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By Root 235 0

of whom orbited around the Mexican restaurant—owners, busboys, patrons. But Homer did boast diversity of character and constitution. I had never seen so many men who missed digits from fishing and construction accidents, nor known people who could maintain a professional life without a shower or indoor toilet at home. There were the itinerants, the seasonals, the locals who had left and returned and those who’d stayed, had babies, married, and divorced. There was the heels and lipstick set, which was small and drifty, and the men who lived alone in the hills who came into town lusty. People lived in all sorts of homes made out of all kinds of structures, from glamorous estates with million-dollar views to near lean-tos. There were no subdivisions with cookie-cutter houses. One morning, one of the other teachers burst into school and shouted: “The ugliest trailer park in town is on fire. Maybe it’ll finally go!” A year later, the clot of homes was razed and turned into a parking lot for the expanding community college.

This brand of diversity meant there were a number of characters around town. There were the old cranks who wrote angry letters to the editor every week. A moon-faced Japanese boy who walked all over town, always trailed by a mental health worker. A woman with a long, graying ponytail who biked everywhere in all kinds of weather. (A car accident, someone told me, had left her not quite right in the head.) There was the dwarf, a high school girl with blond hair and a silver sports car that had been tricked out to fit her.

One of my students was an eighteen-year-old girl, six feet tall and thickly built, with bugged eyes behind bottle-bottom glasses and a head of wildly curly brown hair. She had been born on an Indian reservation in the Lower 48 and had been adopted by a family who lived in the hills behind town in a modern, fortress of a house surrounded by a wide well-trimmed lawn. The girl was awkward in her movements, high-voiced, with the careful penmanship of a scrupulous fourth-grader, and an unpredictable intelligence. After a year, I understood her to be a young woman who had climbed out of a novel by a South American magical realist. At lunch, she whispered to me about her visions of ghosts, of chickens, of angels who flew down to touch her skin.

In a small town, there’s room for everyone. Everybody needs someone worse off than themselves. But a small town is, of course, the worst place to go to hide away. People trying to escape stood out even more: those who lived far out of town and drove in only as often as they had to; those living off the road and telephone network who were contacted over the radio; people who were particularly hermitic, reclusive, or weird.

As in any small town, rumors spread like oil slicks, and people’s histories trapped them like boom. Before you knew someone, you might know intimate details about their life. “She’s the one who threw the glass of wine in her husband’s face at the restaurant when she found out he was cheating on her.” “Oh them? They’re coke fiends.” “He sells pain pills over the counter of his store.” Domestic tangles were covered by the local newspapers, revealing more information than you thought you wanted to know about your neighbor, a friend of a friend, the guy with the backhoe you might someday need to hire. Gossip webbed the community together and sometimes felt like a trap.

Most news was good news, however. Front pages had photos of local kids skiing, performing, or catching fish. Letters to the editors were typically laudatory and formulaic: Event X Declared a Success! “And so many thanks go out to all of those who helped make this year’s canned food drive possible.” But there were real controversies around town: Should the city be able to annex land outside its bounds? Should the city replace the blinking red light—the only traffic signal in town—with a three-color one? Should the city let people dump fill over the bluff to shore up their disappearing properties? Growth and change brought conflicts, which played out in the local papers, in signs