Small places: In Search of a Vanishing America.

• Author: Sinclair, Ward

Small Places: In Search of a Vanishing America

Thomas H. Rawls. Little, Brown, $16.95. After Tom Rawls visited Fulton County, Pennsylvania, several years ago, he went home and turned out a sympathetic portrait of the rural redoubt and two "outsiders"--this reviewer and his partner--who were struggling to move from daily journalism to full-time farming.

The piece appeared as another of the "Small Places" that Rawls was writing up for Harrowsmith, a magazine about country life that he edits in Vermont. Rawls found Fulton County altogether charming and noteworthy for a local ethos that proudly treasures its ruralness even as the disconcerting fringes of the eastern megalopolis creep ever nearer.

The essence of the piece was that the people of Fulton County, whose own Chamber of Commerce trumpeted the theme "country still is country," deserved praise for resisting the pressures of Californication that have debauched larged swatches of America's rural landscape.

Rawls's point, however, was lost on the locals, and he soon became Public Enemy Number One in Fulton County. The local weekly newspaper excerpted his piece under a front-page headline, "COUNTY PANNED IN YUPPIE MAGAZINE," and all hell broke loose.

For weeks the newspaper printed letters from indignant nitpickers who expressed varying degrees of contumely for this itinerant editor's offense of describing reality as he saw it.

Time has a way of healing, and maybe today, with the inclusion of the Fulton County piece in this collection of Rawls's "Small Places" columns, the local critics will be less defensive, for compared with other small places, Fulton County is a gem.

As individual magazine pieces, Rawls's reports made interesting and even compelling reading for their bright writing and insightful observations. Better still, collected in book form, the essays become an important piece of reportage about the physical and emotional changes that are sweeping across the national outback.

This is not a wooly theoretician's prescription for stemming or reshaping change. Though written during a time when mean-spirited Reaganism was attempting to kill the federal programs that provided some small developmental uplift to rural America, Rawls's pieces are free of political cant.

They are instead a rather mournful recitation of many factors that contribute to the decline of those rural communities that we still romantically identify as the bastion of what's good about the USA. In some places, the...