The Real Cost of City Life

While there are a lot of things to like about New York City, I'm afraid, as a born and bred country girl, Southerner become Westerner, lover of the open sky, athlete and all around fast becoming non-shopper, I am increasingly hard pressed to find reasons to want to be there.

First of all, the cost of living. When I first left the Army in 1978, I scored a rent control apartment on the Upper East Side for $400 a month. It was on the top floor of 434 East 58th Street, which of course is positively unheard of these days. Smack in the middle of Sutton Place, rife with millionaires, I was on the top floor. The windows didn't lock and the kids who ran rampant over the rooftops regularly made their way into my apartment during the day, leaving filthy footprints on my pillow, and scaring me half to death. I ended up sleeping with a hammer next to my bed, just one of many reasons why I left New York in the fall of 1979, cheap rent or no cheap rent. By the way, the current rent for a similar apartment is $5070. Ouch. I'll bet they still haven't fixed the windows.

Second, crowds. My skin crawls when I'm surrounded. New York City is defined by teeming masses. The sense of being suffocated with nowhere to escape brings on claustrophobic tendencies and an unhealthy urge to take out a ball peen hammer and start creating personal space. That of course creates another opportunity to spend time in crushing humanity behind bars, in even less habitable conditions. And really, really bad food.

Third, as a farm girl, I need sky, open spaces, green, forests, and animals. Not the kind who are sculpted models who pay $200 a pop to get their eyebrows plucked twice a week to look like a fake celebrity to feel superior over those who spend too much to live in Manhattan, smell garbage and the body odors of the human detritus and then stride down the street wearing disposable clothing the price of which would purchase a decent-sized home in most Third World countries.

My father lived here during the Depression, a Cornell educated actor, whose roommates at the time included Jimmy Stewart, Burgess Meredith, and Henry Fonda. All drank too much, were dirt poor, all traded responsibilities for the rent when someone got Broadway stage work. However three went to Hollywood, Dad went to on to radio work in Washington DC. Dad never got over that decision. For my father, who was a pretty serious alcoholic, this rings true: the word "Manhattan" is from the Algonquian manahachtanienk, meaning "the place where we all got drunk." I could easily add, and "sold our lands to the white devils and our people down the river," but then, that's obvious.

The New York City Police Department has 1.2 million open arrest warrants, which to me means that Match.com/Manhattan probably has more guys who are wanted in Manhattan by the police than by its single women.

There are three things in New York which I do admire, however. The New York Library. The New York Times. And The New Yorker. All three are scions of literary value, learning, journalistic value, high standards and sources of inspiration and hope.

The very good news is that for two of those, you don't have to live in New York to enjoy them. I have to admit that I also admired the hell out of Mayor Bloomberg for taking on the soda industry, he was right, and way ahead of his time.

As of 2014, according to Citymetric.com, about 54% of the world's population was estimated to live in our cities. By 2050 that number is expected to rise to 66%. As someome who grew up surrounded by woods, streams, animals, fresh air, a work ethic based on physical labor, a deep appreciation for the life/death cycle of Nature, this terrifies me. Most kids today have no clue that for them to have food, something has to die. Food comes from the store. Nature isn't important. Food (chemicals in food shapes) comes out of a box. Big industrial food is very happy about this.

Now I pick on New York because it's a big target and I've lived there and so did my Dad. But this goes for all big cities, which are getting some three million people a week moving into them. They are not each getting $450k jobs and $5000 a month apartments. People in every country are leaving traditional lands and lifestyles and pouring into cities looking for jobs and landing on the streets. I see it in every major city I land in all over the world.

To give you an example of how bad cities can be, when I flew into Hanoi a while back the pollution from the city's massive motorbike population (four million and counting) was so intense that I couldn't leave my hostel. I'd bought one of the ubiquitous local face masks, but that doesn't help the eyes. When my tour bus picked me and another French couple up for our adventure to the northern villages for home stays it took fully three hours to get out from under the foul blanket of suffocating smog. It was the same in Saigon. I never got to see any of either city's storied sights- the air was so foul that I was driven inside to struggle to breathe.

While the good news in America is that highly creative people are coming up with ways of growing decent food in your own apartment to get around some of these challenges (and good for them), the simple truth is that pollution kills. The lack of blue sky, open spaces and woods to explore numbs the soul. Not understanding Nature- our Mother and Source- kills who we are, for we don't understand our responsibility to the planet.

We cannot be good stewards to that which we leave to developers, miners, corporate rapists who only see the land as sources, not as precious resources worth protecting.

When city life means we have lost sight of Nature, we can't relate to Her, and we don't understand that She is worth protecting, we are no longer human. This is why I will never be a city dweller. Each to his own. And thank God. For I will take a lonely, windswept cliff affording me a view of the Milky Way over a cityscape any day.