A nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit there

Despite all the terrible things I’ve said, I must admit that the people I met in Gallipolis, from waitresses to trainees at the hospital, were very friendly people: a country kind of friendly.

One afternoon I had lunch with my students at the flagship Bob Evans restaurant. I asked the them why they lived in this area, and they all answered that it was a safe place to live and “a good place to raise kids.” With a bit more probing they all admitted that they had been born there, and I wondered if their real reason was a tribal fear of the outside world and a strange kind of Gallipolitan chauvinism.

The low crime rate seemed like less of a selling point after my lunch mates began an eager conversation about the few but grisly murders that had occurred in the area. “How about that guy who murdered his wife for burning his biscuits?” (then turning to me) “We take our biscuits seriously here. “

No doubt they do. As we drove back to the airport through West Virginia, roadside signs proclaimed a chain of restaurants called “Biscuit World.” My travelling companion didn’t share my fascination with vernacular cuisine, so I didn’t even bother to ask if we could stop. I’ll probably never know how the concepts of “biscuit” and “world” could possibly be linked. Another reason I prefer to travel alone.

Perhaps I’m being unfair to the Gallipolitans by calling them insular and tribal. Last year I attended the funeral of a close friend’s father. With the exception of a tour of duty in WWII, he had lived his whole life on a single street corner in a small Massachusetts city, moving once (diagonally across the intersection) in his life. He loved that city, that neighborhood, and that street corner and he was respected and loved by pretty much everyone there. A life like that seems so distant, quaint, and desirable today. Love of place is something I respect. It’s a big part of why I live in Vermont, probably the most beloved state in the union, and I’m sure it’s a big part of why the Gallipolitans choose to stay in their corner of the world.

I think I can sum up Gallipolis by inverting the ancient cliche’ about New York City; “It’s a nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit there.”

Tomorrow I’ll have a brief footnote to my musings about gadgets, then I’ll be taking a brief break from these missives until my Atlanta trip around the February 8. Sometime soon you’ll hear about why traveling is sexy, sleeping with the television, the Coca-Cola museum, life in Skyland, expense accounts and more.