Life in a small town

I lived the first twenty odd years of my life in a suburb of Los Angeles. What would I know about small towns? I remember a song in the mid 1980’s by John Cougar Mellencamp with the title „Small Town“, that’s the closest I ever got to one. I might have heard that song while passing through so-called „hic towns“ as my friends and I drove to Phoenix, Arizona for a science fiction convention; places like Indio, Blythe or Quartzsite on the Interstate 10, remote desert places. Anyone who has been there will know exactly what I mean.

It really wasn’t until my move to Germany did I really understand the concept of living in a small town, just like the Mellencamp song, so to speak.
Check out these really small places just an hour’s drive north of downtown Munich: places like Viehbach, Röhrmoos, Rettenbach, Pasenbach – almost everything is a „bach“, which means „creek“ in German. Viehbach sounds funny in English, I translate it as „Cattle-Creek“ like some ghost town in Texas where shootouts might occur. But the origins of the name Viehbach really means, in Bavarian, „Fichten am Bach“ or „Spruce Trees on the Creek“ – nothing to do with cattle after all – darn. Here’s another place near where we live – Vierkirchen. I would translate that as „Four Churches“ in German. Nope, it means „Fichten Kircha“ or „Spruce Church“, (unlike Spruce Goose); are you beginning to understand the logic?
Many moons ago Bavaria, or „Bayern“ was nothing but massive forests (of spruce trees) and fields with rivers and lakes, which explains the meaning of many of these places. Right now, Vierkirchen has 4,000 inhabitants at 222 persons per square kilometer. Where I live now with my family, in Viehbach, it’s probably less than a hundred families. Most of the original families have given up farming and now use their large cow stalls for car repair garages. So far only two families in Viehbach still farm and milk their cows, a back-breaking job I must say – the farmrs never have weekends or holidays off. They accept it as their way of life and don’t want to change it either.

Here’s an exercise I did to understand the concept of living in a village. You should try it if you’re ever out here: go up to a high hill outside a village and you could see several villages separated by farmlands. You’ll notice that each village has a church tower in the middle, an artist’s delight really. If you use your imagination and go back only a hundred years in time, the logic of how the villages are structured and how they’re separated from each other makes sense. The communities are clusters of villages, each making up a small handful of families with large plots of land to plow and work on. The old Catholic church buildings are built in the middle and usually on a high hill for all to see. The bells were chimed by „Mesners“ or church custodians at all hours of the day, the bells would call the faithful to Mass, to warn of bad weather, or that a death had occurred in the village. This was the way of life for centuries. Some farmers I know can trace their ancestry back to the Middle Ages. It really hasn’t changed until the advent of the automobile.
Coming from L.A. where my world consisted of endless freeways and urban sprawl, I immediately appreciated this new environment. I remember going to college near Pomona where the area was surrounded by hills and ranches; by the time I graduated it was almost all developed by „master-planned communities“ and condominiums; tragic I must say.However, the officials in „Bayern“ are well aware of the „Los Angelisation“ of communities and do everything they can to slow development and zone vast areas outside of Munich for farming and forestry. Good move for the Germans, too late for Los Angelinos.

When Germans hear my American accent and ask where I’m from, they always get suprised when I say I’m from L.A. One even tried to remember the text from the Neill Diamond song, „L.A. is fine, the sun shines most the time, and the feeling is laid back …“ Then they ask me why an L.A. boy would want to live here in Bayern, when their past vacation in Hollywood and Malibu were wonderful? I usually answer them, „Ah, you failed to see the non-stop traffic, the smog, the gangs, the crime, the poverty, the endless urban sprawl, the occasional brush fire or earthquake, and the redundant climate where any undeveloped hill looks green in January, maybe, then turns ugly brown for the rest of the year.“ Then the Germans say, „Oh, yeah, I didn’t think about that.“

I guess, in the end, I have become "smallified!"