I asked the woman behind the counter what it was like living here, and I watched her face do the thing. A small closing. She said it was fine, and then she said the coffee was fresh if I wanted a refill, and that was the end of it. Twenty minutes later I left having learned nothing, which was entirely my own doing.
That question is a trap and I asked it for years. It sounds friendly. It is actually an enormous request. It asks a person to summarize their entire life for a stranger who is leaving in an hour, and it carries an unmistakable implication underneath it, which is: what is it like living out here, in this, instead of somewhere else.
People hear that implication instantly. I would too.
The question that never works
Any question that asks somebody to be a representative of their town will fail. What is it like here. What do people do around here. Is there anything to do. What is this town known for.
That last one is the worst, because it asks a person to sell you something, and if the honest answer is nothing in particular, you have just made them apologize for where they live. I have done this. I have watched someone at a register visibly search for something impressive to give me and come up short and feel bad about it, and that is a genuinely rotten thing to do to a person who was having a normal day.
The other failure mode is the notebook. Not literally, although literally too. If your questions come in a sequence, and each answer produces the next question, you are conducting an interview and everyone can feel it. People answer interviews carefully and briefly.
Ask about the thing in front of you
What works is small and specific and about an object, not about a life.
The mounted fish on the wall. The photograph of the flood. Why the street changes name at the intersection. What the building across the street used to be. Whether the sign painted on the brick was for a business or a product. That machine, what does it do.
Specific questions are easy to answer, which means answering is not a burden, which means the person can decide whether to continue. And they very often continue, because the object usually has a story attached and the story is one they enjoy telling. The flood question in particular has never once failed me. Every town near water has a flood year and everyone remembers where they were.
The other reliable opener is a question where I am the one who needs something. Where is a bathroom. Is there anywhere to eat that is open past eight. Is the road north closed, I saw a sign. Asking for help puts a person in a position they know how to occupy.
Let them decide you are not a threat
A stranger in a small town is an unresolved question until they are resolved. The fastest way to resolve is to volunteer the boring information nobody asked for: where I came from this morning, where I am going, why I am off the highway.
Saying “I got off for gas and the main street looked worth a walk” does more work than any question. It explains me. It closes the loop. And it is true, which matters, because I am not good at maintaining a story and people in small places are extremely good at noticing when something does not add up.
The other thing that helps is time. Not much, but some. If I walk into a diner, order, eat, and then talk, it goes better than if I talk on arrival. If I am at a counter and I let a few minutes pass, somebody usually says something first. Being unhurried is the single most useful posture I have, and it took me a long time to learn because I am usually trying to make miles.
Where the conversations actually happen
Not at the restaurant, most of the time. Restaurants have a service relationship built into them and it is hard to get past it.
Counters at hardware stores. Auto parts stores, which are wildly underrated for this, because everyone there is solving a problem and problem solving makes people talk. Laundromats, if you actually have laundry. Bars, obviously, but bars have their own rules and a woman alone at a small town bar is doing a calculation that I do not always want to do at the end of a driving day.
Best of all: anywhere with a line. Waiting next to somebody is the most natural conversational setup that exists and requires almost nothing from either person.
The times I pushed too hard
There have been a few and I remember all of them.
A man at a gas pump who mentioned the plant closing, and I asked a follow up question about what year, and then another about where people went, and he answered both and then said, evenly, that it was a long time ago now. He was telling me to stop. I understood that about half a second too late, and the last thing I said to him was clumsy.
Another time, a young guy at a counter, and I asked whether he planned to stay. He was maybe nineteen. That question has an entire family conversation behind it that I had no business walking into, and I asked it out of pure curiosity about the town, not about him. He said he did not know, and it hung there.
The lesson I keep relearning is that the town is an interesting subject to me and a set of unresolved personal circumstances to the person I am talking to. Decline, leaving, closure, all of that is texture from a car and pressure from a kitchen table.
What I do with what people tell me
Not much, deliberately. I do not take notes in front of anyone and I do not use names. If somebody tells me about a family dispute over a piece of land, that stays in the car.
I also try not to turn people into material, which is a hard thing to promise when you write about places for a living. The test I use is simple: would this person be annoyed to read this. If yes, it does not go in.
Mostly what I do with it is drive on and think. A twenty minute conversation at an auto parts counter has reorganized my understanding of a whole county more than once, and I never told the guy that, because it would have been a strange thing to say. He was just answering a question about a brake line.