chicoktc

I think some clarification is in order here: 1. I grew up in rural Upstate NY 2. I left for over a decade 3. Every time I came back home, it broke my heart to see how this place is declining -- yet the land is so beautiful and the houses are cheap. 4. I came back, not with any illusions about the culture here. I figured that maybe I could help make it better, and if nothing else, I could live cheap for a while after I got out of the military. 5. Within 6 months of leaving the military, I blew up online and wound up accidentally launching into a successful online writing career. It was totally unexpected. 6. On the fly, I tried to use my newfound online reach to attract people here, to promote this place, to try to publicly reflect on ways to improve not just Upstate NY but all of rural America. Some of my ideas were controversial, but the thrust was always oriented towards making my pocket of rural America thrive again. 7. Three years or so into that, we had a baby, and I had to start weighing the feasibility of my ambitions here more seriously out of a duty to our daughter. Does she deserve to grow up in a place that is collapsing? What is her future like here? Some of the more cynical commentators say that any negative experience I have here is me "reaping what I sowed." Some even revel in it as a form of "punishment" for my unspeakable crime: reminding American youth that rural America exists, and that maybe they could make a life for themselves here very cheaply, if they liked. But what I was actually trying to "sow" was a rebirth of my own homeland. It just didn't sit well with me that the place I grew up was just supposed to die and be abandoned, so I thought I'd try making it better. Why not try? I genuinely figured that since so many people are mad about high housing costs, and since remote work exists, maybe we could leverage the ultra-cheap housing here in deep rural Upstate NY to start up a kind of Renaissance. Seemed like maybe it could've worked out for everybody! Cheap housing for folks from unaffordable places, new life in towns that are literally about to become ghost towns, locals get to see their towns avoid total collapse, Churches filling pews again, etc. But I learned it's not quite that simple. Many of the problems here appear to be totally intractable. I found that the property tax situation is worse than I'd thought. And the locals may complain about decline here, but they also don't really want to see a Renaissance either. Meanwhile, though the general public may complain about housing, but they don't want cheap housing badly enough to move to a place like this. To be fair, Albany makes all of this worse than it has to be. But even if the NYS capital started making genuinely good legislation, you can't use policy to force a stagnant, parochial culture into being anything else. And you can't force the wider public to brave long winters, ceaseless overcast, and to take a risk on trying out a place on the far margins of the American mainstream just for cheap housing. So it goes. At this point, I'm simply glad to have tried it out. I did exactly what the "localist" types say to do: I came home. I tried to make it better. I sang the song of my homeland. I did this for about three years, and at the end of it, I've got enough equity to recoup 100% of my housing costs from while I was here. If I walk away, I can do so knowing I tried. I'm not one of those who left with his nose upturned at where he came from. From here, who knows. Maybe I do strick around, albeit without any pretensions of "solving the problem" here. Or maybe we head out to the Southwest, which has always felt more like home to me anyway. Hard to say. Big thanks to those of you who see this and have come along for the ride.

Hyrule is my choice, but Camelot is a close second. What about you? Which world would you enter?