When I say I'm from a small town, I always wonder if people truly understand what that entails for me. I'm not talking about some quaint little town just past the border of a metropolitan area. I'm talking about a small town that is surrounded by counties containing nothing but a few small towns in any direction. I'm talking about an entire county that sends its children to one high school and that high school graduates fewer than 200 students ever year. That's normal for the area.
Also, most of our roads are unpaved. I live on an unpaved road, actually. The road is named after my grandfather and at one point it intersects the road named after my great grandfather. It's not that my family is influential or wealthy. Far from it, actually. It's just that my parents are the only people living on the road named after my great grandfather and everyone living on my road is either related to me or a member of one of two other families (that's a total of three houses and two trailers along two miles of road). My family was the first to homestead that area, so we got dibs on the road name back in the '90s when the county finally started to bother naming unpaved roads for 911 purposes.
Something that many of you snooty city folk may not understand is that dirt roads don't like the rain. Sections of my road become a nearly impassable mud pit after a hard rain and about half of our student population lives on similar dirt roads. In case you don't keep up with the weather in my part of the world (and you probably don't), it rained five inches this past Saturday and has been raining since about 6 p.m. last night and isn't supposed to really stop until Friday. It's not raining that hard, but it's not letting the roads dry out.
The principal made an announcement during lunch today to let us know that if school is cancelled for tomorrow because of the condition of our roads that the graduation test would be taken our first day back in school.
That's right, school gets canceled here because it's really wet.
5 comments:
I know exactly what you're talking about having grown up in a similar town not all that far from you. We lived on a dirt road until after I graduated from high school. Our school used to get canceled when the paleolithic air conditioning shat itself turning the high school - which was built in a swamp - into a greenhouse.
I applaud you all the more for not seeing 4wd as essential for your vehicles.
I guess it's only fair. The kids up north get snow days. You should get something.
Mickey, you've seen me take the Prius down ATV trails before. A little muddy road isn't going to give it any problems.
I don't think my school has ever been closed on account of the weather. Bomb threats yes ...
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