A glimpse inside a rural America of the past, part one

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The first time I visited Second Life’s The Refuge and Expansion, it struck me as a well done reproduction of a quaint aspect of bygone America, but not worth a return visit.  Fortunately, I did return, because subsequent visits revealed deeper layers, both literally and figuratively.  For me, the underlying feeling of the place is the ways rural boys – and it does reflect entirely the traditional interests of young males – could express their creativity on a farm in the pre-internet and pre-television era.  It is a very male view of the world – the house doesn’t even have curtains in the windows.  I see the place as the story of several brothers, most of them fitting in well with their town, but one who does not, a boy whose imagination and creativity crave more than his rural world can provide.  Of course, this is only my own personal view.  The creator, AM Radio, might have something else entirely in mind.

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When you first teleport to The Refuge and Expansion, you are standing on a two lane road that appears to stretch as far as the eye can see, complete with power lines on wooden poles, surrounded by mid-America farmland.  A single 1940s car is on the road.  Not far away, a billboard stands at a blinking traffic light where another two lane rural road intersects.  Turning to your right, you see a farmhouse, not American Gothic, but reminiscent of it.  You almost expect to see the man and woman from that painting step out from the house and invite you inside for some fresh made apple pie.  In the hazy distance on all sides, barely visible in the simulated mist at sim boundaries, outlines of buildings suggest nearby farms.

Inside the barebones house, you find simple vestiges of a past age: stiff backed wooden chairs, a wood burning stove, complete with axe and firewood, and in the kitchen, a water pump in a wooden stand for pumping water from the well.  In the back, you’ll see doors leading to the storm cellar, but they are non-functional and there is no storm cellar.  I wondered, if a tornado struck while I was there, where would I take shelter?  Of course, this is Second Life and there was no tornado nor any risk of tornado, but the setting felt real enough that doors to a non-existent storm cellar were a letdown.

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The barn across the road contains some important aspects of rural creativity in a past era.  A 1912 airplane sits at the center of the barn.  On one side, a late 1940s style car sits near a racing car such as might have been seen in the 1930s.  In the right rear corner, what appears to be a 1960s MGB. In the center, you’ll see an old style band saw and on the back wall, airplane engine parts carefully laid out on tables beneath blueprints of an airplane.  The place reminded me strongly of visiting the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome when I was a child and flying in a 1930s plane that my favorite uncle had rebuilt himself – my very first flying experience was taking off from a rural dirt field in that plane. 

Returning to the house, if you go up into the second floor, you see another aspect of rural creativity – the solitary brother, bored by the mechanical things that excited his brothers and craving the education and intellectual excitement that his small town could not provide.  I could see his brothers finding outlet for their creativity by building planes and cars in the barn, while their more bookish carved out his own tiny workspace in the attic amidst detritis that other members of the family have stored there.  He has a work table with a microscope and a telescope pointed at the stars and on the floor, dozens of books stand in stacks scattered around the floor, surrounded by a pile of wooden chairs and a spare wind blade for the nearby windmill.  This is the first hint we have that The Refuge and Expansion is not just a paean to an idealized rural past.  The boy who sat at this desk, at a window overlooking the feverish activity of his brothers in the barn, was lonely and frustrated.

Tomorrow in part two, we’ll explore more of The Refuge and Expansion, and further down the road, we’ll see reality morph into something very different.

If you’re a Second Life member, you can teleport there by clicking  slurl.com/secondlife/Wales%20Springs/251/113/24.