But this is Chico, too

One of Chico’s best features is its combination of big city and small town amenities. One thing I like about a city of 100,000 people is that you can go about your business and feel relatively anonymous. Personal contacts are few and far between. This suits my personality perfectly.

Small towns are designed for extroverts. One of my friends is the mayor of a Sacramento Valley town of about 4,000. Whenever we walk along its main street or have a meal together in one of its restaurants, we are constantly meeting people he knows. It goes on literally nonstop. He seems to thrive on these contacts, but it makes me want to jump in my car and drive back to Chico. Oldtimers tell me this is what Chico was like several decades ago. How did introverts stand it?

Before my family and I moved to Chico, we lived in Lompoc, a city of about 50,000. We were there 14 years, and it began to feel like we were living in a fishbowl. We became connected to everyone by no more than two or three degrees of separation. My wife Gail said Lompoc was small enough for everybody to know your business, but too big for anybody to care about your business if you were going through a rough patch. One of the columnists at the newspaper where I worked wrote a column that was partly about the people she ran into as she did her errands. Gail said whenever she saw this person in the grocery store, she would turn her cart and head in the opposite direction.

Over the years, I became acquainted with several Lompocans I would just as soon avoid. I’m sure they felt the same way. But because the city had relatively few places where people congregate, it was impossible to do this. Whenver our paths crossed, we did our best to pretend we didn’t see each other.

In some ways, Chico is has become big in a negative way. Its volume of traffic has outgrown its road infrastructure. Driving here is becoming as miserable as it is in big cities. One thing I’ll say about Lompoc is that it had no traffic problems.

But I take comfort in the fact that in the eight years I’ve lived in Chico I’ve become acquainted with no more than about 2 percent of its residents. Everyone else is a perfect stranger. This keeps me from feeling like I’m living in a fishbowl.