Tiny Towns

Abstract

Tiny Towns Michael Dowdy (bio) The roads end At motels. —Weldon Kees, "Travels in North America" Inns are not residences. —Marianne Moore, "Silence" 1 Some folks say a family business "gets in the blood." But they're usually mum on how many generations it requires, or how many decades it takes for the blood to drain, drop by drop, as the puddle beneath your sneakers congeals into a clot of unconfirmed stories. My [End Page 96] grandfather is a dozen years dead, my grandmother's a summer gone, my father's over seventy. Poking around their family business, I'm finding that folks also fail to add that toxins "get in the blood," too. ________ My family's business began with a restaurant that's eroding from my kin's memory. All that remains is a name: Tiny Town. This crack in our origin story may've been caused by a shift in our foundation, its crawl spaces now dank and impassable. For JB, my grandfather, like my father, wasn't a restaurant man. He was a motel man. The restaurants he left in a trail of ashes. ________ JB opened Tiny Town Restaurant in Pearisburg, near the rugged border between southwest Virginia and southern West Virginia, in 1954. Pearisburg was fifteen minutes from the shack where he was born, where three of his siblings had died, near where JB's schoolhouse burned down when he was seven, ending his formal education. I don't know why JB named the joint Tiny Town, whether it was his fondness for alliteration or a short-lived matter-of-factness. Given the man I knew and loved, it wasn't humility or any of its cousins. ________ Tiny Town opened when my father was five. That year he and my two uncles climbed on top of their Ripplemead trailer and threw flaming trash into my grandfather's pickup, which burned to a crisp. The temptation of fire, I'd later learn, was rumored to run in the family. Pearisburg is indeed a tiny town, [End Page 97] but it's mammoth compared to where he grew up, between the pinpricks of Pembroke and Hoge's Chapel. The New River flows past all three dots. Unlike his aptly named restaurant, the New is a misnomer—the world's second oldest river cuts through one of the world's oldest mountain ranges. Near its banks, tiny towns like Ripplemead abound. ________ Another Tiny Town appears in season three of the Netflix cult classic Arrested Development. As the Bluth family, their family business, and the show itself unravel before our eyes, the Bluths build on the hillside behind their own model home a model-sized village of model homes. The Bluth's Tiny Town is a bait-and-switch designed to fool their Japanese investors, who will, the racist Bluths believe, stare in awe through binoculars and miss the tricks of perspective and scale. Yet it's the Bluths, not their investors, who mistake the appeal of their scheme. In their arrogance and desperation, the gigantic—their incompetence, xenophobia, and self-sabotage—shrinks. In real life, the small can appear outsized, especially up close or at high noon. Getting a durable sense of the scale and perspective of one's inheritance requires a tricky mix of curiosity and forbearance that the Bluths sorely lack. ________ My family's family business wasn't run by Bluthian sociopaths, and our Blue Ridge hustles were a far cry from the Bluths' Hollywood schemes. But, like theirs, ours was agonistic, dysfunctional, ever edging toward dissolution. My grandfather's Tiny Town, like many of his businesses, lasted only a few years. Like the Bluths, whose real estate acumen [End Page 98] consisted of hunches and gambles, JB led with his gut. Like the Bluth patriarch George, whose Banana Stand went up in flames, JB had a business or two burn to the ground. One rumor ran that he torched them for insurance cash. I've found little evidence of that, other than ashes, and ashes rarely speak. Were his fires the result of going-it-alone? Now, cable TV brands such instincts as DIY. Then, it was simply the ingrained habit...