I rolled in at 11:20 on a Sunday morning and thought the town had been evacuated. Four blocks of main street, every door locked, not a person on the sidewalk, one traffic light blinking yellow at an intersection with no traffic to manage. I drove the whole length of it, turned around at the grain elevator, and drove it again in case I had missed something. I had not. I wrote in my notebook: empty, nothing here, keep going.
Then I passed the church on the way out and the lot had sixty cars in it.
The entire town was in one building, three hundred feet from the street I had just declared dead. I had done the equivalent of walking into someone’s kitchen at midnight and concluding they had moved out.
The eleven o’clock trap
Between about 9:30 and noon on a Sunday, a small town does not look like itself. It looks like a set. That window is the single most misleading two and a half hours in the week, and it is also, inconveniently, exactly when a lot of us are passing through, because we left somewhere at seven and are two hundred miles in and starting to want lunch.
I have written off at least four towns on a Sunday morning read. Two of them I have since been back to on a weekday and found to be doing perfectly well. One of them had a bakery I would now drive out of my way for, and on that first Sunday its lights were off and its blinds were down and I decided the town had nothing.
So the first rule is simply this: a Sunday morning read is not a read. It is a photograph of a room while everyone is in the next room.
What is open, and what that tells you
Something is always open, and the something is informative.
The gas station, always. In a town with any hunting or fishing nearby, the bait shop, sometimes before dawn. If there is a pharmacy with Sunday hours, that is a town serving old people who need it, which is a real signal about who lives there.
The most interesting one is the restaurant that opens specifically for after church. Not a place with normal hours, a place that opens at eleven on Sunday and closes at two and is otherwise shut all day. If a town has one of those, it has a reliable crowd that moves together, and that crowd is the closest thing to a town meeting you will find without being invited to one.
I have eaten in a few of those. They are chaotic in a way I like. Tables get pushed together. Nobody is in a hurry. I get looked at, politely, and then absorbed, and if I am willing to answer where I came from and where I am going, I can sit there for an hour and hear about a school consolidation fight or a bridge that has been closed for three years.
The parking lot census
If I want to know how many people actually live in and around a town, I stop counting sidewalk traffic on Sunday and count parking lots instead.
Church lots at eleven. The fire hall if something is happening. The lot behind the American Legion or whatever equivalent the town has. School lots are empty and tell me nothing.
This is not a perfect method. It weights the churchgoing part of the population and misses everyone else. But on a Sunday morning it is the only census available, and it corrects the emptiness of the street by an order of magnitude. Four blocks of nobody and one lot with sixty cars is a completely different town than four blocks of nobody and one lot with six.
Sunday afternoon is a different country
Around one, sometimes two, a small town comes back. Not to weekday levels, but back. People are out. Somebody is mowing. Kids are on bikes in a way they are not on Saturdays, when families are running errands in the bigger town half an hour away.
Sunday afternoon is actually one of the better times to be walking around a small town, if you do not need to buy anything. Nobody is working. People are on porches. The pace is slow enough that a stranger walking down a residential street is a curiosity rather than a concern, and I have had more unforced conversations on Sunday afternoons than on any other day.
The catch is that you cannot spend money, which means you cannot use the normal excuse of being a customer. You have to just be a person on a sidewalk, which is harder.
I built a whole trip around this and got it wrong
Two summers ago I planned a five day route through a stretch of small county seats specifically to look at main streets. I mapped it out carefully. Mileage, fuel, where I would sleep. What I did not do was look at what day of the week I would hit each place.
Three of the five landed on a Sunday and a Monday. Sunday everything was shut for the reasons above. Monday, and this is the part I had genuinely never thought about, everything was also shut, because in small towns a great many independent businesses close Sunday and Monday both. The owner works six days or five and takes them together.
So I spent two of five days looking at locked doors, in towns I had driven a long way to see, and I have not fully forgiven myself for it. Now the first thing I check when I plan a route is not the road. It is the calendar.
Why I still like Sundays
All of that said, I would not skip them.
A small town on a Sunday is the only time you get to see the buildings without the business. The light comes down a main street with nothing moving in it and you notice the transom windows and the ghost sign painted on a brick side wall eighty years ago and the way the sidewalk changes color where a curb cut was added in 1960.
And the silence is real silence. Not quiet, silence, the kind where you can hear a screen door two blocks away. I have sat on a bench in front of a shut courthouse on a Sunday for forty minutes doing nothing at all, and that is one of the better things this whole habit of mine has given me. It just is not information. I have to come back on a Tuesday for that.