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Life is Hard – or Not

The home energy audit fellow and I were chatting in my kitchen recently and he made the observation that Matinicus might be the “hardest” place to service, given our particular logistics challenges (those being, normally, that nothing is normal, and you never really know if, when, and by what sort of conveyance you will be crossing the bay). Mainland people say living here must be “hard.” I am not so sure I agree. How do we measure something like that?

A recent article in that well-known big city Newspaper of Record over which people in spotless Oxford shirts engage in fisticuffs at the Monhegan Store and similar remote establishments touched on the delicate subject of it being “hard” to live in some places. Specifically, the researcher was trying to determine the “hardest” places to live in the U.S.

The article did not discuss the hardships endured by those living in such places as where you have to roll up your Brooks Brothers sleeves and rumble on the sidewalk for your Times. That would require a separate study.

Here, on Matinicus, we do not have to brawl for our New York Times because anybody who wants it either waits for it to come in the mail, which is two or three days late, or reads it online, making the paper less a Gray Lady than a Blue Whippersnapper. At any rate, nobody ends up losing a cufflink in a streetfight.

We did get to thinking about what makes life in a given place “hard.” All sorts of folks who do not live here assure me that life is “hard” on these islands, especially my island. What they mean, I suppose, is that you can’t go to Starbucks. There are a great many other things we do not have on Matinicus including high school, Chinese food, decent broadcast television signal, law enforcement, a doctor, a grocery store, 3-G, a library, a gym, a bar, an oil delivery company, professionally trained firefighters, T-ball, fresh vegetables, daily transportation off the island or—worst of all—somewhere to buy an ice cream cone. Or, as the home energy audit guy acknowledged, a simple way to get a spray foam insulation truck to a jobsite.

None of that is what the Times was talking about. Their metrics included “education (percentage of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree), median household income, unemployment rate, disability rate, life expectancy and obesity.” A few folks wrote in to take issue with that last one. I don’t know. I did get more than a little bristly, however, about that first yardstick; in fact, I’d say that using college and graduate degree percentages to measure how “hard it is to live” somewhere is akin to measuring the height of a building in degrees Fahrenheit.

The coal-mining communities, or what’s left of them, in rural Kentucky and West Virginia and similar rural counties won the contest, and that probably shouldn’t be surprising. Just the same, what counts as making life “hard” somewhere? Is it about money alone? It shouldn’t be. The study never claimed to be measuring something as simple as wealth. They proposed an abstraction: finding where life is “hard.”

Now, I am not naïve about how this stuff works, and I understand the free-associative, indirect, conventional-wisdom relationship between the end point of one’s education and the average wealth of one’s neighbors. Those who research such things, and rare among them one with calluses on his hands, don’t mind a few sociological over-simplifications, broad-brush stereotypes, and statistical machinations. However, if they’re out for a day of sociology-101 type mass generalization, they could have got as valid data measuring the neatness of people’s yards, the number of people’s bathrooms, or the likelihood of finding a potato peeler in the kitchen drawer. Sociology isn’t hard. Life, so we hear, is hard.

Do you only want to measure money, or do you really want to measure difficulty? Measure how many households have access to an automobile that always runs; that’ll tell you a lot. Measure average summer and winter temperatures; measure crime rate; count up how many elementary schools offer art. Count up how many days the local roads are dangerously icy. Count dentists. Measure snowfall. Measure green space. Find out who is growing the tomatoes. See if the water is fit to drink.

Count up how many different modes of transportation are required to get your load of groceries home from the store.

Here’s my argument: the whole pretext is flawed. The units of measurement are about half wrong, but more to the point, there is inadequate definition of terms. What do you mean “hard to live there?” Of course it is hard to live in McDowell County, W.Va., but you’re singing to a very particular audience when you start worrying about how few people have postgraduate degrees. Ye gods and little fishes. I suppose it is the New York Times. No—that’s not fair. Life isn’t all that easy in New York City, either. Eight million people live there; very few of them are wealthy.

A couple dozen of us got together in the island’s little schoolhouse one evening this summer for a pot-luck supper and movie night and watched Julie and Julia. We saw the main character lugging her groceries home on a crowded New York subway, and several who had lived there in the past corroborated the story. People do it. That looked, to be frank, hard. It looked about equal to our maddening island dance of putting our groceries into a mainland car, then board a boat or an airplane, and then into an island truck before getting them home. Nobody says life in New York is “hard” because the logistics of shopping are a pain in the backside. Everybody says life on Matinicus is hard because the logistics of shopping are a pain in the backside. I sense a technical discrepancy in the informal data collection method.

On a lighter note, here’s an example of how life is easy on this remote island, based on the oh-woe-is-you language of folks who imagine our lives to be so arduous: people think it must be awfully difficult to live where the high school kids must move off-island and mommy can’t hover over her poor helpless teenager so much. I will go out on a limb here, with respect to the other parents, and say that this special hardship made my life much easier and for one specific reason: sports. Our daughter loved sports in high school (and damned if we know where that came from).

If we’d been living on the mainland I’d have been strong-armed into being a “soccer mom” for sure, mini-vanning all over the place to stand in the sleet for hours and stare at all manner of inexplicable running around. Instead, our 14 year-old islander went to a Hogwartsian boarding school on scholarship, where she became a varsity athlete her freshman year and loved every minute of it—every bash and smash and dislocation and every championship. We showed up from time to time, watched a few bicycle races, did a little smart-phone telemedicine over the ether, and steeled ourselves to the rugby position known as the “blood substitute.” Here’s the thing, though: those schools have team vans. Mom doesn’t have to do any of the driving (not to mention any of the laundry or very much of the first aid). Epic win.