Lack of anonymity in rural Worthington

In his Smithsonian magazine essay, From Brooklyn to Worthington, Minnesota, novelist Tim O'Brien revisits his rural hometown. The story focuses on his father who began drinking heavily after moving to rural Worthington from Brooklyn. The drinking, attributed by O'Brien, in part, to the isolation of the rural town, eventually resulted in admittance to a state treatment facility for alcoholics--and a lot of shame and embarrassment for the author.

For my father, still a relatively young man, it had to be bewildering to find himself in a landscape of grain elevators, silos, farm implement dealerships, feed stores and livestock sales barns. I don't mean to be deterministic about it. Human suffering can rarely be reduced to a single cause, and my dad may well have ended up with similar problems no matter where he lived. Yet unlike Chicago or New York, small-town Minnesota did not allow a man's failings to disappear beneath a veil of numbers.

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Places are defined not just by their physicality, but also by the joys and tragedies that transpire in those places. A tree is a tree until it is used for a hanging. A liquor store is a liquor store until your father almost owns the joint.

The essay, a highly recommended read touching on many aspects of rural life, is available online here.