I have a new gig in two communities in New York State near Lake Ontario. The communities are eighteen miles apart, oriented east and west from each other. The community to the east we shall call Parker; the community to the west we shall call Coomer. Parker and Coomer are both towns centering respective town-and-country lifestyles. Those who live outside Parker envy those who live in Parker, and those who live outside Coomer envy those who live in Coomer. I live in neither community: I commute from no small distance to work in one or the other, or both, four days a week, driving in from the south.

Or, as they say, I drive from “up,” because I live above the Niagara Escarpment. In this way they are the same culture. Below the Escarpment is one culture, what I might call the Lake Culture. It is populated by very old, early-American farm families, in some state or another resembling the The Sound and the Fury, some having achieved greatness, others having fallen from greatness into utter ruin, still others having wallowed forever in the misery of poverty. Overlaid is the Erie Canal Culture, which is archetypal mid-century blue-collar America, its participants working in the many and varied factories of heavy industrial giants, seen in one way as the purveyors of great wealth to a rural class of people without the back-breaking and agonizing labor of farm-tending, and also as the soul-destroying never-ceasing powered shafts and conveyor belts. The factories shuttered suddenly.

Above the Escarpment is another culture, with a completely different history, distinct family infrastructures, and different institutions, even though the factories are shared.

So I drive north, down, to do my work in their midst as an outsider, always looking in, watching them as families interacting, and I on occasion being invited in to interact with them, to my great delight. I get lonely while I’m driving, and they’re good people, enviably so.

It has been given to me as a task to unify a few families of each community, so that they might achieve some effectiveness in certain charitable endeavors, endeavors which are to be determined in the future, after we can determine what sort of resources we might be able to pool together, determined by ascertaining what resources these several families are able to acquire. Driving from Parker to Coomer, and then again from Coomer to Parker, is a lovely task under pleasant skies, with regular glimpses of vast lake waters to the north, the constant shoulder of the Escarpment to the south, the land between lined all long with orchards, vineyards, farms, and wooded lots, wherein dwell various species of game animals and their predators. It is a flat plain without a single geographic interruption.

Nevertheless, the people of Coomer, being separated by a mere eighteen miles of empty highway, translating to twenty minutes of travel time, have no knowledge of the people of Parker. The people of Parker know nothing of Coomer. In fact, they are suspicious of each other. At first, this flummoxed me. How is it that these very old families, who are veritably nearly in view of each other, know nothing of each other? When their respective high schools compete against each other in varsity contests, the enmity is palpable and brief. After sharing a regulated and tightly contained space to yell at their children for an hour or two, they depart, socializing not. They have not intermarried.

Instead, each community looks up the Escarpment to sizable little cities, traveling north and south for goods and services not available in Coomer or Parker, respectively, which journey is more than twenty minutes. It seems obvious, to an outsider, that Coomer and Parker together, with greater ease, could support each other with those same goods and services, such as restaurants and larger supermarket grocery stores. It is not so. They think on a north-south axis, they speak of a north-south axis, and they live on a north-south axis, going up and down the Escarpment, to the disadvantage of their own utility. Well, maybe. I dunno.

Driving on the east-west axis, the horizon is apparent, I suppose. One could argue that I’m trying to manufacture a horizon, where the one community ends and where the other begins, but I think I’ve found one. There is a third community, which we shall call Lakeshire, a very thinly populated town, spread out over some area, closer to the Escarpment than Parker and Coomer. There is practically nothing to this Lakeshire community to speak of, no important institutions, no real history, no central presence in the area. Although it is little more than a crossroads, it is more than a crossroads, but no inhabitant of Lakeshire claims to be from Lakeshire. Instead, they claim to be from either Parker or Coomer. The inhabitants of Parker and Coomer, on the other hand, would not consider Lakeshire a part of their respective communities.

There exists, north of Lakeshire, exactly halfway between Parker and Coomer, and on the main road, a mobile-home park. It is large, containing the population of a small town all by itself. The inhabitants of the mobile-home park are located exactly as far away from any amenities as is possible in this area.

There it is, a blight, an unpleasant experience, seeing all those country poor people gathered together in one forlorn place, out of sight, and perhaps out of mind. What is life like within this mobile-home park, each home nestled too close to its neighbor, with no fences to make neighbors, good or otherwise? Caricatures fill the mind. And then the conscience strikes.

There are no trailer parks on the north-south axes.