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Of course they don't, but the Wileys are plunging into their new life all the same. And they have plenty of company. A new kind of "white flight" is going on in America today, but unlike the middle-class exodus from multiethnic cities to the suburbs a generation ago, this middle-class migration is from crowded, predominantly white suburbs to small towns and rural counties. Rural America has enjoyed a net inflow of 2 million Americans this decade--that is, 2 million more people have moved from metropolitan centers to rural areas than have gone the traditional small-town-to-big-city route. (In the 1980s, by contrast, rural areas suffered a net loss of 1.4 million people.) Thanks to the newcomers, 75% of the nation's rural counties are growing again after years of decline. Some towns are even booming, with high-tech industrial parks and bustling downtowns in which refurbished storefronts boast serious restaurants and community theaters, ubiquitous brew pubs and coffee bars. Inevitably, a cottage industry is springing up to service the newcomers. At least four recent books promise to teach cityfolk how to find the village of their dreams (Moving to Small Town America, Small Town Bound), and one entrepreneur has a company, the Greener Pastures Institute, that helps urbanites engineer the great escape.
The trend, which began in the back-to-nature '70s but stalled in the '80s, has roared back because of powerful technological forces that are decentralizing the American economy. The Internet and the overnight-shipping boom are enabling high-tech industries once tied to urban centers to settle in the countryside, creating jobs for skilled workers almost anywhere. There's a software-design company in Bolivar, Mo. (pop. 6,845); a big computer maker in North Sioux City, S.D. (pop. 2,019); a major catalog retailer in Dodgeville, Wis. (pop. 3,882), all attracting people who want to live in places where the landscape is emptier, the housing costs lower, the culture more gentle--places where Martha Stewarts manque can slow down long enough to create the gilded topiaries they've dreamed about for years. In Wilmington, the emigres include a Boston doctor, a California silicon-chip engineer, a pharmaceutical-research scientist, a cop, a prosecutor, an artist looking for solitude and a carpet installer from suburban Dayton who chucked his job for one selling fertilizer in town.
If young professionals are moving because their jobs can move with them, retirees are moving because their fat 401(k) accounts can put them almost anywhere. And whether young or old, the new emigres share a sense that they're reinventing their lives in places that seem purer than the suburban moonscape one emigre calls "the United States of Generica." They believe that in rural America they won't get lost--and maybe they'll even leave a mark.