We're Not in Mayberry Anymore. And That's a Good Thing.

Silver Creek, running through downtown Silverton, Oregon. Image credit.

There’s a sign in one of our local coffee shops that says, “Welcome to Mayberry.”

Just so there’s no confusion, I don’t live in a town named Mayberry. And I don’t live in Mount Airy, the North Carolina birthplace of Andy Griffith that’s said to be the inspiration for the idyllic community in The Andy Griffith Show.

No, I live on the other side of the country in Silverton, Oregon (pop. 10,643). Though we are just 45 miles south of Portland—and 15 miles east of Salem—Silverton is still surrounded, for now, by seed nurseries, Christmas tree farms, and, up the road, the temperate rainforests and many waterfalls of Silver Falls State Park. We have a picturesque and walkable downtown (with a creek running through the center) and one of Oregon’s highest-rated school districts. In normal times, there are community events year-round here: the fine art fair, the pet parade (a tradition since 1932), Homer Davenport Community Festival, Strawberry Festival, Sidewalk Shindig, the town Christmas Tree lighting, First Fridays—the list goes on and on.

Silverton is also a town that eats together. We have not one, not two, but three weekly community meals. Wednesday Night Dinner (a collaboration between multiple churches and nonprofits) serves 400-500 meals per week. In years past, there was an older gentleman who wandered from table to table serenading people on his accordion. My friend Josiah played the piano. When First Christian Church started Wednesday Night Dinner back in 2008, they established a reserve fund in case costs exceeded donations. Last I heard, they’ve never needed the reserve. And they’ve never run out of food.

Time and again, I’ve seen Silvertonians rally to help neighbors in need. After a fire or accident. After a tragic death. When someone loses their job. Rod Dreher once described Mayberry’s “natural order” as being “undergirded by everyday kindness and a sense of the common good—that people look out for each other.” More than any place I’ve ever lived, folks in Silverton consciously aspire to that level of kindness, and so can perhaps be excused for thinking of ourselves as a kind of West Coast Mayberry.

I know I used to think that way.

Loving to Know

My wife, Kate, and I moved with our daughter (age three) to Silverton from Portland more than a decade ago. It was in east Portland that our family started to be intentional about cultivating community. I remember the day Kate said to me, “I am going to get to know our neighbors. Our actual neighbors.” That simple declaration unlocked something for us. We shifted more of our lives from the backyard to the front—and then watched as, slowly, several other houses on our cul-de-sac did the same. We sold our car and started walking, biking, and taking public transit. We shopped at the local farmers market. We helped start a couple house churches. We met regularly with friends and family at our favorite eastside pubs, Horse Brass and The Moon & Sixpence.

As much as we loved our life in Portland, Kate and I knew it was temporary. She and I both did a lot of our growing up in small towns, and we still felt drawn to rural life. At the same time, we didn’t want to be too far from family in Salem and Portland, or the lifelong friends we’d made. For 18 months, we looked at seemingly every small town within an hour’s drive of the city. Yet somehow Silverton wasn’t on our radar. Then, on Christmas Eve 2009, I took a wrong turn out of a town called Mount Angel (I was visiting a Benedictine abbey there) and drove into Silverton. I knew within a minute that this was going to be the town where our family would settle for good. I brought Kate back the next day, Christmas, and she knew even quicker.

There’s a nine-syllable concept I learned from the philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek that helps describe our last ten years in Silverton. The term—bear with me—is “covenant epistemology.” Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with how we know. My understanding of covenant epistemology is that it is a way of knowing that has love as its starting point. Typically, when we think of the relationship between knowing and loving, we think we know in order to love. And there is some of that. But Meek turns the status quo on its head and says that to know—to really know—we start with the love. We don’t know in order to love, we love in order to know.

Wendell Berry said to feel at home in a place, we have to have some prospect of staying there. If it is within our power, Kate and I plan to stay here forever. Though we’d not yet heard of Esther Lightcap Meek, Kate and I covenanted with Silverton. We committed ourselves to this particular place in ways reminiscent of our own marriage vows. And something extraordinary happened: as we opened ourselves up to Silverton, Silverton felt safe to open itself up to us.

The author’s co-housing community last December, out getting a Christmas tree from a local farm. From left, the Pattisons (4), the Leslies, and the Neveses. Photo credit: Summer Sheldon.

First at our daughter’s preschool, then at the local Quaker meeting, and then simply around town—we’ve found amazing community here. When not under quarantine, we meet weekly with six other families for Friday night homemade pizza (we call it “Pizza Church”). On Friday mornings, I meet with several friends for an early morning breakfast we call “Old Man Breakfast Club.” (We like to name things.) We also co-house with two other families. There are eight people, four generations, in our house. I can’t walk for two minutes downtown without running into a half-dozen friends or acquaintances. One day I was writing my book at Gear-Up coffee shop, and I was interrupted 22 times. I didn’t count, a guy across the room did. Those interruptions are bad for book writing, but great for feeling loved and known and at home. 

