About ten years ago, the diner in our village closed its doors and left about 30 farmers, among others, orphaned. We all had difficulty understanding why a person would not want to rise at five in the morning anymore to serve a five dollar plate of bacon and eggs and then listen to people moan about the world as they drank bottomless cups of coffee.
We did our best to keep Rhonda and Dave going. Dave had been standing at the grill for three decades and suffered poor circulation. We bought him a special mat for his feet but it only gained us a few weeks. Dave quit and the restaurantclosed. I still have the sign in my barn in case Rhonda, or anyone else named Rhonda ever gets the urge to fire up the business again. Ten years have past and still no takers.
The same year, Bruce Burgess died and his little garage was sold, shutting off yet another gathering point for people who don’t care to pay retail for coffee. Garn’s Repair Shop and Combustion Club south of Stayner had shuttered a few years before that. The only outlet left for people who had an infinite amount of time on their hands was Neil’s Driveshed on the next concession where about six dilapidated Easyboys form a circle around a woodstove and the visiting hours linger between dawn and noon depending on who is in attendance and how wound up they are.
Unfortunately, the authorities closed that establishment down just before the pandemic. By authorities, I mean Neil’s wife and sister-in-law who got tired of the men coming back to the house grumpy about Trump and many other political topics north and south of the border. The women agreed the men needed a change of scenery and for almost a year it was a hit or miss thing to run into any of them at Tim Horton’s or the back corner of McDonalds in town. I found I was becoming dangerously uninformed about births, deaths, hip replacements, cataract surgeries, lost dogs and special deals on used equipment.
Then the pandemic hit. The women eventually took pity on the men and allowed a re-opening of the Driveshed, with appropriate precautions, under a temporary permit. The doors were thrown wide open to allow air movement, the chairs pushed apart to a regulation six feet, maximum occupancy of ten and bring your own mug. The men were already habituated to working in a dense toxic fog of WD-40 fumes and Roundup and they argued that the virus didn’t stand much of a chance making it past the mailbox. But the most important rule change was the total ban on political discussion. It’s been six years now and the Driveshed is going strong.
Bubbles like these have formed everywhere across the country and they are essential to rural mental health. I was reading a psychologist the other day who claims that human beings need three things to operate normally: Structure, predictability and what the industry calls ‘mirroring’. Structure and predictability are probably self-explanatory, although I have never been impressed by the human ability to predict anything with any accuracy. We guess wrong ten times out of ten. The psychologist assures us that we don’t need to be very accurate in our predictions as long as we feel that our guesses are going to land somewhere in the ballpark. The pandemic was deeply unsettling because it left us with no idea of what the state of things would be in a month, six months or a year down the road. That still remains the case today, and it continues to rattle us.
The business of ‘mirroring’ is a more subtle concept. The oldest part of our brain, the limbic lobe which produces all of our emotions, evolved over 75,000 years while we learned to live in the village. Whether it be the flicker of appreciation in a stranger’s face when we hold a door for them or the wave of a driver who lets us into traffic, we still need a regular diet of micro-contacts with people every day to remind ourselves that we are part of a group and expected to behave. Yank those micro-contacts away from us and our anxiety levels climb dramatically.
I think the women knew this already without reading any psychologist’s book. That’s why they gave us back our driveshed coffee club.