highway. Your town will be fairly rural and the snowplows and pothole crews may not be up to the standard you expect. If you end up in a ditch in a snow storm, it may take a while for another person to pass by and give you a hand.

Rule 7: Sometimes you’ll be Dad’s kid, sometimes you’ll be Mom’s.

Many of your fellow townies will be descended from stock going back generations. They will refer to things you don’t know: “it’s just past where the old water tower used to be”. No matter how hard you try, or how long you live there, you will always be “from away” to some extent.

However, the degree to which you’re from away will vary wildly depending on what you’ve done recently.

When you do something people approve of, you will be “that nice couple who moved here a few years ago from Saskatchewan”.

When you do something less popular, you will suddenly devolve back to: “that couple from away that live in the old so-and-so house.”

Rule 8: Join things.

Despite the relatively small size of your small town, you will probably discover over time that there are social circles. I have been here for over 10 years and I still know some people that I only run into in one place, ever. I never see Zach (I don’t know any Zachs so let’s use that name) in the pub, only at the coffee shop. I’ve always found it weird that there are people I see routinely at one location but never, ever, see anywhere else. It’s like they parachute in for single events and then disappear once it’s over. To some extent, that is probably true. Small towns can exist because they usually become the service center for the larger population in the county surrounding it. Some of your acquaintances will be from the county and not live in the town limits.

But I digress. My point is that simply living in your small town for years does not necessarily mean you will eventually know everyone. If you want to expand your circle of associates, you will probably need to join a community group or a recreation league, or find some other way to become involved with the larger group.

Thus ends the lessons of moving to a small town. While it was quite different for me initially, I have become used to the cadence and atmosphere of a small town and now prefer it over the cities I grew up in.

my shorter content on the fediverse: https://the.mayhem.academy/@jdw