Silverton is growing quickly. We’re increasingly a bedroom community for Portland and Salem, and I’ve heard grumbling against the influx of newcomers. Kate and I never perceived an ounce of that coming our way. Our best guess as to why is that we were often explicit with people we met that we were here for the long haul—Silverton’s past was our past, its present our present, and its future our future, the good and the bad, in sickness and health...God willing, until death do us part.

Past the Honeymoon Stage

Yet no good relationship can (or should) stay in its honeymoon stage forever. For years, I felt like Kate and I really had stumbled upon Mayberry. There is just so much goodness here, so much beauty, so much to be proud of. Those things are unequivocally true. Yet we also started to notice some difficult things, and we started to ask hard questions.

• Two of Oregon’s first hate incidents linked to Election Day 2016 were in Silverton—and both involved high school-aged kids. Why were our friends of color saying they didn’t always feel safe in our (overwhelmingly white) community?

• For a while, our beautiful downtown Silverton had a lot of empty storefronts and a revolving door of new businesses. What was keeping would-be entrepreneurs from building sustainable businesses downtown?

• New developments were going in on the edge of town, yet young people who had grown up here couldn’t afford to actually stay here. Why was affordable housing considered to be the #1 problem in Silverton, and what could be done about it?

• Many neighborhoods didn’t have sidewalks or well-maintained infrastructure. Many of our community’s kids can’t safely walk or bike to school because we have multiple state highways running through our town. Why does one of the poorest neighborhoods in town have so few sidewalks and streetlights, and how is that contributing to the perception that it is an unsafe place to live?

Kate and I remained passionate about our community building efforts, but we were becoming aware of interrelated systemic issues—issues of equity, the economy, and the built environment—that were quietly undermining Silverton’s hopes for itself. We couldn’t fully articulate these challenges yet, let alone how to fix them. (The story of how we got there involves Strong Towns, and is the subject of tomorrow’s installment in this series.) But something was challenging our Mayberry fantasies.

Importantly, in no way did any of this diminish our love for Silverton. In fact, it was out of love for our town that we noticed these issues, and because of our love for Silverton that we wanted to name the struggles and be a part of addressing them. The author Norman Wirzba has written that we must learn to “respect the integrity of things by giving them the space to be themselves.”

What we must now realize is that such a posture is not possible without love, for it is in terms of love that the true marks of knowing can emerge: openness, affection, resilience, patience, humility, vulnerability, kindness, intimacy, responsibility, and perhaps most important, repentance. In other words, lovers of wisdom must first be lovers in the most genuine sense of the term, people who are considerate and show compassion for the one loved.

Publicity photo of the television program Mayberry R.F.D. Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

And so we come back to the conundrum of Mayberry. The values of Mayberry are values worth aspiring to. As Rod Dreher wrote in a separate post, Andy Griffith’s fictional town became “a pop culture touchstone because it spoke to profound longing and deep-seated ideals within ourselves.” But it is inherently aspirational — “not only in terms of what we may become, but in terms of what we already are, only hidden beneath the flaws and failings of our everydayness.”

But problems arise when a town or city holds so tightly to its vision of itself that it becomes blind to what’s right under its nose. It also obscures what’s possible. One evening, in a discussion group I attended, a young local pastor I know gently pushed back on the Mayberry comparison, simply pointing out that Silverton has its dark sides too: addiction, homelessness, violence, and more. He wasn’t disparaging Silverton—these were statements of fact, realities he encounters regularly in his ministry—but I was surprised how defensive people became.

The challenge for my wife and I—and for all passionate community advocates—is to celebrate the good things about our places, while also acknowledging the work still left to be done.

At Strong Towns, we have two simple rules for neighborhood change. No neighborhood should experience sudden, radical change. But neither can a neighborhood be exempt from change. Places must be free to adapt and grow incrementally over time.

Neighborhoods can’t be frozen in amber. Similarly, our towns and cities can’t be relegated to sepia-toned daydreams either. Real-life is too important and, ultimately, more interesting.

Editor’s Note: Every Strong Towns member has a unique backstory and is applying the Strong Towns approach in ways particular to their own contexts. This week, Member Week, we are running a series on the Strong Towns journey of our content manager, John Pattison, who started following Strong Towns five years before he started working here.

• Part One: We’re Not in Mayberry Anymore. And That’s a Good Thing.

• Part Two: “Does God care how wide a road is?”

• Part Three: I work for Strong Towns and sometimes even I know don’t know what the Strong Towns approach is.

• Part Four: Finding the Good Life on Danger Hill

To help us grow the movement even further, will you consider becoming a member?

Become a Member

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