“Well, Long Beach, although a harsh task-master, taught us a very valuable lesson. When you run with the big boys you are liable to get trampled under the slashing hooves of your municipal betters!” said Chester Snopes, an area farmer and the guy most single-handedly responsible for keeping Lamont pressed tightly against the loving bosom of the pre-industrial age. “Sure, we rose above our station when we tried to compete against a charming seaside paradise that actually has stores and restaurants and a beautiful beach with real sand, but let one never say that Lamont cannot learn from its crushing defeats and will not always spring back to fail spectacularly in some other area! We may be laggards, but we are scrappy laggards!” he said proudly, stubbing the toe of his manure covered cowboy boot with all that fancy stitching into one of the few healthy-looking clumps of grass in Bug Tussle Park – the town park named after the original home of the Beverly Hillbillies – if you can believe that. “So, we all got together in Scooter Bodine’s still unpainted (after 72 years!) and manure-filled barn (last shoveled out when Truman was President!!) and decided that enough was enough. Why should we continue to swim upstream like some over-achieving salmon and all when we could just stop swimming and let the current flush our bloated municipal carcass out to sea where it belongs and where metaphorical crabs, seagulls and other critters could pick our bones clean and put an end to all this nonsense once and for all” he said, voicing one of the 2 or 3 most coherent sentences he ever produced in all of his 56 years of torturing the poor English language.
“But then we realized, if all us here farmers and ranchers feel this way about this crazy modern world and all the demands it puts on a feller, there has to be others like us, so why not position Lamont to be a place where people who fundamentally reject the modern era and refuse to bathe can come to blow off a little steam and stick their heads in the local sand with like-minded folk?” he beamed proudly! “Heck, it is just a matter of being true to one’s own nature – and the good part is we won’t have to change a doggone thing to make this place 16th century friendly, neither! Sure, I was the one who lead the fight against using them new-fangled fire hydrants, which was my duty as a local fire fighter, but we can just cover them up with little hay stacks or something and people will never know they are there. It ain’t like we ever planned on using the stupid things anyway, although we promised the town we would! So yeah, we can now be the new ‘Anti-Long Beach’ where people come not to eat and gaze upon some beautiful ocean and stay at swanky hotels or whatever, but where simple folks can just dig a hole or something for shelter, scratch and pick and complain about how the world has gone wrong! There has to be at least a dozen or so people in this here country that would snap at the chance to return to some pre-soap, pre-flush toilet, pre-book learning era where men were men and, as a rule, they all smelled pretty darn bad! (You should see these guys when they show up for town business meetings with outsiders! Yikes! We wish we were making this up!) I think we are really onto something here!!” he said proudly before scattering the chickens as he marched up to his sod cabin to tell the wife (not that he had to tell her anything about his plans!!) to put an extra pig’s foot in the pot just in case some Luddite-like laggard got the word already and would show up for dinner in the new vacation Mecca for the flotsam left in the wake of America in the 21st century, for crying out loud!!
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