Five Kids
The Five Kids Bakery in Gilbertsville has been a destination for us since Peter and Aviva took us there last year. It’s not just the wonderful smell that greets you even on the street, it’s the cheerful, friendly owner and his good taste in all the other things he stocks, including the best gnocchi. His wife is the baker, and they do, in fact, have five kids – all under 12. How he stays so cheerful is a mystery. They’ve just expanded into the old market that failed next door to them, so now they have lots of room for the store and room for a proper cafe. For most folks it’s coffee and a fabulous pastry, but they also do two sandwiches for lunch. In the old place they only had room for two tiny tables. This is a big improvement, with wonderful light. It created room for the kitchen to expand too. It’s a pretty amazing place, a place that would be competitive in any city. But here it is in Gilbertsville, population 326 (down from 399 at the 2010 census). I sure hope they make it – it’s a huge asset to the community, especially now that there is room to sit and visit. And it’s clearly a labor of love.
I read a piece in the Times about studies of rural America, and how the sociologists often get it wrong, because of assumptions they make and things they don’t know how to see. I’m still just getting my rural land legs, figuring out how things work here, why I love it so much, and why some of its politics are so foreign to me. In Hartwick, right in the center of town, some jerk flies a Confederate flag right across the street from the Clarvoe’s Freight Wheel Cafe, a bastion of kindness and welcome. I suspect that half the folks in Gilbertsville would never go into the fabulous Five Kids Bakery. But there is only one school serving each of these small towns, so the kids ride the buses together and learn together and parents across the political spectrum meet at basketball games. I think we all love this countryside in our own ways. But those of us who have come here after seeing the bigger world may love it quite differently from those who have three or more generations of memory here, who took the bus to high school with the guy who fixes their cars now. Mike Huestis is our window into that world, living in a web of kin and generations of neighbors. But he’s open minded, willing to entertain new ideas, willing to listen to Democrats. And he and his Greek wife are raising five kids too.
The five kids of the bakery ride the school bus to Morris, eight miles away. Mike and Bea’s kids ride from Fly Creek to Cooperstown, just four miles. The Clarvoe kids are long since grown and moved away from Hartwick, and mercifully, the jerk who flies the Confederate flag has no kids. But the kids who do live in Hartwick ride the bus to Cooperstown some nine miles away. All these little towns had schools of their own, and even where the building is gone, there is a School Street in every town. The economics of those little schools clearly weren’t sustainable, but it’s a sad loss for a town. The schools were the hearts of the towns, they were the hope for the future, they were a source of pride.
Otsego County is steadily losing population, and it’s hard to see how that trend will be reversed. In Cooperstown, the hospital is the economic engine, and massive summer baseball tourism keeps shops and restaurants alive. But if kids go off to college, there aren’t jobs to bring them back here. The people of color, doctors and nurses who come to work at the hospital, mostly don’t want to stay in a town where their kids are the only minorities in the school. There are still big patches of the county with no cell service, and plenty of roads where we lose satellite connection. The investments the Biden administration has made in rural areas shows up here in several ways, but it’s an uphill battle to keep the people here and the towns alive. Stores on Main Streets sit vacant, and you have to drive a ways for groceries or to buy shoes.
A great deal will be lost if we don’t figure out how to make these rural economies work. We have to look beyond the model of generations who stayed put and think about how to attract families with five kids who want their kids to grow up with deer and woodchucks and the occasional bear. We have to figure out how to provide services seniors need to stay here – a hospital, yes, but also transportation. And for people who do migrate in, there has to be a way to help them understand what is precious here, what needs to be protected. The natural world, of course, the places for five kids to get their toes in the mud and freeze their feet in clear creeks. But also the sense of community and neighborliness, knowing everyone on your road and most of the people you meet daily, watching five kids get off the school bus and grow up before your eyes.