The Thing About Hometowns
Places like Krumpe’s Do-Nuts give our county its character.
By Laura Forrest Hopfauf
I’ve been a lot of places. Thirty countries. Forty-nine states. Cities from Paris to Havana to Miami to Rome. The thing about all of those places is that they have something that nowhere else does. They haven’t been filtered so they’ve become blurry. They haven’t been tamed so that their unique nature no longer exists. They haven’t been forgotten, yet they’ve kept up with the times. In the midst of a constantly changing world, they’ve held onto their identity while progressing forward.
In contrast, I can think of dozens of places that were unidentifiably bland. A town in Texas with none of that Texas flair, just box stores and developments eclipsing ranches and mountains and lakes. Cities in California within an hour of the mighty Pacific that could have been placed directly into Chicago’s sprawling suburbs without anyone batting an eye. Towns along the Mississippi that looked lost to both the past and the future, a bunch of same chain restaurants with sticky floors and bleary-eyed staff.
It’s no small feat to keep an identity intact. Not for cities. Not for their people. Not for a culture. Not in a world that seems like it’s trying to strip us of our uniqueness for an easy buck or a little more convenience.
In my own life I can think of times when I was trying to evolve or was forced forward into the future, and I wasn’t sure who I was anymore in the process: when my father died in my early 20s and I lost my earliest protector and fiercest friend; when I blew out my knee playing soccer and had to reconcile with who I was without a game I never imagined not playing; when I first became a mom and the world tilted on its axis pushing me out of the comfortable space I had inhabited when I was only in charge of me; when I decided to be a writer and struggled for years to find anyone to publish my work.
Life is constantly asking us who we are? And even if we know, staying strong enough to stay true to ourselves is a constant tightrope between holding on and letting go enough so we can continue to grow.
Right now, in Washington County, I think we are moving forward and developing and changing more rapidly than I have seen in my lifetime. There have been more warehouses built, more developments set, more shopping plazas added in the past few years than perhaps the decade before. I’m not saying that’s all bad. But I am saying we need to have boundaries as we grow. We can’t develop everywhere, endlessly, with no clear direction of what we want to be known for in years without losing who we are. Just because we sit at the interchange of interstates 70 and 81 doesn’t mean that every exit in our county needs to have a gas station, a chain restaurant, a warehouse, or a shopping strip. We need to carefully choose our placements and quantity so that we don’t choke out the places that are only ours—Krumpe’s Do-Nuts and Nutter’s Ice Cream, Rocky’s Pizza and Schula’s Crab House, Broad Axe and River City Farm and Pet Supply—and all the others that make our county our home.
We have to keep enough open spaces to remain wild enough so that when we walk through Antietam Battlefield or Blair’s Valley or canoe down Antietam Creek or the Conococheague we can still hear the quiet.
I’m not saying this to sound disgruntled. I’m not even saying the ways we’ve grown so far are wrong. I understand that to live in the world as it is we have to move forward with it. But I do know we need to pay attention to who we are becoming, how we are growing, and make conscious decisions about where we want to live 20 years from now and who we want to be because if we give away our identity, if we give away our hometown, there will be no way to get it back.